skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's your jab at "christian missionaries" got to do with the article? The group Common Ground that is mentioned in the article have no religious affiliations mentioned on their website (after a quick scan).

Vis-a-vis your OT remarks:

Man A (to Suicidal man on a ledge): Would you like to come down now?

Man B: No

Man A: What about now?

...
Now let's pretend that he decides to live in front of your house. That's ok, right? What's the harm?

Providing for homeless people is definitely society's responsibility. I don't think we really want to make people "institutions" and call them iconic because they've camped out somewhere for a long time.

If 100 people decide to camp out in Time Square because there's a lot of tourist quarters to gather, is this ok? Should we grant seniority if there are ever too many? I'm sure you've heard the stories about "homeless" people in NYC who make a good living begging for small change and have nice apartments.
So you consider the Chinese people so inept, so incapable of influencing their destiny that they tolerate such an outrage?

Or do you consider them to be morally inept and complicit in their own enslavement?

When you claim that a foreign regime is illegitimate you are either making the above claims OR you are calling for intervention.

What kind of intervention? Well we occasionally see sanctions (which result in starvation) and we occasionally see bombs.

When it comes down to it, most people in China are living their lives quite happily, and I think it's condescending to think that their biggest concerns happen to be America's most self-congratulatory customs.

edit: If you hold this view, then you are putting the state and the state's laws above the day to day lives of people. This is the kind of thinking that leads to beliefs like "it's worth killing 1M Iraqi people and making another million starve just to be rid of Saddam".
One reason to do A/B testing is to collect data/facts.
That article contains only opinions ie : "The biggest difference, is that we are now introducing a bribe"
Trust data, not opinions.
I love the website. The design looks great (don't change it!) and I like the simple, intuitive interface.

I spent about 10 minutes flipping through reels, and linked a friend. Now he's going through reels. We probably won't get much work done for the rest of the afternoon :D
The Border Series (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, etc) is riddled with inaccessible scene description (non-stop landscape lexicon) and bouts of Spanish, only barely detracting from each story's general awe-inspiring quality.

No Country For Old Men is more accessible and I'd definitely recommend it. The Road is also a must.
I wouldn't call it creepy. But it struck me as extremely cynical.
Google discloses IP address of user making threats to congressman
What do you think of this model andrew? I have a prototype of a similar app that is a little less blatant.
Tech4000: Support US
I don't know where you seem to be getting that I am for static typing. In fact, what you say about static typing only being useful up to a point is exactly what I was getting at. Neither way is perfect to remove bugs from your programs.
Because they've sucked dry their hosts in the West, and globalism allows them to move on to another region.

With "vertical transmission", a parasite must stick around to deal with the consequences of its actions to the host, so such arrangements evolve into benign symbiotic relationships.

With "horizontal transmission", a parasite is free to kill its host and move on to another. Such parasites are noted for their virulence.
They're separate for now. That's an idea I've thought about, though, but I'm not sure if it's better to keep Vimeo's "like" and this "like" as separate things or not...

For the time being, I think our plan is to make a "top 20" page or something like that which would feature the reels with the most votes.
Also, two front-page articles about homeless people in just one hour... that's a little odd.
This is from the affidavit:

6.	On March 27, 2010, an Emergency Disclosure Request was completed and faxed to Google Inc, the owner of YouTube. The request was for Google to provide the IP address(es) used by the user who posted the YouTube video described in paragraph 5, above. Google provided the IP address - 74.109.58.150 - that was used at various times by the user between March 24, 2010 4:48 p.m. PT and March 26, 2010 04:58 a.m. PT.

7.	Subsequently, the IP address 74.109.58.150 was subsequently provided to Verizon Internet Services. Upon being served with an "Emergency Situation Disclosure Request By Law Enforcement" form, Verizon provided the subscriber information for the user assigned IP address 74.109.58.150 between March 24, 2010, 4:48 p.m. PT, and March 26, 2010, 04:58 a.m. PT. According to Verizon's records, the subscriber to the IP address, at the specified time was: John Hopkins, 1653 Benner Street, Philadelphia, PA 19149.

What I'm curious to find out is if an Emergency Disclosure Request is legally compelling.
That's a little extreme.

Contracts are good for memorializing simple numeric facts like "you get X shares vested in this way on thus and so date". Much better than depending on the memories of even scrumptiously honest people.

The assignment of IP part is also important, at least when I learned this in the '80s. Makes it crystal clear that the employee is doing work for hire and has no copyright interest in his code or whatever.

As noted elsewhere, this is easy to put in one page and you should strive to do that. "Just the facts, Mam".
Luciano Pavarotti's Secret to Online Success
It just seems disingenuous. All the talk about a happy community working together for the betterment of all involved and the $700-$2500 price being charged by one party for simply organizing the event.

Startup School is the real deal.
The Spring Framework for Java is supposed to have pretty good support for AOP in Java.

I haven't used that particular feature of Spring so I can't vouch for it, but Spring is generally excellent so I expect no less from this.
"The first thing we always do is make slight modifications to what we already have."

rather contrasts with

"The next big difference is that we changed colors and went from cardboard to white to spark the interest of people walking by instead of automatically having negative associations that they have with cardboard and homeless people."

The second can (and in the context of the article maybe should) be tested. The small change is to make exactly the same text on the different material.
Why not link to the original article?
Just to address a depressingly common misunderstanding whenever testing and static typing is brought up:

Static Typing vs Testing: Which is better? No! Stop that! There is no "vs"!

To take Haskell as an example, it is a completely statically typed language which, if not abused cleverly, guarantees that you don't have code trying to add inches to centimeters, or divide a hangar by a sorted apple. It also has a very powerful unit test generation and execution library (+), code coverage tools, and test statistics tools. These libraries and tools are frequently used by Haskell programmers. Creating any large project without unit tests is just as silly in Haskell as it would be in Python.

Nobody has ever (or possibly, only nobodies have) argued that static typing eliminates the need for tests. The author of this post didn't argue that either.

(+) http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_QuickChec...
Are they still selling them at a loss?

That's how it starts out, before serious cost reduction.

Also, hasn't IBM capped the Cell line?
This is hardly A-B testing...this is more barely readable sign with hidden cup to VASTLY improved sign with prominent red cup and BRIBE!
I think that the book is obviously not true in the sense of being a true/false sort of book. For example, it does not offer a good argument for its views.

However, I think the Chautauqua theme is enlightening. For me, the book was a "mind-shaper", if you'll allow me such a term. It didn't convince me, but what it taught me was tangential to what the book was actually saying.

I guess another way of saying it is that, for me, the journey taught me something very valuable, whereas the destination was a bit silly.
"If you ever want to be at a C-suite, you have to have a global skill set and you have to have significant international exposure,"

Can someone translate this? What does it mean?
I strongly recommend _QED_ by richard feynman.
Spam notwithstanding, what's wrong with the usual methods for sorting email, e.g. catchy wording in title, and filtering based on whether the sender is familiar to you?

Admitted I'm not a celebrity like Arrington, but I really don't find myself especially more likely to absorb email content that I'm apathetic about, even if I get paid. And precisely because I'm no celebrity, I don't see how I could be paid anything more than a pittance by this scheme, meaning someone would be buying my attention span for very cheap.

I'll let the attention span devoted to writing this comment (provided free of change) serve as an example of how I believe this scheme would drastically de-value email readers' time.
Without an explicit predicate, I would guess that the implicit predicate would default to either "true" or "false" rather than "at random". If it defaulted to "false", then the imperative conjugation would make no bloody sense at all (i.e. "eat up" would parse into "don't eat anything"), so I think he's saying you shouldn't write anything.
I am not sure if this is what you feel or not (and this may be over-analyzing), but for many people, homelessness is a problem that should be delegated for others to do something about. They don't like the presence of them in their neighborhoods (for whatever reasons) and they often have misconceptions of homelessness that exacerbate the problem.

What works for me is to just chat with them. They don't all beg, but even if they do, one thing they all have in common is the need for ordinary conversation.

The fact that someone posted a story about A/B testing a homeless person's sign sends me two messages. a) They are thinking about homelessness and want to do something about it. b) They are trying to relate it to another problem that many other (non-homeless) people experience. I'm not sure what the author's motivations are, but they definitely got their message across, and they will definitely get people talking about it.
It's one thing to "make sense" after changing a name to 'animal' it's another for it to mean the same thing.

I got the same impression as korch. In several ways, it does mean the same thing. They've got a bunch of people "studying his habits and movements", figuring out where he eats and sleeps, and telling the population not to feed him because it's actually bad for him.

People, even other homeless people, are not usually treated this way, but wild animals are. At the root of the similarity, I think, is an assumption that Heavy is not capable of deciding what is in his best interest -- that he can't be reasoned with but that he might be coaxed to do what they want.
Some singers want the audience to love them. I love the audience. -Luciano Pavarotti
The fallacies are summarized as follows:
1. The network is reliable.
...
Always Split Test (Even If You’re A Bum)
"Before you get all 'ugh, you are mocking a homeless man' on me, realize this... This experiment improved this bums ROI"

I got the same feeling. It's because he doesn't treat the guy like a person; he never calls the homeless man by his name, Keith, but keeps referring to him as a bum.
Article summary:

Michael Arrington hates reading his email and thinks you should pay him to read it. Enter a service called Attention Acution that gives you a special inbox and let’s people know how many emails you have in your inbox and place a bid to have you read their email. If you read their email then you get paid. Apparently the site is buggy and doesn’t work all the time so it’s unlikely it will take off.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/29/get-paid-to-read-your-email/
Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer
My problem with PostgreSQL is that you're half expected to tweak it to your needs. Ideally I would have to record and replay real life activity against the database for each adjustment. It's too much work to do properly. An expert could probably make a good first guess though. Which is why I've wondered if there is a tool where you drag a couple of sliders that describe your server specs and application nature and output config.
The Successful Failure of OpenID
Pluginquery: Clean search interface for 400+ jQuery plugins with repositories
What? He winds up exactly where he started but with the roles of people relabeled.

> Features: I want feature X and I want it on the same schedule.

> Truth: We need more time and since I know all the moving parts, I know that we’re ahead of schedule of one feature. I think we’ve got two weeks of wiggle room.

> Bits: Two weeks isn’t enough. Can we cut this one feature that we haven’t started and no one cares about in half?

> Features: I can live with that.

> Truth: Sold.

This exchange is "the triangle" working properly. They sacrificed some of the quality in the form of features in exchange for time. All he's done is found another way to say we need to properly prioritize application development.

I believe it's addressed in The Mythical Man-Month.
i don't think that it's that, although i am aware it's a (subconscious) possibility.

rather, it seems like it's connected to relative levels of power / wealth. i am wary of doing anything that "uses" someone when there's a large difference (in power / wealth) because it would be so easy to coerce them.

one way in which i can draw a difference: i really don't think this involved "ordinary conversation" (and if i am wrong, and it was - obviously there is no way for me to know for certain - then that would make me much more comfortable; it's also true that i am a poor communicator and i may be projecting my lack of ability...).
I wonder if he collected enough money to offset the cost of the hand sanitizer and go ramen profitable on that sign
Two early ones (mid-80s) for laser printers:

Treekiller (obvious).

Software Hoarder (at Unipress software, the legit licensees of Gosling Emacs, which was also the start of GNU Emacs).

Me, I've always used the names of anime gals (home or work).
This is already on the homepage http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227279
I didn't get that feeling at all. It seemed like he referred to him as the "homeless man". Either way, I felt he focused more on the problem of A/B testing than making any denigrating comments about the homeless.
It would be if "big games" was as clear a category as "Scotsman".
Yeah Faye makes it dead simple to set up the channels to communicate on but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of filtering for the channels. I am sure it is something that could be added, but I didn't take the time yet.

Thanks!
I disagree - I volunteer with the homeless here in Seattle and I have not gotten that impression from anyone I've worked with here.

The city government, city council, and general people are more interested in removing eye-sores and guilt trips. But by and large the aid workers are genuine - heck, they are the only people who seem to perceive the homeless as people.

So the question is, who are these aid workers working for - if they represent the city directly, then yeah, I'd be inclined to call shenanigans. If they represent an apolitical aid organization though, I'd be hesitant to make that accusation.

Part of the complexity of the situation is that a lot of the homeless have severe mental illnesses, and many are dangers to themselves because of it. This is why I don't immediately jump to the "enforcer" conclusion - it may very well be that the social workers are trying to get him to a place where his mental illness may be treated.

Personally I'm against efforts by cities to simply get the homeless out of sight - I think most people in society sorely need a daily reminder of just how lucky they are, and how much they are not doing to lift up those around them. Let the ugliness and ills of the city shine openly, it's the only way we will ever be compelled to fix them.
"Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman!" can be found here:
http://www.gorgorat.com/
YC is not a charity.
Mac OS X 10.6.3 Released
Ask HN: Where do you buy your health care?
I have been working as a programmer for 15 years now. Currently, I have a good job at a major company. I have a wife and a kid. I am thinking about starting my own company but I am not sure about the health care insurance. I have look at this site http://www.freelancersunion.org, which is very affordable but it doesn't have a plan for Texan. Please let me know if you know any other good options.

Thank you
Ask HN: How do you guys work through you aggression?
Right now I want to throw a chair across the room or punch a hole on the wall. I was in the middle of working on my program and my wife walked in (her day off) to ask about the cell phone bill. I told her it's been paid online already and she said how. My blood pressure has just gone through the roof. I told her again it's paid and she left eventually. I know it's irrational but I don't know why I am so angry afterward.
I got into MIT by doing very well at math competitions, mostly. I also wrote a good application essay, which followed a certain kind of idea which is admired at MIT - the ideal of the "passionate" young person, who is a sort of intellectual go-getter. This doesn't actually reflect my personality, but at the time I was somewhat dazzled by the MIT mythology, and I'm pretty good at writing in character.

By the end of my time at MIT, I'd moved towards a fairly radical point of view about education, and about many other institutions in society. I think that the established structures of society - educational, scientific, political, or economic - tend to be highly conservative, in the sense that they defend a conventional view of what is 'scientific' or 'educational' and so on. In this way they devalue diversity.

I personally don't think it is possible to develop the awesome potential of the human mind by following a 'program' of any sort. The defining characteristic of the mind is its ability to adapt, and to incorporate new ideas and new points of view into a more thorough conception of reality. This implies that one will progress most by constantly challenging what one has previously believed. But this kind of path can not be planned out in advance: at most one can try to have as wide a base of experience as possible, and to resist the urge to dismiss the 'outlandish' too quickly.

In short, I think the primary characteristic of curricular education is its conservative opposition to diversity; while the most basic ingredient in intellectual progress is exactly that diversity. This view was reflected in my time at MIT - MIT has a rather strong curricular structure, and I found it frustrating in the extreme (I was frequently depressed while at MIT). For example, MIT teaches analytic philosophy, neoclassical economics, rational-choice political science: these are all echoes of the same narrow, scientistic outlook. Continental philosophy and heterodox economics follow a more tentative, experimental approach to knowledge, but they would fit poorly with MIT culture.

As for whether it is a good thing for a young person to go to MIT, I suppose that depends on your view of a good life. If a good life is doing well at one boring, pointless task in order to be given a still more boring, more pointless task, then MIT is an excellent choice. An MIT education is genuinely rigorous (more-so than Harvard), and an MIT graduate can move onto graduate studies with confidence. From there, who knows? You may even win a Nobel Prize.

If you want to achieve intellectual excellence, in a traditional human sense that would be understood by the ancient Greeks, I would look elsewhere. I get the sense that continental Europe is less fully colonized by one-dimensional thinking, although I can't entirely confirm this.
"Real Fast Food" by Nigel Slater.

Yes, it's a cookbook. Bloody good one, though, and you've gotta eat.
The door knob example is terrible. How about this: an office that is either too hot or cold? Would that qualify as a bug? I think it does, and it happens all the time in new buildings.
Not specifying any common required video codec was a real failure by the working group. What good is a standardized video tag if the actual contents can be random?

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...
The scientific process can be formalized, even taught to a machine, however the hypothesis-generation step is a human, artistic, creative process.

This book is about reconciling this, and thus reconciling rationality, art, and religion with one another, though the religious part isn't touched on all that much. The author goes on to suggest an idea that "quality" is the fundamental force in the universe. As an example of this idea-application in practice, the author says to open the Tao Te Ching and replace "the way"(etc..) with "quality", and then see how much it makes sense.

While insightful, it really is a bit silly. But don't let that get you down on the book -- the book is well worth your time to read. The material is really very interesting. I am certain you will love it.
The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. A really interesting analysis of modern narrative structure rooted in mythology. It'll appeal to HN readers; it's an analytical way of breaking down every story ever told.
if he was "making [...] denigrating comments about the homeless" then it would be obviously wrong. that's really not what we are discussing here - it's certainly not what i felt (i would have simply flamed away if that were the case).

in general, saying "it's not [some extreme caricature of a position]" isn't much use in arguing against anything, and doesn't really help anyone much...
Tinfoil Condition Red - CERN to power up LHC on Tuesday
The greatest enemy of the programmer: hemorrhoids
And if you're not you could read his essay collections -

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" the title essay of which is now available on the internet and is a terrific introduction to the late great American author (http://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/03...)

"Consider the Lobster" (http://www.amazon.com/Consider-Lobster-David-Foster-Wallace/...)

Some of the few pieces of physical literature I actually own and chase back every time I lend them to someone.
Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely
Paying out to be advertised to... ?
Have you ever measured the levels in a new car? It's about the same.

Or the levels given off by a new sofa? Or new carpeting?

What about trailers purchased on the regular market, are they any different?

BTW, I'm not trying to say we should ignore the issue, but rather extend it everywhere.
Haskell programmers are fond of claiming that their type system is more expressive than some programming languages, and that an impressive number of programs work correctly the first time they pass the type checker. I've been using Haskell for a while and I've found quite a bit of truth in that claim. I've found it to be more true when I actually use the type system, creating my own data types instead of just sticking values in to lists or tuples.
If you want to tune your database to squeeze every single Mhz and MB on your machine then indeed you need to take the time to learn the parameters that PostgreSQL offers you, and it does offer you those parameters, it's an extra compared to MySQL. But you don't have to, you can pretty much limit yourself to a few configuration parameters that are very useful and would get you 80% of the way, and of course add some monitoring, especially for slow queries.

A good starting point for setting up a database is here: http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2010/03/5_st...
It might make sense to learn from AllAdvantage.

If you are going to pay people to read email, people will generate thousands of email accounts and auto-readers.