skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Anyone who bought a house is just as guilty of precipitating the crisis as the banks...

This is true to a degree. But remember that banks and real estate investors are expected to be much more knowledgeable and sophisticated players in the market than someone buying one house as a primary residence.

Similarly, the societal norms when hiring a web designer are different from the norms when dealing with a waiter. You tip your waiter, you don't tip your web designer.

I am a DBA, not a web designer, but I have gotten bonuses above and beyond the agreed upon minimum in both full time and contract work. This is very similar to a tip and often they arrive at the number in a similar way (a percentage with percentage based loosely on their evaluation of my performance).

Also, it is worth noting that the tradition of tipping came from a desire to secure exemplary services. Personally, I consider it quite ethical to not tip if the service is subpar and I will tip generously if it is better than I expected.
Moose is nice, but making your own objects can be pretty cool too. Try blessing a function ;)
Ask HN: Does this idea have any potential ?
I created one site while learning Flex and just put it up online at www.yawtv.com , i know the ui sucks but first come first i want to know does online video sites have any potential to make money without facing any copyright issues (specially when you are just an independent developer and your site is based on youtube).I also wanted to extend this idea hence started making http://www.yawtv.com/twittertv/TwitterTV_fs.swf (still developing this so has lotsa bugs).I read about what happened to totlol.com (at one point it was generating lots of traffic), sites like them have lots of potential i think.Consider this if i collect all the yoga videos or how to videos and create a channel dedicated to that with videos well categorized then i am sure it will generate traffic but how to make money from it as Youtube won't allow to put ads if nothing else is there on the page.
Please give suggestions and how i can improve this site or this idea or change it altogether.
Actually we allow people to hit walls, for the reasons you mention above, but we make sure that the robot slows down a little before hitting them. Basically we allow any movement but you can only go fast when you are in an open area and if the robot detects that you are going to barely clip an obstacle you barely miss it instead (thats the hope anyway)

-Benjie, anybots obstacle avoidance guy
I don't think you should claim "demonstrable" and "future" in the same sentence. "Theoretical" or even "promising", perhaps. The most performance intensive problems in the world, when they have competition, are very much still solved in C and C++.
The fifty smartest people in tech
I think your analysis is a bit harsh but hits on a good point. If we give people benefits forever it doesn't make sense to work. Ie if you lost a higher paying job. You will make more taking unemployment than getting a lower paying job.
... provided you have java installed.
The Crisis & the Euro
It has one. Autodocking isn't finished yet, but on the work queue. You can see the dock in the background of the video (it's the white C shaped thing sitting on the ground)
Creationism doesn't get a say in Science class. It's science class.

And lets be honest here: When people talk about teaching intelligent design, or creator origin, or whatever, it exclusively focuses on the Abrahamic idea of the matter, paying no mind to the Dharmic or Taoic ideas on the origin. So not only is it completely out of place, but it's also grossly incomplete, biased, and serves no purpose other than the reinforce our society's dominant religious cultures, rather than to give students a better understanding of the world around them.
I don't believe in Creation, but my beliefs have nothing to do with it. The main problem with Creation being taught in Science class is that it is not science. If you want to teach Creation, teach it in Religion class.
I agree. His recent ACM article is an example: provocative and even unpleasant, but making a point which, if correct, could hardly be more important; and I think it is probably correct.

What do you think it is that makes Varnish so fast? I've read the article (http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes) but I'm curious to hear about it from people's experience. Sometimes the stated reasons for something being great are not the same as the real reasons.
Please also add your location if you're comfortable sharing that.
On a racing yacht at sea there is no "room temperature"!! Ambient temperature inside the hull might be slightly warmer than the sea, but barely. You can't even go into a cabin and close the door, because there are no cabins and doors, there're berths above stowage compartments or in the sail locker.

Once you get cold and wet out there, you aren't going to get warm and dry again until the race is over and you're back on land, which might be days and hundreds of miles away. So we train for that. Similarly in our first aid, the "rules" on moving casualties are different. 'Cos you can't leave them on-deck...
http://code.google.com/p/cube2py/

http://vimeo.com/13154869
The law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but here in Ontario, common law status has very real consequences. Not all of them are bad and in fact if you read this FAQ on property division, it sounds like what people would expect when two people break up (e.g., joint assets are divided in half, each person keeps what belonged to them solely, etc.). Common law partners are also eligible for spousal support upon separation. People think I'm weird for not wanting to live with a girlfriend, but common law status creeps up fast and often before people have had the time to realize if the person is right for them in the long run.

http://www.common-law-separation-canada.com/property-divisio...

http://www.common-law-separation-canada.com/spousal-support....
I agree with you, but I think jmillikin's point is when most programmers hear "scripting language", they think "dumbed-down programming language" rather than "cleanly separated layers of design".
Yeah... most peoples js code-base is more like 3kb.
HIRPS: A new model for PR and influencers
Yes, but not an existential danger.

Sure, it could be done, perhaps pretty trivially (from the article it sounds like you'd have to do it when the climate is wet enough), but the US dependence on wheat is more ... say cultural than essential. We produce a lot of other grains, e.g. in my home area of SW Missouri in addition to wheat we produce a lot of dent corn and "milo" (grain sorghum), the latter two for animal fodder. Elsewhere there's a lot of rice grown (e.g. my mom grew up on a Louisiana long grain rice farm).

We've always had the option of "gearing down" and shifting some of the grain from animals to people. Nowadays with something like 1/3 of our corn crop going to ethanol fuel production we're in great shape, at least in terms of being able to provide everyone enough calories.

I hope you like cornbread ^_^.

Seriously, go to this page: http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=5...

Select the US, Production Quantity, year(s) and the grains you're interested in and you'll see as of 2008 that we produced 4.5 times as much corn as we did wheat.
-- making coming soon pages for 3 iphone apps and 3 physical products in development (see my profile)

-- working on iphone app to manage/coordinate your medical care: http://twitpic.com/23sew2
Probably can do for cheaper. But if you're a company that owns a warehouse in Kentucky, you'll probably spend a few million in equipment at the warehouse where the $15,000 will feel like a drop in the sea. It cost Zappos $20M to outfit their first warehouse -- they didn't even have the Kiva robots at the time.
A new form of database, new query language.
How about Arrington becomes an Annoybot?
What Do Twilight and a U.S. Senate Candidate Have in Common? Bad Copyright
It's hard, hard work, and the people who do it get undercompensated

It seems to me that you're implying that appropriate compensation is proportional to the difficulty of the work.

I assert, instead, that appropriate compensation is proportional to the productivity of the work.

I have never accepted the notion that hard, physical, agricultural labor is a job "someone" must do, any more than cleaning toilets is [1]. I allege that we lack the requisite farm automation to eliminate the hard jobs because there are people willing to do the work so cheaply.

[1] Search for "urinal elephant"
People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without illegal labour need to look at the Australian example. A helluva lot of food gets produced in Australia without the need for a permanent third-world underclass. How? I guess it's a combination of higher wages (a good shearer can make upwards of $500 a day, frinstance) and greater automation, which presumably increases prices somewhat, but realistically not by much.

(There's also a class of visas for foreigners who want to do some fruit picking as part of a working holiday. These mostly wind up getting taken by backpacking students from Europe.)

People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without subsidies also need to look at the Australian example.
Venture Pimp: Trendero wants to help you be a trendsetter
Chris Rock has some good input on the subject:

"Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check is wealthy."

If you're rich, you can buy an expensive house. If you're wealthy, you can forget exactly how many expensive houses you have.
Has anyone read the book he suggests?
I wish I could tell you. I also found the "Admin Templates" but not much else. Most of the templates appeared to be geared to blogs or company web sites, and not web applications.

I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and go with a designer if I can get the price to an acceptable level.
I've found being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like that is a losing strategy.

Perhaps I'm just not good enough at being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like this though.
404 ?
Spooky.
It's more a lesson to get pre-nup because not only you can get screwed in a divorce, your partners and shareholders could to. So, if your significant other ask why you need a pre-nup hand them that line and it so happens to be true.
"My girlfriend..."

So you're following Felix's advice then :-)
I was disappointed that a urinal elephant is not a real elephant. I suppose while an elephant could be trained to clean toilets, you'd still need someone to clean up after the elephant.
Stopping the OOM Pain -- Removing JVM Memory Leaks
These things don't need to be taken to their logical extremes, though - handling most of the semantic edge cases is still an improvement, even if it isn't exhaustive.

Emphasizing well-defined semantics could also be a push to keeping the language small and clean.
The client interface is up to you, but no need to re-invent the serverside part:

From http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html
This specification defines a transport protocol that emulates the semantics of a long-lived, bidirectional TCP connection between two entities (such as a client and a server) by efficiently using multiple synchronous HTTP request/response pairs without requiring the use of frequent polling or chunked responses.

Drop in an existing XMPP chat server (or write your own if you must) and you should be good to go. A lot of high-volume sites are using this implementation for their web-based chat services.
Googles move in China will leave lots of revenue on the table for Baidu.
Moving search to HK was a reasonable thing to do but they might have also left a varient search engine back at .cn that would only see products and services, in safe categories. That might have allowed them to dodge the censorship issues and keep advertisers happy until China begins to relax its censorship rules in the coming years.
[Citation required]^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Do you have any data which supports the statement regarding average size of script?

I suspect that the sites which might consider deploying something like this have "most" of the Javascript code on the internet if you look at bytes transferred, rather than number of URLs.
I think YouTube Leanback has this covered: http://www.youtube.com/leanback
Maybe we will move in that direction, but I'm not sure. That depends on what our customers will want.
Seriously? A border fence? I didn't think many people actually took that serious as a deterrent. Have you seen the Penn and Teller show where they pay (legally questionable) immigrants to build a length of fence using the same specs as the border fence - then pay them to go over, under, and through it? I just remember they were on the other side pretty quick.

Then there's the cost to build and maintain... it's just such a ridiculous idea to me.
Just release it.
Hello, jdminhbg. It's an interesting point that you make, but here is the real situation with my girlfriend. Do you still think that she is considered wealthy?

- She has been employed as a licensed clinical social worker for 11 years with a county in california.
- She owned a condo for 3 years, sold it, made 100K profit.
- She used that 100K as a down payment on her current home.
- She bought the home for 500K, 400K 30 yr fixed mortgage.
- She bought the home 6 years ago.
- Today, she owes $370K, and the BPO of the home is 170K. This is commensurate with other homes in the area.

- She has 30K in the bank and a pension plan with the state of California.

She is still employed with the county, but they are pursuing layoffs in social services. Her job is at risk. Technically, she is insolvent, as the 300K owed is greater than the 30K she has in the bank. Her retirement pension doesn't count towards solvency.

So a set of circumstances where she used the profits from one investment, and placed all of those profits in another investment to buy a nicer home for herself has turned sour. Her salary let her afford the 400K mortgage, but she wasn't able to save or invest in other items.

She didn't have tremendous wealth, but she did have skills and a job that would allow her to continue payments against a loan, at the cost of not being able to afford any other investments.

When this is all done, she'll have 40K in the bank from saved mortgage payments, a pension, her job (hopefully), and bad credit.
You're quite right about the juxtaposition of "demonstrable" and "future". I should have said functional programming has "already" demonstrated an advantage in producing robust and understandable concurrent programs, which will continue to be relevant in our multicore future. Really, there's nothing "theoretical" about that fact.

To your second point, I made no claims that C and C++ are not used to solve performance intensive problems. I'm sure C and C++ (or Assembly, for that matter) can be applied to solve any number of problems, if that's one's calling.
Boy, Did Google Blow It In China
That is something we worry about. There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect at first, like interactions that happen in a computer screen are somehow less real than face to face ones. The hope is that bumping in to people with a robot is sort of like making faces in a teleconference: it's maybe something you do when you are first trying it out, but once you start using it for actual work you stop.

I know that we have certainly moved past that here using them (we use them to keep in communication with our manufacturer). Hopefully having 2 way video + the fact that the robots will be used almost exclusively in business settings will help us avoid the Penny Arcade Internet Fuckwad Theory http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
Related: Why are we not installing an over-head electric rail at freeways that tall trucks and buses could use? I understand that at high speeds the kind of system used by Trolley-buses the poles would constantly fall off or the wire themselves would wear and tear.

But what if one had sturdy beams instead of wires that could guide the trolley-poles, and indirectly the driver to stay in-lane. More like a third-rail, that is 4-5m above the road.

These trucks and buses could then have a weaker combustion engine to use off electricity, but perform the majority of the trip, on the freeway, on electricity.

I understand that not all countries have a near mix of 50% hydro and 50% nuclear electric power to make this decrease pollution.
"App Store contributed to only 1% in profit!"

I see this, and I can't help but feel the App Store is being looked at in the wrong way. The App Store isn't a separate product. It's a feature of the iOS system. Remove the App Store, and the iPhone and iPad become much less appealing. Yes, maybe directly the App Store contributes only 1% of the profit, but the App Store itself contributes to a lot more than just 1%. I'd say it's probably the most essential piece to all the other products right now.
The engineer pays more taxes when employed, in order to collect higher benefits when unemployed.

Only in theory. The reality makes far less sense.

Here in California, it's not the employee who pays the tax, but the employer, and it's only proportional to income up to $7000 per year (yes, year, not month) per employee. The payout is only proportional to earnings up to around $50k annually.
Got 7 clients competing for my time, right now. If you're considering making the switch, do it.
You have to watch this TED talk where Lewis Pugh swam in the North Pole. It's fascinating. http://www.ted.com/talks/lewis_pugh_swims_the_north_pole.htm...
The link title is a bit hyperbolic. Looking into a bible belt classroom is as easy as interviewing (or simply just talking to) current and former students and faculty.

Having grown up in the bible belt I can attest to how backwards the approach to knowledge (not just science) is. Critical analysis and logic are far, far down on the totem pole compared to propping up incumbent biases. In fact critical analysis (and I use that term loosely) is often only viewed as valid if it supports a pre-determined viewpoint. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who has spent even a brief period of time in southern US, but it can be easy to forget how much of a real every day occurrence it is.
This one I can explain, it's a token concession used by the government to get Google in the "right frame of mind" (in their view). Google gives them an inch, eventually they will demand a mile.

Google's domain renewal, from now until the foreseeable future, will be a difficult time for Google/China relations - the government will escalate their demands every year. It will be interesting to see what the government makes them do next year to keep the domain.

It's part of their negotiating process, that government is very used to being threatened like this and certainly knows how to return in kind. Politics in China can be incredibly subtle (and deadly).
Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

Your subject "Design" sticks out the most with this one.

Or how about some predictably bad computer humor:

Gnised: Reverse Engineering Design
This is something that actually has puzzled me for a while, so if someone can provide me with some economics insight I'd appreciate it.

The question is: why does it make economic sense to refuse a cheap labor force? If suddenly some aliens came to the US and said "we have figured out a way to get free food. have all the food you need here", would there be complaints about the number of farmers that are losing their jobs or unfairly competing against free products?

Theoretically, it seems to me that the positive aggregate effect on consumers is larger than the negative (and very regrettable) effect on the farmers. For this reason, wouldn't it make more sense to have the consumers compensate the farmers by helping them pay for their education, etc, so that they can find new jobs? This seems to me as the efficient way to think about immigration.

Where I come from (Mexico, of all places), I hear people sometimes complain about how computers shouldn't be allowed on certain government offices, since they will leave thousands of people without a job. I'd say that, if they can find a different job, then we can all be better off by finding cheaper production factors.
That's a really wonderful link, and I wish more people used the definition it advocates. I've one minor complaint, in that it conflates typeless and dynamically-typed languages, but considering when it was written that's not a big deal -- strong, dynamically-typed languages probably didn't exist in any significant way.

Unfortunately, almost every use of "scripting language" I've ever heard is more along the lines of:

"We can't write our GUI frontend in Python^! Scripting languages are too slow for rendering advanced graphics."

Usually uttered by somebody who's been writing C++ for 20 years and refuses to touch anything more recent.

^ Substitute Boo, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, or anything else without enough curly braces
Working on polishing a new WordPress theme. I am not a designer per se, but it is very difficult to come across simple and neat themes for websites. So I designed one for myself and now I am giving it away as a free theme.
The snarky [Citation required] didn't add anything to your more useful second paragraph.

Perhaps the internet could go back to calling people on generic statements in long-hand form.
Trouble is, if you actually do try taking their jobs, see what happens. Most illegal-dominated farms probably wouldn't even hire you.

I commute through a ghetto full of largely-unemployed folks who apparently have nothing to do all day. I'm sure a few years out in the sticks picking strawberries would do them a lot of good.
Exactly, Google complies with the government demands. But next year there will be more government demands.
First I would say that using a template is a sure fire way to make your site look boilerplate and out of place, a designer doesn't really cost you that much. For a couple thousand dollars you can get someone to put together PSDs for you and then pay someone a couple hundred to cut them up into HTML/CSS... then the rest you can handle. You probably only need them to do 3-5 pages to cover most of your app.

That being said, I did find some admin specific ones back when I considered doing this (I didn't and paid for a designer) but here you go:

http://www.admintasia.com/

http://www.adminizio.com/

http://themeforest.net/item/ninja-admin-/21190

http://themeforest.net/item/profi-admin-administration-for-t...

http://themeforest.net/item/boxie-admin/full_screen_preview/...
I agree with you. What I meant is that for a variety of bad reasons, farm workers sometimes get less than the true market price for their labor.
I've been wondering when someone would come out with a cloud-based IDE, although this isn't quite the same. I've always thought, wouldn't it be cool if Google came out with an online IDE, hosted on a GAE instance, with code saved in Google Code, allows you to build your code on their servers, and deploy to a dev GAE instance with seamless push to a production instance. For kicks (and probably an extra fee) you could have Google engineers do a code-review.
Malware from Russia on the Increase
I'm interested in this sort of competition, but honestly, I don't know enough to even begin. What do you recommend to someone who'd like to learn enough to participate in these competitions?
Are you using any parsing tools? Like the stanford NLP?

I am currently developing an API for the stanford NLP so that other web apps can easily use that parsing and word tagging tool.

Cool website. I like the idea of the "where is this slang used" feature.
Ask HN: Best Place to run a UI Design contest ?
We have a version of web application and we would like to have some designers compete on a homepage redesign so that I can get some alternate design ideas. Where would you suggest I do it. The budget would be around 800-1000$ for a single (or max 2) PSDs.
Put your blog/site/projects in there too. I like to browse the profiles of people making interesting comments to see what they are up to.