skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even for small claims court, it's a pretty big burden to file suit.

Then make it less of a burden to file a lawsuit, and make it easy for people to prove and disprove that there was indeed noise pollution or whatever.

Of course, the state have a monopoly on the court system, so that might be a difficult problem.

We don't need new laws, as that will make more things complicated in a land that filled with overly complicated unclear laws.

Make it so that laws are as simple and understandable to the average citizen as possible. Make it so that competent judges are selected. Make it so that the system is efficient in handling out appropriate and fair judgement. Then make laws that make sense without allowing people to convert their dollars to political power.

In the first place, people shouldn't use the laws as solutions to every single problems that they might have.
I don't know how many of you here are native NYers. And I stress the native, because anyone who hasn't lived here for decades won't have a deep understanding of how things work here. Going out to the Hamptons (or elsewhere) for two weeks or a month and renting out your place has been going on here for decades. This has never been something hidden from the government, The Village Voice would be filled with Short-Term Sublet ads just for this purpose. Now that this has risen to the level of a nascent Internet business that can centralize, organize, and capitalize on this practice, Patterson -- faced with a crushing deficit -- slams the lid on it. Every day I wake up to find local, state, and national government tightening the noose around our necks more and more. All of you talking about liability -- hey, one of these budding Net businesses involved in this could also sell short-term insurance for such liabilities.
You appear to have ignored every other thread and story about this issue, in which it was established pretty plainly that there is a public concern about short-term apartment rentals.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1471771
Actually my phone only has one button and it is still one of the most capable phones ever made. In fact, I'm writing this on my phone with a single button.
I think the history of our neglect as a society of the mentally ill has little to tell us about crime

That makes sense if you look at one as related directly to the other or vice versa (aka mostly not), but if you look at both as symptoms of a bigger issue then it becomes readily apparent that they are highly related: Americans don't want to deal with 'undesirables'. Lock em up or make them homeless, whatever, just as long as we don't have to deal with them.
"It makes Consumer Report's not-recommended status look increasingly irrational..."

If this is the root of Apple's concern then they can work with Consumer Report to establish whether their appraisal was unjustified against other devices. They don't have to take this approach.
A better article on the same topic:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...
You have never had experience in NYC Housing Court. I have. Keep dreaming, though.

It might be rather difficult to fix the courts, but it's lot better than adding regulations that probably benefit the entrenched business interests.
The Complexity of 'Simplicity'
But how many neighbors did you piss off?
It was late I meant state of the art, teach to to write anything after midnight.
"Free will" is meaningless in the context of quantum scale physics.
I think you struck on an important point. For clients Wordpress is a godsend. If you quit contracting or the client needs to change developers for one of a thousand reasons there's a massive pool of talent that can step right in and make adjustments. I've taken over Wordpress sites and the learning curve is almost flat (save a few weird plugins). Anyways, it's a whole lot better of a situation for clients, developers and productivity in general than the days when everyone had a custom framework that solved the same basic CMS issue.
Very Cool, I saw this before but it was inspiring to watch again. I think that his ideas could spawn a number of startups.
Something the w3c validator now offers, never noticed it before so I tried it out, my html is best just w3c never agrees with me.
Programming Is Not Fun
We're using Basecamp, and slowly transitioning to Open Atrium (http://openatrium.com/). My business partner does Drupal development, which OA is written in, so it's nice fit and easy for him to customize.
Yes, I totally agree with you there. I'm just saying that expecting recourse from NYC Housing Court in regard to neighbors is not something that's bound to happen. And let me just say that as a tenant, there have been times that Court has given me the slack I needed when rent fell behind years ago, so I'm not wholly against it!
@sprout: I disagree that airbnb and ilk would increase inefficiency. In fact, it seems to me that it's hotels that bring the inefficiency into the market. They are proxies for short-term housing needs created at a time when it was difficult to arrange short-term housing in unused space in residential zones.

Imagine a world where sublets were completely unrestricted on both a governmental and leasing level. If I go on vacation, I would rent out my place. Theoretically, because my place is used 100%, the demand for these massive, overpriced hotels taking up prime real estate in our nation's cities would dwindle - and the efficiency of the city would actually improve.

Instead of locking up this prime real estate in hotels, which are seasonal and affected by economic hardship, we'd enable more people to live downtown full-time, close to their jobs - which would lower transportation costs, monthly housing costs, overnight rental costs, and in general bring efficiency to the market.
I'm exceedingly curious about this little gadget.

Looking at one of the error messages that popped up, it certainly resembles Android, but looking at the full-screen browsing experience, it looks much closer to ChromeOS than Android.

I'd really like to know more about the software on this device.
I could leave the rest of the article, but I think the key point is that this story was largely on its way out at this point. The fact that Apple drug it back up yet again seems to suggest that their PR department just doesn't know how to handle bad PR.
I wonder how the governor will feel now when NYC foreclosures skyrocket.
Yeah, I know about the whole dictionary thing. I'm not saying this was the factor that caused Perl to succeed. There were a lot of reasons, one of which was that Perl was unafraid to have multiple reasons for people to join their community. ;)
i've noticed that on verizon, bars don't matter. as long as you get a signal, the sound quality is perfect.
> Oh no, there's no crime in Japan.

Violent crime in Japan is ridiculously low.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza

You know that a large percentage of the Yakuza are Korean? In any case, every country has organized crime - yet the Yakuza isn't that violent.

Japan isn't that violent - when you compare things such as murder statistics. I know, I lived in the most violent country and in Japan. Japan is a joke.

> But that's exactly why past a certain point, "getting tough" doesn't work.

The USA never had any really tough laws. I bet that if the USA starts executing major drug dealers (like Singapore), drugs would be a much smaller problem.

> In the USA, it's so out of proportion now, that in many poor or ethnic minority communities in the USA, the police are perceived as oppressors, not guardians of law and order.

The problem in the USA is that it only gets tough when it is too late (e.g. after the 3rd major offense). It should be tough on the first offense (however minor). It is much more difficult to change an established behaviour than a new behaviour - every animal trainer knows this (and it is the same with people).

In any case, the problem with certain ethnic communities is that they value crime (e.g. showing how tough you are) and idolize criminals. That is not the problem of the police - but of the communities. Idolize criminals, dress like criminals and act like criminals and you may be treated as one.

I bet that this idolization of organised crime would disappear if there were chain gangs of criminal members of the community cleaning parks, schools and toilets.

Instead criminals sit in prison doing nothing and each prison becomes a Crime University.
Actually the demonstration is of the phone making a call and the bars dropping as a result of the way it's held.

You can tell the phone is engaged in a call by the dial button being a great big red "End Call" button, and by there being a little green call icon on the top left of the status bar.

Why this is a home-goal by Apple is that even though the bars dropped by the death grip, the phone did not drop the call.

The fundamental complaint about the iPhone 4 is that the death grip is causing dropped calls.

So Apple have gone and shown that whilst their competitors also are affected by the basic laws of science, they've managed to keep a base level of quality that avoids the consumer being affected by dropped calls.

Of course, we can over-analyze anything nowadays.
Good lord, the CSS on this page made me think I needed to get new glasses.
but it probably has a touch screen, making it possible to display lot of buttons at the same time.

one physical button != one button
Why oh why does he write so much FUD in the post? Is all this Perl’s situation is not terribly happy and ...Perl’s somewhat beleaguered status really called for? Is he even correct?

Well here's a fascinating stat from OSCON 2010. The language with most (presentation) tracks was... wait for it... Perl!

* Perl - 17 tracks

* Python - 16 tracks

* Java - 13 tracks

* Javascript & Ruby 7 tracks each

Interesting eh? :)
I was hoping to see a proof there for 'whoever smelt it, dealt it'. A little disappointed, but the other calculations made up for it.
No home loans: Financial assistance to your needs
could check out DC Startup Digest... I haven't lived in DC for a while but planning to move back soon. I subscribed a while ago to get a feel for what's going on.
Determined and random I can understand, free I can’t.

How can any actions be free (as in not determined and not random)? That, to me, seems impossible, at least in a great many situations where humans would claim to have free will. How can any action a agent makes be meaningful without causal links to the outside?

Determinism to me seems to be a requirement for agents to make useful decisions.
akshell: server side javascript development and hosting. sounds interesting, but is not quite what I had in mind. it should be possible to save the application locally.
Your Enlive tutorial is excellent. Thank you.
You can do exactly the same thing sans frink with google, except you have to look up the KT --> J conversion yourself (google is still missing some obscure units).

Just stick in:

12.5*4.184e12 J / (6 years + 9 months) in hp
You're certain of this? I can't imagine Consumer Reports is amenable to negotiation on their product reviews. If they are, then that's a scandal in and of itself.
> You don’t need a culture shift, you need a different political system :)

A culture shift is also needed. In most of Europe, being tough on crime is not a requirement for being elected.

Furthermore, judiciary usually isn't elected, which avoids judges themselves having to become tough on crime for their next mandate (though they're not immune to hierarchical pressures of course).
New startup idea:

Combine AirBnB w/ Zipcar, but for RVs.
Maybe my parents just aren't dumb like you expect, but I explain these things to them just like I explain other software's strengths and weaknesses. And again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be stuff installed by default - I'm just asking for easy overrides.

As they say, "sane defaults, easy overrides."
looks nice, but is very minimalistic and further development is stalled.
Acunote
Here's a good one:
http://www.conferencealerts.com/index.htm

Some other eclectic ones:
1) http://www.poptech.org/ - Maine
2) http://conferences.oreillynet.com/ - Countrywide
3) http://twtrcon.com/ - NYC (Nov)
This presentation can basically be summed up as a verbal kick up the ass - "JFDI". For that, it's useful - beyond that, I feel it's much too shallow for the HN audience (we know this stuff... we've read Steve Blank, we're looking for more nitty gritty details).
Simplicity is subjective. Any given interface may feel simple to some users while complex to others. The objective of interface design shouldn't be to make things "simple" for the sake of it. The objective of interface design should be to allow the highest number of users to achieve the goals they have, while keeping in mind how frequently they want to achieve that goal. Iconography, for example, works pretty weel for frequent tasks, but it may fail when the user is only doing a given task once in a blue moon. When in doubt, and in the spirit of pursuing objectiveness, split A/B testing works pretty well.
Yes. With cocoa.vim, you can invoke Xcode's "build" and "build and run" right from MacVim. I haven't checked, but I suspect this feature uses AppleScript behind the scenes.
Ask HN: how would you design this app?
My wife and mom are notaries public. Basically, they get calls from banks that need someone to notarize loan docs and get paid ~$100 for their time.

I didn't really pay much attention to their stuff until I realized that their side gigs pull in a few hundred bucks a week. (I realize that's not a whole lot but this is "beer money" on top og their FT jobs.)

Anyways, I built a ghetto app in a few hours one night last week (notarycrm.com) and I'm trying to figure out how to make this whole thing easier on the eyes. (Since quietly launching it to my wife and mom, I've reached out to other notaries on Twitter and have managed to get a bunch of people using the app multiple times each day to manage ~$100K worth of business already.)

On one extreme, I guess I could spend a few days trying to sketch something out, figure out AJAXy stuff and tinker until I get it right. On the other extreme, I'd find some with some experience building niche B2B apps and pay them for their front-end experience/instincts. (FWIW, I started coding for fun about 18 months ago. I use RoR for pretty much everything now and, while I can hack together little ideas like this overnight, I can't help but feel like my projects traction could be better if a better UX/UI was in place.)

What would you do? Any suggestions on alternatives?
Tweetaboogle - Social Search Redefined
very nice. seems to have great potential. a good starting point.
That's because you're not familiar with modern Perl libraries. Out of all of the languages I've worked with, by far my favorite database library is Perl's DBIx::Class. If you want a mature, amazing web framework in Perl, look at Catalyst. Perl has a lot more than just "little utility libraries" if you care to look.
Perl 5 isn't going anywhere, nor does anyone claim that it is. Perl 5 is still being actively developed, and it's still going to be in the future. Perl 6 has worked out to not be so much a Perl 5 replacement as just another language in the Perl family.
Which iPod? My old 3G was a usability nightmare.
I've tried designing UIs without IB. I went thorough years of mailing list archives, several questions on StackOverflow and I don't know how many blog posts. Trust me, writing an app without IB is a stupid, stupid idea. IB is central to Cocoa development.
What about home owners convert their N family house into N+1 (or N+2) family houses and rent out the floor(s)? In fact I'm pretty sure it's very common to do. I've even seen houses with 2 floors, but 5 mailboxes. I'm sure the government would also get taxes from the increased property taxes and reported income of people doing that.

The hotel chains aren't evil, but they have their interests and I don't doubt they're giving the extra push for this to go through.
In that particular example the English word "computer" simply adds a suffix to the already-in-native-use Latin verb "to compute" which is a standard English way of converting to a noun meaning "a thing that computes". The main problem here is that compute is a relatively uncommon word (especially outside the context of computers), and English as a language has too many uncommon words.

However there are more important things than vocubulary (which you can learn by rote given sufficient motivation) when applying basic foreign language skills learned in your homeland from a non-native speaker. English-speakers tend to be unusually tolerant of mispronunciations as well as misspellings; likewise with our excessively complex grammar. When you're not having to master things like tone usage, communication on a basic level (surely all that can be expected of most US high-school students) is a lot easier to master.
Hmm,

When you actually get down to writing it, a top-down parser is a fairly simple beast. A programmer doesn't really need many extra tools to do it. You just create a bunch of functions which peak-at symbols, consume symbols and call each other.

The art is in having an exactly nailed-down specification concerning how these function are going to work together before you even begin. And that art comes from first analyzing and manipulate your language's grammar. That's a process that's distinct from the final code that you write and it requires knowing a little bit about abstract languages. (Your functions are pieces of the language but not the language pieces one would intuitively imagine. The parts of a language are great examples of "programming objects" which are not "object oriented" objects).

What's hard about understanding an abstract language is that it isn't a command or feature that within a language but is ... a language in itself. Creating an abstract language involves moving to a higher logical level, just using a programming language involves moving to a higher logical level than using an application. It's not that it's impossibly hard but it requires a student to interrupt any rote learning they're doing and think. It's a great thing but it's also a road block to a significant percentage of students.

Given this situation, I'm not sure how any language feature can help. Sure, you could plunk a whole parser generator into the code but I'd say it's harder to understand the combination of language specification and generated-code that results from such a thing.

I'd like to know how the Perl 6 people expect to deal with this challenge.

I agree that it would be nice to move people from complex regular expressions to reasonably simple parsers.
5 Tipps für ein erfolgreiches bestehen von 70-432
The U.S middle class is on the brink of extinction
How can any action a agent makes be meaningful without causal links to the outside?

One of the responses that has been raised to that issue goes like this: At any point we have a number of meaningful choices from which to choose. For example, if someone calls you up and asks you to go out to dinner with them, it would be meaningful to say, "sure that's great!" or "no thanks maybe later". In any situation like that, we are 'free' to choose from a set of meaningful choices. Each is meaningful in that it is related to the past, but regardless of eventually choosing one choice, we could have chosen another of those choices, and still had it be meaningful.

I don't particularly buy that argument, as the idea of 'could have chosen something else' is just a further escaping of the question of free will. But it is a way of looking at it that seems to avoid the randomness/lack of meaningfulness associated with the idea of free will.
(Disclaimer: Author of the OP)

I absolutely understand your feelings on hacky code. Every academic produces hacky code, there are precious few who don't. I myself, when I started, did not want to release my code for the same reason.

However, once I began to realize that we were all on the same boat of HMS Hacked Together, that feeling began to dissipate. My advisor calls it "research code", and it's fine, because as academics, we're all used to it!

That's why I usually just ask for source. I assume the build won't execute on my Mac, and that's OK. I'm not really interested in running the tool, but explicitly finding out how you solved the problem.
Seems much more likely that Dave is Captain Queeg.Early success, muckraking ever after, yep. sounds like Dave Winer.
Yeah it really is, but a lot of people have given me some good feedback, so at least I have a place to start. Thanks for the reassurance photon, its good to hear from someone who has experience with the same process.
Conway comes up with the best names for things... Doomsday algorithm, monstrous moonshine, Game of Life, surreal numbers, cosmological theorem, etc.
I haven't used that, sadly. First one I bought was the nano.
Business Term Paper to Your Study Topic Area
Business term paper is used to evaluate the students’ knowledge in the selected subject area. The student has to select the topic very carefully so that he can demonstrate his/her deep understanding on business matters rather than showing his wide knowledge.
Also, the sun rises in the east.
(Disclaimer: I am author of the OP)

The NSF is a great point.

One of the things that bugs me about this, that I didn't go into in the post for brevity's sake, is that a lot research is funded by some government institution under the banner of public interest. If you are paid to create something, and then you lock it away for whatever reason, that's not in the public interest. Worse still, more money has to be spent for someone else to re-implement the exact same thing if they liked it!

I hadn't thought this out to the logical conclusion of having the funding body also ask for the code to be released, but I think it's a great idea.
Look, there are many ways that US hospitals could cut costs by reducing the standard of care in one way or another. Some of them would be safe, some of them would be dangerous, and some of them probably look safe but would turn out to be way more dangerous than you'd think.

Sure, it's a great idea to save money when money is being wasted, but I'm really skeptical of this new fashion of claiming that the US's worst problem is that our standards of healthcare are too damn high.
A good example of the authors specific notion of simplicity, can be our own Hacker News. On one end of the HN machine you submit a post or a comment or a question and around 2000 people see it in a day. After that you receive a nice little discussion (if your original input was good enough), as the output. A little noisy sometimes but has a form of natural filtering.