skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hehe yeah, indeed. Also reminded me of that Gantz Graf video from autechre. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJfHU4GoOQ
What tax cuts are you talking about? My California state income tax bill (or sales tax) certainly hasn't gone down in recent years. You might be right, but your comment is seeded with anecdotal examples that seem politically partisan ("sneaky?"). "I know a guy who" isn't the best way to prove a point. Instead, numbers showing tax revenue and spending would help illustrate how the financial ills are caused by lower taxes, instead of spending problems.
Isaac Asimov - Foundation Series : taught me to have no fear 'cause Hari Seldon already figured it all out and I'm gonna be alright.
The addressable market is small? Doesn't every Fortune 500 company use dashboards in their operation and control centers? The market is ripe.
Star investors (and other stars) come out for Y Combinator's Demo Day
> Why do publications refuse to post links to (or at least citations of) the original scientific articles?

Here are my three best guesses:

1. The reporters think their readers are idiots who aren't capable of understanding anything beyond what the reporters spoonfeed them.

2. The reporters want to reduce the chances that they will be caught in whatever mistakes they make.

3. Adequate citations in the pre-WWW world looked intimidating to the uninitiated.
Seriously, when am I going to be able to pick and choose what channels I want to subscribe to?
hundreds per screen sounds high

Given the value of seeing your key metrics in a continuous display, hundreds seems low to me.
Almost any good programmer has the chops to make one of these

Except the making it beautiful part, right?
Just to be troublesome: Ruby has implicit parens where possible, and none for defining loops :) Even including {} where applicable (single-line loops / anonymous functions), we're still talking likely significantly below 1/2.
His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy)... This is true:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per...

To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and mean-spirited.

If a politician wants to raise taxes (in any way, even on the wealthiest 1 or .1%, who would barely notice), countless will bitch about it, without regard for data or reason (or common sense). It will be a knee jerk reaction.

WRT to his assumptions, I don't think that he is assuming that California is not spending its money wastefully (see his mention of the penal system). There is an argument to be made, however, that it is incredibly difficult to reclaim wasteful spending that has already been done. (California is not going to pardon 60% of its prison population and close its prisons or cancel state pensions).

So the expedient solution, if you believe in spending more on education and social services, would be to tax more.
(but no politician in their right mind would say that).
In the golden age of the British pop industry, record companies used to play their newly pressed singles to the elderly doormen and cleaners in the offices. If these old duffers could whistle the tune after hearing the record once, they knew the song stood a good chance of becoming a hit. They called it "the old grey whistle test".

I am increasingly of the opinion that the single most valuable asset to any consumer software company is at least one "old grey". The more time I spend with ordinary end-users, the more I realise that I cannot even begin to comprehend their mental processes. They are a total black box to me, with a completely different set of instincts and intuitive responses. I think that the majority of software developers, even professional UX folks, massively misunderstand their users.
I (www.supercoders.com.au) am looking for lots of people for employers in Melbourne. C, Objective-C, PHP, C++, Java .NET Ruby and getting plenty of applications but few of them have the key things: passion, computer science fundamentals (object oriented principles, design patterns) and an understanding of web technologies. Same sad old story, tons of jobs, very few people with any level of interest, experience and knowledge.
Or so the theory goes, if adhered to the current hypothetical parameters which seem to be making the media industries perform very slow seppuku. If people were happier with what they watched, wouldn't it stand to reason they'd watch more? Doesn't Econ 101 also cover why demand is good for your income?

Not that I think you're wrong :) I'm definitely in the minority in this. But I do doubt these sentiments / desires / tendencies are in the minority.
I too have never thought about it that way. Thanks for the new perspective. Maybe I'll stop avoiding this question.
And, if he gets roped in, he might then be forbidden from commenting on the case. Speaking out now might be the best chance he'll have.
I hope so. My background in art and design is my only competitive advantage.
A Disturbing Link: Disease and Intelligence
Orkut Now Encouraging Users to Project Different Personas to Different People
Prelude to Google Me?
Which is why those ethnicities then go on to have perfect 4.0 GPAs and rack up countless patents & inventions and start tons of successful new companies, thus proving those standardized tests wrong in the most effective way possible.
A tech start-up that would encourage a balanced lifestyle and create more digital downtime? It does sound paradoxical.. however, I am currently developing a start-up right now that will literally move (physically and emotionally) you offline. Never say never. :)
Did the CIA spread LSD?
An article like this without a single reference to the impact and influence of unions is absurd, like trying to explain the workings of the solar system without invoking the concept of gravity.
A Tale of Abort Traps (or Always Question Your Assumptions)
I am working on JaxScript, which will be the first XML-based abstraction framework for HTML/CSS/JS/DOM. First tech preview version within about a month. http://www.jaxscript.com
Why does this seemingly come up so often on entrepreneur blogs? People care about perception from strangers way too much.

There's no silver bullet for this. There's no magical phrase that's going to get people unfamiliar with startups to understand or care about the nuances of your multi-faceted responsibilities in marketing, development, sales and the top-down strategic stuff.

So I just say I'm a dolphin trainer most of the time.
Just start your own thing. You might be interested in this: http://www.pollenizer.com/services/bootcamp/
Housing in Ten Words « The Baseline Scenario
Does keeping a socket open affect the handset battery life much?
Ask HN: Startups and working remotely...
Just a general question about startups...Anybody ever work for or hear of a startup that all/most of the members worked remotely. If so is this very common?
Salary is time traded for money. Teachers trade 10 months for a certain amount of money, while most other professionals trade 12 months for a greater amount of money. The calculation I propose accounts for this.
Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)
If you want to see how CA as fucked themselves look at spending on prisons, pensions, and personnel.

Prisons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inma...) Just locking up all the bad people sounds like a great idea but it's also ridiculously expensive and provides little long term benefit.

Pensions without appropriate savings represent a huge drain on the government that "suddenly appears" (after 30+ years).

Personnel costs rise not just with inflation but with the completion from the local job market. Unfortunately for the state it can't reduce benefits when times get tough.
For fun I was whipping up some haskell one-liners as I read along.

You can just do:

let fibs = 1 : 1 : [ fibs !! n + fibs !! (n - 1) | n <- [1..] ]

for the Fibonacci sequence and

take 10 $ iterate (succ . recip) 1

for the first 10 iterations of the continued fraction.

To me these read much more clearly but then I haven't written anything big in a lispy language yet.
That's an explicit Java patent grant separate from the open-sourcing (note the 2000 date, long predating OpenJDK). The exact patent status of OpenJDK is somewhat murky, though. Some people (incl. some lawyers) think that there's an implicit patent grant in the GPL, because the GPL explicitly prohibits distributing under the GPL any software that does not have all relevant patents licensed under royalty-free licenses. So if you gave someone a license to use your software under the GPL but didn't give them license to use a relevant patent, your licensing is self-contradictory: you will be simultaneously giving them a license to use your code under the GPL, and then that license is immediately terminated by the GPL's Section 7.

Therefore it's possible that a court might infer that giving someone a GPL license must imply a patent grant, because it would be absurd to assume that the licensor intended to give a license that was immediately self-terminating.

Courts do generally try to avoid interpretations of parties' actions that would assume they were meaning to undertake null or self-contradictory actions. But I'm not sure how much I'd bet on that outcome.

edit: Forgot another unlitigated possible angle. It's one thing to open-source something with a very explicit reservation of patent rights, like "this source code may be used under the terms of the [license], but Sun reserves any rights to patents that may cover portions of the software, which must be licensed separately". But what if you open-source it with a more blanket statement? With the OpenJDK release, there was a lot of rhetoric about openness from Sun, that amounted to: Java is now open source, you may use it for anything you want, as long as you comply with the terms of the GPL. It's possible that a "here, use this for free if you want" offer implies a license of any patents needed to use it. At the very least, it'd be somewhat dishonest to go up to someone and say, "hey, I've got this great thing you can use... here I'll give it to you free", and then come back five years later and accuse them of violating a patent. I mean, you're the one who gave it to them in the first place and told them it was okay to use it! So this might either imply a patent license, or at least present some sort of "inducement" or "estoppel" defense to a patent suit.
The real reason ... is administration costs. http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941
Quick Customize TaylorMade R9 Driver Review
If you're post is only on the new section and never makes the front page it will still get a bit of traffic.

http://abiekatz.com/2010/08/20/introducing-a-new-theory-the-...

It got 5 karma points and 29 page views from Hacker News.

So making the front page is very important for getting traffic from HN. I am sure this is the case for any social news site.
Martha Coakley tells Craigslist: Abandon adult sex ads
It's interesting that the enrollment has grown much faster than population growth (and I'd suspect, much faster than the population of the age 18-22 population, since there was a bulge in that age group in 1970). So what really may be happening is that the spending is spread thinner, as the "everybody should go to college" meme has spread.
Non technical - Autobiography of an unknown Indian.
Technical - Little Schemer.
That's a tricky one -- I went to what you can call a 'therapeutic boarding school', so I ended up doing a lot of work in high school (manual labor, cooking, event planning, tutoring, peer counseling, etc.) but I never had to go out and get a job.
but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking

Exactly right; and that, not the numbers, is the point of the article.
The first 144 digits of the fractional part of pi sum to 666.
You think that teachers have easy hours? Have you ever known any teachers?

When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.

I don't have any statistics on it, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher... is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about how much work teaching is.
You just have state funding in there, you have left out tuition, grants and other sources of revenue.

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/accountability/index/1...
Yes definitely, we are going to make it affordable for startups. We want everyone be able to use our dashboards.
Checkout www.geckoboard.com - made by a guy here - it rocks.
Thanks. We received an overwhelming response and we are actively sifting through all the signups. Please be patient and stay tuned for a response from us.
This site could work well for someone who is not that technically proficient, but had a tech-savvy friend who created a group. A layperson could easily handle visiting the site to look at other people's photos, and e-mailing pictures to the site when they want to share them.

Also, you leave out the possibility that Facebook might alter the privacy settings without warning, which could catch even a savvy user by surprise.
Well yeah, but that was my point: that state funding of the UC system is in decline. Among other things, that leads to students paying higher tuition and graduating with much higher debt than their parents did.
First-time poster, go easy on me!

Lowering taxes may be better from a textbook economics perspective but this is creative real-world marketing that has already been somewhat effective simply by generating so many headlines.

I'm just one data point but I would have not considered Chile as a potential base for a small venture I'm working on otherwise. Now I will likely apply for this program and keep Chile in mind for future reference. I recognize most people aren't as geographically flexible as I am but the opportunity to spend time in Chile and speak Spanish sounds exciting to me.
Pension and health care outlays are not exogenous givens. The economy is not some external entity which government passively receives prices. Likewise the recession is not some external thing that can be waited-out like a hurricane. Our actions, and particularly those of that blunt club called government, entirely affects what emerges from the market making up the economy.
You're right, and I was aware of that when I posted, but even with that I still think that everyone would be better off paying for at least part of their tuition themselves.
agreed and that is what we are trying to build. something that is a super simple execution of a core notion and build out from there. email is great for direct communication but social conversation naturally branches and add in lots of folks it gets unmanageable to track.

soon we are going to integrate tighter into email so people can have the convenience of replying via email if they want but also to be able to go to the site for a richer experience.
Here's the conversation as I have understood it:

andreyf (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629954): Among other things, deems Kurzweil's nutritional theories (and commercial promotion thereof) as questionable.

You (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631254): Provided evidence of Kurzweil's sincerity and good motives to defend him from andreyf's criticism, as you perceived it.

Me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631299): Illustrated (unclearly, I admit) a fallacy in your argument: Kurzweil's sincerity doesn't completely absolve him of being wrong, irrational, or even crackpottish about his nutrition.

I admit that I was unclear. What isn't unclear is how you responded--with repeated personal attacks, accusations of ulterior motives and "agendas", and a militant refusal to make any good faith attempt to understand anything I was trying to express. And now you pretend we weren't discussing an aside about Kurzweil's idiosyncratic nutritional views at all, as if you've forgotten how these comments were nested in the first place. You accuse me of wanting to "tar" Kurzweil, or "all things Singularity" (as if I'm blaspheming your god?) and then name-drop Grice to assure yourself of holding the intellectual high ground? Yeah, I know how these forum games are played as well as anyone. I just wanted you to know that I actually was trying to meaningfully communicate here.
I've seen lots of BI tools used for creating dashboards in Fortune 500s given that most of the data is secure in random databases, mainframes, etc - the most popular of late is QlikView.
I agree, but I'll go one step further. This whole time, I've pretty much been against the whole "web app" thing. I still prefer visiting (and definitely developing) websites that are basically just a bunch of hypertext documents—the kind of sites where URLs point to resources and don't change, HTTP methods make things happen, and (almost) every click of a link or button causes a synchronous request/response to/from the web server.

Now of course, there is at least a modicum of hypocrisy in my statement. A few "web apps" are nearly indispensable. Right now, Gmail is the only one I can think of, and the only "web app" out of the ~25 sites on my browser's bookmark toolbar. Everything indeed works perfectly, but I can't imagine how nasty the code behind it is (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Lastly, I completely understand the main advantage of "web apps." It's just too darn convenient to deploy the things compared to any other platform.
17 Year Old creates website that predicts future of Digg
We make software that drives the displays. The dashboards are fully customizable through our website. We have a simple API for collecting the data that needs to be monitored.
I've been a teacher. Teaching sucks.

The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.

In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.
Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.
Just wanted to follow up... I checked out the ITP course list and it really looks outstanding for what I want to learn next. Think I might be applying... Once again, appreciate the tip.
You could say why... but instead, you left it to my imagination.
There are all sorts of ways to do it; for instance, I really like the following:

(def fibo (map second
(iterate (fn [[x y]] [y (+ x y)]) [0 1])))

I just went with a different version for the article to show another way of doing it that might be clearer to someone new to Clojure. As for understanding/ease of reading, the Haskell version is a little more alien to me, but that's because I haven't spent much time in Haskell.

Once again, for your CF ex:

(take 10 (iterate (comp inc /) 1))

Which gives ratios in Clojure, not doubles. Both elegant solutions, definitely. I just wanted to use my GCF, which could probably be made to look a little nicer as well. This post was more about playing around with the Golden Ratio than writing sexy code (though admittedly, I probably could have done better in many places!)

Haskell is a really cool language: I'm making my way through Real World Haskell right now!
I wouldn't class your initial comment as a troll, and with a little bit of context, philwelch's commentary could have been pretty useful.

Kurzweil might not be so far ahead of "modern medical institutions", but it's easy to see why he differs from most doctors: he's doing math on a very different scale. Kurzweil's endgame is immortality via Singularity, and that affects his expected utility greatly. He actually gains when he spends two hours and ten dollars to gain one hour of expected lifespan when he has the expectation of eventually going infinite on lifespan via non-nutritional means. Most doctors, and most patients, don't expect the same eventual Singularity that Kurzweil is betting on, and without that expected payout, the supplements very likely seem ineffective in both time and cost efficiency. Most doctors seem hesitant to recommend courses of action that don't introduce significant qualitative (e.g., diabetes vs. no diabetes) or quantitative (orders of magnitude) returns.

(There's also the bit of cognitive dissonance where doctors are fine with heart transplants, but less fine with things that "artificially" extend lifespan or otherwise mess with our "natural" life.)
True, although the spending is down from 1985-1990 levels even without the per-student calculation. It doesn't seem to be for explicitly partisan reasons either, since the UC system was well-funded under Deukmejian (a Republican) and then had its funding cut under Wilson (also a Republican).

Interestingly, most of the faster-than-population enrollment surge is in the past 5 years. If enrollments had grown from 1970 to 2000 in line with the results of the 1970 census versus the 2000 census, they would've been 124,000 in 2000, which is not that much lower than the actual 141,000 (that's only a 15% growth in enrollment rates over 30 years).
A startup with that attitude won't last long. Tech companies can last quite a long time with any poisonous attitude, once the cash cow has been found.

I've experienced "work by CYA." It isn't pretty, but it has the "advantage" that nothing too bad ever happens.
Finnish Startup Scene Goes Baltics
Hmm, well, monads are overcomplicated by people writing the tutorials, IMHO. There's a popular one about burritos and spacesuits that makes no sense.

Here's my take: invoking a function is like writing an email to it. It replies with a direct answer to your question and a PS at the bottom mentioning some interesting trivia. Sometimes you are more interested in the PS than the main message body. That's monads.
Parenting from the Inside-Out. If you're willing to work your way through it slowly, and do the exercises, it is invaluable. If you just read and understand it intellectually, the benefit is not nearly so great.
I think "developing world" is the new PC way of saying it. The fashionable term changes every decade it seems.
I actually think it's exactly the opposite.

If one of the main benefits of Foursquare is letting your friends know where you are, then it requires your friends to be there to engage.

I think that MessageParty is about exploring how to use chat to create new relationships with the people around you and places your at.

If there are only ten users of a service, I'd prefer that it doesn't much matter which ten their are.

I do think the earliest use cases will be things like concerts, though, versus general daily use.