skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about some evidence?

Fair call. I suspect we are talking about different things, though. I'm not talking about investment performance at all - more about how the financial sector supports the healthiness of the rest of the economy.

Anyway, some evidence that regulation can align the interests of the financial sector with the economy as a whole:

For example, Australia has quite strong financial regulation - much, much stronger than in the US and UK. This includes everything from higher ratios of capital-to-loans required by the banks, to stricter laws around mortgages.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Australian banks were able to survive very well, which - combined with a government stimulus program and continual growth in China - meant that Australia was the only developed nation that did not fall into recession in 2009.

More evidence?

* Both sides of politics in Australia are supportive of strong financial regulation

* The CIA World Fact book says The Australian financial system remained resilient throughout the financial crisis and Australian banks have rebounded https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

* The World Economic Forum says The United Kingdom, buoyed by the relative strength of its banking and non-banking financial activities, claimed the Index's top spot from the US, which slipped to third position behind Australia largely due to poorer financial stability scores and a weakened banking sector.
http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/FinancialDevelopme...

* Australia has four of the only around a dozen AA-rated banks in the world, due in part to a tight regulatory regime and domestic banks' limited exposure to poor-quality loans that were the downfall of many banks globally.

Australia has a so-called "four pillars" policy that prevents the four largest banks from merging. That has shielded the four, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Westpac Banking Corp., from takeover and allowed them to build up profitable, dominant market positions without the need to delve into riskier lending practices.

John Brogden, chief executive of pension and managed funds industry lobby the Investment & Financial Services Association, said the results are a "testament to our deep and liquid markets, supported by Australia's superannuation (pension) and managed funds sectors."

Australia has a A$1 trillion-plus retirement savings industry, aided by the introduction of mandatory employer contributions to employee pension funds in the early 1990s.
http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2057316,10,global_crisis_nudges_au...
Yes, but take-out of the same quality as home cooking would cost waaaay beyond 50$ per person.
Gaming Skills Become a College Course - PCWorld
Exploratory Research into the Development of Networked NeuroPhones
"But the ultimate purpose of music is a physiological/emotional response, something utterly subjective and that does not enrich our objective understanding of the world. In this sense, music should be considered to be an indulgence like drugs, sex or delicatessen food, in all but the delivering mechanism. Not that there is something wrong with them, but these are pleasures, not a meaningful activity."

I believe you made two strong claims in your original post, the first being that music's "purpose" is to illicit some kind of psychological effect, perhaps in the fashion of a neurostimulant, and the second was that consuming music is not a "meaningful" activity. Your conclusion is that you find it a "waste of time" to "put conscious efforts to listen to more classical music and to educate themselves about it."

Would you mind elucidating a few things for me? What is your conception of purpose? Do you mean utility, use? Like a hammer or mathematical model? If so is not deriving relaxing states from music a use or utility? Does your conception of purpose carry ethical baggage? Does that explain why you chose the contentious extremes of drugs and sex to equate with music? If so, on what grounds should others adopt your conception of purpose and meaningfulness? Are those grounds objective?

Yes, mine are empirical, and to an extent subjective. What of it?
Techies take nobody seriously by default.

But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately, simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.
Does AR really work like this?

users = User.where(:name => "david").limit(20)
users.where("age > 29")

# SELECT * FROM users
# WHERE name = "david" AND age > 29
# ORDER BY name
# LIMIT 20

It seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. I'd expect that

User.where(:name => "david").limit(20).where("age > 29")
=/=
User.where(:name => "david").where("age > 29").limit(20)

Yeah - just nitpicking, but it caught my attention.
Is the Internet Killing Cable TV?
Having read the decision, I disagree with the assessment that "Arrington gets smacked around". His injunction, to sequester ALL revenue, was dismissed as being overly broad, but in dismissing much of Fusion Garage's 'Motion to Dismiss' the judge certainly talked up TechCrunch's claims for some share of profits.

Now, in reviewing a Motion to Dismiss the judge is required to make any assumptions for the benefit of the defendent (TechCrunch, in this case, since they are defending against FG's motion), so that may be turned around in the future, but it certainly didn't read as a smack.
Posted earlier here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644772

For reasons I made clearer on that post, I'm kind of dubious about how Gruber summed this up.
OP: Yet another example of how Zed was right when he said, "Rails is a Ghetto."

IMO, the Rails/Merb merger is a counter example. It's easier and way more fun to rewrite and port code. Major refactorings with thousands of legacy apps are less fun. It takes a patient, skilled programmer to do it. It's an amazing community achievement that the two teams were able to put aside their differences and work together, like professionals, towards this massive goal.

The blog post is a release announcement meant to focus on features and improvements, not a history lesson. I wouldn't take the lack of a Merb mention as any kind of slight against the old Merb team's efforts.
This is fantastic. What a great demonstration of the limits of self-organization!
See also "Opening the software toolbox" by Arnold Robbins, part of the GNU Coreutils documentation.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Openi...
The query is lazily generated, so that's why they're equal.
Judge Says TechCrunch Case vs. JooJoo Tablet Likely Has Merit
I think code bases that use C and those that use Java probably solve very different problems, though. No one is writing 3D engines in Java.
I just wanted to say a few things.

First of all, this is a huge milestone for Rails. From my perspective, this work is three or four years in the making, from the beginning of the Merb efforts, through the merge, and on until the final release of Rails 3.

From a personal perspective, this release is huge closure for me; I feel like I’ve been working on Rails 3 (and associated projects, like Thor and Bundler) for years.

When the Merb team merged into the Rails team, we very quickly got to work. The previous animosity actually melted away rather quickly, to be replaced with the somewhat tense, but productive give and take of a core team.

One of the really amazing things to come out of the last couple of years is a whole slew of new committers to Rails (in addition to Carl and me): José Valim, Aaron Patterson, Xavier Noria and Santiago Pastorino. Rails 3 would still be limping along if not for these guys, who really went above and beyond the call of duty in the past few months to get things past the finish line.

In light of all this, I really haven’t thought much about the old Merb/Rails party lines in a while. I’ve been too focused on Rails and Bundler, and the rest of the core team (old and new alike) have been busy helping.
Ok, so maybe not the world. But I'm still impressed by the amount of north america/europe that is mapped.
I found this lecture to be very interesting, but I was disappointed in all the jabs against religion (even though I'm an atheist myself). The information he presented about how a flat universe could come from nothing is thought-provoking. I would love to read further discussion about the content-- for instance, the implications of an ever-expanding universe and future societies clueless to the presence of other galaxies. Instead, people are focusing on it as a video about atheism, which really occupies less than 1% of the video here.

I'm aware this lecture took place at an atheism convention, but I don't find anti-theism to be very constructive anyway. You can be a skeptic and an atheist without making disdainful remarks about the belief system of others. Engaging in open, respectful conversation is a better way of making people abandon religion anyway, if that's your goal. You know what they say about flies, honey, and vinegar.

Regardless, there are religious scientists and cosmologists. Being patronizing about their beliefs discourages them from contributing. As others have said, science is not the alternative to religion, and we shouldn't treat it in such a way.
Hey come on, it's running Mephisto. It's got to be at least Rails 1.0 :)
Except that he didn't. He said the faux tough guy speech (that everyone liked) overshadowed the actual message of his rant.
Advances in Windows Mobile Forensics
Solution for problem that does not exist

Yup - that's my reading of the situation as well. I'm moving to London in a few weeks so have been cleaning house for months. Both my beautiful wife and I have rounded up a LOT of clothes in good condition that aren't useful to us anymore - these were put into bags, and I did multiple runs to nearby charity bin at a time when the motivation struck me. Five minutes from thought to being rid of the clothes.

It was easy as pie to do so, and those clothes will be sold for cents on the dollar to people who need them who can go to any number of thrift stores and take immediate possession. Easy browsing, no shipping costs or time or web access to consider.

Good to see someone chasing charitable projects online. This one doesn't strike me as being practical, but perhaps the next idea will be.
"Where do you want to live?"

It would be nice to be able to put in neighborhoods instead of street + zip. E.g., "Upper West Side."
Swarmation: The Pixel Formation Game
Really?? A facebook acquisition is usually 5m - 10m, how is that against YC interest.
I don’t consider the definition of programming to necessarily include coming up with ideas. That would be software design. It’s not unreasonable to consider programming as including thinking of ideas, in which case you are right, but another reasonable definition is just “the implementation of ideas as a program”, in which case programming can actually be easy – or much easier than it is now, at least.
Who said anything about issues? They're talking about manner.

The way you present your ideas is as important as the ideas themselves if you want to reach an audience.
I don't disagree that people should be able to earn a living wage. However it is supply and demand that sets wages (in the absence of a minimum) and so if you are arguing that the minimum wage sets the "floor" you are proposing some fairly mind boggling demand side effects.

Your view also defines workers and firms as adversaries with no shared interest in improving worker productivity (ability to add value). Aside from pure manual labor (for which workers might be whipped to increase productivity and for which virtually no intellect or interest is required) all firms would benefit from improving the human capital value of their labor force.

Strikes are a legacy of the days when work was simply straining one's muscles against the earth or repetitively doing stitching, stamping, etc.

Unions, too, are a legacy of the days when you could be replaced by any willing person ready to step in and earn your wage. Today, Unions are granted additional power (beyond the market power they would have just via collective bargaining) and they essentially impose a tax on certain firms. I'm not anti-union... they serve an important purpose, they just shouldn't have any extra power beyond collective bargaining. New hires shouldn't be forced to join, etc.

In my view, minimum wage laws have a few negative effects:

- they drive low wage work into the black market where there are no protections against abuses.

- they limit employment opportunities for those whose ability to add value is lower than minimum wage... such people become wards of the state, terminally unemployed.

- They make subsidized training arrangements infeasible for low end workers.

- They draw a sharp distinction between employed an unemployed. It would be far more accurate to determine that a person needs $3/hour of support from the state b/c they can only reliably pull in $4 per hour. In today's world, that person is unemployed or is constantly fired after it becomes obvious that he/she is not fit for minimum wage work.
Diaspora to launch on Sept 15
Protovis - javascript visualization toolkit (svg)
It depends on whether your mental model is "applying a sequence of filters to a result set" or "editing attributes of a query". If the latter, you'd expect them to be equal and the opposite would be surprising.

Just from the point of view of a Rails user, generally I want to do the latter. This will replace things I use .with_scope() for right now, which a "sequence of filters" model wouldn't work as well for.
Yes, and you'll note that a huge amount of the remote file driver code involves dealing with those failures.

If you drop that down a level and turn sockets into files then suddenly programs that are written to work with files will try to deal with these kind-of-file-but-not-really things, and fail in unexpected ways.
You should add a leaderboard.
If it was profitable and strengthened Facebook I don't doubt Mark would feed off YC ingenuity without a moment of hesitation.
"Ad Hominem" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem>; is merely not an attack, it's a logically fallacious way of making an argument which the GP was not guilty of. Since the GP merely attacked the GGP but based no real argument on those attacks, what he did was a mere "personal attack."
'This homeless guy asked me for money the other day. I was about to give it to him and then I thought he was going to use it on drugs or alcohol.
And then I thought, that's what I'm going to use it on. Why am I judging this poor bastard.'
Heavy-handed priortization also causes less fluid thought.

I'm really glad Silicon Valley shops tend to have a playful culture. It makes it easier to fight for it where I work.
Thank you. It is about time people like him realised that nobody cares about his business like he does and that people get a job to make money and have fun not to make some other guy rich.
This covers some of that very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
That's what they call a "dog whistle" term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Probably still true here and there -- but I would be willing to bet you could get a competent designer on elance to make you business cards and a letterhead and get them printed for far, far less than $750. And that might be the last priority on this list, at least for me.
I said I CAN'T imagine women in a room discussing tech. Maybe 01% of women will be doing that. But yet, that's MY head. You can't make me imagine what I can't imagine. This has nothing to do with being a girl programer that talks about dating. wich is totally normal and happens to everyone.
Also because most people find it very easy to convince themselves they've come up with a simple solution to a very complicated issue.
This brings up an interesting point: should we trust people about their deathbed regrets?

I mean, let's face it. You're lying there, surrounded by your relatives, and everybody is sad. You're going to want to say something life-affirming about how you wish you'd spent more time with your children or smelled more flowers or listened to the wind blowing through the trees or something like that... something that sounds appropriate for the situation, and something that people will think well of you for.

You don't want to say "I wish I'd married a different woman" or "I should have stopped after my first two children" or "If only I'd gone to law school", even if those are your deepest regrets. There's a certain amount of social pressure to only talk about pleasant life-affirming things, so that's pretty much what you're going to get.
Fascinating.

What has been most interesting to me is to watch the game as more and more people join. When I first started watching, there were about 30 or so pixels was swarming around the middle of the board - now, there are three distinct swarms in different areas of the board, each comprised of about 20-30 pixels.
YouTube has a social network behind it. That's what Google bought, because to date they have yet to build one of their own.

What a startup can create that a large company cannot steal would loosely be defined as a social network; mind-share among people who believe that your company is the go-to place for your service.

If you have built your service on top of Facebook, it will be very difficult to build your site so that you, and not Facebook, are what your customers thinks of when they think of your product. If it's truly a killer Facebook app, they will likely even be happier with a slightly inferior but fully integrated solution. Because they control the social network, the mind-share, that fuels your app.
Hah, I did that while I was in Hong Kong too. It was quite fun.
Net Neutrality is now law in Chile
That looks pretty cool, and the best performance seems to come from aggregating and doing floating point math.

SQLite is designed for embedding into cell phones and web browsers and other tiny devices, so I'd expect that there's quite a bit of room for optimizing the floating point math on server-grade hardware.
Sure but in those 50% will be a lot of businesses that where part time and where never meant to go on forever.

And if you remove the startups from the number, more than 50% of businesses succeed for five years.
All great ideas, especially the gov2.0 data stuff. Thanks!
It's surprising to me that Arrington (having been a lawyer) didn't nail down the operating agreement between TC & FG before they started real work on the product.
Learn How Things Work
The difference is that for men, that's not the main activity. But for women, it tends to be it.
Yeah it's a good point. We thought about it a lot, and found that the games simply never ended if we let you go everywhere. But up to the last minute, it was still hotly debated.

All awesome feedback, look for it in v2!

PS: Heroku just crashed on us.
Actually there is, I can't remember the name right now but there is a 3D engine build in Java (it runs on top of OpenGl, but that is just used to draw and interact with the graphic card).
This looks very cool! Can someone point me to a place which lists a collection of useful HTML5 tools/libraries to build stuff like these?

Thanks!
For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers: Give Me A Break
I am not against engaging in social science. But I am against ignoring the tenuousness of social science's conclusion. Don't confuse "the best we can do" with correct.

The article's conclusion is plausible but far from "established".
Except one thing, you where likely to get into trouble if you had a black man hired to do what would have been considered a white mans job, so the black guy was strictly speaking not worth the same as a white man because he would (in directly, but pretty certainly) cause you problems with your customer.

That is not true today in Silicon Wally, because nobody knows who wrote the code one is currently using.
Ageism in silicon valley: a foreign perspective
They can take away your camera (i.e. you better not stop them from taking away your camera – but they have to give you a receipt) but they are absolutely not allowed to delete or change anything without a conviction of some sort (and you definitely won’t get any conviction for taking photos in public, no matter what you take photos of – stalking is the only exception but that’s not the case here).

They might even not be allowed to look at your photos without a court order (since looking at your photos is a search – I’m not sure about that one).

They can only keep your camera around as long as they plan on using it as evidence – meaning that if there is no investigation or as soon as the investigation ends or after the court is finished with the case they have to give it back to you (unchanged if the court doesn’t rule otherwise – which it won’t).

The good news is that the police in Germany cannot make you pay a fine or get you into prison for taking photos of them. The bad news is that they can inconvenience you by temporarily taking away your camera. Which they can do but as soon as they delete so much as one photo you should defend yourself and sue.
That sounds like a pill that makes you perceive colours more brightly, not a pill that makes you into a temporary-woman.

I'm not sure why you think that women perceive colours more brightly (I don't think the fact that they like flowers is evidence...). In fact, if women do perceive colours more brightly than men, how would we possibly know about it? We can't even solve the "What if the colour I see as blue is seen by you as red" problem.
What's interesting is that it isn't a new phenomenon; Veblen wrote about our strange lawn-care fetishism in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899.
the blue pixel doesn't show up for me on firefox after the first time i go to the page (aka cant play anymore)
The joojoo looks pretty cool, for what it's worth: https://thejoojoo.com/
Math, for instance, is nothing but a set of rules built on top of assumptions.

There's question logicians argue about quite a bit. I would side with folks who view math as nothing but a system for analyzing abstract rule system but which doesn't care at all whether the rules themselves are true or false.

In this sense, math isn't dependent on any assumptions besides the existence of some sort of abstract machine. I know Kurt Godel disagreed with this but it's still complete consistent interpretation of math.

In anycase, this is a bit different from social science, which has to make assumptions every step of the way (not necessary bad but definitely different).
Similarly, every nice restaurant will have a $60 steak entree on the menu to make the $29 chicken entree appear more affordable.
Could you define this "corporate communism" term you're using, and how this post is linked to it?
Also I think you need to swap these labels when you click "How does this work?":

Movies To Watch - Movies that you have watched...

Movies Watched - Movies that you want to watch
Evolution of The Destination Web