skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that'd make it particularly difficult for me is that most of my early-stage experimentation is done in image-based environments with REPLs, not by editing code (Lisp, R; the Smalltalk people are also big on it). So I don't even have code to send! Well, some parts usually are in code, but it won't run unless you load it into my image and do the right thing with it. I have working images / image dumps, session transcripts, notes about what I did (some of which may be stuff I did by hand for the first proof-of-concept stage), etc. I find it a much more fluid way to work than code in a text editor, personally.
Wouldn't things like Bayh-Dole have to be repealed before that could even be anywhere near remotely possible? At this university source-code transfers must be rubber-stamped by the university IPO office. For publishing we only have to tell them what's going on if we think it may be valuable. But actually letting university-owned things slip out is a university IPO matter. Unless you're a student, in which case code you write directly related to your degree is yours, the university owns the code. The work of post-doc's, professors, associates, etc are owned by the employer. The way most research grants work, you are an employee of the university, not of the NSF/NIH.
This article is a great insight about what was hot 12 years ago - a little time capsule, if you will. The web (or browser to be precise) is mentioned only in passing; the author could to not have seen that it would be the platform which most of the software innovations (and a significant number of social ones) in the following decade would rely on.
Do they have to work together? Or is the concept closer to just living and hanging out with like-minded people? I would love to live with friends who inspire me, but I already have my own work, so I don't know if I qualify.
philanthropic donations are only ever patronizing

You're wrong. The Gates Foundation has pledged $10 billion to vaccine research and I can't think of how that could be considered "patronizing".

it shouldn't be possible to accumulate that much wealth to begin with.

I disagree. The most productive people in society should be rewarded accordingly, and encouraged to keep producing. If you put a cap on rewards you'll put a cap on productivity.
lol hacker news
I think it would be more accurate to say the market is regulated by laws.

"laws are created by politicians" probably differs between countries. I wonder which is worse, politicians that don't really care about what they sign or politicians that do care. An incompetent politician that do care is a frightening combination.
Just out of curiosity, how did you manage to learn 9 languages (and how long did it take you, if you actually "studied" them explicitly somehow)? I'm trying to learn French and it still sucks, after almost 3 months in Paris (but not much social contact, admittedly, as I came here without knowing any people). Any tips from an actual doer? Anything that is possible to do by oneself (i.e. not the standard "get a French girlfriend")?
Warren Buffett made almost all of his money himself.

The problem is that when people get unearned money they usually become wasteful and lose their drive. It's also really hard to keep working on something financial when you've got a large external income; if you're making a million bucks a year in investment income then spending all your waking hours on a business that's making fifty grand a year doesn't seem worthwhile even if it might eventually grow much larger.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off with some mandatory complexity. Most people simply don't appreciate the miracles they see around them every second of every day. Miracles that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Miracles that happen everyday on a consistent basis. Miracles that they curse and abuse.

If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually is then maybe the world would be a better place.
I am curious. Just what is the middle class?
> it doesn't seem that the middle class in those countries is shrinking at the same rate.

Do you have a source for this? I think Western Europe's middle class is facing a lot of pressure too due to immigration. Not sure about Canada.

> One common alternative hypothesis, the lack of an aggressively redistributive tax system

Dude, people on welfare are not middle class. At least not for long.
I keep 100s of tabs open, but it's not because I specifically want tabs, it's because it's the laziest solution.

To me Tab Candy is the extra work that made me avoid bookmarks.
In the short time I've been reading HN I've noticed an increasing tendency to upvote this type of mainstream news material. Many of these topics are important and interesting, but perhaps they would be better discussed elsewhere. I'd be sad to see HN lose its geeky focus.
Let me get this straight: you spent a few hours last week to build an app, and it already generated $100K of business? Did I miss something in that story?
Facebook is beginning to look and act like sovereign state
Running on your heels is the #1 source of running injuries. If you learn proper running technique, you don't need motion control shoes or insoles. For a more technical approach, look up Evolution Running. For a more beginner-focused approach that also incorporates mental aspects, look up Chi Running. Both offer the same fundamental technique advice, just go about it in different ways.
It's likely that Google will buy zynga and become the google of games itself...
Since the announcement of Perl 6 10 years ago, there have been fifteen stable releases of Perl 5.

There have been 31 releases of Rakudo Perl 6. Pugs had half a dozen.

What more do you want?
Redistributive tax system and welfare are not the same thing at all.
I'm in the midst of doing more or less what you're suggesting. In addition to new content I'm going to try to strip out some of what people seem to have disliked. The idea that you're supposed to listen to feedback and make changes accordingly doesn't seem so easy when the feedback is hostile or totally unhelpful.
Think you are generalizing a bit. I admit government hospitals here in India are not exactly world class, but 'reek of urine' is not there in every hospital. Atleast the hospitals in my part of the country (Kerala) are way better than you describe it to be. Whether they are the answer to US customers is a different thing.

Also about the part that 'most' Indians think of indianpride(tm) is unacceptable to me. I agree I used to get forwards during my college days about this, but as I grew older, I am smart enough to realize this is not the case. I guess most of my fellow citizens do too.
Scandinavian-style social safety nets and redistributive taxes aren't designed to just put people "on welfare" indefinitely, but aim to make it easier to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, both by providing public goods that people don't have to pay for themselves, and by subsidizing educational/etc. opportunities. For example, Denmark provides free health care, free child care, free education (incl. university), free job-training and continuing education programs, etc.
They neglected the impact of property taxes, which are regressive (independent of income). Here in NJ for example, my property taxes are now at 25% of my income, and that's before other taxes and fees (income tax, sales tax, gas tax, tolls, etc.). As homeowners go bankrupt or walk away from their homes, the tax rate is raised to keep the local fiefdom's income level stable.
Peter-Paul Koch's thoughts on Apples recent PR moves
True.

But I'm guessing the children of successful business people also get, besides the money, a great education on business. More importantly, they probably inherit a great worldview of money/business, which drives them to also try and do great things.

This isn't true in every case, but it's probably true in some cases. I'm guessing any child of a person like Bill Gates might be given the kind of education which pushes him/her to great heights. Should probably check some statistics on this issue.
Sorry if I implied that I made $100K from a few hours of work -- that wasn't my intent.

NotaryCRM users are tracking $100K of their money in my system.

Subtle, but important difference. :)
Actual Pinocchio Tale in the Making? - Interview with a robot (NYTimes)
http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/
Similar articles for reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543328

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540120 <- This one has lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540494

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541197

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541514 <- This one has a few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542275

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542557
Thanks for letting me know. Just sent out a follow-up email. I hate sending addition emails, but figured this was justified since hardly anyone has actually seen it.
If you don't mind me asking, at what ages did you learn each language (e.g. < 3 years, Dutch)
Inaccurate -- I wrote one of those. :)

But do note that instead of this:

git checkout -t origin/feature

You can do this:

git checkout feature

It'll find a branch named "feature" in one of your remotes and make a local branch that tracks it.
Oh you can write bad code in every language, and I regularly do.

However, some languages make it far easier for you to write bad code and Perl is at the front of the pack.

In my own opinion each programmatic device should be expressed 1 way. Shorthands are not a good long term strategy, because they increase the chances of massively diversified coding styles.
I am Dutch so I learned English, French and German at school, but actually those are my worst languages. I really started to learn languages with Esperanto. The first merit of Esperanto was to show me that I actually am capable of learning languages (because at school, languages were my worst topics, as far as that I could conditionally go to the next class with a task for French...)
Then I started to discover that really the only thing that matters with learning languages is to have fun and to speak, and Portuguese, which I learned last, I speak actually better than practically all other languages, I studied least grammar for it and I use it with my fiancee daily.
http://fi3m.com describes mostly how you can actively start learning languages quickly, although details can differ with my path.

I am 21 now, I learned Spanish and Portuguese about a year ago, and most languages earlier.
I am very discouraged by how dismissive most of the comments are in regards to learning another language regardless of what it is. I thought this was a group of HACKERS. Understanding another language, especially one as challenging as Mandarin is beneficial education to learning the capabilities, strengths and structures of communication.

To me, the "English is enough", is totally akin to fanboy mentalities surrounding technology. I supposed you've only bothered to learn C or Java and are completely indifferent to even bothering with any other language. Obviously, this is an extremely limited view.

Additionally, exposure to another language provides exposure to other cultures. In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.

I know a lot of HNers are dismissive of formal education in general, and maybe knowing Chinese isn't directly applicable to most, but come on. We need to teach our kids early on that it's OK to learn for the sake of learning
The robot's algorithm is based on a real live human being.
There is a TED talk by one of the people behind Arvind Eye Hospital mentioned in the article -> http://www.ted.com/talks/thulasiraj_ravilla_how_low_cost_eye....
the benefit of a bulk index is the ability to shove everything into a file and fsync once. so splitting across files won't really give the performance benefits.
They are probably using Windows 95,98,ME or they had some really bad drivers. Windows itself hasn't bluescreened for me since before Windows 2000. It's really scary that they use a full blown desktop operating system for such critical things.
How did this make it to the HN frontpage???

First, there is this tabloid-y "prove beyond a shadow of a doubt" phrase right in the first sentence, not a good sign.

Then, the first table shows the last data point is 2001?

Then, given that the average household net worth in stocks is claimed to be 106'300 USD, that means that the top 1% held 3568.4 / 100*106.3 or about a third of the stock wealth, which seems more reasonable number, given the absolute importance of institutional investors in the market. Now, mind you, most of those pension funds and insurance companies holdings in stocks actually are the risk and potential benefit of the bottom 99 percent of not-superrich people in the US.

So, what gives, or am I missing something here?
very nice bit of blind generalization there... agree the government hospitals aren't the best bit down there. However, there are tons of hospitals which offer equal or better care with on-par facilities as here, minus the high costs.

Insurance is a big nightmare here, which I fear might just catch on in places like India as a lot of practices are just adopted from the west without much thought on the basis of being "innovative". I had an absolute torrid time when I was hospitalized here as a student and the insurance provided by the school didn't even cover 50% of the cost because they found ways to deny basic items of coverage. You're right in saying that the laws and the lobbying pretty much lets the insurance companies get away with murder.

For those who haven't read this, there's a brilliant piece by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker about the system needs to change for the better:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...

Hope I wasn't too tangential ranting off but calling it a dangerous fluff piece is just being ignorant. Cost can be brought down by not compromising on quality.
The future of spy drone tech lands after two weeks in the air
Does FreeBSD have any real purpose anymore except as the base of your new proprietary OS?
Ask HN: Anybody working on opensource web app
Hi,
Is anybody here working on any Open Source Web Application?

I would like to join.

Or if anybody is willing to start a new project, I am fine.

I am currently working as a UX/UI engineer for a Bay Area company.

I rate myself 8/10 in CSS, Javascript and jQuery.
Intractable Migraine &ndash; treatment of intractable migraine
Blogspam. Here is the original: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-...

Also incoherent. The author doesn't even define "middle class", and yet some collection of disparate statistics is supposed to tell us the middle class is vanishing?
- Dutch from birth

- English from around 10 years, needing about 7 years or more to get to speak it comfortably

- French and German from around 12 years, never liked it really and couldn't speak comfortably yet, only the last 3 years speaking it with more confidence

- Esperanto since about 15 years, got fluent in less than a year and conversational level in a month

- Ido and toki pona in free time online that follows, mostly in mailing list conversations, probably don't really count as they are conlangs

- Spanish and Portuguese since my 20th, both basic conversational level in about a month, my spanish is still conversational but my portuguese is quite reasonable, to the point where non-brazilians accuse me of a brazilian-like accent.
Ask HN: What's your favorite Veggie / Vegan restaurant?
What's your favorite veggie or vegan restaurant?
Can anyone say "Eliza" ??
Aside from the license issue, it also helps that the guy who maintains Sendmail in the FreeBSD sources is Gregory Neil Shapiro, vice president and CTO of Sendmail Inc.
There's a reason why a lot of americans and europeans decide to go to India or Southeast Asia for medical purposes. A bit dated but good article nonetheless:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1196429,00....
Why do people play Farmville?
I particularly liked that it has PPC G5 SMP support as well, as then I may be able to get some use out of the retired G5s as ZFS file servers.

Edit: On the other hand, it uses quite a lot of power that thing. So maybe not...
I think Apple sees this as more of a successor to HyperCard.
http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/build-web-apps-iphone-...
wonder if there's a similar to-do list for learning up Django for newbies.
Heinlein covered this subject in his book 'Stranger in a strange land'
This article is based on the premise that people correlate the number of features of a product to the simplicity of using the product. This isn't an accurate premise. A better description of the problem would be that features get added to products without much thought for how it integrates with usability. "The Design of Everyday Things" is a good book that addresses where and why design goes wrong. http://amzn.to/17Wew
"Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense."

It seems that in many languages verb tense plops the "when" into one of a few or dozen general buckets. the "when" is then further specified using more words, such as "yesterday" or "next month" or "a long time ago".

I expect Indonesian to simply rely entirely on such "further specification". Or is the sense of time fundamentally different than, say, English? Does anyone know more?
It has the purpose of hosting my local SAN, Samba server, irssi sessions, and various other tools. It has sane configuration, and a wonderful package system.
I live in India and am a proud owner of a TVS Gold.

I got it for the equivalent of around $30 USD.

A mechanical switch keyboard is completely worth it, if you're like me, and want to feel pampered when typing. It also boosted my untrained typist- WPM by 10 instantly. Its that smooth.

I believe it uses 'Cherry Blue' switches, and the key surfaces have an concave curve that invites your fingers to caress them. For hacker folk, stuck using membranes for whatever reason: you don't know what you are missing; Seriously.

Get a good mechanical keyboard today! Don't pinch pennies and stress your bread-and-butter body-parts.
Lots of folk smuggle these back to the States. Ask your mates with family in India to help you out.

Some TVS Gold Pr0n: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:7268&do=co... (warning: around 2MB of image content)
I am sorry if it sounds like that, but Kerela is better off because of its massive investment in infrastructure as compared to other parts of India, but the truth is that most clinics in rural areas exist only on paper. I am sure that you know the story pretty well.

I have access to a pretty good healthcare facilities in my city, but that doesn't mean that every case is like that. The overwhelming majority points in the opposite direction and it is important to accept that the problem exists before correcting it.

I see fluff pieces everyday in newspapers. If a researcher is somehow related to India then the newspapers give headlines like; "NRI Discovers XYZ". Or, "Indian Led Team Discovered XYZ" and so on. There are specific patterns in the almost all of the leading dailies except for The Mint (http://www.livemint.com/) and a few other business newspapers. There is hardly any news of any significance whatsoever. The world is reduced to 2 pages along with vivid bikini shots of celebrities. In fact, a lot of global news is about how Britney Spears baked her baby in the oven. The myopia used to shock me, but I now know that the newspapers are not at fault they are simply catering to the audience.

>>>I agree I used to get forwards during my college days about this, but as I grew older, I am smart enough to realize this is not the case. I guess most of my fellow citizens do too.<<<

Of course, they're smart enough to realize this, but people tend to believe things often because they believe that they ought to believe them. Further, the circles in which we exist are not varied enough to make a conclusion like this. There is a selection bias in our peers. If you go out of the way and talk to people then you will be shocked and amazed with the replies you get.

At the end it doesn't matter much to me. I don't like the concepts of demarcating plots of land and building elaborate belief systems based on that concept. To me it's a lie and a sham. What matters more are the people who live a life of suffering with no escape and die everyday in inhumane conditions that somehow never make the headlines. The AIDS epidemic in India is comparable to that of Africa. Africa.

There's a lot to solve over here and creating fluffy pieces simply won't do it.

I am really sorry if this appears rude to you. That is not my intention, but I am afraid this is the truth and we ought to do something about it.
Yeah that's what came up to my mind at first. But it feels a little different. When you talk to Eliza, you know it's fake, but based on the video, the more you talk to this robot, the more you start to feel like you are talking to a human..... with a very low intelligence. And it's kinda creepy.
The opposite of "progressive" taxation (tax rate is linked with income) is NOT "regressive". It would be something like "non-indexed", I guess.

Are you suggesting that the taxation of property should not be tied to its market value?
There's a command line tool that lets you make a local copy of the code & support for running apps locally is in the works.
Wouldn't this just be an adjustment to something that occurred due to lack of free trade and globalisation/ ease of communication in the past? If someone in China or elsewhere really can do a job just as well as someone local to a company and capitalism dictates that a company should maximise profit then it makes perfect sense to outsource.
I thought it was something like Bitcoin reading the title.
Was it East point business park that you worked?
I speak 2 languages natively, but have recently studied a third (Spanish) and speak it at a beginner, but passable level. I really recommend the Pimsleur method for learning languages. It's a set of audio lessons, where the basic principle makes a lot of sense: learning the same way you learned your native language. Simply by hearing things said, over and over, and taking part in mock conversations. There is exactly zero time spent on teaching you rules, it's all taught by actual talking.

Link to wiki for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimsleur_method
> They only gain this income by exploiting the proletariat so its only fair!

I can't tell if this is serious or parody. Honestly.
A viral-marketing gambit gone terribly wrong