skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm now a bit surprised that the judge couldn't come up with such an obvious rationale. It's almost a if he was making a political decision rather than a legal one.

The argument presented to the judge was exactly the basis you've pointed out: that the sole purpose of marriage is to encourage procreation and to provide a stable environment in which to raise children.

If you'd actually read the ruling, you'd know that the evidence presented for this was flimsy at best; it was not demonstrated that heterosexual parents do a better job of raising children than homosexual parents, and it was freely admitted that marriage licenses are granted to heterosexual couples who are unable or unwilling to procreate. Thus the argument was rejected as legally unproven, and the ban on homosexual marriage was found to have no legally acceptable basis.

(and again the parallels with racial bans are striking: it was argued, once upon a time, that interracial couples would produce inferior children and that the government thus had an interest in preventing such couples from marrying. Such arguments were similarly unproven, and ultimately unprovable)
Ask HN: How would you design a Technology/Entrepreneur class for high school?
I am trying to design a Technology/Entrepreneur course for a rural high school. I know HN focuses more on building businesses using technology, than building content businesses, but I'm not sure teaching every kid how to program would work. I have a few kids, that I will be working with separately and will probably follow the traditional HN path with. For everyone else I have this as a rough outline:

Assumptions:

1a. Rural America suffers from brain drain where talented people leave to find economic leverage elsewhere.
1b. Rural America can cheat and bring economic leverage back to rural America by using technology and the internet (this post is an example of that).
2. College doesn't make sense for an increasing number of students. Schools must provide options for those students for whom college doesn't make sense and working in a factory doesn't make a lot of sense either.
3. Rural America needs entrepreneurs to build sustainable, technology driven businesses with global reach to remain viable.

Class 1.

* Develop and Design a website that supports the school and other organizations and groups in the community.
* Learn Wordpress, become familiar with online writing, develop a better understanding of how internet publishing works.
* Create Link Bait(?)
* Briefly touch on css/xhtml as is needed in their work.
* Learn how to find information they need on google, and use that to be productive.

Class 2.

* Study Business Models (pay per click, impression, affiliate marketing, etc) and Economics through the lense of the online world.
* Do case studies on online businesses. Wine Library, Gizmondo, lifehacker, etc, etc.
* Read the books Crush IT and Rework
* Brain storm ideas and then get involved in communities/forums about what they think their business will be tangentially related to. Develop relationships.

Class 3.

* Form Partnerships, Give out Shares to Advisors, etc, etc.
* Write Marketing/Business Plan, Conduct Market Research.
* Start to build their content based business.

Class 4.

* Hopefully, a few students have worked on it over the summer (probably have a meeting once a week for students that want to keep keep moving) and this will motivate the others who didn't.
* They should now be able to contact sponsors, build advertisment, write link bait, etc, etc.

What am I forgetting, what should I include, what should I leave out?

If you were doing this how would you do it?
How surprising: a benchmark that favors the company who wrote it...

Using hardware accelerated graphics is clever, and the lack of proper OpenGL support out-of-the-box in current Windows may prove a hassle for contenders to attack multiple platforms. Ditching OpenGL really paid off for Microsoft.
"Personally, all I could think about after reading this article was the song Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas [...]"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121775
Rate my startup: Gantto, easy to present Gantt charts on the web
One caveat, I doubt most instructors would allow students to use their phones as calculators during exams...too much potential for cheating.
The convertible note doesn't disappear. In the worst case it merely converts to stock at a pre-configured valuation.
Hm, (Income - Cost of Living) / Purchasing Power?
Link to the proposed SEC rule:

http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed.shtml

Look for 33-9117.pdf

Interesting questions based on my reading from the pdf (see excerpt below, italics by me): If it's not currently practical to evaluate an investment before making an investment decision, why would you make the decision to invest? <cough,cough, index fund, cough>

Next, who wants to do a constraint-programming back-end web app that takes a prospectus and generates this functional code? How much would institutions pay us for this?

From the pdf:

"The ABS issuer or the underwriter generally will have a computer model of the waterfall. However, the issuer or underwriter currently has no obligation to share the computer model with actual or potential ABS investors. Because prospective investors in ABS typically do not have access to the ABS issuer’s computer models, under current conditions, an investor must create its own computer program. It does this by taking the priority of payment rules stated in the trust agreement, pooling and servicing agreement, indenture, or other operative document for the ABS and described in the prospectus, converting the English language statement of those provisions into one or more algorithms, and then expressing the algorithms as computer code in a programming language. As a practical matter, it is often not possible to complete these steps before making an investment decision. This is particularly onerous for smaller institutional investors, for whom it may not be feasible to acquire the financial and technological expertise necessary to develop a computer program of the waterfall. Thus, investment decisions with respect to ABS may be made without the benefit of the investor performing its own quantitative valuation analysis. This may encourage undue reliance on the determinations of credit rating agencies. Further, there is the possibility that some investors will program the waterfall erroneously, leading to inaccurate ABS valuations."
Very ironic that she emphasises that the business books are general and not applicable and what you need is tailored advise, yet goes on to give very general, and absolute advice, and also make very general comments such as "we" are "addicted" to... blogs?

I don't even read any blogs! And I am not addicted to anything on the internet! And my ability to process information is hardly "plummeting" and basically you should stop just giving out opinions as a wise old man in the age of 80 telling the great youth of what life is really like.
Why wave failed
Information would be, "This drink is good for you and you should drink it."

The part, "This drink is good for you" is an information; and thus you should show some healthy amount of skepticism about it. Is the drink laden with high-fructose corn syrup? What do you know about the drink to take the claim "It is good for you" seriously or not? Whether the information is coming from your father or not is a moot point. Maybe your father is ill-informed about the drink, should you take his word for it?
plenty of fish, I think he makes $10 million a year or so.
Richard Branson seems to be doing OK.
The Death Ray And The Lean Startup
I can understand your situation, but I like their proposed approach (if I understand it correctly). A lot of people like to make appointments in order to be able to plan their time. During YC, you can schedule a 20 minute block of time with PG where he talks to you one on one. A lot of people find it to be useful, and I think it would be great to have something similar for HNers.

Some people like to be able to say "I have 20 minutes from 11:00-11:20 scheduled to talk to this person on this date about my project". Personally, I've always felt that scheduled appointments feel more "serious" than IM conversations. If I've made a commitment to talk with you for 20 minutes, you're much more likely to get my undivided attention during that time. Plus I can prepare for our conversation. If I can't make it, I'll just reschedule.
I'm surprised to see this for 2 reasons:

1) While I don't really have an opinion on it, I was under the impression that the general consensus was any combination of the following:
- it's misleading
- it's unscientific
- it's a Ponzi scheme
- it's a load of crap

2) Isn't this a million years old in internet years now? ;)
SoftLayer, The Planet Plan Major Hosting Merger
Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn't get the iPad
Currently the choice between MongoMapper and Mongoid is pretty simple. If you're using Rails 2.3.x, MongoMapper. If you're using Rails 3, Mongoid. The ActiveModel integration is key for Rails 3. Mongoid also has great documentation. MongoMapper does not as much consolidated documentation.
Just Friends. Interesting article on Facebook
Pairing NoSQL and Relational Data Storage: MySQL with MongoDB
For your reading pleasure: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

"Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four times that of the dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $350 million and a staff that numbers in the hundreds. Until 2007, Frind had a staff of exactly zero."

I think you can call that successful.
52 weeks of work experience
Lets do it at The Rhino. Rails Pub Night is held there and it always works well.

Sin and Redemption was a little small for the crowd size last time.
LIVE Q&A with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) @ 6:30PM PST today
I might be interested ... but I'm in Ottawa. What happens at these HN meetups?
It doesn't seem to handle Unicode very well, or your normalization routines need love. I have several German words in my topic list, and Umlauts get chopped out, for example the infamous "Blumenkübel" becomes "Blumenkbel", "für" becomes "fr", and so on.
I think you would be amazed at how many would still give it a try.
Buy some foosball tables and hire some engineers. You'll be rolling in it in no time.
I don't recall any radio talk about suspecting the van of being insurgent, but I'll rewatch the unedited version of "Collateral Murder" for the reference.

Absolutely, I'm angry about the war. And, yes, Bush and Obama are to blame. But popular opposition to the war won't materialize unless people see the results of it, which is what Assange realizes. Media had much more freedom to operate during Viet Nam than in Iraq or Afghanistan (and, additionally, there have been cases where the US military appears to have deliberately killed journalists, such as Al jazeera's Tariq Ayoub). Assange's case would be much harder to make if real journalism in those theatres was possible (in which case information, such as the fact that the US military killed hundreds during demonstrations in Afghanistan [http://bit.ly/daeWlg], might otherwise see the light of day).
There's a great article on Private Money Lending Guide at
the link below about working with attorneys on these types of deals.

http://www.privatemoneylendingguide.com/investors/articles/h...
Python coder here. Sounds like a fun idea. I'll pop into IRC if I get some free time this weekend.
I signed up for that pretty much as soon as it was offered. My thoughts remain the same: it is dirt cheap (the time cost of watching the videos is much worse than the money anyhow), one idea pays for it in perpetuity, and Andrew produces great work which I am happy to support.
Performance comparison Thunderbird 2 vs 3
The one you linked, is a design of a blog. (That problem has already been solved, and it's a memorized pattern.)

Try designing the entire UX of a web application, from idea (how about we do X ...) to every single case, directly in HTML and CSS. Designing for GUIs it's more difficult when you don't have direct visual feedback.

(I do this from time to time, but only for very simple things.)
Oh yes, the first thing I do is change the SSH port, eleminates 99,99% of the auth attacks.
Isn't this highly unusual? Don't preferences usually give later investors the profits first? Did Fidelity and T Rowe Price really want into Slide so badly that they were willing to let the earlier investors receive a preference over them?

It doesn't really make sense to me the way this is broken down. I would have expected basically everyone to make about 2x their money.
I think people tend to conflate functional (how it works) minimalism with aesthetic (how it looks) minimalism. (I just made those terms up but they seem to work nicely.)

Functionality and aesthetics are connected but I would argue that functional minimalism doesn’t have to lead to aesthetic minimalism.

Aesthetic minimalism is a specific look: a specific color palette, a specific set of fonts, a specific use of illustrations and photos, a specific use of geometries and space.

Some of those specific properties of aesthetic minimalism may indeed lead to better functionality like less distraction and better readability. Much of the rest of it is mostly fashion. There is a wider range of aesthetics with which your design can work and be functional — I would very much despise living in a world were all everyone ever wants to achieve is a minimalist look.

I would also argue that functional minimalism is always a laudable design goal, independent of your aesthetics. At least when your goal is designing something that people are supposed to use and not, say, art. (I should again emphasize that both are obviously connected. You can’t make your aesthetic choices independent of your functional choices, it’s just that there is a wider range of options than just aesthetic minimalism.)
ACM SIGPLAN does a very good job here - Ocaml/F# + "Waterfall" DSL is a very good fit for this problem domain.
Google Books automatically generates cover art
Typically people bring their laptops and informally show off what they have been working on over a few beers. Chats about programming languages, grid computing, the local tech scene. That type of thing. The guy(s?) that came from Ottawa last time had another business function the next day, so he just came a day early.
That may be true. One alternative hypothesis I have is this:

Google is a very able company, but it's core revenue comes from search advertising.

A company like Comcast will (sooner or later) be able to easily afford to build its own search engine that is good enough. Microsoft did this with Bing, and who knows, MS or others could even do a special licensing deal with ISPs.

If a search company (Microsoft, or any of the variety of competitors) were able to score a non-neutrality deal with a few major ISPs, Google's bottom line would take a massive hit.

So all this talk of Google making videos play faster for everyone using a mobile network is a red herring. The real issue is that most of Google's revenue comes from US search ads, and most of those ads are served via a small number of ISPs.

Fortunately for Google, the scale of running web search data centers has been so massive that there have been significant barriers to entry.

But as Microsoft showed, it's possible to build a search engine that is every bit as good as Google for 99% of users from scratch without any secret sauce, relatively quickly.

If you want a thought experiment, suppose Microsoft licensed Bing to Comcast at a 50/50 ad revenue split deal and Comcast offered its customers $20/month cheaper pricing to force all search traffic through Bing. My guess is that most customers wouldn't care too much, and I think Google realizes this and chose to put lots of energy into net neutrality under the guise of not being evil.
My favorite quote on the matter is from Heinlein:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

IT is no different in this regard.
Visually Impaired Touchscreen Accessibility
Balsamiq

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262258
I think that amount would vary based on whatever the standards are for due diligence and the indeterminate nature of the legal answers.

However, as I understand the proposal, most such legal problems would be irrelevant as far as the python program is concerned. The python program would only answer questions like "what happens if party XXX becomes insolvent" or "what if 84% of mortgages are repaid, 10% are prepaid and 6% are in default". Most legal disputes would center on issues like "were material factors relating to mortgage repayment rates properly disclosed" or "are former home borrowers currently squatting 'in default' or merely 'delinquent' if the mortgage servicer has failed to evict them". The answer to questions like these is simply the input to the python program.
The most elegant, protocol-agnostic solution I've seen for doing this is 1st to throttle individual clients to their allocated BW (i.e. so that one client doesn't gobble up an entire shared link), and 2nd to simply kill any long-term (12hrs+) TCP/IP connections that are not over a recognized/allowed L7 protocol. The 2nd is very effective at starving unwanted bit torrent usage.

This method is in use right now by the guys who hang 5.8GHz antennas on grain silos, i.e. rural WISPs.
yep but it doesnt work for all the drupal core+modules mostly needed for field storage like: article-body,comment storage, field storage, sessions, cache, queue (most of the stuff)
More info: http://drupal.org/project/mongodb
Interesting! Did not know that.

Any idea how replica sets / shards might fit into this picture?
Thanks for linking me to Adsdaq, looks very interesting! Apparently I can set backuptags, so if I have less than 100% fill rate I can put AdSense back. I won't risk earning less because of this.

The advice on going a bit higher is great. It's typical negotiating stuff, so I'm guessing the person is expecting this.

Thanks very much! The site has experienced enormous growth and I've had to switch servers twice the last year. It's taken 3 years to get this far but it's finally at a point where some money is coming in instead of going out. To think I was about to abandon it because it was costing me too much.
You can also do it directly from useragent, or jQuery.browser (maybe with $.browser.version). (other js frameworks should have it under utils)
Good point, it's not like people are standing in line to put ads on my site.
Yes, you can code these things properly in Python. However my point is that random code produced by a random bond issuer may not behave in a consistent way. And this could have unexpected consequences.
I don’t think you can look at HTML5 through the is-in-spec/is-not-in-spec glasses. It’s just not a very useful distinction (the spec is just moving too slowly for that to be practical).
The arduino firmware was based on kegbot.org's. We added RFID support as well as analog temperature sensor support (normally kegbot.org uses a separate usb rfid reader and a one wire digital temperature sensor). We wrote all the iPad software ourselves. After jailbreaking the iPad, it's possible to interact with the serial port in the dock connector just like you would in any POSIX (linux, unix, etc) system.
Ask HN: Startups with non-technical founders?
I haven't been involved in a startup myself and for the time-being don't want to be, as I'm happy with my current employment/freelance situation.

The question I'm asking is partly in case I do want to go down that road some day in the future, and partly just out of interest...

From what I've seen/read (correct me if I'm wrong), the majority of small technical startups have founders who are also the coders, and while I'm reasonably knowledgable in technical areas, and dabble in code, I've never wanted it as an actual career, and as such I've never got to a stage where it could be. If I wanted to be a founder of a startup but not be personally involved with the development myself, how likely is that to work? Does it happen more often than I assume already, or would it be a fairly weird structure?

Not asking just from a personal point of view... imagine someone thought of a new startup that has the potential to become absolutely huge, but they aren't able to build it themselves... how big a problem would it be?

Looking forward to hearing opinion.

edit: By "non-technical founders" I'm not talking about people who don't know the difference between two web browsers, but people who are technically savvy just not developers.
"In the Internet age, I find the concept of that laughable. If you want to show something to a great number of people, just post it on a social news/bookmarking site. Sending your info to Wikileaks is a hundred times as responsible an act as just letting the information spread virally would be."

I'm glad we agree that both are equally irresponsible.
If you're looking to get started with hardware, I'd check out SparkFun's Arduino Inventor's Kit.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
Selling Fixy bikes is illegal in Australia
It's flash-based. I would have skipped the link if I had known.

My corporate desktop does not include flash. Surely corporate users are part of the core audience for Gantt charts?
CoffeeScript - The Parts
I founded a startup with two guys who were looking for a cofounder. And we are doing just fine.
You need a complementary team, but it's very rare that tech guys hang out with business guys. So most often the only choice is to go and search.
I think it would be good to also limit by karma score too. It's trivial for someone to come here and create an account. I'm not sure what the cutoff should be, but probably low enough so as not to exclude people unnecessarily, but high enough that it weeds out trolls and people who are just not that serious.
yes I think they are built in Canada. Actually I just checked online and it looks like the NZ price is $295. Maybe I just forgot how much it actually cost.
I read lots of business books and the like over the years. It never resulted in a business. What do these kids want to DO (other than "make money")?
Dealers Marking Up Volt Prices as Much As $20k
Researcher aims to boost Google Street View privacy with "pedestrian remover"
I think limiting to HN users is good. Given HN is a free community, it might be nice to see some HN information about the user (who they are, how long they've been a member, links to posts/comments, karma, etc).

If I'm crunched for time, I'd probably be more willing to help somebody who is making HN a great community in favor of helping somebody who joined 35 minutes ago to get free consulting.

(Note: Unless abuse occurs in the future, I would prefer to choose myself rather than having a policy that says "You must have XX karma or be a member for N months.")
Yeah. If people don't like the fact that the cable companies jack up the prices 5-10% a year for service that sucks and doesn't improve, they should just go bootstrap their own nation-straddling, trillion dollar infrastructure project and outcompete them in the free market.
The car dealer model needs to change. Any takers?
It would be interesting to see how this correlates to population density. Also, college density.
100% flash? No thanks. Good luck though.