skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. Process changes, to the lower case "c" constitution (e.g. on the filibuster) or upper case "C" Constitution (potentially this one) are very important.

Changing the rules of the game will result in unknowable consequences, and as long as limited government is a distant memory our part of Main Street has to pay attention.

E.g. look at the Dodd bill that will decrease the number of angel investors by raising the net worth threshold and by either adding bureaucratic friction and delay or devolving regulation to the states. For all we know, angel financing in California could cease to exist in a few months or years.

(That's a different sort of "changing the rules of the game", but one of particular interest to all of us.)
but Droid is doing pretty well
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/03/16/flurry-compares-nexus-...
How old is your oldest (current) domain?
...and, I'd like to add, doing so makes you sound stupid. So I didn't read very far.

People like Bruce Schneier argue eloquently about why privacy is a good thing without this sort of childish name-calling. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_p...
Didn't we just make fun of this article yesterday? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193936
The Basics of Music Licensing in Digital Media
Ranking applications by HN karma? I hope not.
A cat pricks it's ears to increase fidelity of it's hearing, dogs point with their nose as a learned trait they don't do it in the wild and a snakes 'sees' with it's tongue as it picks up scent trails.

None of these behaviours are naturally evolved communication methods, two are evolved traits that better adapt the animal to it's environment and the other is a learned behaviour.

If creationism ever compliments evolution it is purely by accident.
"Which is funny - just because you can work without being led doesn't mean you can lead others. One would hope you've gained some insight into how to work without being led and can apply this to others, but that's far easier said than done."

How often does a business/company allow you to work without being led or managed? If that's the case, the company is very small (and you are the manager of yourself because nobody else knows what is going on). The next logical step to this is to hire more people under you.

Most companies aren't going to give you a management role. You need to prove you have the skills in some way.
Neat. There's a group in Cambodia that teaches blind people massage so they can make a living. It's great to help people use the abilities they have.
That is a bit misleading. Niju only allows you to mash-up your own newspaper from several given sources, so that your individual newspaper contains only articles from categories (politics, culture etc) and sources you chose (NYT, several German papers etc). You cannot actually order your very own paper.
I haven't seen anyone explain how the prospect of Senate "betrayal" is diminished by application of the Slaughter rule, especially after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that reconciliation cannot commence until the original Senate bill is passed and signed into law by the President.
Ideas about start-ups
I’m really not enough of a politics junkie to know when this maneuver was used for the final language of a bill and when it was used for something else. It seems clear to me, however, that if the maneuver is constitutionally OK for one kind of House resolution, it’s OK for every kind of resolution.

Nothing is being “passed without actually being voted on”. There will be one vote, which will simultaneously have two effects: one described by the procedural rule, and one described in the text of the bill itself. Every Representative who votes on the bill will be perfectly aware of those two effects and can choose to vote yea or nay accordingly. And then the majority will rule, which is more than we get from the Senate.
I went with the Droid because I would not purchase a phone online. I want to be able to either exchange a defective phone or return it within the first 30 days. I read lots of people complaining about the mail-it-in-for-a-new-one online. Turnaround? 2 weeks.
This actually makes sense. 500 pounds is trivial in comparison to the pain associated with getting the wrong bed, and it's difficult to tell if a bed that is comfortable when you first lay on it will still be comfortable after 8-10 hours.

If the beds were functionally indistinguishable, it'd make sense to buy the cheaper one. If they're different but incomparable, then the price difference doesn't add much new information.
To speak of bankruptcy when talking about sovereign governments is somewhat misleading since they have many options that are simply unavailable to even the largest of private debtors.

Articles like this always strike as being not only fuzzy from an economic perspective, but also willfully blind to the political implications.
Get to the root of security threats
ISO format is yyyymmdd, not ddmmyyyy. First recent ISO date in pi is 19530921 at the 417th decimal place. All Wikipedia has for that date is the birth of a musician and recording engineer called Andy Heermans.
What I don't get is them on one side pushing this at the IETF to "convert" it into an RFC and at the other side requiring that license agreement to be signed.

Doesn't the IETF disallow something like that? I always thought that specifications defined in RFCs were free to implement by anybody.
As someone with 20/20 vision whose main interest growing up was snake-catching, I have trouble with this hypothesis. Unless a snake is basking or is already moving, you generally won't see it until it is underfoot. In other words, the proposed adaptations don't actually help you see a snake before it is underfoot. And as you mention, snakes are mainly interested in avoiding people.

Wouldn't the dangers of uneven terrain, tripping, and falling be a better explanation of why we are good at looking down? Peripheral vision makes sense if you're also watching out for the family as you walk.
Tangent: one of my favorite programming patterns is to roughly mimic the human visual processing. This is super simplified, but humans make snap judgements based on small amounts of data, then progressively make better judgements as better data comes in. (ie, you'll jump away from that brown stick instantly before you even think about if it's really a snake).

In programming terms, it's a narrowing funnel of accuracy. You start off vague but very very quick to catch the important stuff early, then you filter it better and better as you have time.
It's like this: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

It works for the first person who tries it, because of curiosity. People were probably curious about what could possibly make a silly iPhone app worth $299. The joke (and a hilarious one) was on them.

After a few people do this, the app store will be pushed to allow returns, adding headaches for developers.
Benchmark of Python web servers
A benchmark of 14 different Python WSGI web servers.
Continental Adjusts Thinking With New Exit Row Fees
One rhetorical question, simply because I find the meta subject fascinating.

I wonder just how much the House is allowed to set it's own rules of conduct? Could, for instance, the Congress decide that whatever bills the president proposes would have the full effect of law without a follow-up vote?

I think the answer is no, but I'm not completely sure. Congress has ceded a heckuva lot of authority already to the executive branch in terms of regulatory authority. If the answer is no, then where is the line and who the heck would adjudicate? The Supreme Court? The Court has been extremely hesitant to go anywhere near the legislature, and for good reason, but if a majority party were to cede all voting rights for the body, I'm thinking somebody somewhere would have to call them on it. I guess that means the Supremes do have something of a role in the legislature.

It's also interesting that something has to go wrong, or there has to be a big political firestorm, and then suddenly everybody is a constitutional scholar. Kind of civics class by crisis. What a country.
No dude it is slavery, it is called indentured servitude (classified as a form of slavery) and it is illegal. The reason being that if allowed it is easy for the rich to drive down the market until you sign up for service or you starve. If allowed, the vast majority on this board would be indentured in less than 15 years. The worst part is that it never becomes enough, fathers have to enlist there sons, before they can consciously accept or reject just to be competitive. If they ever legalized this in America, I would revolt the day it was passed, it may be a revolution of one, but it would be a revolution.
Did Uncle Sam try to kill Wikileaks?
A clear and distinctive title?
[comic] The Difference Between Browsers
I suppose this shows Google is not Dell: selling expensive goods online-only requires some specific expertise.

The good thing for Google is, that all they probably really care about is the success of the Android platform; as long as the world buys hardware that plays nice with the open web and (thus) integrates nicely with Google's services, it's fine. So the 1M sales of Motorolas in that graph are good news.
Why not sell it? You have a service that there is clearly some demand for it must have some value on the open market.
Mafia hitman tracked down through Facebook
Page is worth it for this nugget:

Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!
Using existing infrastructure (the printing press) to open up to niche markets during press downtime isn't a bad idea for newspapers. The example of football (soccer) teams printing their own short-run publication and distributing it at an event may have a better foundation in the long-run than a daily local newspaper that has to be delivered door to door. Distribution is cheaper and they target a highly focused audience segment (which may interest advertisers).
Aside from the obvious reasons, this is also great because it allows the deaf to work in a deaf-friendly work environment; everyone or most there probably sign.

Much of a deaf person's life is spent watching, in silence and isolation, as the hearing people around them communicate freely. Depending on the area, socializing a deaf family member can be a real challenge. Finding a job like this would be a huge help.
What if it were for a site where you'll be providing real, personal details anyway. Like LinkedIn for example?
I haven't seen the data, but at first blush, I really question the strength of this hypothesis.

Most (all?) animal senses have evolved firstly for finding and obtaining food.

From antelopes to bees, the spectral and polarization sensitivity (if any) of the eyes is perfectly matched to discriminate their primary food source against the background of their visual environment.

Predators evolved binocular vision (for distance estimation), and vergence tracking to estimate future prey pathing movement. In fact, amongst humans, the extremely wide margin in vergence tracking performance between the sexes is indicative of a very early specialization for hunting by men and gathering by women.

Evolving defensively against such an extremely rare event (no known extinct or extant species of snake even actively preyed against humans) would seem counter to the daily duty cycle demands of the human sensorium.
For those who are interested:

It is conjectured that pi is "normal" in the sense that the digits occur with equal liklihood. Making that statement precise is exceedingly hard, and not very enlightening.

EDIT: philh points out that the full definition of "normal" says that every block occurs equally often (a concept that needs care to make formally correct) and that does imply that every finite sequence does occur.

pi is known to be transcendental. It is not only not rational (cannot be expressed as the ratio or integers (although 355/113 is close and you can get as close as you like by using bigger numbers)) but it is also not the root of any polynomial with integer coefficients (rationals being a special case).

The digits of pi cannot become periodic.

None of the above is enough to show that every finite number occurs "eventually". As an example, consider the number:

0.123 112233 111222333 111122223333 111112222233333 ...

Here the digits 1 through 3 occur equally often, it never becomes periodic, it is transcendental, and yet the sequence 321 will never occur. Now instead of using 1 through 3, generalise to using 1 through 9.

It is generally believed that the digits are "effectively random" which means any finite sequence will occur with probability 1, but the observations made above are not enough to ensure that. (EDIT: although the full definition of "normal" does, rather thanthe limited version I originally put - thanks to philh for the correction).

(edited a typo 133 -> 113 : thank you for the correction)
C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web
Chroma-Hash: A sexy, secure visualization of password field input
Some Android phones will sell millions, some will sell a dozen. Android is only the platform that makes them run the same software. That would be like implying Symbian is a failure because the nGage didn't sell well.
OK, but I think it would be best to focus on the point that your opponents are arguing about, a final up or down vote on the final language of a bill, and not the red herring of how the sausage that comprises that bill has been made.

Especially in the current context where everyone has had a chance to analyze the 2,700 pages of the Senate bill that was passed ~ 2.5 months ago.
Things That Think: Startup Ideas in the "Internet of Things"
nexus one was not advertised commercially. it was never intended to be a mainstream product it was a solution for people who wish to purchase and bypass carrier lockdowns.

it solved that problem rather well so by that purpose it is a success.
Reading the title I thought this would be ideas for actual products or services that a start-up could pursue. Rather it is 19 points of advice for startups to follow.
Ask HN: how do you backup your servers?
I need to think about backing up data I have on a server, and would like to know how you do it. Do you backup whole machines or just some specific directories? Do you do off-site backups, or local? How much data do you have in a backup job? What's you preferred method: tar, sftp, scp, rsync, paid-for services etc? What's the most annoying thing you encounter managing backups?
Yes, the government tries to keep price down for exporters. The BigMac index shows the BigBac exchange rate of the New Taiwan Dollar is around 23 NTDs = 1 USD, but the official exchange rate for the moment is around 32 NTDs = 1 USD.

The house price in Taipei can be as high as New York City in Xin Yi, DaAn districts. But generally the rent of an apartments in DaAn district for a 2000 sq ft doorman elevator building is around $1,600 to $2,000 USDs.

There drawbacks to live in Taipe. Although English is taught in schools, people still have problems to communicate in English. To be able to live like locals, you need to be able to speak Mandarin or Taiwanese dialect well enough, and be able to read signs in Engrish and guess what authors meant.
Would be really cool if someone devised a way to get metadata/transcripts up around the archives that could be accessed by API.

Among other things, this would make the Daily Show's segments a lot easier to produce :-) -- "intern, please find me five places in the archives where this politician contradicted what he just said this morning"
The first person who tried it did it years ago, remember the I'm Rich app? The app store also already has returns, you get 90 days (which caused a stir as developers get their money sooner than that so it's theoretically possible to owe Apple money at the end of the month).

http://gizmodo.com/5034122/guy-buys-999-im-rich-app-discover...
Debt is only ever a problem for a country if a) it is trying to maintain a fixed exchange rate or b) the debt is denominated in gold or a foreign currency. Neither of these is true for China, so it's level of debt is not a problem. In fact, under a fiat currency system the entire concept of "debt" is a misnomer for sovereigns. Sovereign debt is must better thought of as interest bearing currency.
Does Sleep Really Affect Your Weight?
The only 'unban' here is to email PG, and I think he likes it that way, bans on HN of established users are rare enough that he can keep tabs on it.
Traction can be a bitch, doesn't mean it's a "flop"... only time will tell on that one.
The author claimed he had 8 sales in the 24 hours it was up.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/08/iphone-i-...
Apple sees over 120,000 iPad pre-orders on the first day
You can hear Russell Davies, one of the founders of Newspaper Club, talking about the project that spawned the startup in his talk "Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)" from dConstruct last year:

http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/8908

He gives a very good talk, and it'd be even better if you had the slides too but I don't know if there's a video of the talk.
That is a great idea assuming they're not bicycle couriers - that seems pretty dangerous in a city like that.
I'm not sure I'd call the Nexus One a flop.
A) You, and a lot of others, are still talking about it.
B) It's more about getting Android 'out there' than about selling phones
No excuses for European entrepreneurs
"Kind of civics class by crisis."

And one should be cogent of the maxim that "Hard cases make bad law." That from the judicial side of things, but apropos here.

On the other hand, I think we're fortunate to have a meta-process that the public is involved in, that seems to work better than a lot of the alternatives.

As for your question and uncertainty, I've seen quite a bit of good discussion at The Volokh Conspiracy in the comments to various postings (http://volokh.com/, it's a high quality group law blog by various law professors and the like). (In fact, if you haven't visited it before, check it out, all sorts of tasty stuff right now, e.g. the 11th Circuit has just made what is possibly a bad ruling on email and 4th Amendment search and seizure. I wish I had time to follow it...).

In the discussions you'll find some comments on at least one prior ruling by the Supremes in this area; they are very reluctant but not entirely so.
Generally rsync to a mirror-image hardware box in the same location. Everything is backed up so any fault/failure on the primary machine can be recovered (in theory) via the hot-standby machine.

Critical user data, databases, etc. are dump'd/tar'd/gzip'd to a remote location once a day, generally held as long as space permits.
We've considered it but the truth is we can't keep running it in the mean-time. We'll have to wait until the dust settles and then see where we stand.
pi doesn't have my phone number (in the first 200000000 digits)

I'm so sad.
So it turns out that carriers subsidize phones because ... customers like it that way?
Napster failed because it was closed down, as it was found to engage in illegal activities. So: no, Twitter is not the next Napster. Comparing Napster and Twitter is like comparing a tree to pair of scissors. I'm sure you can find some analogy between the two, but that doesn't make them related.
> a) it is trying to maintain a fixed exchange rate

I thought China is trying to maintain an exchange rate (or rate "band") with the USD.
I wonder what happened to the hinted-at open sourcing of the linux GUI a couple of months back. I really hope this is not it and we still get that.
If you're only 15, then my heartfelt apologies, I have a subconscious mental image of HN visitors as being people that are somehow active in the IT industry for a while, and not knowing about VMware would be unthinkable in that case.

Once again, sorry about that.

Regarding the 'jackass' bit, beware of thinking everybody on this forum is 15 years old, that street works two ways and bans here are swift and pretty permanent.

HN is a forum unlike most others and one of the reasons for that is that people that can't control their use of language get killed.
yes, it is.

"social element is embedded in the commercial operations" is something I want to remember.

Can't help but think that, should this happen here, someone would try and sue - which is sad.
is Taipei behind the Great Firewall? What kind of price is normal for middle of the road livable apartment in a central location with a stable net connection and food / incidentals per month in your experience?

For the record, Sydney figure in my experience is about 2.5k AUD per month, Tallinn figure in my experience is about 900 AUD.
All indicators point that it's going to release for Verizon on the 23rd. Granted, that won't help the "first 75 days" numbers, but I'd wager money that the sales will skyrocket when it's released. No, I don't have any solid data or research to back that up, it's just a hunch.

I've held off of disowning my BB Storm and getting a Droid just to wait for the Nexus One. Of course, your 2nd point feeds into that heavily. Anytime I mention Android, several people I know that have a Droid or Droid Eris claim they have an "Android". I suppose technically speaking, they do, but they certainly don't understand the difference.
Ask HN: Please review our startup
Dear HNers,

We just rolled out the latest version of our recommendation startup and would love to get feedback. It's not a 'recommendation engine' or anything of the ilk but more of a whrrl or eat.ly for recommendations. The recommendations themselves are multiple choice, which is our take on a present-day review site. We originally were working with something more like Yelp but we nor our users really got into it.

We'd love to hear any feedback people might have. We're four months in (one month post funding) and are just about to start iPhone and BlackBerry app development. Any feedback would certainly be appreciated.

www.jukaroo.com

Peace,

Matthew & Onne
For Cooler Chips, Follow the Grooves
Except that this is fraud. And the USAA app requires you to log in first, so the depositor has been authenticated.

Trying to pass off a photoshopped check via USAA's deposit@home would be about as wise as walking into a bank to rob it after first presenting two valid forms of photo ID.
In Denmark there is a company called Specialisterne (The Specialists) that only hire people with autism as software testers. It's a huge success as some types of autism is perfect for extremely repetitive work as it both improves the actual testing and even better the autist loves it.

http://www.specialisterne.dk/
Not quite. If the carriers would allow you to pay for the service minus the subsidies, then we would really find out whether people like the subsidies. The carriers won't allow that because they really like 2 year contracts.
Sunny Lamps from Japan « Lighting Universe
The Rising Cost of Public Higher Education in the USA
Agile Git Workflow
So I hope someone is explaining this to the you-know-what-hat Senator Dodd. Remember to speak slowly.
Good stuff. In my small town one of the two super markets hires people with disabilities and that is one reason I do my shopping there.

A good friend has been deaf since she was about 4. She has accomplished a lot in her life, but many things are difficult for her.
Yes, I've seen the situation where you have a group of people looking at a close-by tree, and one person is shouting: look there is a snake. And everyone is saying "where, where"? I've seen this go on for 10 minutes, and people just don't see the snake. It's like some type of puzzle.
The Three Online Knowledge Wells (VIDEO of Hacker News)
My wish list for @anywhere
Karl Rove's book vs. Rework - what the American People need to know
We do tar'ed directories/databases onto S3 and this script: http://simonwillison.net/static/2008/backup_to_s3.py.txt

Right now its only done weekly, as we're not experiencing high growth. We also store downloads, so the tars can get very big, but it works well.