skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again, I don't understand the hostility. I wasn't in fact trolling, I was trying to get into a discussion about why economics gets people so riled up and then you came along and reinforced the point I was making without actually adding to the discussion.

The thing is that I find myself charged up over the topic as well, which makes me wonder why exactly it's such a hotpoint issue, and why it makes people (myself included) feel like they are qualified in a field in which they are clearly not. I mean that in the sense that I (nor, likely you) have any formal economics education beyond reading columns, articles, and perhaps attending econ 101 many years ago.
Saving Newspapers the 37signals way
Equity vs. Convertible Debt: VCs Debate Shifting Investment Trends
I'm under the impression that most people think "film critic" is a guy who writes a paragraph for a newspaper saying whether or not a film is entertaining enough to see, and that was true before Ebert showed up. I don't think White's field has a public face at all.
Perhaps you could add some more feedback after selecting the image? It's great that it starts automatically, but it took me a few seconds to notice the progress indicator.
Thanks Kin. I'm sorry my website depresses you. :) But I agree that it needs some work. I'll definitely see what I can do about making the image not look like an ad. Once I get some additional styles integrated I'll put up a gallery and hopefully that will.
A Protein Killer Could Treat All Cancers, and Possibly All Illnesses
This made me think immediately of John Gilmore's quote about censorship: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

[edit] Also: hmm, maybe we should create a Congress Kill Switch -- shut down Congress when it panders to corporate interests.
Sounds great. It this like mongodb's sharding?
In Search of (How We Perceive) Time
Interesting - I wasn't aware of that, a good bit of info to know.

Presumably YC only works for US companies, as people from outside the US (Canada, for example) wouldn't have the permission to work in the US for the three months?
Gotcha. You should make that more prominent.
> No matter how thoughtful a comment, if it goes against the groupthink, you can expect it to hurt your karma.

So what? If you think that karma means something significant, you're doing it wrong.

As to whether "thoughful" comments get significant downvotes, I don't see it. Instead, I see a bunch of earnest twaddle.

Symptomatic of that is the belief that "thoughtful" is a worthwhile characteristic. It isn't.

> The worst trend I see is comments getting downvoted based on opinions expressed within, not on how poorly they are expressed.

Artfully expressed nonsense is still nonsense.

In other news, HN isn't intended to make you feel good about yourself, no matter how special your mother says you are.
By realtime the autor means that it would pop up like an IM/SMS. I'm not so sure I'm convinced that emails popping up like IMs is a good idea.

I have nothing wrong with getting my emails faster, and I'm sure it would benefit a lot of people, but personally I don't want email to be realtime in the way that IMs or texting is. More importantly, I don't want anyone who emails me to expect it to be realtime.

When I want that kind of availability I have phone-availability and instant-message (be it phone-based or PC based). I'd rather keep email to important-yet-not-time-sensitive things.

If email were "realtime," I would have some kind of expectation coming from the people that want to use it in such a way, thereby beguiling me into constantly letting it be checked (by it alerting me).

Even if I don't allow it to pop up on my device I would still have to explain to each new contact that email for me does not mean an instantaneous read and reply.

Some of my friends get cranky when I don't answer their IMs instantly, I think it would be a bit of a pain if people treated email with the same expectations of responsiveness.
It looks pretty obvious to me that YC has hit some kind of marketing inflection point here. They've become a status symbol for investors and industry pundits as well as for founders. I can't articulate it better than that, but it bodes well for them. Congrats.
Adams comes in sideways sometime. He wants to compare logs with someone else who practices a lot? What? You play against someone to see who is best. Why does he default to thinking that we all expect that to prove that the winner was naturally better?

He seems to believe that he is the only person who understands that practice makes perfect. He should surely make sure to only play against other studied players, but the playing of the game is what determines who is best.

And who is best is the sum total of the practice and natural ability of the individual players.

I keep seeing blog posts taking on the same tack. They promise to reveal some sort of insight, but usually say something banal which has been slanted with assumptions.

He starts by saying professional sports and competition are foolish; but ends up agreeing with the notion with circular reasoning.
I think you're misapprehending my point (and I wasn't all that clear or let alone detailed).

I agree 100% that deleveraging is what's required, the liquidation of all these bad investments (and for that matter that's what the Austrians recommend).

Here I'm talking about timing and secondary effects. There's a big difference between this effectively happening all at once as banks and other institutions refuse to do business with each other due to the fear of counterparty risk vs. working through this inevitably very painful process over a period of years (traditionally I gather it tends to be about a decade, which is way too slow and painful, but better than the first option).

When you allow the first to happen a bunch of viable companies go out of business quickly because they can't do their day to day financial work. E.g. one of the FDICs actions has been to guarantee non-interest bearing business accounts so that e.g. you can be sure your payroll will happen (even if the bank collapses and a bit of a delay is incurred at worst case).
Closure Compiler: This Var is My Var
I wonder if NSLs can already shut down networks thanks to the PATRIOT act.
A birth surge from all that 'cocooning' in blizzards
XBMC Live should have VDPAU. See http://a8t8.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2518DD508BB713E8!804.en...
This is the problem with raising so much VC money, especially at a post-$100 million valuation (and dreams of an IPO).
There's no way Digg can get the revenue necessary to repay their investors (or even be profitable with their bloated staff), without having to resort to actions like these. Having just a skyscraper ad isn't going to cut it.

By essentially allowing their sponsors to decide what's going to be on their front page, they've changed digg from a crowdsourced editorial board to a sponsored RSS feed.
I can't remember the last time a .com made such a shortsighted decision....I can't see digg even being around in a few years after this.
I use 12voip. It's cheaper. http://www.12voip.com/en/calling-rates.html
Isn't it just a matter of time until Digg is in the same monetization conundrum? They're limping along right now, but at some point you have to think Conde Nast is going to say "alright.. make some damn money already." Reddit gold isn't going to do that on a large scale.

I fully expect to see a similar scenario play out on Reddit at some point.
"I want emails to popup on my phone just like SMS does."

My first thought was, "Really? I would hate that." But I think it could be great as long as there is an easy way to limit the notifications to only show emails from certain people, with certain labels, etc.

The idea of arriving at a restaurant and emailing my friends to ask where they are is appealing, because it's a move in the direction of a single communication address for a person. I don't like needing to store both a phone number and an email address for someone. How FaceTime for the new iPhone places calls is nice for this reason as well.
Ideas:

-- Slice up the background images for me, and include them as css background images

-- Hierarchical nesting of divs? (this div is inside this div)

-- Integration with some grid framework, e.g. 960gs
A lot of "may," "potentially," "considering," and other weasel words in that article, no?
Ask HN: (Audio)book recommendations / community
I've got a new credit to spend on Audible, and I was thinking of asking people for recommendations. I realized, all the people I wanted to ask were HNers. Then, I thought, HN would actually be the exact community I would want to turn to for book recommendations.

I'm curious if an HN book community exists anywhere? If not, would people be interested in one? Know of any other communities with a similar center of gravity of systems design and small business?

Also, please actually suggest a good audiobook if you've got one in mind that's outside the mainstream that a HN minded person would enjoy.
It's a real unit but it doesn't appear to do doing anything except swimming/moving through the water though, does it? Maybe I missed it but I watched the whole thing.
Ah, I see what you mean. I guess I was impressed that my game state was perfectly restored... current letter times, score, and ability to add to my prior words.
Email is great because everyone can use the protocol in the way they want to. If you really want real-time email, it can be built.

I'd prefer not to open that box, it took me years of fortifying my gmail filter defenses, playing around with Tim Ferriss style auto-responders, and using 3 sentenc.es before I found Inbox Zero zen.

Realtime e-mail could be great for certain purposes such as customer service, but I hope that it never become the personal norm.
My fundamental quibble is that for the multiplier to kick in, the central spending authority must not only invest in certain things (the part our real-world stimulus failed), but it must invest successfully in projects that also bring value to society. A Keynesian stimulus isn't just paying 10 men to dig holes and 10 men to fill them in, it's paying 20 men to build an important road or something, usually infrastructure, of other importance that will bring wealth to a society. To get the multiplier you must both put money into the otherwise-jammed society and obtain something of value for the money. Skip the second part and you just lost a full 1x factor off your multiplier.

This is where I say that even Keynes could tell you this stimulus would fail. For instance, there is a local road that even as I type is being "repaired" with stimulus money. But it didn't need repair. Where a $1 of stimulus here is supposed to produce, say, $1.20 in "stimulative value", now we're only getting the $0.20 in value. That's not stimulus. That's actively worse than letting the funds sit there, actively worse than the worse case that Keynes fears; now you're destroying capital. Not only does that not help avert the worst case, you actively bring it closer! And this is the "good" part of the stimulus that is actually infrastructure, too.

Granted, not every project wastes %100 of the capital, but an analysis of the actual stimulus shows the vast bulk of it does; most of it essentially puts useless and wealth-destroying institutions on life support so they can continue destroying wealth. You don't have to guess what the resulting consequences are, you just have to look around.

As an Austrian I believe (with some reason) that a central government is not capable of deciding which projects are actually valuable, any more than a central authority can set prices of any other kind. Moreover, in a relatively efficient economy (it doesn't have to be perfectly efficient), the big infrastructure wins would already have been built, leaving only the dregs behind, things that weren't already built because the economy has decided they aren't of value.

So I think right at the heart of Keynesian economic policy is an enormous "... and magic happens here...", right where the stimulating government entity determines how to allocate the stimulation. Which, if you note, rather precisely and correct predicts how the stimulus fails in the real world, which is that it was very inefficiently applied regardless of whose standards you apply, Keynes or otherwise. A Keynesian must believe that this was a poor application of the stimulus concept, but that hypothetically a government usually gets it right, despite my inability to come up with examples of said; an Austrian like me gets to continue believing that governments are foundationally and structurally incapable of efficient allocation of resources.
Advice for preparing to apply and actually applying to science Ph.D. programs
Thanks - I couldn't get it to work in either Chrome 6 beta or FF 4 beta on OS X :^(.
Different strokes for different folks, but one of the most frequent pieces of productivity advice I've seen given is "disable the notification when new email arrives." Checking your email on a regular, infrequent schedule lets you establish flow and get work done in between getting work pushed at you.
Mm I see what you were going for with the lighting, a solid black plane would stick out like a sore thumb in a light brown canyon though.
I dunno my email seems realtime enough. I get growl notifications with new email and freak out if there's a red dot with a number in it on my iphone mail app.

Heck I had to turn off the vibration or sound notifications of new email on my phone because of the sheer volume.

I guess I kind of disagree - Email can be as "realtime" as you need it to be and IM/SMS seems to take care of the rest in my book.
That's exactly what I was saying. Keynes assumes he can reduce the world to Calc 101. Austrians/Chicagoans/etc don't.

As for why I think it's clear this reduction is not always valid, a simple hypothetical: suppose the stimulus targeted doctor-delivered medicine. There is no unemployment among doctors, so there is no pool of underutilized doctors to employ. It also takes about 8 years to train a doctor, so any effect that stimulus has on inducing construction workers (or others) to become doctors can only occur 8 years later.

Also, sticky wages don't immediately lead to the validity of AD or keynesianism. For example, suppose construction workers earned $30/hour before the bust and assume Keynesian wage stickiness. They will not take un-stimulated jobs at Walmart at $12/hour or even stimulated jobs at $24/hour and they will be unqualified for Sous Chef jobs at $30/hour or even a stimulated $35/hour. Unless there is some specific job out there that pays at least $30/hour and construction workers are qualified for it, they will simply remain unemployed. Thus, under some circumstances, Keynes own assumptions make his Calc 101 reduction invalid.

Lastly, there is no reason a housing bubble bursting would cause job losses only in construction. It would also harm realtors, mortgage brokers, bankers, etc. It would indirectly harm people who sell things to realtors, mortgage brokers and bankers. Thus, in the recalculation picture, we'd expect the biggest job losses in construction, real estate and mortgages, and correspondingly smaller job losses as you move outward through the economy from this epicenter.
Could he could sell them to another shareholder?
Kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't it?
I don't understand why people assume efficient markets. This is a good example of a market where I'd assume that the market is not efficient - there are poor information flows about CEO value; empirically, CEOs who are paid a lot don't often seem to steer their companies well; there are skewed incentives for the board since board members may very well be CEOs at other companies; there's very indirect shareholder control over pay; the company as a whole is unlikely to fail if they overpay since CEO pay is usually a small part of the whole budget, etc. Shouldn't you have to prove the surprising premise that the market is working?
It is called Google Wave. Oh wait...
I've gone through http://www.merchant-accounts.ca/ in the past.
Has the guy ever heard about IRC?
World Map of Web 2.0
I'll concede that my second and third points skew the conversation away from the issue of addressing homelessness.

If the topic were 'personal liberty' than they might have more relevance. I guess the attack on capitalism as being 'evil' brought out my personal bias.
I guess the fact that Twitter employees use bit.ly to map from short url:s to slightly longer url:s even in mails means something, but I'm not sure what.

(the http://bit.ly/sitestreams_doc link goes to http://dev.twitter.com/pages/site_streams)
Color, Photos, and One Fuzzy Little Boy in a Field
Personal experience and the experience of colleagues. I spent 11 years in the undergraduate/graduate system both learning and teaching. It's also something you can learn if you ever have to look for work in academia. It's very rare that anyone cares about your teaching credentials. Typically undergraduate education is at the bottom of a professor's concerns. First is research/publications/funding. Next are graduate students and their research. Undergraduate teaching is an 'in the time left' activity.
Our team can attest to these estimates. Visual layout and design is by and large the most time consuming part of building a website. Code is easy once you know what you're doing.
Well, little ones are easier to prototype. They also are less likely to get in the way of anything. Focusing on effectiveness, though, would probably be better to retrofit a bunch of large ships to drag it around and process the fabric on-board. If the little ones are effective enough once deployed, that will probably be the ultimate outcome. But the technology, right now, is unproven, and so no one is going to invest the millions[1] it would take to retrofit ships.

The distinction between large robots and large manned ships is important to note, though; I was thinking that Kliment was referring to large robots, and therefor didn't even consider manned ships (tunnel vision can be irritating, sometimes). You're thinking about large, manned ships, with no need to function autonomously, based on standard ships, and therefor able to be repaired without as much effort - minimizing the amount of new technology in a solution makes it less likely to break, outside of the new technology. That is obviously superior to a swarm of small robots, except for prototyping.

Also, swarms of small robots are considered shiny technology right now.

[1] I don't know how much it would cost. I'm guessing a lot; take the number with a whole lot of salt.
This is a nice public service announcement. It does make me think that these guidelines should be linked to more prominently somewhere, maybe on submit page?
Not sure how old you are but this is great advice. Taking time to work out (run, lift weights, box, do whatever you enjoy) will pay massive dividends in the future.

Also make sure you're in great emotional/mental state. Sleep a lot, enjoy yourself, and get pumped to do whatever you want for a year.
This includes all the large banks and financial services firms (Bank of America, Citi, AIG, etc.), which to me all feel like ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementations of half of a bank.
His site still looks like SEO spam so I'm not sure he learned his lesson. There are tons of content-less pages to keyword stuff like this:

http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh....

I also find it odd that every page features 20 logos from media outlets. That doesn't get them anything and I seriously doubt mentioning the Colbert Report helps sell gift baskets.

Link trading is still advertised, which seems risky considering that's very close to what got them in trouble in the first place.

http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm
Hey, no argument here.
I didn't realize that you were talking about using it with existing boats; doing that instead of robots is pretty obviously a better solution, assuming that the material can be produced in large enough quantities, which may or may not be the case.
Are you saying that you don't think prices are set by supply and demand? What sets them, then?
I think you misread my post.

3.6 million = 1.2% of "the population", which is roughly 300 million people

There are 818,000 people earning min wage who's chronological age is between 16 and 19 (i.e., "teenagers"). See table 1. That's 22.9% of 3.6 million.
I haven't used or been excited by Node.js but after hearing about the dnode library they used I can see the attraction of having the same language on both the client and server:

http://github.com/substack/dnode

The examples are really cool.
What defines government is not hierarchy: it's coercion.
Interview with CardStar's CTO and Co-Founder
you know when the aliens finally stumble upon us, they aren't going to walk up an shake hands. they aren't even going to acknowledge our excited radio messages and flashing lights.

they're just going to vaporize the whole thing, like how you'd put any sick diseased animal you happen to stumble upon out of its misery.
It's not entirely what the author is describing, but these days e-mail delivery [via Gmail IMAP for me] is essentially instant already. The rest is just UI alert notifications.
It's going to be awfully hard for any taxing authority (at least in the US) to characterize a contractor hired through a service (in the manner described in the article)as an employee:

1. The contractor presumably has other clients/customers
2. The contractor is not in your facility
3. The contractor is using his/her own tools and equipment

There are a number of other tests, but this is actually probably one of the "safer" ways to hire contractors.
If you liked, you could look at historical Western culture as well. In the 1800s, both boys and girls wore white, and gender differentiation in clothing style was quite subtle for the first few years of life. Styles only began to diverge around 1900 and the pink / blue dichotomy only became really prevalent after WWII.

That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
Yes. The costco one also comes with an LCD screen good for Android ports.
Does the typical American house have "good construction" though? Or does it vary by state.

(In Europe construction seems to be extremely good quality, I'd like a comparison.)
I wish someone would make a shutoff switch for Congress, or at least an auto-shutoff for anyone sneaking anything into a bill where it doesn't belong.
> It is fundamental that you keep focused on your current book and don't exchange it for another. Focus on finishing, one at a time (or 2 or 3, try not to pass the 3 books at the same time barrier).

Great post, but I halfway disagree with this point. I made a huge gain as a reader when I decided to stop feeling guilty for abandoning a decent book halfway through. Lots of times you get the thesis of the book and a few good examples in the first half, and then you're better off jumping around until you find something else that makes you really need to read it.
I haven't done it myself because my wallet isn't deep enough but I've seen it be very successful for my competitors who's emails make it into my inbox and I then check their Google link: list that shows it does actually work.

Lame or not the proof is in the search engine result position.
need to add another category, "nearly have it but don't know it yet"
plus you are insured against acts of God (or at least 2 out of 3!)
Of course, outreach to blogs and gaining traction on social networks is a necessary and productive endeavor. That's all about driving traffic. But that's not SEO, that's outreach. Getting a higher search ranking is a natural byproduct of outreach and marketing. And developers aren't necessarily the best people to do that.