skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.

You should dig into Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."

The biggest barriers aren't technological, they're cultural and conceptual. When Gutenburg invented the printing press, did you instantly have serialized novels, political pamphlets, abstruse philosophical treatises that depended on exact wording, magazines, and public libraries? Nope. That took time. Gutenburg just wanted to produce Bibles better and faster. We're still figuring out what to do with computers and networks.
As I recall from past discussions, pg has indicated that his algorithm discounts outliers. So someone who has one 40+ comment and a string of comments rated 1 or 0 will not see the benefit of the outlier.

A solution to piling on, if it persists, may simply be placing a hard limit on the maximum score a comment can garner. Slashdot and Kuro5hin both max out comments (Slashdot at 5, Kuro5hin used to max out at 5 but that was later changed to 3).
You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
You sound like you have a good grasp on the economics of publishing; what do you think are the chances of publishers being cut out by tactics like Amazon's current 70% royalty for authors selling books through them directly between 2.99 and 9.99?
Is corporate campaign spending a big deal? One way to tell is to look at state laws. Some states do not restrict corporate expenditures on political speech, and others do. Can anybody tell the difference? If not, then who cares?
Wow, this is pretty conservative for the Times.

I think that if an employee is fired for cause, they should be forced to sell their organs to pay back the debt (and cost of finding a replacement worker) to their company. This would make small businesses more profitable, and it would be an incentive for people to work harder. It would also lower the cost of organs, allowing the ultra-rich business owners to get a replacement kidney AND own a vacation home.

What I meant to say is that I think business owners whine too much about money. If your business is not profitable, then it's time to do something else... not whine about how your fired employees shouldn't get unemployment benefits.

(I worked at a small company once, and all I ever heard about was how everything was too expensive. Health insurance is too expensive. Salary is too expensive. Taxes are too expensive. Guess what then, you aren't charging the clients enough.)
Maybe I'm just inexperienced, but can't you get around this with contract-to-hire? E.g., bring your prospective salesguy in for a 90-day contract, and if they cut the condiment of choice, keep them?
Who Woz?
also yes but not on hn please.
An oldie but a goodie!
That explains the cold chill I sometimes feel down my neck when browsing this site.
When you're hell-banned, you aren't notified of it, you can continue to post links and comments, but you're the only one that sees them normally -- they're deleted for everyone except logged-in users that have [showdead] turned on.

It was pioneered by the goons at SomethingAwful for dealing with problem users in a particularly lulzy way. It is rather effective for drive-by trolls that would just create another account and amp things up if they knew. But even SomethingAwful, with the most deliberately lulz-stoking moderators on the web, uses other methods almost exclusively: probation, timeouts, and normal banning.

news.arc is uniquely capricious in that hell-banning is the only method in use
Your intended point about pigeonholes can sometimes backfire within the context of email. Consider a Gmail user who sends a query to a number of different recipients, expecting unique replies from each. Gmail, because of the like headers, will group all of the responses into the parent conversation. Let's say the users tags the first response with a label corresponding to that sender, and then the second response comes in. At this point, the user is at an "oh shit" moment, finally comprehending the implications of Google's labeling of conversations rather than individual messages.

You need to be able to specify both parent and child tags to be able to facilitate search and give users something that isn't too confusing re: organization.
I doubt anyone has valid stastics to answer this, but I'll throw in yet another anecdote. For about five years I used Python for all my personal projects, then for a couple years I switched to Ruby because I was using it at work. Last year I switched to Haskell for everything from simple command-line scripts[1] to larger programs[2] to silly recreational programming[3].

[1]: http://github.com/mbrubeck/outline-grep

[2]: http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2009/10/30/compleat.html

[3]: http://github.com/mbrubeck/mynock
The value proposition should be more visible.

"What are you interested? Where?" is a question and doesn't answer what I get from the website. It doesn't necessarily give me a reason for being there.

"HeyKiki lets you connect with instructors and/or practice buddies for any of your interests," is not visible enough. I really had to look for it. If that's going to be the value proposition, then it needs to be brighter and larger.

Good luck with this site. I started a skill exchange that was similar to Heykiki a while ago. It was called Foobity. It was very difficult to get traction. Sites like these need a lot of users to start being useful. We tried to expand our userbase and accessibility by making a facebook app right when FB opened their platform, but even that didn't turn into lots of usage.

We also had a competitor whose name I can't remember. They had a more polished version of what we were trying to do, but even they faded into obscurity.

Something about this mode of getting people to connect is very difficult. Part of finding teachers and learning partners is that a system of actual payment of pupil-to-teacher insures commitment. And casual non-money interaction takes a bunch of other factors to connect.

Still, I think this is a good idea because anything that increases the chances of people coming together to enjoy learning and practice activities that fuel their passion is a good thing. I hope it is successful.
There are multiple business models. Witness:

1. They take % of base first year salary on W2 - their incentives are aligned with yours. A good deal.

2. They take % of base hourly rate - their incentives are also aligned with yours. A good deal.

However:

3. They receive a flat hourly cap - their incentives are opposite yours. They're trying to fuck you.

4. Flat retainer - their incentives are technically neutral, but the lower they get you onboard, the better they look because their client is spending less. They're trying to fuck you.
I posted a much more comprehensive and correct summary here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101588
Because they walk a small part of an index to figure out how many hits there _probably_ are.

Geez; you think they actually count a giant left join on the internet?

Also: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort
I'm a happy Flavors.me user. Such a simple and useful service. I'm sure Goodsie will deliver on its promise, as well!
Gene hacking for muscle growth
John is awesome. After hearing Doom Classic was out on the iPhone I immediately bought it and tried throwing myself into hell to see what would happen. Immediate reaction: Doom is really hard to play on a touch screen.

I really hope they make Doom 2 for either Xbox Arcade or the iPhone.
> So what's your solution?

To repeat myself from the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102381):

The natural counterforce to corrupting influences, all of them rather than just campaign finance, is robust citizen accountability. Clearly this accountability has left something to be desired to date. I would argue this has largely to do with rational ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance) on behalf of voters, that they, having so much to do, aren't willing to wade through the maze of political discourse in order to really know who is worth voting for.

But what if it was dead-simple to know where your rep stood, on every issue, not just the obvious ones, and on every level, not just congress?

I'd argue that you could convert a substantial number who currently don't vote, or else default to simple heuristics in deciding who to vote for: e.g. party or incumbency.

To that end, I've started a site: http://votereports.org which aims to be something like the github of political accountability. A simple, decentralized group of folks generating, exchanging and refining politician report cards based on objective criteria such as votes.

The project is just 2 months old, and there's plenty to do, but it should be ready well before November.

For better governance, I'd stake my bet on this before I would on a constitutional amendment or change of heart for politicians. After all:

> "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson

Really, can we expect to do very much better, in a world where we collect, analyze, and share more data on baseball than on our own government? (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/12/government-20-five-predicti...)
This is another example of perverse, unintended consequences of "pro-worker" initiatives biting their intended beneficiaries in the hindquarters. Take a look at France for the endgame to that: between generous benefits and legally guaranteed protection from firing that makes Japanese salaryman positions look unstable, the economy is structurally incapable of employing a huge percentage of the work force. The young and immigrants, who are the worst affected by this (not surprising: the lowest skilled/lowest educated/poorest always catch the worst of every systemic economic issue), have little to do but sit on the dole or riot, and few prospects for ever doing anything else.

My impression is that similar issues cause the massive underemployment of the non-salaryman strata of Japanese twenty-somethings. Many of the freeters (people who bounce from part-time job to part-time job) are cut out for entry level work, but hiring someone is a lot like marrying them, so if you don't have the appropriate credential and a resume which looks like exactly what the company wants, they generally pass.
What kind of consulting do you do? Software?
What kind of consulting do you do?
Power monitoring can still be useful to help prevent you from slipping back to inefficient usage.

There are a lot of measures that can reduce people's power usage for a short period of time. For instance, advertisements to ask people to turn off unused lights can have a temporary effect on power usage. Making those savings last is much more difficult. Hopefully ongoing power monitoring can help there.

For Gridspy, I'd love to provide a free minimal service, a highly affordable normal service and a premium service with long range high resolution data.
Yes, but you need more than an edge detector. The y-values output by the edge detector might not be a function of x - you could have more than 1 y-value per x, or none at all.

You need a segmentation algorithm to draw a line where the mountains stop and the sky starts, that way y is really a function of x.
>Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

As far as I can tell, that study measured mobility by quintile. If the United States has a wider variance in income, the quintiles will be much wider, hence more difficult to move from one quintile to another.

It seems reasonable to assume that the social welfare states of Western Europe and Canada have less variance in income distribution, and therefore it's easier to move from one quintile to another because the quintiles are smaller. Saying that there's greater mobility between quintile in Western Europe really only reflects the smaller variance in incomes in Western Europe.

To set up an accurate cross-national comparison, one would have to construct a unified set of incomes for all people across all the studies countries. Then measure mobility of individuals between quintiles of the unified data set. Only that type of design would control for the different variance found in different national-economic contexts.
I'm flattered that you were thinking of me, though I obviously expected as much.
Who cares?

Why do these tiny little people have this pathological urge to fix things? This is not broken!

Risk-taking is masculine because males are expendable!

And even if that wasn't so, it's not important, people!

Let's forget this crap and get back to work.
"Python is more like english"

Having written non-trivial programs in Haskell, ML, and Python, I agree with this, but I would add: Functional programming is more like mathematics.

English expresses some ideas more clearly, while mathematics is better for others. And notations that are more "mathematical" often have other nice properties like composability and equational reasoning.*

*The best example of what I mean by equational reasoning is the Sudoku functional pearl: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/comp150fp/archive/richard-bird/s...
Six Feet Under Seasons 1-5 - Free-Press-Release.com
Most bartenders in San Francisco are below the national poverty rate. The best paid bartenders in this city make less than a first-year programmer.
Would you care to present your evidence that the world has more income mobility now than at any time in the past?

(And, FWIW, I am still having grave difficulty believing that you really meant "the world" when you said "we".)
The Union Cares
How does this earn you thousands 'on the side'?
I think that we're bickering over semantics here. I'm not saying that we jettison 100% of something when it doesn't explain a new phenomenon. When I say 'thermodynamics is proven wrong,' I mean that we find a case where it doesn't apply. As it stands now, the thermodynamics 'says' that it applies to everything. So when we find an exception it is 'wrong.'
It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that.

Your monthly electricity bill does give you a monthly snapshot of your last month's usage, but the primary point of these devices appears to be moment to moment usage stats. The instantaneous data can act as a feedback mechanism that a monthly snapshot makes difficult. Integrating power monitoring at the device level would also be a nice step forward.
We have a rough approximation of that in the United States with the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you have a job but make less than a certain amount, the government sends you a tax return to supplement your income up to that level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_Income_Tax_Credit
Errr, I haven't Read The Fine Article, but I know from nasty experience that if you're fired for cause in Massachusetts or Virginia you can't collect unemployment (both times this was relevant, my employer tried to claim that and failed miserably).

After reading the fine article: in Illinois, for cause == no unemployment, no taxes for the employer down the road.
Did Apple Just Ban Location-Based Ads in iPhone Apps?
Make Something Users Care About
This covers one big point that a lot of 'workplace rule making' types never quite understand. Most policies designed to protect people from losing their jobs actually increase either the chance they will lose their job, or their chance of getting another job. If there are penalties for firing an employee, with an associated 'trial period', then the employee stands a greater chance of getting fired before that period is up, even if there was a chance that any issues could have been worked out.

If an employer knows they may lose money from claims of unfair firing, then they will resist hiring employees until they have sufficient funds to cover the cost of losing someone.

Anecdote in point : a member of my family runs a business. A new hire didn't work out, and after counselling them several times, they decided the person had to go. They waited until after Christmas, fired the employee, who said that they understood the reasons. The former employee found representation, came back and successfully won compensation for an unfair dismissal. The reason was that some paperwork had not been completed correctly during the firing process. The resulting legal costs and compensation meant that the position will remain unfilled for several months until the balance sheet position is restored.

It's the same law of unintended consequences that means rent controlled apartments actually decrease housing affordability in cities (apart from the lucky few). Employment policies like this decrease employment (apart from the lucky few). In both cases the results are the direct opposite for what they are intended.

In terms of a social policy : governments should cover minimum wages, working conditions and other safety issues. Compensation for unfair dismissal should be capped regardless of salary and paid out of a central fund taken from company income taxes.

That might be tough but that is life.
All things being equal, if someone is offered a full time position and a contract-to-hire, which will they take?

And if that became the norm, I'm not sure the ploy would stay legally viable.

Added after reading the fine article: I'd really wonder if it would fly in Illinois. Surely the author has considered it?
I've never been called by a 3rd-party recruiter that I didn't hang up on. Often I mock them first. I even sent one company, emailpcs.com, an invoice for 10 hours of consulting at $150/hour because they were calling me up every day for a month. They refused to pay, I sent them to collections, we settled.
It also has negative effects for experienced workers:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a3Es...

Instead of being fired or laid off, employees are put into "Milton" type roles where they are made to feel useless, or intimidated into quitting/committing suicide.

There's a line between workers' rights & social safety nets and making the employment market extremely inefficient. I think it's fair to use public funds to retrain employees who have spent years contributing to society, or even to provide them a temporary income so they don't have to worry for their family's future. Still, people generally want to do useful work, and keeping unproductive workers employed hurts them, other candidates, and the nation as a whole.
One advantage is that the storage and processing of your power usage is centralised in one place, benefiting from economies of scale. If you had that storage and processing power in the meter itself the meter would cost more and use more power - while not using the advanced functionality most of the day.

Having an independent monitoring company (Gridspy or WattVision) whose sole task is to help you gain insights from your power usage data is more likely to benefit you than depending on a large power organisation to do so.

Also, the goals of measuring power for billing purposes differ from those of measuring power to save power.

If you are billing you want highly accurate, irregular samples, with a single meter per customer (no matter how many buildings that covers).

If you are trying to save power, you want affordable, perhaps less accurate sensors measuring as many different channels as possible at the lowest price possible. Gridspy takes this approach.

WattVision is providing you with what the smart meter solution should have been, today. It does that by giving you a single channel of accurate, fairly realtime online.

The roundtrip from your house and back sounds horrible to us hackers - but to the population at large it makes installation and router configuration non issues. It also makes software upgrades on-line much easier.
Why doesn't everyone just cut to the chase and start an "I can have sex with anything and it's ok" movement?
One minor design related thing: the diagonal stripes behind the search box on the front page create an optical illusion where the boxes get warped. I do not find it pleasant to look at.
Your solution is what? Abolish unemployment benefits? Fund them from general revenue instead of a targetted tax? I'm honestly curious. Your use of scare quotes in the first sentence tells me you're a typical political troll, but the rest of your post seems thoughtful. What's the fix here, or are you just trying to score a quick point?
I can't help but wonder if this article kicked off a ddos from China. They've been pretty brutal about attacking anyone who questions or criticizes them for the past few years.
Maybe you should read this article

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

It might be convenient to paint all business owners as 'ultra-rich' but the majority of employment happens through smaller businesses, which generally aren't in a position to 'charge clients more money'. Ask someone who is getting a start-up off the ground why they can't just pay everyone more money.
Why the Apple iPad has no Java or Flash
I have been doing the same thing for about 3 years. Even if it's a few dollars more, I'll still get it from Amazon for the reasons you listed.

If it's not listed for sale on Amazon with Prime shipping, I think long and hard how bad I need it. If it's out of stock, I'll wait to get it later (I've waited this long in life for it, what's a little longer).

My parents and friends thought I was nuts paying for Amazon Prime, but now many of them do the same thing after seeing how much of a convenience it truly is.

If it's not perishable, I get it from Amazon.
This low cost individual circuit monitoring is where Gridspy is going, although it will take some time (and high production volume) to get the price down that low.

http://gridspy.co.nz/
Personally I think that the Chinese government is directly, or indirectly behind a number of large botnets. Rather than advertising any particular server to sent data to, why not just open itself up to being consume by the borg^h^h^h^h botnet?
Lua has a library problem for many tasks.
Comic Books on Tablets Could Be Amazing
A contractor is a very different thing than an employee. In most circumstances employees and contractors are not interchangeable [1].

Companies that hire Permatemps [2] can get bit hard. As a regular contractor I work hard to keep that line very clear.

[1] http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179115,00....

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft
He is getting some serious PR. A class act.
This article is pretty embarrassing in its use of numbers/statistics.

The second number is how many jobs the state Economic Development Department claims to have created in Santa Fe last year.

As if the state's economic development department were the main driver of job creation!

Bowles argues that inequality is holding the United States back, but it's not clear that that's the case. You can see the chart of states arranged by gini coefficient, where rich dynamic centers of business like New York and California score highly. In contrast, Utah is the most equal state in the U.S., but is anyone flocking there? Does anyone want to reproduce Utah's social model throughout the rest of the country?

Then the statistics for the top and bottom 10%--both groups have an approximately 30% chance that their offspring will stay in the same percentile of income distribution. But this means that 70% of rich kids are going to fall from grace, whereas 70% of poor kids are going to grow up to do better. And that's bad?