skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices.

I think the lack of smartness is what makes people poor. I heard lot of stories of people who inherited millions and finished as poor as a blue collar employee.
Were those sites developed prior to this experiment? If so, it sounds more like dumping assets than flipping anything.
I believe the grandparents meaning is that a 2-0 final score can be viewed as a crushing defeat, not that a 2-goal deficit is an unrecoverable situation.
I got interested in that, the most authoritative source I could find on the fly (the NIH) seems to say it might cause flashbacks, but "LSD is not considered an addictive drug since it does not produce compulsive drug-seeking behavior.":

http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/hallucinogens.html
4,000 to 6,000 within 48 hours, assuming one's post is on the front page for most of a day. (Anecdotally they seem to age off a wee bit faster these days.) That is traffic directly from HN, with minor follow-on from folks tweeting. Substantially more if the story gets carried elsewhere as a result.
Moving between quintiles is more frequent in the middle quintiles (2-4) than in the lowest and highest quintiles. Of those in one of the quintiles 2-4 in 1996, approximately 35% stayed in the same quintile; and approximately 22% went up one quintile or down one quintile (moves of more than one quintile are rarer). However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 39% of those who were born into the top quintile as children in 1968 are likely to stay there, and 23% end up in the fourth quintile. Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%. On the other hand, the children of wealthy families have a 22% chance of reaching the top 5%.

According to one study, the income of a person's parents is a great deal more predictive of their own income in the United States than other countries. France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility.

It's a point of contention, at any rate.
Part of your friend's reluctance may simply be a lack of desire to start his own business. I've made similar offers to select family members (with higher dollar amounts) and nobody has taken me up on a single offer. When I ask them why not, they tell me they don't want to take the risk of starting their own business... then go right back to complaining about their horrible boss/small salary/current situation.
Incidentally, I experience this every time I put in or remove my contact lenses. Because they are in a different position than my eyeglass lenses, the refraction affects image distorsion such that for a few minutes afterwards (especially if I am outside looking at large distances) it's somewhat disorienting.

It's not obvious to me that the "risk" talked about in the article is real, though. It seems that what they talk about in the article is that strabismus is when your stereoscopic vision does not develop because one eye does not align properly to your viewpoint. This is fundamentally different from the fact that your 2 eyes have to align slightly differently when viewing 3D video compared to the normal world. If you have strabismus, 3D video just won't work. It seems like a stretch to say that because you have to shift your aim point, you will lose the ability to align your eyes properly completely. In fact (like barrkel hinted at, too) it seems like this would be practice, not detrimental.

But this is obviously only speculation on my part...
I'm on the ZingChart team - we render charts in both HTML5 and Flash. So far we've gotten great feedback. Our charts are JSON driven and can plot huge data quickly [demo] http://www.zingchart.com/labs/blog_charts/10k_points.html.

http://www.zingchart.com
http://www.twitter.com/zingchart
Eating some oatmeal right now, actually.

Here in Minnesota, USA, warm cereals (primarily oatmeal, Malt-o-meal and Cream of Wheat) are very popular in the colder months (September through April or May, most years).

They also rock when you're sick, especially with a sore throat (as I am today).

However, I almost always cook mine on the stove top, not in the microwave.
I completely agree. I made pretty much the same point on the last "change Soccer's rules" thread:

"One of the reasons Poker is so popular is that even a terrible player can beat a pro by chance, some of the time.

I've always suspected the same is true of Football.
Any attempt to "fix" the game by making refereeing better makes the game more fair. While that might seem like a good thing, I don't think anyone is qualified to decide whether that will make the game more or less popular. And considering it's the world's most popular sport, tinkering with the games in unpredictable ways is stupid."
Upcoming quarter final maybe an early final?
The first pill costs from $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 and that's just for FDA approval.

Source: http://www.pkdcure.org/Research/Resources/FDADrugDevelopment...
We're certainly in a great depression already - with real unemployment close to 20% (shadowstats.com), most of our states having greece-like deficits, people losing 50%+ wealth from the market/real estate crash. We don't see soup lines because we have food stamps and unemployment checks mailed to our home and deposited right into our bank account .

And it's only the beginning. Global austerity is here (except US and Japan is fighting valiantly to steal more honest work from its people via printing). World's biggest consumer, the boomers, are retiring. Automation/Software will keep reducing jobs permanently.

The ancillary point is, boostrap your startup wisely. Hire smartly. Don't spent money on things unless you have to. Don't take money. Keep control of your company.
Using WP as a CMS is like trying to use a Honda Civic to pull a boat through the mountains. Yeah, you can probably bolt on some parts to get the job done, but eventually it's going to end up a big smoking pile and you're going to have to buy the truck you should have used in the first place.
> the same people qualifying for $25/month rents were driving Escalades

I have not known this to be true. The handful of people I know who qualify for section 8 don't own cars, or have 15yo beaters.
Oh they discuss harshness and intoxication. However I imagine that those two aspects will be a lot easier to control and manipulate via simple chemical means if marijuana productions ever becomes properly industrialized and placed in the hands of smart and educated engineers. I just don't see a pot smoker paying $20 for a joint that tastes a bit different from $2 joint assuming they both get him equally intoxicated.
You are confusing monetary policy with fiscal policy.
Some interesting ideas here but wouldn't want to post it up on the wall as the road map to success.
This sounds very much like some of the theories that one hears when talking about the causes of procrastination when faced with an overwhelming task. For example, the quoted section here:

http://lifehacker.com/5508417/the-overwhelming-wave-that-mak...

One difference between the two cases is that the situation with many of the poor may be such that the problem they are facing may be unsolvable (i.e. it's not just a matter of 'getting to work') or at least unsolvable given the current framing of the problem. This means that the rational solutions that people suggest for procrastination problems, such as breaking the current task into small chunks, are not rational solutions to the problems the poor face. Hence the bee sting theory.
AT&T claims New York City 3G upgrades complete
Corporations cannot behave according to common human morality, because they are accountable to different systems. They must create profits simply to continue existing against entropy.

But it is not necessary to have the system in which corporations operate so divorced from morality, that's just an abstraction that we have allowed to continue. We don't count things like pollution, destruction of small businesses, resourse depletion, etc. as being unprofitable, even though they certainly are. If the so-called bottom line were redrawn, moral ideas could, in fact, contribute to profit and loss.

For example, if every single current shareholder in BP could be held accountable to some degree for the current catastrophe, things might have taken a different course.
There have been some poverty studies in India that shows that the lack in belief that "things could be different" may be the cause of some irrational behavior.

What I wonder from the article is what happens if you take a poor person and pay off everything and get them started with an education. Do they fall right back into debt? I have always suspected that having a child while a teenager is too big of a cost to dig your way out of.
It's no the same thing, those apps come pre-bundled when you purchased your blackberry, the Google mechanism is a safeguard for when a malicious app slips through, and it only applies to apps downloaded from the market.
"Directed by Alan Smithee"
Why do you think that Android would be more profitable? It seems to me that Google is terrible at marketing; the only people I've seen interested in Droid have been geeks like us.
Except that this would make a qualitative change to the game.

This would be a version of that most hated of results - the shootout.

People who truly understand the game (I am not in that subset) speak in terms of flow and touches and the setup. The qualities which makes a Dutch or Brasilian or German or etc style distinctive.

True fans do not watch for scoring alone.

People who watch American football do not do so for the scoring alone. High scoring games are often very sloppy and boring. The classic defensive-minded battles of the Giants or Bears are the games I remember from youth (or more recently Pittsburg or Baltimore).

The well played American football game is fought at the unglamorous point of the two lines each trying to wear the other down. The tension builds and one side cracks - a defensive lapse, a fumble, botched pass - and the game turns on a few such plays.

There are versions of American football that emphasize scoring - Arena league etc. There have been indoor soccer leagues that have rules for higher scoring.

But these are different games.

A good soccer game is a game of flow and of concentrated effort. Multiple failed attempts - small adjustments - perhaps a lapse or two and a goal.

One of the interesting graphics I noted in the online coverage of this world cup (in the NYTimes I think) is a slider bar showing the preponderance of the ball location over time. Things like this can get the casual or new fan to begin to understand what there is about the game - there than scoring - which is mesmerizing.
10 Awesome Geek Inspired Flip Flops
In case you really don't understand what I'm saying and your questions are not just rhetorical point scoring I'm going to try to make it clear once again:

a) I think low cost of living is important in the initial stages of a startup. The lower the better. Spending time on anything other than the startup is bad. Dishwasher or other salaries in Vienna are not particularly relevant to understand this principle. Therefore, the UK and Ireland are better places to start a startup than continental Europe.

b) If a significant part of the cost of starting a business comes from mandatory contributions to something I don't want and will never consume (i.e pensions), I get annoyed. You may not know that half of those 250 euros go into pensions and not health care. I want the health care part but I don't want to be forced into a pensions scheme. All contributions should be a share of the income people generate, not a set minimum fee. I have no idea whether that is socialist or not.

c) I'm not as anti-socialist as you might think. My opinion is that society needs to catch people who fall, for practical reasons as well as human dignity. Some things like health care, basic shelter and access to information need to be available to everyone. I don't believe that abject poverty makes people more entrepreneural. The biographies of successful people just don't support that claim. I am willing to pay a share of my income to cover the cost of helping those who cannot help themselves. Unfortunately, in Europe, the people who are best protected by this odd form of socialism are not the ones who have fallen but rather those close to government and traditional trade unions. They don't just cause unnecessary cost, they also create very inflexible rules that discourage self-employment and make it very expensive to hire people.

Having said that, I totally agree with you that none of that should deter anyone from starting a business wherever they may be.
However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile.

In other words, if you're born in the bottom quintile, you probably will not stay there.
Bilski v. Kappos
Not being familiar with JavaZone, I am assuming that this must be a teaser for a short film to be played at a Java confab of some sort? Or is it just your typical spoof trailer?
I've only tried seriously twice, but both efforts were expensive failures.
Bilski v. Kappos: Business Methods Not Out, Software Still Patentable
I totally vouch for the idea of "resigning to being poor". This is what ruins people. I understand that poor people face lot of difficulties and not everyone gets an opportunity what your poor friend got in terms of 5000 cash; but the people who get it are too busy complaining about their poverty rather than working on it and this develops as a life long attitude. It's not that none of the poor people have been able to become rich. There are stories where a poor person alone has created history for himself and lots of other poor people too. If people start working towards their poverty, I think we might have a better face soon.
I agree that higher education is the next wave. I am doing kinda the same thing as this math teacher but with music. http://www.MusicTrainer.com . I should be "officially" launching soon. Please let me know what you think. I read hackernews everyday and value the opinions of the community here.
This is mostly true, except for location. The iPhone has always asked for permission before providing your location to apps (even to Apple's preinstalled apps, like Maps) and as of iOS 4, you're able to see a list of apps that have asked for your location, whether you said yes or not (with the option to change) and whether the app has accessed your location in the last 24 hours.
That is just a strings on the screen. What is the internal in-memory representation of this? The pointers to functions and agruments, as is should be?

Btw, there was a link here to a blog-post from a jruby developer who argued that JVM is a crap for a dynamic languages (read: for anything except what it is) Why would you think it is perfect for a Lisp?

Do we need to start again about bad-by-design FFI, rudimentary and inefficient network and disk support, and so on?

Yes, it is well situated to some in-house development, but not for everything.

I know, some people believe it is good even for things like Cassandra, but I cannot imagine database system without things like efficient and low-level implementation of network layer (epoll/kuqueue support, tunable buffers, intellectual error handlers) and especially disk routines (O_DIRECT, proper caching and the like).
Forsaking Life for a Startup
New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email
Almost. Appcelerator Mobile is a cross compiler with a component framework. It takes Javascript and compiles it into Objective-C and links it against their framework. You can build completely native apps in it.

It's a little confusing in Justin's case as he is using it to host a UIWebView which is running his game. You can do the same thing in Objective-C with a few lines of code and some magic mousedrags in Interface Builder. However, I believe he is also using Appcelerator's sqllite bindings to save game state from the UIWebView. You can also do this in Objective-C by making your own bridge from the UIWebView using intercepted custom URLs (which always feels like a dirty hack - not as clean as Flash's DOM injection using ExternalInterface).

Btw, Justin is part of a two person podcast I listen to regularly. I'd recommend subscribing:

http://techzinglive.com/
I'm not a big football fan, but it's hard to live outside the US and not be exposed to it.

Part of football's unique character is how rare goals are. When a team scores a goal, it is a big occasion (GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL![1]). If you change that, you fundamentally change the game, a game that is the most watched, most popular sport in the world. Also, the assumption that the only purpose of a match is to pick the better team is probably wrong. An important additional factor, perhaps the most important factor, is to make the game exciting for the fans. Here, I think the unpredictability of goals helps.

[1] When I lived in Panama, the announcers had a really funny ability to turn a goal eventually into a pitch for Goldstar Consumer Eclectronics -- "GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLDDDDDSSSSTTTAAARRRR!"
Could you clarify "IT industry as Developer" for us? How much 'small' development do you do, vs maintenance programming?

Depending on what you're looking for and why you're looking for it, Perl could actually be a better choice. (I am personally in the Python camp, but right tool - right job.)
I'm not saying this as a joke at the previous poster's expense, but I think it really is likely a result of too much time spent on Twitter (and perhaps an addiction to the is.gd clickthrough analytics?).
"Along with clojure.jar, I'd like to see Leibke's clj script packaged and promoted."

This is the answer to so many of the concerns cited in this discussion, I'm shocked that it has not been more heavily cited in this thread.

http://github.com/liebke/clj

I haven't used it yet, but from the documentation it looks brilliant. Dead simple package management and REPL tied together in a single command line tool. A noob should be able to go far with just this plus text editor of choice.
Ask HN: Call Detection?
Something just struck me when answering the phone just now. I ad to reach over to my Macbook and bring up iTunes and hit stop to kill the web radio. This is a bit of a pain. One of the coolest features demoed for the iPhone debut was its ability to fade out from a song when you clicked the remote and go into a call.

It would be nice if there was some sort of system for globally detecting that a call is happening in your notebook/desktop OS. Apparently, there is some sort of facility like this in iOS 4, since Skype will fade out the music just like the native phone app. Such integration between one's Mac and iPhone over WiFi/Bluetooth would also be an awesome feature, but this is just wishful thinking for now.

I think Nabaztag detects cell phone call emissions. It also occurred to me that stock ringtones should be easily detectable. What about a cheap USB device that's architected so it can't be easily used for recording more than a second of sound, but can reliably recognize a small number of sounds like ringtones, which can activate software on your PC?

EDIT: Thinkgeek has these silly things: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/a150/ Those would be much more useful if they could talk to your smartphone/pc.
From that quote you conclude that the world followed his advice, and that led to the housing bubble? Now that's cojones.
Simul Climb
One Page Web Sites: Are they for You?
"It's Econ 101 that's to blame," Karelis says. "It's created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty."

This question is based on faulty assumptions. There is no cause of poverty: it is the natural state. Tens of thousands of years ago, all of our ancestors were running around barefoot and naked. Just a few generations ago, none of our ancestors even had refrigeration nor access to antibiotics.

So every one of us comes from a line of people who didn't enjoy nearly as much luxury as we've got today. The reason we're no longer in that situation is because we (that is, ourselves and our progenitors) have worked our way out of it.
A client of ours has eight WP blogs on Bluehost; none of them were affected.
I would have thought he was known for selling coffee instead of wine. He's got undeniable energy.
Real mortgage interest rates did not go negative at any point during the housing bubble.

> For the most straightforward, plain English explanations, I'd recommend Peter Schiff - he was correctly predicting the housing crash almost to the letter

Yes, but his predictions after that has been rubbish, anyone who would take his investment advice would have lost a ton of money. You say we should take what Krugman says with a grain of salt since he's been wrong before. Doesn't that also apply to Schiff?
Here's Google's explanation http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/exercising-ou...

No conspiracy or anything to be alarmed with if you ask me
Keep in mind that iSuppli's reports have been described (by daringfireball, as well as others: http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/isuppli) as "bullshit". A lot of their price numbers (especially the ones for unusual parts, like the CPU and LCD in the iPhone 4) are pretty much pulled out of thin air.
Finally: Releasing Navvy 0.3
I think the two of you might be overlooking some of the social pressure involved in taking thousands of dollars from a close friend. If I made that offer to any one of my friends, they'd turn it down every time. They might say it's impossible, or come up with some other excuse, but most of the reluctance will come from having to see me again if their idea fails.

If you changed your offer to something like, "Hey, I've got about $5k laying around, and I want to start a business, are you interested? What do you think we should do?", you'd probably see more action.

I personally think this has more to do with your friendship than the idea of your friends being mentally "poor".
Be Better Than Yesterday
Got an idea? Test it quickly.
Why do people mix SG&A into COGS discussion?

We are talking gross margin here, not net profit.
In a previous job there was a system similar to JIRA that sent out e-mail notifications on new bugs and so on. Each employee was also represented by a ticket with contact information and so on.

Less than a week into starting this job, I received an automated message saying that "Ticket 1234 Fred Bloggs has been deleted". At the same time, the guy got up, left and never returned...
Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund
One of our clients on Bluehost was hacked in the last few days too, but not with this. We noticed today, but I'm not sure when it happened. Here's the script.

http://rayschamp.com/misc/spammer.html
Re: help networks -> poor people might not have a network that can make a house payment for them, but their networks are (IME) more likely to give a hand via couch-surfing and the like.

As a person who grew up poor and made it out of the bottom quintile, I can tell you that the number of my poor friends who had the talent and opportunity to do the same but didn't actually do it is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who did.

So why don't they actually make it out? The theory in the article sounds interesting, and I hope to see more research done to test it.