skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compare and contrast this to the US news media's treatment of Toyota, a company that otherwise has had an amazing safety track record.

People in the US, and the media, are extremely sympathetic to major corporations. The European look is entirely the opposite. That's why EU countries have so many wonderfully solid consumer protection laws.
He never connects the dots, though. It could just be that the stupid (according to the author) like the music, not that the music is causing them to be stupid.

This sort of thing doesn't belong on HN. It's just one long rant on a musical group. Edit: Because of the lack of content but more importantly the tone. This is just a guy practicing with his poison pen.
>The usual rule of thumb is the cheapest car costs you _at least_ 300 €/month (taxes, depreciation, not counting gas money)!

These prices are hardly uniform across all of Europe. I live in a smallish city in the Netherlands and you can probably own a car for 60 - 100 €/month here.
I think we just lost some carats in the mix. The original comment meant to type exponentials but they didn't come out right on the page.

Someday HTML will support TeX and we'll never have this problem again. ;)
First startup almost there. The road hasn't even been that rocky. I agree with jacquesm about keeping it simple & foregoing the pipe dream of huge growth and an IPO.

To which I'd add: Solve a business problem. Charge businesses money for it.

The friends I've seen fail with 'startups' had no true value built in, and no capturing that value (e.g. not charging for it).

Or they were trying to sell vague services to a vague audience, who they didn't understand. (Namely: consumers, who pay for very little on the web, without understanding & compensating for that fact with what they chose to build.)
How much of this is perpetuated by 'echo chamber' I wonder?
What and where are you working that you have access to a processor with hardware transactional memory support?
Do you know if that is specific to the iPhone HW? My 1st-gen iPod touch performs very well with iPhone OS 3, only stutters a bit when changing tracks while playing games.
I really, really recommend reading The Millionaire Next Door (I have no affiliation with it. It's kinda old-school, but in no way out of date.).

Almost the entire book is about how luxury goods are NOT consumed by rich people, but by semi-struggling middle class people. (BMW's, Rolex, premium liquor, etc.) (Or at least people who have to go in to debt to consume these things.)

(It's also about how rich people DO live, choose to buy stuff, negotiate, etc.)

Everybody in this thread who's saying, "duh, cars aren't supposed to be an investment," are technically right. And everybody should indulge in things that really make them happy. If cars are your thing, go on, do your thing. It's all good.

But in the Millionaire Next Door, it goes over how cars are an especially precarious purchase for most people, as they just really eat up a lot of money over time. For most people, even non-luxury car purchases require a loan.

Cars might be more dangerous for us than say Rolexes, because most of us think "well either way I have to have a car, might as well get a _____."

Anyway, maybe this article wasn't the most persuasive case, but it is true. Most rich people don't have fancy cars, or probably fancy anything.

(In the Millionaire Next Door, it says we get confused by this because there are a famous outliers who show off their wealth, so we incorrectly associate wealth with luxury, when they're rarely related.)
Agreed, no Al Qaeda leader is going to deploy a single nuclear weapon on the US or other nuclear power without full and implicit knowledge that our nations opposition to this war will flip 100%.

I'm sorry, the reaction after 9/11 lead to a full blown invasion of two countries (regardless of any other motives behind the actions, it was the public opinion that allowed it to happen) and that was just a couple of buildings disappearing. If a nuke had been deployed in New York, the populace would only have been happy to let the government turn Afghanistan or Iraq into a few million square miles of radioactive desert glass.

The terrorist organizations themselves are acting logically by using illogical agents. The men who killed themselves on 9/11 weren't logical, but their actions were considering the masterminds behind the scheme. Right now if Al Qaeda got a nuclear weapon, they're still at a losing ratio of >1000:1. I'm sorry, but the reason the USSR went nuts building nukes was because the US already had hundreds developed by the time the USSR only had a dozen and it wasn't MAD logic it was suicide logic. Any deployment of nukes in the early stages of the cold war would have wiped them out. Similarly, a terrorist organization is only ever going to get its hands on a handful of nukes, it'll never have the 1000's required to destroy western civilization, so the deployment of a nuke only guarantees the destruction of their own.

I'm sorry, but Islamic Terrorism really doesn't instill fear if every Muslim just bit the atomic dust. I'd hate to see a world where we wiped out countless countries mainly because of religious association, but I really don't see anything else happening if a terrorist organization detonated a nuke in NYC or any other city.
I seriously see no point of this
Running barefoot is cool, but at least to me these five finger high tech socks kind of miss the point. Part of the reason for barefoot running is the "back to the basics" feeling, I wouldn't want to get into another arms race for better equipment.

In my experience it is best to run on on grass first (football or soccer fields) to get used, if it's dewy it feels extra nice, running form surely improves with barefoot running.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician%E2%80%93patient_privi...
First, note my parenthetical comment.

Second, your answer is to a different question - what is a reasonable theoretical valuation for a minority shareholder based on various potential outcomes? Not: at what price could I sell 100% of the asset in the market right now?

An actual cash purchaser is always giving up a current cash flow because they expect a larger future cash flow.

In your example, 2 and 3 can also be viewed based on cash flows. If you plan to build the same thing, buying it instead eliminates the negative cash flow of building it. Comparable transactions are based on how others valued comparable cash flows.

Economically, it's always about the cash flow. Of course, economics isn't everything, there are trophy properties, social motives etc.
I've got a pair of the Vibram KSOs, and am loving them.

Dunno where the $125 cost is coming from, given they mention only the KSOs. The site sells KSOs for $85, and that's what I got mine for. Because I've had such ridiculously good experiences there, I got mine from Run Away Shoes [1] near my house (your experience may vary), where you can try them on to check size / fit / whatnot. Highly recommended you do that first.

($125 is for the kangaroo-leather super-deluxe model, which I'd imagine would be WAY too warm for any time but the winter. Your toes don't get cold/pain/numb like in shoes, there's more blood-flow due to their being used. Just cold. At least, in my 30-degree-morning-walks-to-school (1 mile), and if I jogged they positively warmed up.)

First time I went running in them, I hadn't run more than a mile, intermittently, in over a year; I got lost, and ran 3.5 miles. Felt great. Land on the balls of your feet to take the landing-shock, keep your weight forward, slow down slightly, and take smaller strides; it'll feel right when you do it right. And be nice to your feet, they take a long time to heal. Looking at some barefoot running videos and deconstructing the strides helps a lot.

Speaking of healing, my forever-weak-and-puffy arches have been better from about the second week. My calves had no problem, but I jump around a lot; the balls of my feet got sore after ~hour or so walking around on concrete / tile, however. That cleared up after a couple weeks, and now I'm good all day.

As to washing them, my feet apparently sweat a lot. Hopefully that'll change in time, but in the meantime I wear them daily / everywhere: they don't air-dry in a day. If you force air into them (we've got an air purifier, and just lay them on top), they'll dry in an hour or two, but non-moving air won't dry them quickly. * shrug * maybe if you hung them outside?

[1] : http://www.runawayshoes.net/

edit: oh yeah, another surprising bonus: your balance improves tremendously, especially as your toes strengthen. At least, mine has.
Email is infrastructure software and some of the MTAs that are 10+ years old still don't do it well enough. Wrap Postfix, Exim or Qmail with your own business-logic interface and sleep well at night.
Underwater? Viewed as an investment any car puts you underwater immediately - it's a net loss.

If you borrowed money and are also paying interest on the vehicle, that's just MORE cost... I don't get the rationalization.

Yes, a new-ish used car is a better value for money deal than a brand new car - but if you have to borrow money, you are probably better off convincing your ego to let you buy a cheaper model rather than borrowing money from the bank to purchase something.
The common thread in most of these is Twitter, some decent ones though given the time restrictions.
What will happen when smartphones become powerful enough to run windows? [Thinking long-term, tectonic shifts here]

There's constraints of display/keyboard size, and the form-factor encourgaes different usages (eg. less business software).

But I think people might start to dock their smartphones to large displays and keyboards at home (that's what I do with my netbook) - like a portable harddrive. Projectors might also become popular, giving a large portable display.

Or, future desktops might actually be smartphone components, wrapped in a desktop package (in the way microcomputers invaded the workstation, minicomputer and mainframe markets).
Off-topic but meh. The guy is a frighteningly funny and shrewd to boot. See any of his posts at A Tiny Revolution http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/

Oh a thanks for the heads-up on this data structure ljlolel.
This week's Real Sports on HBO has more on the topic. The interesting part to me was that people who run with shoes tend to land on their heel (causing more of a shock), while people who run barefoot tend to land on the front of their feet.
Even with Zed's changes to the text, I'm completely baffled by what he says about some people allegedly thinking that "Python delinks".

First he links to some blog post where someone threw out 20 questions about the GPL, and got approximately a million comments. I read about half way through the comments before losing the will to live, and didn't see anyone claiming anything like "Python delinks". (I also searched for the bizarre word "delink"; it isn't there.)

Then he links to Van Lindberg's lightning talk, where he does not by any possible stretch of the imagination say or imply or suggest or support anything even slightly like "Python delinks". He hardly gets as far as mentioning Python in his five minutes. I have no idea how anyone's belief that "Python delinks", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, could be "reinforced" by anything he said.

I also asked Google about <<<python delink>>> and it didn't turn up anything remotely like what Zed appears to be talking about.

It's hard to be sure, though, because Zed never actually says what this weird belief is that he's commenting on. "Python delinks", "the GPL doesn't apply to Python" -- I'm pretty sure no one with a brain has said either of those crazy things, so what is this belief that he's caricaturing and disagreeing with? Zed never says.

(He does go on to make a positive claim about what the GPL allegedly means for Python software, namely that if you write something that can optionally use something GPLed to provide an extra feature it wouldn't otherwise have, then you have to release it under the GPL. I think that's debatable, but in any case disagreeing with it is not at all the same thing as saying that "the GPL doesn't apply to Python" or that "Python delinks".)
Eggs, toast, coffee, and HN. Just like my grandpa used to do.

:)
well, you forgot some brands on your list like: hennesey, saleen, caterham, ariel, ultima.
Anyone care to explain this downvote? These are very valid questions that would greatly help the original poster sell their vision if answered.
It's not your age, it's your self-pity that's going to get in your way.
I did know someone who belonged to the "those who see a car as just something to take you from point a to b" view of cars.

However, he owned his own jet (and other aircraft).
Another KSOs owner here, and I love them.

I only have them about a bit under 100 kilometers, so I still don't know for sure if they're that great against injuries, but at least the feeling of running with them has been great until now.
I've been running barefoot on the beach since I was a kid. Unaware that such practice would now be considered better than running with shoes. I did it for fun, splashing the water or just feeling the moist of the sand by the sea shore.
Oh please, today is Sunday :) Seriously, take a day or two off in a week.
Part of the Flash presentation was broken for me. I got to the section about "the handoff" and the slides turned into a big green rectangle. Fortunately it came back after it moved on to the next section.

So if this happens to you, hang in there.
> It’s actually a good idea to start with barefoot shoes, as they make a great transition into barefoot running.

I would suggest the opposite, that the vibrams become more useful after you have more accurately dialed in your running form. In doing otherwise, you risk injury through "too much to soon."
Bottom line from the article, it's costing an estimated $19,358 per student per year to educate, or maybe we should say fail to educate, in the NYC public school system.

By comparison, average private school tuition is $6600 and Catholic school tuition is $4254.

Spending is probably not the problem.
Lessons for the Apprenticed Investor
I can confirm your experience. Heres hoping for a 2.2 release soon though!
As someone who can be described as a Gen X'er, I have the same position now, as I did when I first saw Myspace and Facebook - I don't want to be part of it. The lack of privacy is a huge problem, and the worrying part is that it seems that the younger generation has a much lower threshold than others. I guess they are not old enough to have fully experienced or thought about the potential risks.

I take great care in how I present myself on the web. I have blogs and share photos online, but only on personal sites that I have full control of.
This is one of my hobbyhorses. I'm cautiously optimistic that this effort will not end up like the last seven times bold new centrist Democrats tried to take on the teacher's unions.
A scuola Google Earth al posto degli atlanti
You can go very far. Facebook apps, mobile apps, SMS, Mapping,

Here are some impressive implementations:
http://www.drupalgardens.com/
http://openatrium.com/
http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system
http://developmentseed.org/ -> Their projects are cool
http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=drupal_core%3A87&#... -> Modules organized by usage. Go through a few pages to see some specific use-case modules.
http://2bits.com/articles/presentation-28-million-page-views... -> Drupal is NOT slow when configured properly.
www.whitehouse.gov is probably pretty cool.

I recommend http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/state-drupal for an idea of where Drupal is today.

I'm curious what other HN people think about Drupal. Would love to hear.
You'd kill, but you wouldn't move?
This is what you are looking for: Danah Boyd's SXSW keynote:
http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

It's important to realize that "privacy" actually means "control over how your personal information is presented and revealed". Because having a magazine photographer with a telephoto lens take a naked picture of you and post it on the web sends a different message than posting that picture yourself, which in turn sends a different message than mailing that picture directly to a younger member of the opposite sex. Even if the pixels are exactly the same.

This is about the important social meanings encoded in the way you present something: Steven Pinker on "indirect speech as a window onto social relationships":

http://fora.tv/2007/10/15/Steven_Pinker_Games_People_Play

It's a bit abstract and academic, but this is HN, right?
The ability to handle transactions makes it very interesting to me, but your criticisms are valid.

It still seems a little too young a project for me to want to use. I will definitely keep an eye on it though.
Hyperbole I hope

You can stop hoping. The great majority of email is sent in plain text (SMTP) and as the datagrams are routed from machine to another, they're open to interception, and in fact, are routinely logged.

SSL/TLS are cryptographic extension that attempt to secure messages in a socket communication, and by extension, application layer protocols such as SMTP.
Good teachers aren't motivated by money, so paying them more just attracts bad teachers. Good teachers want autonomy and to have an impact, and more testing is just going to drive them away. So both sides of this are advocating for things that will make the problem worse!
I agree with the point you are making, but those numbers are not directly comparable. Catholic schools in NYC are heavily underwritten by their local parishes and secondarily by the archdiocese, and they also have non-trivial funding from a variety of government programs for providing social services.
I prefer zlib license[1] just because of that. I'm fine with other people using my code. But keep my name clean. It also also haves quite simple and easy to understand language and no extraneous capitals.

[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.html
To me this seems like a nice gesture but largely ineffective.

The fact is it takes effort to make changes that would earn this money and the school districts who are willing to make that effort are the ones that already care. So while it’s great to reward teachers and school districts that excel those people were probably already doing good jobs (or at least competent ones). So giving them more money is nice but doesn’t really solve the problem.

The problem is the lethargic ones. The ones who are so lazy and incompetent that they wouldn’t even try for this money. The districts that are so pulled down by incompetent teachers who can’t be fired that improvement is all but impossible for them. Fixing education means finding a way to deal with those people and this push doesn’t seem to address them at all.
I didn’t know it was hard
Trust me, teachers in the public schools aren't being paid 800,000 dollars to teach 40 students. Most of the money goes into the bureaucracy that comes when you have much larger class sizes and much more diverse student populations. (not claiming it couldn't be smaller) The proposed accountability changes aren't going to change that.
His remark might not be 100% accurate, but it's pretty damn close:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing-dem...

The majority of facebook users are women 26-44: no word on their maternal status though.
... except for fuel.
"Hey, sir, I just need to tell you that I'm recording this for my rec---"

"Turn it off. Now."

"But---"

"TURN IT OFF AND STEP OUT OF THE CAR."

You're right, but not in a relevant way.

(I have a very little bit of experience with this, though not with municipal police; a friend got assaulted because of this, too).
Your numbers are misleading in one key respect: In Manhattan, private school tuition is far higher than that average (more like $25,000-35,000). Link: http://privateschool.about.com/od/schoolsny/qt/nyctop.htm

That said, the public schools in NYC are (mostly) a disaster, and it's disgusting to me (as an NYC taxpayer) that their return on investment, so to speak, is so poor. (Even the good schools will commonly have class sizes of 35-40 students. Lots of long writing assignments for high school students? Not likely...)
OK I guess I could not question your decision here maybe but let me make my point:

Firs, I was raised in a non-religious home and all my ancestors were either protestant, catholic, or Jew, or probably adored a totem or some other chunk of stone or wood ;-) And as such I have a problem with the emotional reactions. I have a problem with the violence and death threats. I have a problem with a war on terrorism that is conducted by terror and disdain for Muslim protests in return.

This question of the perception of Islam by non-Muslims is such a challenge. Islam has been around and is not going away. However, Islam is complex and diverse. It's so important to keep discussing and resolving and exchanging ideas on this.

Even if us geeks like to think that the world is made of predictable things like science, machines, and nice people, it's not. And it has been that way since the dawn of people. So if a growing portion of the Muslim world thinks there is a problem with the way we portray them, if they keep thinking we disrespect their values and prophets, maybe we ought to listen, debate, and propose new ideas.

I, for one, believe that many Muslims are wedded to a value system that comes more from ancient tribal societies than from modern industrialized democracies. I believe that this is the main root of this clash of "cultures" instead of the "Clash of Civilisations" which sounds like an announcement for a war to come.

I do not want to bore you guys or take this out of the realm of Hacker News etiquette but this seems like such an important issue. Please kill it without killing my karma ;-)

I have lived in the Valley for years before moving to Oregon and I know the culture there is not very favorable to questioning racism, political and religious values. But please ask yourselves if you really think that Muslims are monsters or if you have just not misunderstood them. Then put the violent ones in jail and stop attacking the religion of the other 99% who are peaceful.
I don't think the author has the attitude he says he does. No-one truly can stand by the statement that everything they put online they expected to be public at some point.

So, your banking is online, your email is online. Clearly you expect some things to not be public. The question is about where that line is and whether someone moves it without your say so.

People would indeed freak at Google and banks if they revealed what they promised they wouldn't. And that is the issue with facebook, they told people they wouldn't share this stuff and so people used facebook to tell their close friends stuff and facebook moved the line, repeatedly.
That we know of. Other possibility: they simply went way over the line this time.
Every Hug, Every Fuss - Scientists Record Families’ Daily Lives
No. I have enough money and I don't have any use for a twitter account.
Beyond that, there are fewer and fewer parish Catholic schools in NYC. (The parish schools have much lower rates. There are also independent Catholic schools (ones run by boards rather than the archdiocese directly) that charge tuitions in the 25,000-35,000 range. Those aren't closing down so quickly.)
People don't comprehend how insecure the Internet is. They take for granted that their information will remain private unless they explicitly wish to share it publicly. This may be naive, but ideally this is how things ought to be.

The reason these issues have been at the forefront lately is that mainstream media has picked up the story. Facebook has, to use a cliche, reached critical mass. Everyone and their dog has a Facebook profile, so when something involves Facebook, even if it's a slightly more technical topic than usual, people are interested and want to understand.

Combined with other coincidental events, like Google being compromised by Chinese hackers, and people start thinking about it.
The El Paso Miracle