skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not going to happen. The unions rule this state, not the Governor. Arnold should realize that by now.
Sources? It's nice to just throw out percentages but where is the data to back this up?
Behdad is a core developer of both Pango and Cairo, along with being the #1 guy on all things Linux i18n, specially BiDi hacking. I don't think the article was meant to be technical and indepth, rather, imo, it aimed for breadth to help someone get started quickly.
My point again is not that CO2 doesn't become cell mass. It is that in elementary/high school, kids are not taught that. Kids do learn the concept of photosynthesis. They just learn the energy side and not the big picture. So the author's assertion that people use "photosynthesis" without knowing what it means is false.
The article started by pointing out a logical incongruency that most people have. I know better than to think the tree is made of the ground, however I know many people are not.

However he's talking mass and reneges on his statement that trees are made from the air by stating that many trees are over 50% water. Well IMO when talking about mass the majority-share counts as the subjects mass origins.

The plant breaks down CO2 into C + O2 via photosynthesis. The C makes up the plant. This is the simplified version he starts with, which was an ample metaphor. However then he states that the tree can be predominantly water. Meaning the plant is made up of say 60% water and 40% carbon.

However the plant is made up of predominantly of water trapped within cellulose membranes. If we talk dry weight, we're still talking 6 carbon atoms (72), 10 hydrogen atoms (10) and 5 oxygen atoms (80). This means roughly 66% of the trees mass comes directly from water from the ground sequestered in its cellulose.

This means roughly only 20% of the tree actually comes directly from carbon sequestered from the air.

So really, where does the plant get its mass? The ground.

If you're asking where the plant gets its dry weight, still the ground by ~6%.

By tackling a logical fallacy with scientific thinking he opened the window to be completely corrected by it himself. Trees grow because they take the carbon out of the air. However you talk about mass and we're talking about molecular weights.

Now if he'd have been as smart of Feynman he would have dismissed the water quite logically again. The rain falls from the sky. Save for a few very large trees that actually reach into the water table, trees well inland rely solely on the rain for their supply of water. That means the 50% of its mass that is water still technically comes from the air from moisture being condensed in cold air and forming water droplets.
I think you're right which is funny because many people (way more than half as this article noted) would say they are above average and say that only half of drivers can be above average

Only 50% of students can be above average (median) but 80% may have above average grades (mode)

People tend to confuse the two concepts
I am quite happy with my illusory inferiority. Deal with discontent by trying to outrun it, and you'll never run out of things to do.
It'll be interesting to see if they can beat what the Smart Roadster [1] delivered. My gut intuition is that Tesla hasn't the chops.

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+roadster
Make a encoding standard like Unicode
Guys, what does it takes to make a new encoding standard like Unicode ?
I am ready to learn anything for that.
In how many years do you think the project will finish as one man project ?
My Empire of Dirt
Very personal interview with Rand Fishkin (Mixergy)
I had this same though recently after thinking about how much shrub/tree/grass growth I have pruned out of my yard over the last 4 years ;-). Keeping a compost pile of all trimmings keeps this in perspective. Conversely, the amount of mass left after you burn wood is quite minimal. There was a nice scene about that topic in the move "Smoke". Screenplay dialog here: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/smoke-script-tr...
In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's really hard to say.

It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus, there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders. Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in medium term).

Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know of one startup that came very close to signing a contract to get service from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At least for a wee little startup.
You can't always have filet mignon. Sometime you just gonna make do with a hamburger. :-)
This guy always comes up with insightful yet humble posts.
...also, it looks like some of the links didn't make it in. This one (http://github.com/rjurney/Cloud-Stenography) showing the code driving the Pig editor in the demo was one I particularly wanted to see in the parent.
They can just use a placebo.
Congratulations, I went through college drinking Coca Cola imported from somewhere like Khazakstan because my convenience store was cheap as shit and they sold it for almost $0.25 cheaper per can.

The Coke-Zero I drank today was made in Toronto. The beer I drank this afternoon was made in Halifax Nova Scotia. Some of the beer I frequently buy comes from England, Belgium and I drink wines from Niagara, Australia and France.

Not to mention a large proportion of the water I get daily comes from my food. Much of which can come from far of places like Chile and South Africa, and for my Kiwi's New Zealand.

Yes beverages may leave geographic signatures, but by what I eat and drink in a single meal I can be receiving water from a half-dozen places around the world.
I think Hadoop is less than 5 years old.
Another HNer was working on something like this for rap:
http://www.hiphopgoblin.com/

It is apparently not being worked on anymore but was focusing on mixtapes and such.

Edit: Found the project open-sourced on GitHub: http://github.com/zackster/hip-hop-goblin
cool thanks!

so like i said... gigantic move in the travel industry :)
We are web-hosted so affiliates create accounts on our system.

I define customers as 'not being turned over to us' by allowing the company to export all the information and handle all payments.

100% free was my answer to having a demo. You may realize the value of 'free to start' if you start an affiliate program --> pay upfront --> determine you want to customize something that fits your company.

Most other packages only offer "monetary" campaigns so any dropbox-like program won't fly with them. They will also charge about 30-40% of your payouts.

Thanks again for all insight, it definitely helps define our target demographic. Feel free to email me and let me know how your program shopping goes. Good luck!
It's entirely possible that we could move to entirely IP jobs. Why not? If all our physical needs are taken care of, we could became gainfully employed in the metaverse, or maybe just end up as a bunch of WALL-E-style couch potatoes. It's probably ultimately a more likely direction than an unending escalation in widget production.

There's also the question of what percentage of the population would be suited to these IP jobs, but geeks are getting more action than ever before, so I think the population will shift in that direction as well.
Turns out he has a rant about this very issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
Facebook Adds Face Detection To Photos
It seems it would be great to have the inverse of codility, where job seekers take a bunch of coding tests, and then employers start sending them job offers based on their scores.

it was only after completing their warm-up problem that I realized that wasn't the case, and that in order to have access to any of the other programming problems (ie, in order to get to the fun stuff), I'd first have to set about finding an employer who has signed up with their service :(
I hope you get some good feedback. We've been working on a similar service for a while now and it hasn't been easy getting companies to answer these types of questions. If you'd like, feel free to email me and we can talk sometime. My contact info is in my profile.
My high school psychology teacher taught us about illusory superiority by another name (which is discussed on the Wikipedia page): the Lake Woebegone Effect.

This refers, of course, to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Although that was years ago, I think about the effect often. Part of the reason it had such a profound effect on me, I think, is because the name is just so awesome.
Wow, I have never seen this: human digital logic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI

Kids acting as bits in a machine register and performing binary arithmetic by raising their hands if set, or not raising when cleared.

Really cute.
http://cufp.org
Hey, just stumbled on this forum. Interesting stuff here.

As a CPA that supports Xero.com and QuickBooks, I can tell you that the one downfall most SMEs face is to fail to focus on their accounting and tax issues with a professional.

We help clients all over the country do this with technology so that the processes become much easier, more efficient and paperless.

If interested, I'm actually doing 30 minute FEE online webinars about this topic because it is changing the face of business.

Come register if interested: http://blumerbusiness.eventbrite.com

Thanks,
Jason M. Blumer, CPA
Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC
jason [at] blumercpas [dawt] com
Google to own the App infrastructure behind Bing Travel?
Actually no. Most everything else. You having a lot of trouble in opera?
Regulators bound to stack up over Google-ITA
That's really the only question that needs to be debated in the wake of Google's announcement that it plans to acquire ITA Software, the leading provider of flight information from airlines to travel Web sites, for $700 million in cash.
Even simpler:

javascript:updateSlider1(4);
uh oh, you expressed a negative opinion. you know they can't handle that.
Dodgeball's a commonly cited failure. The founders left two years after being acquired to start a very similar competitor, which even has a hilariously similar name (Foursquare), and then Google discontinued Dodgeball two years after that.
It seems like something you've seen before, because it is. There are lots of devices that require batteries to be inserted.

Perhaps there's no prior art, because it's an unobvious advancement to battery technology. Is that so hard to believe? Why do you find it hard to believe the guys at Microsoft were the first to think of it? They create lots of battery operated devices like mice and keyboards and microsoft has a ton of geniuses working for them to boot.

I've never seen anything like this before. I wish all batteries were as easy to insert as this invention makes them.
I don't think that we do. My post was largely spent explaining why jobs move overseas, which is not the same as agreeing on what to do about it. He concludes that protectionist policies will result in manufacturing jobs staying in the US, but doesn't look past that to see that those policies will not create value and will just redistribute it around by moving the wage decreases to tariff increases. Wealth comes from innovation and productivity increases. You cannot "create jobs" by instituting tariffs.

We will not be left with no domestic manufacturing, we will be left with the manufacturing that we are most efficient at. Anything else is just fighting gravity. We need to be making tomorrow's jobs, not fighting over yesterday's. Tariffs will not solve unemployment.
Thanks everyone for all of the pushback on my idea so far it has been a very constructive day for me as I continue to iterate on my product. (Thanks HN :) )

I am a little confused on one point though and am hoping that some iPhone developers can give first hand accounts. What kind of returns are you guys receiving on adMob/Quattro/whatever ads? The iPhone developers I have spoken too have had dismal returns (<10 downloads for a 50 dollar campaign) and this was one of the problems I was hoping to help solve with adsReloaded.

Do any of you mind sharing your campaign numbers?
It's not just his style, but how animated and excited he gets when he's talking about these things!
I think this way, too. I assume I'm a bad programmer, businessman, communicator, etc. It has always served me well. It keeps me asking questions and always striving to improve. Even in the unlikely event that I ever knew what I was talking about, what would it have mattered? It's rule of the Price is Right: you automatically disqualify yourself by going over.
Ask HN: Source for important, brief, programming news?
Is there a blog, rss feed, or twitter account out there that provides brief descriptions of only the most important news stories for programmers?

Something where the titles tell the important details, where the authors aren't trying to meet a quantity quota and are fine going a week w/o an article if there's been nothing significant, where the topics are fairly general (I'll keep a close eye on my personal stack on my own), something with a philosophy along the lines of "only the stuff that you absolutely must know as a developer" or "things that will still be important in a year."

When I look at the news sources I go to daily I can't help but think that 99% of what I read won't matter tomorrow, let alone in a year. I'd really like to just ditch it all (side question: anyone done this for an extended period of time? experience?), but I'm hoping there's a way to get just the 1% that's important.

I tried to think of some topics and stories from recent months that I'd want to know about if I canceled all other news sources, here are some:

- Google buys ITA, $700M
- Eclipse Helios 3.6 released
- Oracle buys Sun, $7.4B
- Java Play 1.0 released, a popular Rails-like framework
- iPhone 4 announced, renames iPhone OS iOS, anounced iAds, available June 27, new: very hi-res screen, video chat on wifi, multitasking
- Ubuntu 10.4 released, faster boot, dark (less orange) theme, social networking features integrated
- New MacBook Pros
- HP bought Palm, $1.2B, webOS on printers/tablets?
- Amazon bought woot, plans to stop retailing and just produce monkey rap
- Chrome 6 released, new: vp8, built-in pdf support
- Flash 10.1 released
- Scala 2.8 RC released, new: compiler plugins,...
- Android 2.2 released
- x,y,z will support Google's VP8 codec in HTML5
- RIP, I mean RIM, buys QNX
- Android 2.2, faster with JIT
- Rails 3 beta

So basically acquisitions, major releases of popular languages, frameworks, libraries, and hardware.

You get the idea. So yeah, know of anything like this?

Alternate questions: Thoughts on interesting-information (noise) overload? Ideas for creating the proposed news source? I haven't watched the points on HN stories much, but maybe the stories with the most points correspond well to this list? (I wouldn't be surprised though if they correspond more to entertainment than "what will matter in a year.") Maybe a group twitter account run by programmer editors? Other ideas?
exactly. government slanted in favor of anybody is trouble for everybody else.
Rapping Monkeys And An E-Commerce Behemoth: A Match Made In Cult Brand Heaven
A Google buyout of ITA could improve things in one simple area: resources. As in, way way more. Hardware and cash.

Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.
Adam: Who invented the cotton gin?

Bob: That's easy, Eli Whitney

Adam: What's a cotton gin?

Bob: Shrug
> Go to Beijing... brown air... sick... gaping holes with no signs... break your leg... welding rain down on your head... boss rapes you and you're not connected, that's too bad...

Dude, I was in Beijing two months ago. It's not like you make it out to be. Actually, it's a hell of a lot nicer than Detroit.

In fact, I was in China five years ago and again two months ago. It's trending upwards quickly - the pollution was near unbearable five years ago and is rapidly improving. Infrastructure is improving. Air and water quality are improving. The country is gradually politically liberalizing... almost everything is improving in China quickly. Scary quickly, actually.

Over the last 10 years, China is trending upwards quickly and the USA and trending downwards slowly... you might prefer living in Washington D.C. to Beijing right now (but would you, really?)... but you almost certainly won't prefer D.C. to Beijing in 10 years unless something changes.
What kind of encoding standard? Creating the standard isn't the hard part, but getting it used by other people could be very difficult or very easy depending on what it is.
Clifyt is the first comment on that article and I think he's got the right take. Honestly there is a reason at times for what might feel like a bad usability decision. I also didn't like the fact that enterprise software usability decisions are paralleled with filing an expense report.

Seriously - it's NEVER a pleasure to do that.

37Signals.com - Why does childbirth have to be a pain?
Many of them shifted into fields that didn't exist in 1900 because in 1900, food and shelter were the majority of what people in the US worked for.

Exactly -- science led to technology which led to job creation. That's the whole story of the 20th century, with a couple of wars tossed in to keep things moving.

Meanwhile, in 2010, science and technology are just two more things most Americans take for granted. We still have to fight the Scopes monkey trial every few years, we couldn't get back to the Moon with any less time and money than it took the first time, and especially since 9/11, we're no longer a place where the world's STEM students come to study and live.

That farmer from 1900 would say we're "eating our seed corn."
The Power of a Couple of Links: A Beginner’s Endorsement of Social Media
I wonder if something similar will happen in the future, except replacing "food and shelter" with "food, shelter, manufacturing, electronics, clothes, etc.". Would new industries then come out of the ashes of manual labor in these different fields?
I'd gladly teach everything I know to somebody. :)
Maybe I am a total inconsiderate jerk, but I think this is cool. Using nuclear power as weapons is bad, but the technology is just... cool.
I'm also reminded of the mid-80s movie Agnes of God. The entire point of the movie was that you could figure out all of the events from either a scientific or religious point of view, both were consistent, yet they disagree on the interpretation of every single fact.
Do you mean a universal encoding format for any printable glyph?

Well, it's a helluva lot of language research to start with. I guess you could cheat by just copying the Unicode code pages, but then you haven't really accomplished much.

Or do you mean a new Unicode Transformation Format? That may well be a fun exercise, but you'd need to have a clear idea of the problem you're solving. 7-bit gateways? Fast compression? Fast decompression? Favors common glyphs at the expense of rare ones? Random access versus stream decoding?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Transformation_Format
Turn a rubber wristband into an iPhone 4 bumper
It doesn't seem like it would be too hard for Facebook to implement facial recognition. It's clearly not a trivial issue, however they certainly have the data, servers and intelligence to do it right. After all, they have a list of everyone you come in contact with (as well as friends of friends), along with anywhere between a dozen and a thousand tagged pictures of each.

EDIT: In reply to the poster below me- of course, autotagging wouldn't work. I was thinking more of a "suggestions" implementation.
eh, there are lots of open-source things that would help with that.. where's phpnuke these days?
I always think of the Nichimen Graphics group when I hear about interesting systems coded in an FP (lisp)

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphic...
My guess was going to be Twig Bosons
I don't think they'd have an aversion to buying a piece of legacy software written in Lisp if said software had a proven revenue stream and was part of the core underpinning to a major category of search they want to get into more.

However, it's reasonable for them to be averse to writing totally new projects in Lisp, in-house, because when you're at a huge company as a general rule you don't want dozens of different languages in use: it's inefficient and you lose out on a lot of opportunities to leverage skills across teams and across service layers if you do that. Lisp, from what I heard, didn't make the cut, despite it's strengths. They still allow a few though, and I believe they are Python, JavaScript, Java and C/C++.
The only purpose of a public company is to make money for shareholders.

Not make stuff, not employ people, not even turn a profit - just increase the share price / pay dividends
>you mean like VC's and angels

Since when do VCs bet 30:1 on anything? If anything it's 1:1, because they can't borrow more money against their fund. That's the whole point behind venture capital - people put money in where tradtional banks {d,w}on't.

I was referring to CDOs and default swaps, you know, the stuff that almost crashed the American economy a couple years back.

>I'm really not sure what your criticism of Blackhawk Partners is. Could you elaborate?

Sure. He's using pizza shops and construction contractors and other working class small businesses as a cover to justify his job of moving rich people's money from one place to another and calling it productivity. In other words, he takes the example of people who, you know, actually provide a product or service to the bulk of Americans as an emotional crutch to justify his firm's greed by pretending that it's largess for Main Street businesses.

And, there's a reason they're called raiders. They don't usually "improve" anything except for their wallet.
Wow, I got bounced to a map and then to a generic newspaper page. No wonder this industry is hurting.