skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I classify as right-wing biased propaganda any article dealing with California's economics and politics that doesn't mention Prop 13.
i've been dissatisfied with every article i've read about this subject, and it's something that i care deeply about as a supporter of network neutrality. just like every other article, it's linkbaiting and taking the opportunity to bash google when the only alternative is to let congressmen make up these rules on their own with the telecoms (not the type of situation you want to be in).

if anyone is going to negotiate the formal policies of network neutrality, i can't think of a better company to do it than google. the formalization has to happen one way or the other, we've already seen that the fcc's power is questionable at best right now.

engadget wrote the best explanation of the tradeoffs here: http://i.engadget.com/2010/08/09/google-and-verizons-net-neu...
I agree with the first sentence entirely. The second sentence is not so hot, disabusing people of their misconceptions and reinforcing their logical positions is absolutely something that should be considered a public good.

This is the root of the sunlight is the best disinfectant argument; that no matter how offensive or absurd the position presented, at least it has the opportunity to be subject to peer review.
As the government makes more spectrum available wireless bandwidth will become abundant. Google and Verizon are setting policy based on a snapshot of current infrastructure which will have very long lasting impacts. If we want to be cynical it appears they picked the absolute best time (pre-4G) to use bandwidth scarcity as an excuse to make wireless a second class citizen of the open/fair Internet. In 2 or 3 years when we're getting 10-15Mbit/sec off our SmartPhones we're going to feel pretty god damn cheated when a competing non-Verizon, non-Google, video service is getting gimped down to 50k/sec. That's exactly what this deal allows.
If the narrative continues to grow the way it's growing, Google are going to backpedal on this the same way they've backpedaled after making other mistakes. It doesn't matter much what the particulars of the deal are or how unfairly they're being misinterpreted (if they are); there's a risk to Google's brand here and they're smart enough to protect it.

The reaction against this deal is emotional. How many people have studied the details? I haven't. It doesn't matter because people have such strong feelings about net neutrality and -- on the whole -- rightly so. These feelings may be limited to the small tech community but that community's importance is greater than its numbers and includes a lot of people inside Google itself. If this doesn't die down in a couple days, expect some sort of adjustment from Google.
I was told that Gitpan is not included in the stats.
> some foods are considered "heating"

Tangential anecdote - pregnant women apparently should not eat lamb, because it is "heating food" and will cause the growth of myomas (uterus tumors). No scientific confirmation what-so-ever. Can't eat it just because it's "heating" and causes "things to grow". Try countering this when talking to a pregnant wife choke-full of interesting mind-altering hormones :)
K-12 education: For any state, this is among the highest expenses. Nonetheless, CA is actually below the US average. (http://www.edsource.org/iss_fin_FAQ_cacompares.html). It certainly doesn't explain why CA has one of the highest state deficits (even per capita) in the country.

As for Prop 13, I fully agree that many people (perhaps even my parents) may have had to move to smaller homes or even out of the Bay Area due to property taxes. So yes, my family has benefited. But that doesn't make the proposition "right". I find it much more unfair that new or non home owners are subsidizing the older ones though a highly regressive tax system. This only feels more absurd when you consider that part of the reason housing is so damn pricey in the bay area is because of zoning restrictions (both green lining and density restrictions) passed by the baby boomer generation.
Indeed. My emacs projects have more watchers (and forks) than any of my other projects.
I think most people agree that the trend towards automation will continue. It's not a new idea; this has been happening for far longer than either one of us has been alive.

I mean, the difference between science fiction and reality is primarily that the robots we have, so far, look nothing like humans. but the part about them replacing workers, that's been true for a very long time now.
"That doesn't mean renting is cheap. I'm paying $2165/month for a 3-bedroom apartment in Irvine (i.e., $25980/year)."

The basic problem with California and real estate can be summarized by the graph at the start of "A Tale of Two Townhouses:" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o... . Notice how high San Francisco, LA, and San Diego are; in many places along coastal California, it is effectively impossible to build substantial numbers of new building at sufficient vertical heights to meet demand.

Econ 101: if you restrict supply while demand is still very high... you get price increases (and sprawl, that other ubiquitous problem in California). This is one of the major stories of California over the last two decades, and one that gets less attention than it deserves.

Come to think of it, I think I'll submit "A Tale of Two Townhouses" to HN.
>Well to just provide one example, Verizon would only have to pay $2,000,000 if they knowingly violate the statue. No criminal sanctions. They can thereafter continue to violate it and just pay another two million. It is a bit of a business deal. If you can get in more money then out, then you are good. The FCC, or anyone else, has no other authority.

I don't know enough law to understand the granularity of this. Is it 2M per infringement? Could the potentially be shelling out 2M per customer? It seems like this is what would determine whether it's a high cap or a low cap.
A Tale of Two Town Houses
This submission inspired by this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1590060 .
yep, agreed ... especially because it sounds so artificial, like they're trying to make AT&T engineering seem hip and cool. if you read just the conclusion, it sounds like a normal article, so clearly someone made a concerted effort to sound 1337 in the rest of the article. if the author had really been a 13-year-old kid, the conclusion wouldn't sound so 'formal'
I was under the impression that the nonrefundable ICANN fee drastically reduced kiting.
This explains the "Marina bro" better than I could: http://uptownalmanac.com/2010/07/wont-you-be-my-bromate
How is this different from the self managed approach taken by eg clickable, or the more full service places like Yodle / ReachLocal / Efficient Frontier / CityVoice / et al?

Edit -- after watching their video, their in-browser funnel visualization is cool as hell. Probably not scalable to larger merchants, but amazing for small sites. Props -- that's a great idea.
I'm afraid it's anything but subtle. The first line is "Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge". All learning until the Ph.D. is within that circle.
With wireless you can't just keep increasing capacity forever.

The problem is that there is a theoretical limit to how wireless infrastructure can be improved. Sure, new generations of wireless tech. are improving the bandwidth available every few years. But RF frequency bands are a limited resource and sooner or later Shannon-Hartley's theorem [1] will dictate that the only way to improve bandwidth will be to increase power levels received at user's antennae (either by increasing effective transmission power or clustering cells more densely). But doing this will deliver ever diminishing (logarithmic) gains and an increasing public health risk associated with increased RF levels.

Couple that with the fact that wireless is going to be the Internet in the coming decades (for many youngsters it already is) and you are faced with a problem of how to allocate things fairly.

Wired Internet resources on the other hand can be upgraded effectively forever. If the demand is there we can keep laying new fibre whilst maximising the existing lines with new modulation techniques etc. The same cannot be said of wireless technology.

It is precisely because of these major contention issues that wireless spectrum should be protected under net neutrality regulations, its need of regulation is in fact greater than that of wired Internet. When there is an approaching hard limit to bandwidth available why would we want to allow the parties with the biggest wallets dominate the traffic? It is precisely these sorts of situations that governments are for, without them monopolies will naturally form at the expense of the populace.

Imagine if governments around the world said, let's solve (or rather ignore) the problem of car traffic congestion by allowing employers to bid for priority access to the roads on behalf of their employees, and businesses to bid on behalf of their customers, even though everyone has already paid their own car tax, fuel etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem
Ironically, the UCI is pushing to get rid of radios, so the communication side of it is probably here nor there in pro cycling.

I suspect, though, that regular punters will be quite keen. I certainly carry my iPhone when out riding; having one device to map, monitor speed and make phone calls is nice.
It does get frustrating when you have an article with 40 or so comments, and only the last two visible. I like Disqus a lot, but if it simply doesn't work - it doesn't work.
On Food And Cooking is AMAZING. McGee used to live in Palo Alto too.

I just bought the Thomas Keller Sous Vide book. I'll probably buy the myrhvold book too.

You know what I've found terribly useful lately? The Flavor Bible.

On the other hand, somebody got me the recent Herve This book on molecular gastronomy and didn't really get much out of it.
A $600 cookbook? Well it has at least one thing going for it: it differentiates itself from most alternative products in the category by being so damn expensive that it could be seen as an ultra premium brand that only the rich could afford.

Back to my ultra cheap and healthy rice that does not require any cookbooks to make...
So who here purchased Old Spice or had it purchased for them (which was the original aim of the campaign by all accounts) post Old Spice Guy? I know I've considered checking it out but my aftershave purchase cycle is pretty long (years?).
I saw a lot of sites spam the bejeezus out of delicious when they got their starts; folks who claim to be reputable now.
Net neutrality isn't about charging consumers a different price depending on what services they use. Providers like Verizon want to exploit their control of the infrastructure to extort kickbacks from web-based businesses.

Take VOIP, for example. It won't be VOIP as a whole that receives priority access, but Skype VOIP - and in exchange, Skype will kick a portion of their revenue back to Verizon. Verizon gets a bit of juice and Skype doesn't have to worry about competing with other VOIP providers. It will be invisible to users.

A similar process happened in the video rental business when Blockbuster signed a deal with the movie studios to pay less upfront for videos, while kicking back some of their rental revenue to the studios. Whereas an independent rental store might pay $100 for a tape, Blockbuster paid almost nothing - the independents went out of business, and video rental became a Blockbuster-dominated monoculture.
most just use codeplex I'm guessing?
This appears to be the primary patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=2EkUAAAAEBAJ

It is indeed a method patent.
I'll play devil's advocate:

Building static PHP pages is easy (and is demonstrated in the first block of code). So easy it's hard to beat by a significant margin, especially for small projects like this seems geared towards.

Building dynamic - much less real-time - PHP pages is not-so-easy, and certainly not that easy. At absolute simplest you have to look into JavaScript as well.
I am better versed in the investment area than in the personal debt area, so I will let others speak to that. But a couple of thoughts on the investments front:

1.	In many ways it is about time horizon. If you are sure that you will not need access to the funds in the short term (conservatively, in the next 10 years) then you can invest in high risk vehicles. But remember, this is not necessarily because the funds are in a 401(k) or IRA account where there is a large early withdrawal penalty, but also because high risk instruments could have fallen greatly in value at the time you need the funds, and if you have to withdraw them at that time you’re forced to take a large loss.

2.	If you think you have a long time horizon make sure to do the math to actually be sure - ndimopoulos’s advice above about having an emergency fund is good.

3.	If you have a long time horizon, there is no need to discount 401 K plans and IRA plans. Tax-free growth, or tax deferred growth as depending on which flavor you choose, is an amazing thing.

4.	If you’re really interested in extremely risky investments in an effort to expose yourself to the largest upside, there’s been some recent work around lifecycle investing where some relatively well respected academics are proposing a model that includes some small amount of leverage for folks who have a long time horizon and a large amount of risk tolerance. This will road, if you choose it, bears quite a bit of research before you start. Take a look (as a start) at http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Investing-Audacious-Performa...

5.	Remember that being rational with money is a lot easier when its not yours and when it’s not decreasing rapidly. It probably bears some effort on your behalf before jumping into any high risk investments to project yourself into the future and understand how you would feel if your life savings drop by 50% or even 80%. Make sure that you’re OK with this.

Just a couple of thoughts, hope this helps.

P.S. I am the cofounder of the recently launched YC Summer 2010 company FutureAdvisor. Our current product targets specifically optimizing an existing portfolio, so not much help in this situation, though this is definitely a scenario we hope to support in the future. Thanks for sharing your story, it helps us understand what folks might need out of a investing product.

(written with the aid of speech recognition, please excuse the occasional bewildering error)
Turns out that the FriXion ink is still there after being erased, but it's on the other side of some kind of (reversible!) phase transition. Any kind of heat makes it go away, and cold makes it reappear, as this video shows:

http://www.jetpens.com/jetpics/?p=172?

Very cool ink.
Tax Revenue as a Fraction of GDP
Side Project: node.js Drag and Drop Image Sharing (Firefox only)
Smartphone security put on test
The above post proposed that Varnish is not needed because Nginx could handle the task well with the best performance. But Nginx is a bit slower than Varnish. It's been shown in benchmarks that Litespeed is a bit faster than Nginx. By inductive reasoning to show that Varnish is faster than Nginx, I posted a link to show that Varnish is faster than Litespeed, which in turn is faster than Nginx. So Varnish is faster than Nginx.

Let me know if you have any question/comment.

Regards
NPC algorithms are roughly equivalent, so a P solution to one is a P solution to all. So, assuming the proof would be somewhat constructive, that would give you a P solution.

But, RSA (and probably other) cryptosystems aren't even thought to be NPC to solve... so they're probably unaffected. So, I guess it depends on the implementation details of the cryptosystem. Probably it wouldn't render them wide open, but it might make previously good keys far weaker, and mean that much longer must be spent on encryption for it to be safe (rather than now where a safe key can be decoded almost instantly on an embedded platform).
Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer’s
my prediction: you drop a nextgen iPhone, it hits the ground, BOUNCES right back up into your hand again. ;)
> Don't you mean `regressive' then?

Not at all. A "progressive" tax system defined as one where those with more money pay a (progressively) larger fraction of said money. Since SS also has direct benefits, you look at the sum.
Except that it won't be VOIP that's prioritized, it will be Skype, or Magic Jack, or whatever company offers Verizon the biggest kickback. It will be terrible for consumers, since those companies with a monopoly will have no incentive to excel when their success is determined in a backroom deal at Verizon HQ.
The dalai lama would disagree

"companies are living, complex organisms and not profit machines. The profit should therefore not be the object of a company, but rather a result of good work. Just like a person can't survive for long without food and water, a company can't survive without profits. Not that I would ever reduce the purpose of a human to that, as eating and drinking are the only prerequisites for a meaningful life."

"When we search for organizations that have the capacity and ability to improve our world, global companies are at the top of the list. In particular integrated global corporations are in an ideal position to support developing countries to close the gap to leading national economies." http://www.dalailama.com/news/post/362-exclusive-interview--...
The Old Spice brand is on more than just aftershave. The real question is how much more brand awareness did Old Spice acquire because of this campaign, and how much did this campaign change the brand image from "something you remember your dad using" to "something that you'd consider buying for yourself."
The Sky Isn't Falling
> "we are supporting net neutrality, as long as it only applies to the parts of the internet that we have no interest in"

Except Google makes most of its profit on wireline broadband...
The Flavor Bible is also fun to flip to an arbitrary page in and read in either direction, but it really wants to be a web app, doesn't it? (There's obviously a bunch of web apps that try, but they don't have the curation that the book has).

I don't know if you've been following Myrhvold's cooking stuff, but my understand is that there's a fair bit of mythbusting going on too; he gave a talk recently where he claimed to debunk the notion that you have to poach duck in fat to confit it, for instance (lies! all lies!). My cofounder Dave is a cooking school grad and he's sure that this book is going to be hugely important, even if you already have McGee.

But, $500 for a book!
As long as my neighbor and I are both paying the same ISP the same amount of money for an internet connection, then we should have the same probability of one of our packets making it through their network. If I'm making an FTP transfer and my neighbor is teleconferencing, it's fine for some of his packets to be delivered more quickly than some of mine, provided that over any given second, we get to transfer roughly the same amount of data. Until our ISP redefines itself as a telecom provider with ancillary FTP capabilities, their QoS strategies shouldn't benefit my neighbor at my expense.

If ISPs are allowed to discriminate significantly based on the protocol, then what's to stop them from inventing a new proprietary video transmission protocol and prioritizing that over any protocol used by YouTube, effectively reimplementing discrimination on the source or destination of traffic (which is the most obvious justification for net neutrality)?
Low-fibre western diets deter 'good bacteria'
This isn't a cookbook. It's TAOCP, every volume, including the unfinished-but-planned ones, for cooking. It is fully expected to knock pro chefs on their asses.
This supports my thesis that all human population has the potential to be as smart as any phd graduate. All you need is to put the work required to get there. i.e. put thousands of hours into it and you will become a master of your field. For whatever reason a lot of people have been down voting me for saying this. They believe that not everybody can obtain a phd. That only some people are capable of becoming educated to the level of a phd. I wonder if it is because hacker news is filled with elitists. Am I offending egos by saying that a person in a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as a person that currently has a phd? Is it that educated people like to believe that they somehow are special and separate from people that did not go to college? Granted that if you went to college you will be more educated than a person that did not. But that uneducated person can reach the same level of intellect as you if he wants to, as long as he/she decides to invest the amount of work required. We are all stupid monkeys. Pretty much all of us have the same potential to learn.

Frankly it completely stomps me that people would think otherwise. I took it as universal knowledge that all humans have almost the same potential to learn. Yes there will be variations but all in all they will be statistically insignificant. Apparently I was wrong in my belief and some people think that only a chosen few can become as highly educated as a phd.
That's why reading this blog post is inferior to actually reading the paper, although it's better than most of what passes for science journalism these days in that they at least bothered to give a proper link to the paper's abstract. In the third paragraph of the paper's introduction, the authors cite six prior fMRI studies of hypnotic vs. non-hypnotic states, the first of them dating back as far as 1997. If those six papers employed careful methodology and measured a statistically significant result, then I'd say it's pretty well established. I don't particularly care enough about it to go look up all of those other papers, but I suspect the phenomenon's neurological basis is probably well established and the detractors calling it hogwash are probably not neuroscientists.
I am a meteorologist and depend on NWS data for much of what I do. To give you an idea how deep the disclosure goes, NWS even issues Area Forecast Discussions where lead forecasters discuss in scientific detail their reasons for the specific conditions they predict. Here's one from Upton, NY (covering Metro NYC).

http://kamala.cod.edu/ny/latest.fxus61.KOKX.html

Here's a similar discussion from the Hurricane Center

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATWDAT+shtml/100003.s...?
I'm quite a fan of the initiative process in California. I mean, sure, it's been abused by short-sighted people, leading to things like three-strikes legislation overcrowding our prisons, but it has also brought us important social progress such as medical marijuana, and any sufficiently unpopular law is only a petition away from redress. It's encouraging that we enjoy the power to reform law from the bottom up in such a direct manner, and I wouldn't want to give up that power quite so readily, as those who toss around that 'out of control initiative process' talking point are so eager to do.
A Quick Rundown of CrossFit
Gah. I hate saying it, but 600$ for 6 books?!

Im sorry, but i'm poor. He deserves money for his accomplishments but i'll wait for a torrent to be published. Then, I can at least read what he's doing and be awed. And then ii'll stick with my goodwill 2$ cookbooks and written down recipes.
I think you're very wrong if you assume that most Mac users also run Windows.

Anecdotally, the only Mac users I know who run a VM at all do so for IE testing, or occasionally for some other UNIX variant. Then again, i don't know many people who are super hardcore gamers.