skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many of you, when you hear announcements of how many jobs have been saved by the stimulus plan, immediately do the mental arithmetic to figure out how many dollars of taxpayer funds were spent to save each job?

I do not, because that is a fool's calculation.

The value created is not one year's salary, it's the difference in the present value of an individual without a job and the present value of an individual with a job, including all estimable secondary effects (both positive and negative.) If you simply divide it and compare it to a year's salary, you'll sit there and go 'HURRR THAT IS DUMB', but in reality, you're proving only that you don't really understand policy analysis.

----

I'm reminded of a situation that occurred many years ago in my career, when I was still working in a corporate setting. My team hit a seemingly intractable combinatorial explosion problem while trying to create a tool for the sales force. It was incredibly difficult, and quickly blew through the allocated budget (which we'd told them right from the gate, was inadequate).

The management just assumed we were lying... that we weren't up to this task, or we were just lobbying for more money and man-power for our group (I was trying to make a very specific high-end hire to help, and I had already purchased some serious iron). In fact, they were so convinced that this couldn't be this difficult to accurately analyze that they started shopping consultancies, and most agreed with us, that this would be difficult and expensive... but one did not. One said "yes, we can build it, no problem."

A year later, the consultancy had burned through a pile of money, and had nothing to show for it.

Only then did management recognize that maybe this seemingly simple configuration problem was not, in fact, as simple as they imagined. And perhaps we weren't just lying or waving our hands when we said "this shit is not as simple as you think it is." (and even then, they didn't admit it outright. I had an all-day meeting which consisted solely of them asking me stupid question after stupid question, as to why various simple approaches wouldn't work... and me having to draw out specific examples on a whiteboard, indicating the business and technical problems with these simple approaches.)

It's sad, but common, for people to assume that other people's jobs are easier than they really are. Even very smart people fall into that trap... but generally speaking if intelligent, hard-working people are advocating something that seems stupid to you, it's probably because you don't understand the problem or the solution.
Some are better than others.
I can see your point, but even the notable works of highly-educated classical writers regarded as producing the best of English literature are rife with the most egregious violations of prescriptive grammar.
Analyzing Word Frequencies with Clojure, Enlive and Incanter
Of course, given that the moisturizer is unsanitary, the doctors and nurses would immediately have to wash it off again. :/
Ask HN: Can I sell my early stage startup?
I have an early stage start up. It's a subscription model business. All the software/website is fully operational and customer ready.

A sudden change in my health has made it necessary for me to either sell or shut down. I've spent the last year of my life building this company. Money is not much of an issue, I simply want to hand over the business to someone excited and capable. If I can recoup some of what it cost me to build this company, that's merely a bonus.

Is there a market for this? I would have been thrilled if someone dumped a primed and ready startup into my lap, but perhaps I am alone with that thought.

A fair amount of knowledge in our business domain is necessary, but any intelligent hacker can pick up the basics within a few months.

What are my options?
If that is the case I would think that the voting system would be sufficient for handling any such discontent for posts such as these. If you don't like it don't vote for it, and if the rest of HN agrees the submission will see no votes and the submitter will hopefully get the hint.
There's the competitive edge, too. Lots of people (myself included) are very competitive and want to "win." More twitter followers, more foursquare badges, etc. If you and a friend both join the same site that promotes these types of game mechanics, you (potentially) just got two loyal users who will fight to beat each other, also inviting their friends to compete as well.
A downvote is hardly punishment, it is just a community measure of the worth of a comment. From that point of view it is a learning experience, as you learn what is valuable to other people and what is not at all valuable.

If you can't handle correction, or the opinions of others, then Hacker News isn't for you. If you want to improve, learn more, and become a sharper, more attuned, internet citizen then this is the place to hone your skills.
Your generic post looks much like a bot attempting to gain some karma before spamming than a human conversing about the topic.
Mite launched in the end of 2006 as a free service up until they re-launched as paid service in mid 2008. That's about 1.5 years free service.
This is (/appears to be) the outcome from Google's acquisition of Swedish foundation Gap Minder -- which was some AMAZINGLY smart professors and academics who visualized UN Data. (I say 'was", they still are smart! Just that they work for Goog now!)

I was privileged to attend a lecture and private demo of their early software when they were an independent.

Great stuff.
"Could you perhaps turn convert a Vagrant project into an EC2 instance for deployment?"

That's where Chef comes in. Vagrant uses Chef (http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) for provisioning VMs. It's basically software configuration management (same category as cfengine or Puppet) -- you write cookbooks that specify how a system should be set up (see http://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/raw/master/nginx/recipes... for an example).

If you write your Chef configuration the right way (ie not hardcoding anything to a set of system specifications), you can take the same set of Chef cookbooks you write and deploy to EC2 or any other Linux box, virtual or no.

So with Vagrant you can essentially pass around a virtual machine configuration amongst your team and be confident that the entire team is coding and testing in a near-exact replica of the production environment. Not that this was impossible before, but Vagrant streamlines the process.

I've provisioned 20+ servers with Chef and once you have a solid base configuration you can take your attended time on a full server stack (nginx, memcached, post{gres,fix}, munin... the works, essentially) to less than 10 minutes.
Side note:

The owner does not explicitly share a document with
any individuals, but chooses the sharing option
‘People can view this item without signing in.’

All viewers (or editors) will appear as anonymous.

from http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

I love this. Please anyone sharing Google docs use this option, so it doesn't expose the email addresses of everyone who views it.
No warnings from Amazon, no - at least, not that I saw. It was totally out of the blue. We, too, do not really depend on revenue from that source, so we can be somewhat amused by the whole thing. But it's a severe warning for anybody wanting to build a business on somebody else's foundation; you never really know if it will vanish tomorrow.
While the details of the $44.5 billion for local education aid were indeed changed by "the twins from Maine" (although I'm not sure to the degree you claim), you're not counting the $40 billion for unemployment benefits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm...) and the required changes in state law to get that money, or the $86.6 billion for Medicaid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm..., "More than 11% of the total bill is allocated to help states with Medicaid"; I can't remember if there were eligibility changes required there).

For you to be right about no state aid and there being no strings attached, you'd need to explain why there was all that furor about the governors of Texas and one of the Carolinas (I think) refusing the aid, and the provision in law to bypass a governor, and how the governor of Florida's figurative and literal embrace of Obama is helping to destroy his campaign for Senator.

WRT to tax cuts, putting the annual relief ($70 billion this year) for the not inflation indexed Alternative Minimum Tax into the stimulus was pure political theater.

And I just can't see how Perry "took" the Texas share of the remaining $167 billion in individual tax cuts (perhaps he should have instituted a state income tax to capture that "windfall" for the state???) or how he "took" the Texas share of $51 billion in business tax cuts, but I don't know anything about Texas business taxes.

Anyway, I don't need to see graphs to get a rough idea from the listed breakdowns at Wikipedia or any of the other zillions of sites.
Still waiting for a proper AdBlock on Chrome/Mac (ie. one that doesn't just hide the ads) and I'll switch.

"GWT developer plugin" for Chrome/Mac would also be nice although it's not that essential.
Absolutely nothing - the e-mail hit my inbox at 1:08am this morning.

Seriously considering my options - it's interesting to note that the hundreds of Amazon affiliate links on my website are still working - I'm just not being credited for the sales, or compensated for the referrals.

I've been a huge fan of Amazon until today. It seems their strategy is to get Associates to pressure the CO legislature to change the law, but hitting Associates in the pocketbook isn't the best approach, IMO. If they would've said what they'd do if the legislation passed, we could've weighed in before the law was passed.
And yet these people would probably give a thumbs-down to the Bill of Rights.
You can try listing it for sale on Flippa. Although if its not making money, I'm not sure you'll get much for it.

If the business is promising I'm sure it'll get picked up.
Isn't techcrunch evil?
This is so useful!!! I've been doing this manually for a select number of important projects. However, I'm not a Rails dev.

What would it take to work with [language/framework]?

I've skimmed over the docs and here [http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/setup.html] it seems like instead of

rails init

I could run

django-admin startproject
The Haskell 98 Report takes two lines:

foldr f z [] = z
foldr f z (x:xs) = f x (foldr f z xs)

Clojure does it like this (note the overloading - this is both "foldl" and "foldl1" in Haskell terms): http://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/49a7d6b8e14050a45d...
Just be glad Guido knows how to write a parser.
That's afternoon UTC, so the submission time was near the higher point time period.
I work out in the cold, and while it does appear he's wearing virtually nothing compared to what we usually wear in the present day, the quality of clothing plays a big factor.

I've sweated my ass off (literally dripping) at -15C with just a fleece sweatshirt on over a thin tshirt (literally less than 1/5th of an inch of material), but the slightest wind with that on draws all the protection from the cold away. Leathers provide a virtually impenetrable protection against wind, and a real fur below that would have provided great protection against cold. However I found that a simple summer wind breaker over the fleece sweatshirt was enough to get around in the winter <30 minutes outside without getting cold.

During my actual work periods (IE 8 hours) I typically go on the heavy side of clothing and with the heavy exercise I do I actually feel at risk of heatstroke at -10C. Considering these guys frequently had done military service, and often were actively in military service, they probably wore little clothing during travel for the same reason that they had to not only regulate heat loss but heat gain to form a balance between being freezing and boiling.

It's also worth noting that these expeditions were frequently performed during December, which is incidentally the height of summer in the southern hemisphere. Summer temperatures are between -15C and -35C, which is considerably more manageable than the winter temperatures of -40C to -70C. Note the freezing point of CO2 is -78C (not that at its pressure it would ever freeze in nature).
in YC parlance we are ramen profitable, but i don't think flippa is really what i am looking for.
To be true, it's customary that you also add a line for the types in Haskell. Though not necessary.
Hi Mitchell

I love this :-) have myself a bunch of slices and would make sense to consolidate them and run them with Vagrant (also would be less expensive too)

Have a question: does this run on a virtualized environment? For instance, if I get a big instance on EC2 or rackspacecloud, would virtual box work? Of course, this looks like it should be run on a dedicated "barebones" server, but I know I'll run into teams and webdevs who already have hosting at slicehost
I've noticed something interesting about certifications.

At least on forums I come across when Googling things in the Microsoft space, people with certs tend to add them to their signature, along with their little MVP badge.

e.g.

Jon Williams
MCTS, MCPD, MSCE, MVP

As if it lends their post more credence.

I have two degrees, and ~15 years experience in the industry , but I don't sign off with

B.Sc, B.Sc(Hons), M.Sc
15 Years Experience

It adds no value...In my opinion, it's a negative indicator. Some of the best programmers I have ever worked with did not have any degrees or certifications, they got the job on the strength of their interview and ability to think.
The really critical area tends to be the last point. I don't know how many times over the years that I have seen founders get tempted to want to: (i) steer current customers of their employer in the direction of their side venture; (ii) sign up key customer or supplier contacts of their employer as "advisors" for their side venture; (iii) talk to co-employees about joining their side venture; and (iv) the worst temptation of all (but thankfully rarely done) use an inside contact at their employer's business (or use their own position) to steer project work toward the side venture.

On 3, does this mean you can be successfully sued for hiring a co-worker? What if it's 2 years later?

On a side note, it's pretty damned fascist that relationships can be treated as corporate property. That only passes because the corporations now own the legal system.
I think you are perhaps getting mixed up.

The uncanny valley effect occurs when something that you know isn't real that approaches a more familiar state. As your familiarity with the nonliving object increases, that can paradoxically cause you to be repulsed by the object if it isn't 100% right.

However, the thing is, you wouldn't feel this effect on something that is already real. You might be creeped out by it, but that is something entirely different at play. Not Uncanny Valley.

The kinds of situations where this would come into play would be if someone modelled your partner out of wax in the nude (think Madame Tussauds but for nudity)...
The category Grammar is somewhat slippery to define but we can still reasonably exclude some things.

The first "mistake: in the list under discussion is definitely a stylistic problem and not grammar problem - "it goes without saying" is more traditionally known as a "colorless phrase".

Grammar is some combination of rules and usage. "Incorrect grammar" is just generally not applied to phrases that merely detract from one's message. Of course I'm basing my judgment of the meaning of the term 'Grammar' on usage as well.
Hmmm... okay, I'll buy that! Thank you for providing such a thorough explanation of your interest in this site.
You can find some info here http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/2900/life-is-lonely-at-... D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. A lot of research at the time my friend was working was not published as some of these organisms could produce gold as a metabolic product. True alchemists!
Is it possible to get Dijkstra's handwriting (or anyone else's, for that matter) as a font? His writing is gorgeous.
Didn't they do this, or threaten to do this, in North Carolina too?
Depending on your income, you might want to check into incorporating out of state and using a mailbox service. Perhaps you could write Amazon and tell them that due to their new policy you decided to move operations.

Not sure that this is a great strategy, but I'd be looking into it today if I were you.
options:

1) shut it down.

2) sell it. yes, you can sell it, although it will be difficult and/or won't sell for nearly as much as it would if it were fully established with paying customers.

3) find a partner and offer them a majority stake to take it over completely. you retain some reasonable stake in the company and act in an advisory role as much as you're capable of. or not, but realize that if you're totally hands off, you shouldn't expect to keep a big chunk of it.

4) keep working on it when you have the opportunity.

i mean, completely dependent upon what it is, i'd be interested in #2 or #3.
That's why you have to practice the correct social timing to cut in with "Do you think she's ugly?". If you're ashamed of your opinions--"Oh God, I think redheads are ugly, and thus have insulted his wife!"--they'll pick up on that and a fight may ensue. If you skip the illogical guilt and move on to the truth: "My opinion has no bearing on his wife being 'objectively' beautiful or not," you are much more prepared to avoid a violent confrontation, both in your diction and your demeanor.

Though it's probably easier to say "red-heads aren't really my type," which expresses the same sentiment but with less of a loaded word. Thus, you provoke a milder emotional response, have communicated your feelings honestly, and can go back to picking out cute girls sooner.
What's amazing, to me, is that we're still reading about it several months into the story. Mahalo is a known black hat spam site, with despicable tactics, and Google continues to apologize on Calacanis' behalf and send traffic to Mahalo.

I think that's actually the interesting part of the story: How Calacanis has snowed so many smart and decent people into doing his bidding.
I wrote a (poor cousin) version of Instapaper for Android. Search the marketplace for BenPaper.

I wanted to dump the iPhone for Android, but the thought of having a phone without Instapaper (or similar) was too much to bear! I wasn't sure whether to open-source the code or not, it's pretty poor quality at the moment, but gets the job done.

At the moment it pushes the content through the Google mobile web rendered to strip the unnecessary content. Does anyone know if the Instapaper parser has a public API? I assumed it didn't...

It needs lots of work but if you have any comments/suggestions please let me know. Thanks.
Drizzle team leaves Sun, Joins Rackspace
Thanks for this. We use MongoDB to solve quite a few problems here at work. It's refreshing to hear that better replication and sharding are on the way.
A good book on bacteria living deep underground is 'The Deep Hot Biosphere' by Thomas Gold:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#The_Deep_Hot_Biosph...

It's somewhat controversial, but it's a good read.
YouTube - The SECRETS of the Apple iPad Ad (Oscar)
Right, but that's a great example. What if exercise helps because of something that is created as a side effect, and that in the future is available in pill form?
The first comment they probably voted down because you expressed an opinion that had no relation to the way things work... Matt Cutts can't add noindex to a page, only the people who own the websites can do that. The second comment was probably voted down because you whined about the first one being voted down. And I am guessing that they probably voted this comment down because you called them morons. Just a guess though.
I have my bookmarks on the cloud (delicious firefox extension). I have delicious show up as a bookmark toolbar instead of the Firefox toolbar. I choose Favorite Tag view and then I have three tags as favorite: 1-frequently used bookmarks, 2-less-frequently used bookmarks and 3-Read later articles. I tag lengthy articles with the third tag and they stay there in front until I'm done reading I would simply remove the tag.

The only thing missing is the reminder or stay fresh alert. Sometime it takes some effort to go back to old and lengthy articles.
The Real Reason AOL Can't Spend More Than $100 Million On An Acquisition
You know, I thought the exact same thing about a third of the way into the document, and noticed that he used most of the common symbols you'd need, even a capital Z and exclamation point. Maybe I'll make a spring break project out of it and post the result on HN.
So what were you expecting when you clicked a story that read "Advice From My 12 Year Old Self"?
Honestly, I think you under-estimate the general population's ability to learn how to use a tool. I think being able to explain why the results are what they are takes another level of understanding. But I think - and, yes, this is an unsubstantiated claim based on personal bias and anecdote - that many people have developed an intuitive feel for how to craft a decent Google query. They may not be able to tell you why they say what they say, but they can still say it.

Personally, I think Google is a good tool. I feel my mental model of it is relatively simple, and from that, I can mostly get what I want. This is also a good time to plug a great article on tools: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...

edit: My explanation was not that Google understand your search to be "used cars." My explanation was based on the assumption that you were looking for a place, online, to buy used cars from. The keywords "online" and "leader," muddied that. The search for "used cars" yields many places to buy used cars from, and the top entries are probably the "leaders."
Also, is it just me or is it crazy that there's no public URL to a specific Android app? What's that all about? The only way I can currently view feedback to the app is by borrowing a colleague's G1!
Nissan Claims to Have 56,000 Preorders for LEAF Electric Car
Can you send me more info? davidsmit at google's email service. I might be interested.
afaik, yes, they did this and it is still in effect.
Smart move. They shouldn't acquiesce to a small group of largely ignorant politicians. Imagine if every web app you wrote was required to have unique compliance code for every state-- not a good precedent. Besides, I imagine most large volume affiliates will just get checks sent to their uncle in Dubuque. The only thing they should have done differently is sent out a snarky email giving people one week to "move" to another state before deleting their account. Reminds me a little of Wal-mart shutting down stores that attempt to unionize, who can blame them?

(same dumb shit is going on with medical marijuana. colorado voters amended the constitution now the legislature is trying to pass a law that only doctors THEY approve can write recommendations.)
The "flagship" data visualization seems to be the one Hans Rosling [1] is famous for, and that Google acquired from Gap Minder. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for interactive data visualization - something made possible by personal computers, but certainly won't be the last we'll see. It's a great first example of our technology being used not as a "better" version of what came before, but a step into what was impossible on the former medium (paper).

Two interesting related questions: (1) what is possible by combining these with a multitouch interface? (2) aside from "drag this slider back and forth", what kind of interaction would be useful?

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
Thank you very much for this point. We certainly will correct our pages!