skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh, I know this is slightly offtopic, but there's nothing more I dislike than B.C.E and C.E. I can understand not trying to promote a Christian-centric worldview, but by only changing the labels, they accomplish nothing. Now, the birth of Christ sets a 'common era,' which arguable makes it _more_ 'offensive' than just acknowledging what happened on that particular day.
What coding language should I start with?
I know this will sound like a real vague question but I'd like to learn a coding language. I know a little html and CSS but really, not much. What would be a good place to start? I was considering LAMP or Ruby. I know someone will ask what do I want to do with it. Well, right now it's just to learn but I want something flexible that won't handcuff me.

Thanks
Science Friday: Geek Update - What's the Word?
It depends on what kind of problems you like to solve, I suppose. Usability isn't going away, and neither is classical IT type stuff (like your SP project).

If you like to work with more fundamental projects, I'd stick with SP. Fewer fuzzy requirements, much easier to learn if you did things correctly.

Usability involves some psych stuff (knowing both some of the neurological responses, as well as programmed responses due to de facto standards). It's much more fuzzy. You can always improve a UI. It's more people-oriented than traditional IT work.

For me, personally, I consider usability much more interesting. Using a company like Apple as an example -- it was their design and usability groups that have made them so special as a company. Would you rather work for Apple or work for a company like EDS?

Not that I'm suggesting all usability/UX will be like working at Apple. But I do want to emphasize that the two career paths will appeal to different types of folks -- there isn't one option that's "better" than the other.
It's legit, or at least as legit as it can be coming from me. Did I come across too pompous? This is sincerely what I believe and value, although it's an old idea.

From the post:
"Surviving and taking care of your family is an admirable dream in my book, but the quality of your aspirations aren’t for me to judge. I can only observe your dedication"

/post author
I scan all my receipts every couple of days and dump them in Evernote.

Then I simply run down all my transactions on the CC bill once a month and search Evernote for the dollar amount. So if my CC bill says I spent 40.65 at Walmart, I type in 40.65 into Evernote, and sure enough, there's the receipt.

I save about $70 a year doing this and it takes all of about five minutes a month.
Yes. All nightlies are Firefox 4 nightlies. Since there is no Firefox 4 yet, its not numbered that way.
> The term you're looking for is 'irrational.'

I think by infinite he means non-terminating.

Conversely, an irrational number always has a non-terminating non-repeating decimal representation.
Thank you, Microsoft and Google.
"If the browser supports CSS3, Gmail will render the pages using these specifications, rather than its traditional approach of using the Document Object Model (DOM)."

Better go build a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP as well!
There's a pretty big difference in compile time for large projects. If you're just hacking around, sure, works great. But if you make a living on iOS and do a few hundred compiles a day, it's a no brainer to buy a quad-core or eight-core machine.
Doesn't sound 100% legal to me.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd claim that the mere existence of an invoice is a statement that money is owed. Since money is not owed, and the creator of the invoice knows that it's not, that makes this fraud. The fact that it says that the debt is for "nothing" is irrelevant, since it's clearly intended to defraud.

It sounds like the creators subscribe to a "magic words" theory of the law.
http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp
"Poverty causes poverty." I couldn't agree more.

I think the model is exactly right: too many miseries, not enough motivation to alleviate them. But I don't like the proposed solution of giving away money; that fosters dependency.

I think the best approach is a personal one. Friends I've had who were poor were sometimes poor due to circumstances beyond their control, but most often they had just never learned how to live differently. They hadn't been taught how to handle money. They didn't understand budgets. They ate fast food; we cooked. They bought tons of toys; we had fun money, but it was tracked and budgeted. They bought pre-packaged sausages; we bought potatoes. They failed to pay bills for months on end, constantly fighting fees and debt collectors. We tracked and budgeted everything. For some of these people, it was totally lifechanging just being friends with my family--seeing how we ran a clean household on a shoestring budget, and saved money.

A poor person who's good friends with a not-really-poor person has a lot of advantages. Not-really-poor can alleviate some of the worst pain of poverty: help out when they need a lift or a dinner or an advocate or a place to stay. But the major advantage is lifestyle modeling. Poor can see what Not-Really-Poor does that makes it all hang together, that solves all the problems at once. And he sees how he could maybe get there himself.

Economically mixed neighborhoods, a sense of neighborliness, hobby groups (say, gaming) that cut across social classes and create friendships. I have observed these things to effectively combat poverty.
I guess that's only true if you already own a place to live in.

I would do really well on my current wage if I owned a place, but since I don't, I have to spend between a quarter and half my earnings on a place to live in (I still live way better than the average Uruguayan).
As an alternative to tau, I propose the symbol 2*pi.
From the readme:

"So far tested in

Tested in Firefox 2.0
Tested in Firefox 3.0
Tested in Firefox 3.6
Tested in Chrome 5
Tested in Safari 4
Tested in Safari 5
Tested in IE6
Tested in IE7
Tested in IE8
Tested in Opera 10"

Does it mean it works on IE6+? Does IE6 have local storage?
Is TaskFox included in FF4? There's no reference to it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_4_for_developers...
NO "cities have laws as restrictive as those in Chicago [and one of its suburban towns] and Washington [, D.C.]", which have/had full, absolute and total bans on handgun possession by ordinary citizens (maybe with some grandfathering). Therefore the immediate and direct result will be limited (although it should be noted that 3 other Chicago suburbs including the infamous Morton Grove dropped their bans rather than fight (Chicago offered to pay the legal costs of the one remaining suburb)).

As it is, some lower courts have already been writing decisions assuming Heller would be incorporated and there are two cases in California have been on hold while waiting for this decision.

WRT Breyer's dissent WRT "democratic decision-making", Alito slammed him pretty hard:

"First, we have never held that a provision of the Bill of Rights applies to the States only if there is a “popular consensus” that the right is fundamental, and we see no basis for such a rule. But in this case, as it turns out, there is evidence of such a consensus. An amicus brief submitted by 58 Members of the Senate and 251 Members of the House of Representatives urges us to hold that the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental.

[...]

Third, JUSTICE BREYER is correct that incorporation of the Second Amendment right will to some extent limit the legislative freedom of the States, but this is always true when a Bill of Rights provision is incorporated. Incorporation always restricts experimentation and local variations, but that has not stopped the Court from incorporating virtually every other provision of the Bill of Rights."
If traditional economics applied to the poor, a whole lot of things would be working a whole lot differently now.

So it seems he's right about that. Whether he actually understands economics or not. And it's likely that he does understand traditional economics to some degree, it's not hard, he prob took intro, micro and macro like everyone else. Those models quite clearly do not apply to the poor or else we'd see a different poor.
Increase your patience level. Lower your unnecessary expectations. Have a playful environment. Respect everybody's style. And agree that world doesn't move at your pace.

Step back a little. See if there is something you can fix in you rather than fixing something in other people.

I've gone through this situation, and I've come across this problem by letting the steam off, trusting people, and giving there own space as long as I'm making progress on product front.
Excellent, I was just running some markdown and previewing it in Safari with an extra step. This is cool.
How soon before there's software that can "discover" who is gay, who is bi, who votes this way or that way, whose language is creditworthy, et al? I await the day when all of this is discredited.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/20960/why-is-the-gamma-fun...
You just stated why you are a terrible CEO. If you want to succeed doing a startup, unlearn everything and try to be more like him. At the least don't make things worse for him. If he is your 50% partner, he has as much right to decide the office timings as you are.

In my last job, I used to crash in the office most of the time (9 AM to 3 PM), skip most weekdays, work all night and all sunday. I never had any complaints and was considered quite good at what I do.

My last job was at Google.
You know this already, but I sent them to your email as in your HN profile.

I have no idea how important blackboard is - probably less so for the business world, but plenty of students use/encounter them.

If it's easy to work out a algorithm that cleans up the blackboard but harder to work out detecting the blackboard, your idea of two email addresses (doodle/wb@, and blackboard/bb@) would probably be a good solution.
Site is down, anyone have a copy? It seems to refer to this article, though:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178560/FTC_says_scam...
Gmail to harness HTML5
It was really just a joke. I should have known better.
To get started with Clojure you need to know much about the Java platform. The first parts of Java that you will brush up against are classpaths and dot-separated namespaces and I don't think these are overly difficult to understand. clojure.core and clojure.contrib expose most of the Java standard libraries in a Clojure-esque way.
Thanks, everyone for the replies.
IPad To Be Blessed By iOS 4 In November According To Apple?
I'm tired of these excuses for software makers to have more and more control over the devices we own.

Palm OS phones like the Treo never had any remote kill switch or other such nonsense. Anyone could develop for it and post their apps wherever they pleased. There was no gatekeeper to be be paid or placated, nor were there any super-scary viruses that brought down the network.

If this kind of Orwellian control is "a necessity specially for an open platform", why not allow Linux vendors the same power over your servers and workstations? After all, "imagine if a malicious app got loose and they couldn't do anything about it".

Seriously: it is up to the users to exercise good judgement and safe computing practices. If an infected phone is causing problems, let the carrier disconnect it (just like ISPs disconnect problem accounts). Turning power over to someone else is just another example of the nanny mentality. Not to mention that the back doors themselves may be exploited by malware.
I'm not sure I do trust you to gauge things correctly when your explanation for his refusal is "he wants to be poor".
You can grab a low-specced Mac Mini off ebay for <$300.
How many symbols aren't in use, though? If you've got a notably better one, the "manifesto" may consider changing, but they seem (to me) to have pretty good reasons for choosing tau.
1.) The Bee Sting model doesn't imply that the poor have a completely flat utility function - just a huge drop-off at some point and then a gradually decreasing plateau from there on. Indeed, the poor do seek to improve their utility functions - with booze and drugs and short-term gratification - in ways that would never allow them to overcome that seemingly insurmountable drop-off. The initial drop-off is the chief characteristic of the Bee Sting model.

2.) Utility functions are mathematical tools, and our interpretations of and use for them don't exist in a moral vacuum. Why should tax policy seek to minimize it's effect on our utility functions at all? Why not take $40000 from Warren Buffet AND the primary school teacher? Local movement on one's utility function is important, but so is absolute position, with all of the attendant moral implications.
I wonder how this will effect the provisions of the Brady bill such as background checks, waiting periods, bans on felons buying weapons, etc. I'm all for gun rights but these seem like common sense restrictions. If it invalidates these provisions an escaped convict could walk into a gun store and buy guns. A guy with a bunch of priors for beating his wife can walk in a buy a gun. By the strictest sense of the law it probably raises doubts on age limitations too. Why can't a 10 year old buy a gun? The second amendment doesn't set any restrictions.
Perhaps in order to have a say in the direction of the country, you need to have skin in the game.

One of the original thoughts behind establishing a bi-cameral legislature was that only (real-estate) property holders could participate in the senate. The idea being to prevent the masses from voting the property to themselves. Eventually, it was settled to give the senate to those who were competent enough to organize themselves into local governments/states. Still, it would be interesting to have a house where one man == one vote and a senate where one dollar == one vote. I'm not sure human nature would allow the government to be primarily funded by power-mongering but it'd be a fun experiment to try.
"Wrong" can mean "factually incorrect", but it can also mean "poorly suited." For example, outfits do not have a property of factual correctness, but somebody wearing a tux to a semiformal event would be wearing the wrong thing, as would somebody wearing a speedo.
> Saddling future generations of individuals and businesses with debt inhibits growth, it doesn't promote it. The revenue to pay the interest on that debt has to come from higher taxes down the road, which means higher tax rates for businesses and individuals, which means lower growth.

Do you have anything to back these statements up? One, that deficit spending leads to higher taxes, at least most of the time. Two, that higher taxes directly translate to lower growth, at least most of the time. It would be nice to think of the economy in such black and white terms, but it's often orders of magnitude more complex.

The revenue to pay the interest comes from a stimulated economy, which is what we're trying to do. I am not arguing against paying down debt at all, I am arguing against paying down debt during economic crisis. There are periods in which the government has excess cash and pays down it's debts. It's ignorant to assume that it's more burdening on our children to saddle them with debt than it is to saddle them with a depressed and stagnant economy. Ultimately, this is a gamble, but one history has shown to pay off. Economic stimulus through deficit spending is a long-term solution, not a short-term fix. You are essentially saying it's alright to starve and suffer the deleterious effects of malnutrition, just to save some interest payments.

My example about student loans still holds true. The average person makes more money with a bachelors degree than without, by far. This is indisputable fact. While some may find out that they have to actually learn and work hard and perhaps some fall through the cracks, it does not discount the excellent investment that education is.
That's what the data-driven culture is for.

Google is similarly filled with smart, opinionated people, though Google culture seems far more team-oriented than PayPal does. The way we manage differing opinions is to run an experiment. Instead of saying "Okay, we're doing it this way," and letting the office politics determine what "this way" means, we say "Okay, what experiment could we run that would indicate whether this is a good idea?" Then we go off and run the experiment, and usually the data is clear enough that even the idea's most opinionated proponents and detractors end up being convinced.

"Strong opinions, loosely held" is a pretty good mantra for a productive team. A culture full of alpha dogs isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as they all respect the data.
I'm not sure science has progressed to the point where we can successfully graft bear arms onto the human body, but it's nice to see the Supreme Court thinking ahead.
My first thought exactly. Mechanical engineers and physicists appreciate where Tau is at the moment. But as someone notes, there is always symbol conflicts.
Ruby seems like a good choice, given its presence and popularity both in webapp and desktop app niches, and reputation for being fairly easy to learn.
Probably uses Adobe Flash storage in browsers that don't support a db.
Take a look at the source. It uses an IE-proprietary something or other to mock the behavior.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531424%28v=VS.85%2...

Been available since IE 5.5, apparently. Who knew?
You get $70 worth of bogus charges per year?
You're technically correct, the best kind.

I'd argue, however, that 'irrational' is closer to what he meant, than the exactness of what he said. Any time you move between a layman's understanding and a detailed technical one, the abstraction can leak.

I think 'irrational' matches up with intuition better, even if it's described as 'non-terminating.' People don't talk about 2/3 in the same way they talk about π.
Looks like it. If you look a the store.js source code, it links to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531424(v=VS.85).as... which appears to be another one of those hidden gems in IE, like the original AJAX implementation, or XDomainRequest.
Is he really lazy, or is it just the committing hours that is bothering you?

His committing hours can change significantly than your hours particularly if he is facing challenging software implementation problems. When you get such problems (and they come one after the other in a startup) the important issue becomes fixing that royal problem rather than when or how much time you are spending on it. Those become the details. If he focuses %100 on the problem fixing, when you commit definitely tends to become less and less important.

You may say, we have some communication to do in the same hours, well sometimes also it even helps to cut communication so he can figure out and finish the job.

This is for someone who is really committing his efforts though. If he's not solving any problems then best thing to do is fix the business rather than your co-founder (i.e. quit or make him quit)
Looks pretty good man. I'm not too big into the affiliate game anymore but if I was, it would definitely be something I'd give a try. The interface looks pretty simple and smooth which is nice cause the last thing I would want to deal with is learning some new platform while running my affiliates.
I've seen some frameworks that use flash storage as a last resort for IE6. I've found success just building in a ajax fail-over and then let IE6 or any other browser make use of the fail-over.
Marx figured this out over a century ago and these people are still puzzled about the "answer"?
I have a client still running an old NT box because it's the newest computer that can run a $100k+ piece of equipment. The piece of equipment it is attached to is in excellent shape and is still considered state of the art.
What I would like to see is an informational analysis where you take something like a thousand common equations and look at how they would be expressed with pi versus with tau. If you can show they would take significantly fewer bits of information using tau, then tau would be objectively superior.
The source code is very short, readable and only one JavaScript file (plus an HTML page with embedded JS for the tests). There's no Flash, although that was admittedly my first thought as well.
Anyone have any ideas on the encoded data?

The final == is a clear sign that you're looking at base64-encoded data; but after decoding it just looks like noise to me. Maybe there's a cryptographic signature in there somewhere? I think you'd need to compare multiple boarding passes to learn anything.
White-label cloud servers with ElasticStack
And as someone else pointed out - time to get a new iMac Gary :) (But only because we told you to!)

It's funny, I was watching this in bed and my wife said "hey, Gary V has the same iMac as me"
Really awesome. I did check the source, but did not quite understand that. Thanks!
Hey thanks for the comments kendubyou!
Yes, the samples for both of those are promising. Thanks!
The main reason his theory is crap is it just doesn't agree with experiment. The article mentions several, all of which tend to encompass the income regime Karelis is presumably talking about. One example is the negative income tax experiment of the 70's, another is welfare to work.

If Karelis has evidence of his theory, he should present it. But as it stands, he is pushing thought experiments and analogies, and telling us to ignore the empirical evidence when it disagrees with his theory.
How is this different from a combination of one time pads and steganography?
Facebook snags the guy who built Google's Chrome OS
Those models quite clearly do not apply to the poor or else we'd see a different poor.

Could you explain this statement in more detail?
"What I really want is a decent fucking co-founder who can show up at 9 (or 10 AM if he absolutely needs an extra hour of sleep) and be a profesional"

and therein lies the problem ... he's the technical guy, you're the business guy, you're setting the same standards for him that you do for yourself, which is inherently wrong.

does he meet his targets??, if the answer is YES, then the problem is yours, not his.
I was obviously considering only negative findings with actual thought, research plans and analysis.
Agreed. Upvoted.

When I was younger, I used to look at poor people and condemn them for being lazy and irresponsible. It's when I started paying bills that I realized that many lower middle-class lives hang by a thread - a missed paycheck can sometimes be catastrophic.

I often wonder what I would do if I were poor. I'd have hope-I'm a smart kid, eloquent, so I could dig myself out of it. But what of those who, through no fault of their own, are not so lucky? To me, it is an absolute marvel that they don't engage in more mayhem.

If you follow international news, you've probably watched the drama unfold here in Jamaica over the extradition of Christopher 'Dudus' Coke. A resident of Tivoli Gardens, the inner-city community where Coke was from declared on local news that 'Jesus died for us, so we will die for Dudus.' Many people I know were upset by her statement, because they don't understand. Sure he was a criminal. Sure he was involved in drugs and murders. But when he's the one sending your six kids to school, paying for medical care for your grandmother, and providing swift and effective justice, let's just say your loyalties will not be to the state that has repeatedly signaled its lack of care. Fuck the 'social contract.'

Now you know why they called him "The President."
Oh come on, upvote this man for the awesome reference!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgCceg042w