skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a difference in having access to a concierge-type service, where the nature of the service is not completely described (there's no set list of provided services, only rules to help the employees figure out if a request is acceptable or not), versus this service, which is very clear, focused, and narrow.

Even the request for daily affirmation was answered with the contact of a possible company that might provide it; so perhaps if knowledge of this service spreads, it might be a recommended source of that service.
Asynchronous Semaphore
As technology improves we should expect costs to decline.

Only if you assume labour isn't the prime mover. Assuming that technology improvements help education at all (I'm skeptical -- I learned more about logarithms in math by using an abacus than I did using a calculator), we would ideally want education quality to increase, not decrease. Therefore, we should probably assume costs will stay approximately the same percentage over the years.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.
Why doesn't the "active" JVM community fork the OSS dump from a few years ago and start improving that?
Well that's a great feature and smart of developers to take advantage of. But what I am really curious is the thought process (if it's possible to remember and elaborate on) for someone who was going through this the first time, was not presented with such a user-friendly DMG background image, but was still able to intuitively figure out what to do.

It seems to me that while it might be a great way to install something - incredibly simple - years of Windows use would completely program someone to not consider something so simple.
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets?

Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
The future of Content Delivery
Right, this is a common economic discussion. People under the poverty line today can afford a roof, TV, and a home phone; 70 years ago they would stand in bread lines. Quality of life has definitely improved.
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Which doesn't make it look any less like a static diagram.

Specifically it doesn't do anything more to imply there are two objects presented, like say "drag the (image|icon|folder) below to (your|the) Applications folder to install."
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Perfect timing for this

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...
I don't know much about economics, so I'm probably missing something obvious. How is revenue linked to how much a government is doing for its people?
While I am no fan of Java the language myself, there is no reason for schadenfreude. I would like to see Java survive, if only because of its virtual machine (and Jython, Clojure, JRuby, etc).
From what I can tell, there is a patent grant on the OSS version provided you pass the closed source compatibility suite.

> (iv) pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopy...
Cool to see this all in one place. I've been Twitter spammed all day with the news. Looks like it was a great event. The American economy should be proud!
> Unfortunately, it's still hard to tell how much of that is substantial engagement.

A pinging stats provider, like Clicky, gives you great insight into single-pageview engagement.

It's true that there's room for inaccuracy in the pinging measure. Some viewers with third-party (or all) JavaScript disabled won't be counted, viewers that leave the page open in a tab before they look at it may be over-counted, and readers who legitimately spend more than ten minutes reading a longer page are capped at the ten minute mark. However, averaging that across thousands of views is a very worthwhile measure of engagement.

I had a relevant post about that here recently (which was castigated for semantics more than it was actually discussed, unfortunately): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294969

The Clicky pinging data was invaluable then too. HN visitors to that post show an abysmal 95% bounce rate and an average 14s time-on-site in Google Analytics. Meanwhile, Clicky shows those same HN visitors spending an average of 3m29s time-on-site and truly bouncing from the page only 12.9% of the time. Even if you assume Clicky's numbers are wildly optimistic, it's nice to have that alternate insight.
I just can't imagine it. I am not a technical founder, and I would never waste my time building something without one. I guess that unless you have one, you would never know what they can bring to the table.
But this isn't about cranks. It's not even about Kurzweil! It's about Singularitarians that explicitly aren't Kurzweil, even.

You haven't made any points germane to the conversation here. If you'd like to place some actual points regarding Kurzweil as a crank, or tar all things Singularity with the crank label, or find an actual topic about cranks, your words may be well placed, but until then, your Gricean maxims may need some work.
Government revenue (usually: taxes) funds the services governments provide for its people.

Example: USPS has seen slow/negative net revenue growth, so they're considering cutting Saturday service.
Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.
Users are still idiots, cough up personal data despite warnings
"In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget."

Even in good times that's a lot for a school that will only house 4200 students. That's almost $140k for every student it holds. I wonder how long it's going to take for students going through it to generate enough economic activity to cover it.

Is there an economist in the house?
Neat. This reminds me of using bluetooth to chat with folks in cafes and libraries, back before bluetooth became popular.
That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well.

But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
Meh. It's "evil", supposedly, because if you add up the first N decimal digits of its fractional part then, for carefully chosen N, you get 666, the Number of the Beast.

I say we should be using binary rather than decimal -- ten is a terribly arbitrary number -- in which case, of course, all numbers are "evil" other than a few dyadic rationals.

Here's a better reason why the golden ratio is evil. As you know, Bob, in mediaeval times the musical interval of a tritone -- three tones, or six semitones -- was called "diabolus in musica", the devil in music. It was called that because it's a highly discordant interval; in equal temperament (which of course they didn't have back then, but hush) it corresponds to a frequency ratio of sqrt(2). And why does that sound highly discordant? Well, basically because there's no simple rational number that's a really good approximation to sqrt(2); for much much more about what's going on here, put "William Sethares" into Google and consider buying his book. In fact, in a certain sense sqrt(2) is the second-worst-approximable-by-rationals irrational number, which is related to the fact that its continued fraction is [1,2,2,2,2,2,2,...]. And what's the worst-approximable irrational number, which would produce an even more dissonant musical interval -- a maximally dissonant one -- something even worse than the devil himself in music?

Why, the golden ratio, of course. Continued fraction [1,1,1,1,...]. Evil incarnate.

(Note: there are a few half-truths in the above, but only for convenience of exposition.)
Not an answer, but you should probably adjust by some sort of CA wage index rather than purely inflation, since a lot of things the government pays for have grown more expensive much faster than inflation (like salaries of sysadmins, and land). Looking at revenues as a percentage of state GDP would be one approximation (that would also bake in a correction for population growth).

I do think it's likely they haven't decreased greatly, though--- imo a bigger factor has been that where the money is spent has shifted greatly (less on education, more on cops and prisons, for example).
"As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! "

Because teachers are technology...?

Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.
On top of that the ability to chose 10 of those songs to keep a month DRM free is such a good deal.
That's a different paradigm. It's one thing for me to, say, post a drunken picture of myself on Facebook/Fridge. It's another to actively invade my friend's inboxes. The former is the acceptable way currently (other than the social ramifications). The latter will make my friends think I'm desperate for attention.

Overall, I can't say I'll be participating in either activity though.
They didn't take out a loan, though--- the generation of Californians he's talking about (pre-1970s) built a bunch of infrastructure while also balancing the state budget.
> wouldn't it be easier to email the pics to the friends directly?

I think you're underestimating the value of organizing the information into one place. And I'm sure there are/will be other features than just picture sharing.

> I dont think people would be comfortable with idea of sending it to a third party website...facebook album with proper privacy settings is much better option

This strikes me as a tad contradictory. People wouldn't trust a third party with these pictures but facebook is somehow okay.
According to Prop 13 grand-daddy Howard Jarvis, state revenues have indeed increased since Prop 13 passed (1978).

We have a heckavu budget morass in California. Our ballot initiative democracy has _written into the constitution_ both spending minimums (40% of general budget from Prop 98) for education, and tax maximums. It's a massive vote of no confidence to strip our legislatures of the working room to make a budget.

I'm going to agree with the letter here. Somehow, in California in the 60s, we decided as a state to build the world's best civil infrastructure. We (well my grandparents) built this to benefit residents statewide. The terms of debate have changed from what makes the best place to live, to fear or sounds-nice-but-not-right-nowism.

From 2/3s majorities, to social issues, to pensions, we're in a real hole. But a rebuilt civil infrastructure is necessary, decline is obvious.
> There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition.

Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
If the person didn't care what you did, then hopefully they wouldn't have asked.

You wish! It's like asking "how are you?" Most people don't care; they're just being polite/making conversation.

Give the stock answer in an inviting tone. If they want more information they'll ask for it.
There's room yet in the cloud
jobs.rubynow.com occasionally has things
That song he links to at the end is quite awesome. I guess this is the original version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs
"As technology improves, we should expect higher quality teachers for less cost" --- if and only if we know how to use technology to increase instruction quality. I contend that we have almost no idea about that.

He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less.

The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!).

Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.
Agreed. But given that 49 out of 50 states were struggling to fall under budget this past year, we can safely say they're cutting the useful stuff now.

Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
States can't run a deficit. Money in can never be greater than money out.
Hmm. So what do you actually swig while languidly dictating to your busty secretary, if not dry martinis?

Thanks for the hours of entertainment I derived from reading the Laundry novels, by the way. I especially loved The Jennifer Morgue. Accelerando was awesome too. More!
Using state figures and the CPI calculator:

1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)

1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)

2008-2009: $144B ($145)

2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)

Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled.

You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less.

I feel the urge to get out numbers here, but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
According to this source of unknown reliability ( http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/California_state_spendin... ) state & local spending as a percentage of state nominal GDP went from 20% to 24% from 1992 to 2009. Don't know the numbers going back to 1960, but I'd be shocked if spending was lower then.

For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended the border of California 400 miles south into Mexico, the average state scores on tests of math, history, and English would obviously go down, simply because of the composition of the population. Similarly, if you move 10 million Mexicans into California, the average test scores of the people living within the borders of California will fall (even if there is no change in the amount of learning for one individual person). In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.
In socialist systems when the service is originally socialized, where do the professionals come from? Well, they come from the private sector, where people must work their asses off to succeed and only the best and brightest achieve the top positions. So, when government comes in and coerces them to be part of a socialized system, things go very well (for a time); the system is staffed with lots of brilliant, hard working people. Over time, the system is more and more politicized, the hard workers retire or become defeated by all of the bullshit that occurs and newcomers more and more over time become entitled and jaded. Real qualifications become less and less important, unions invade, tenure takes hold... Eventually, the system starts to fail more and more, and the worst type of people inhabit it, because those with principles are long gone or don't want to participate and so the move on to other activities where they are wanted and appreciated. What you are left with is a system inhabited by the most corrupt individuals who are highly skilled at gaming the system to their own benefit with little concern for those who use the system. Take a look around at teachers unions, and any other public service union you can think of.

And then the masses yell out "please we need government to come and fix this problem!!!" - Sorry, the solution to the problem is not the problem.
Intro to Monads (new chapter of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good)
What does one of these cost on average? Are they affordable to the average startup guy?
Want Digital Ear Thermometer?
A digital ear thermometer is probably one of the fastest ways to get the temperature of a person. It provides an accurate reading and only takes a few seconds to get the results.
Some other thoughts... will be higher level adoption of dynamic languages and higher abstraction with continued increase in client-side code via javascript with continued development of JQuery/JQuery UI, HTML 5 gets more fully adopted but few care, semantic web never gets realized.
What if your favorite channels are considered "terrible" (or perhaps just boring) by the masses? Be careful what you wish for.
I don't think I'm being as clear as I should be. I'll see if I can rephrase it tomorrow. Trying to think economics at this time of night often proves hazardous for me. :)
Great to hear but BrainTrust (and perhaps the creator can step in and clarify) was focused around groups of people originally until A/B testing and the ever-present need to make some income pushed it towards companies/project teams. BrainTrust has group feeds and per file discussion which DropBox does not as you've said (different focuses). Nonetheless I look forward to seeing how you guys overcome these barriers so I can selfishly learn from your approach.
It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?
DEA wants to hire Ebonics translators
The article is short on details. Does Leftronic provide hardware + software or just software?

Does it run on the company's network or via the internet?
I'm not quite sure what they're offering besides "software that makes it easy for companies to aggregate data" and “People pay hundreds per screen for our visualizations.” I could imagine that it's a subscription-model for the web service that gathers and displays the data? But hundreds per screen sounds high

Is the professional services part a significant one? The mention of YCombinator, Cloudkick and WePay make it sound like they setup the whole thing.

Anybody has more details on that?
Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html it's 31% of the budget, with the next largest expenditure being Health and Human Services.

There are few major issues with the California budget.

1) Much of the revenue is required by law to be allocated in a certain way. This leaves the government with very little wiggle room to make changes to the budget.

2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations.

3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund.

4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course).

Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!
Ask HN: Who is hiring in Australia?
I love the who's hiring threads and spreadsheet on Google, but I'm really not in a position to relocate. America's working visas make it difficult to bring a de facto partner with you, and the UK is tightening up their system as well.

So who, apart from Campaign Monitor, is hiring in Australia?
I get that too, but what I've come to realize is that mostly people aren't really asking you to fix their computers. They just have insufficient information for proceeding with the conversation in a knowledgeable way, so they try anyway with a starting point you can both understand.

The people who ask these questions are usually trying to be friendly, is what I'm trying to say.
Well it was Pasadena, so Mexican or McD were the options.

Go into an American supermarket and there are dozens of types (or at least shapes) of bread - all the same oversweet soft wonderloaf inside, and dozens of types (or colors) of cheese - that all taste the same.

When I lived there, live cheese was banned, pot is being legalized but Brie is illegal !!!!
facebook provides a better way of organizing them via tags. and regarding trusting facebook, people are motivated to learn facebook privacy settings, since they are using it everyday.

Finally a person savvy enough to use such website/ email based service, must already be proficient with Facebook settings.
The Campaign Monitor UI designer & front end developer job in Sydney - http://www.campaignmonitor.com/jobs/
Based on the submitter's other submissions, I think it is the "Swippet PC": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc-qO5RVdmI
Java the language != JVM