skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Semi-related: Can someone explain to me California CRV on recyclable containers? My understanding is that this is meant to encourage recycling, but the deposit amount you pay at the store doesn't equal what you get when you recycle your containers. I checked out the Wikipedia page, and it explains how the "Redemption Value" has changed over the years. If you take one of those large 2.5 Gallon containers of Arrowhead Water you are charged an additional $.50 each! There is no way you get that much to recycle it. How many bottles are sold annually in California? That looks like clear additional tax revenue. To add insult to injury, you are charged sales tax on the CRV deposit!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Redemption_Value
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

Do you ask every non-awkward person you meet whether they were home-schooled? Do you ask every awkward person you meet whether they were home-schooled? Do you keep a running count?

Sounds like sample and/or confirmation bias.
When I have kids, I might consider this. One of my big fears is that I may not be the most qualified person to teach my children. The idea of un-schooling actually reminds me of a program that I went through in elementary school.

When I was in elementary school, I was identified as a "gifted" pupil. Once a week, I was removed from regular class for a few hours and sent to the GATE program (Gifted And Talented Education). It was run in a way that my natural curiosity led me to learn things that were considered above my level. For example, one of the activities that GATE provided was being able to draw pictures by plotting coordinates. You would be given a set of instructions that looked like:

(2,2)
(2,6)
(6,6)
(6,2)
(2,2)
STOP
(2,6)
(6,2)
STOP

That would draw a square with a diagonal line through it. Of course, they had more interesting pictures than this example, such as a horse. Naturally, I wanted to draw these pictures, so I learned how to plot coordinates. Later, I discovered a more challenging set of pictures--the coordinates involved negative numbers, and the grid included all four quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate plane. My teacher gently nudged that it's more advanced, but when I wanted to try anyway, she taught me about negative numbers and I was successful at plotting the negative coordinates. This was all while my peers who were not attending the GATE program were still learning basic arithmetic.

Later, in 4th and 5th grade, I was put in a full-time GATE class. This was a regular class in elementary school, which was comprised entirely of "gifted" pupils. It wasn't free-form like the weekly GATE sessions, but it was structured in a way that helped gifted pupils more than a regular classroom. I think the GATE program is partially responsible for me excelling in math. When I arrived at junior high (6th grade), I was placed in the advanced 7th grade math--honors pre-algebra.

There's a little bit of information about the GATE program here: http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt/gt/, but that resource is mostly bureaucrat-speak.

Another resource that helped me excel in math was my 2nd grade teacher. I was picking up math faster than the other students, so my mom suggested that I ask my teacher for something more challenging. I did, and my teacher gave me a different assignment from the rest of the class. (I don't remember today what those assignments were--probably double digits when the rest of the class was learning single digits.) I remember during a car ride home asking my mom and older sister how to multiply double digit numbers. They explained it to me and wrote down a few problems for me to work out.

The tl;dr version of my comment is: I completely agree with the premise that a child's natural curiosity is an excellent catalyst for learning. If you're lucky, you might find a resource that nurtures your child's curiosity, even in the institutionalized school system.
Verizon to Offer All Palm Devices on Prepaid Plans
There are some private regulatory agencies already - certificate authorities, for example. Seems to pretty much work.
This entry needs to be removed from here! Not the right place for it.
It's not. We British like to complain about being ripped off but we're better off than we think. Having moved to Canada much more leaves my paycheck than it would in the UK and, according to an online calculator, the same would be true if I moved to the States.

The things that really hurt in the UK are things like power and fuel costs, council taxes, and various other mortgage-related taxes. That's where I'm really seeing the difference.
If you guys get this hacker/founders meetup put together, I'll buy the pizza for you. I (me, Doba, LaunchUp) love to support local wicked coders/entrepreneurs. Just let me know. Seriously.
lol, I just popped in here to write that and saw that someone beat me to it.

As soon as I saw that title "Fastest helicopter" the only thing that popped in my head "Airwolf"

now I have the theme song in my head...
Are you forgetting about the 12.4% you pay to SS? How about 2.9% to Medicare? Now let's add in sales and property taxes etc.

PS: Relative to his income his sales and property taxes are well under 0.1%.
I'm not American, so I can't really say anything on the subject, but one thing that always shocks me is that while American's health care is strictly bounded to their jobs, yet lots and lots of them seems to have no or little savings, and some even use credit for relatively small purchases.

If I were to live without enough money in the bank to sustain myself for at least a couple of years without a job, i'd be truly scared, even here in Italy where the health care is all paid. I assume it's mostly just a different social behaviour/mindset, nobody can really tell if it's better or not.
Slim in terms of features. Programs that use more memory to be fast don't bother me - that's what the memory is for.
Why couldn't it be a combo Wiki + Browser toolbar app?

When you read a story on any of X sites, a popup appears in your browser informing you that the writer of this story has an entry on JournoWiki (or whatever), and that independent readers like you have deemed him/her "Full of Crap."

The popup would then have a link to share something on Twitter of Facebook indicating whether you thought their latest story was better or worse than what people thought of them. That share would have a unique tag in it so it could be picked up by your app and sucked onto his/her profile page.
The Case for Open Source Design:  Can Design by Committee Work?
Doesn't happen on the Wii, PS3, Xbox, iPad, iPhone and I'm guessing not on the new apple tv either.
Coming up with a broad sample of "terms that would be considered onerous by one Steve Jobs" turns out to be a fun mental exercise.
Reviewing host companies - Which one is more secure?
Check this too. Found on HN.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-secon...
The Problem with Seasteading
So this man thinks that because he only uses 5 apps other people will only use 5 apps.

This reminds me to the web "bubble". The same way not every web page about cars or cats made millions to their creators, not every fart app is going to make you millionaire.

You can use the same arguments for web too:
1)web don't generate profit for their developers(using his per capita metrics).
2)web is not profitable for MS, Apple, IBM...
...
But the web is very good thing with or without profit. It gives you just the profit opportunity. Is not going to give you money just by standing up waiting for the money to come.

This is only the start of a new paradigm: Using touch with your computer, and like the first "visual" apps, they look like toys compared to the serious precedent(were is Lotus 1-2-3?). Easy to look down on, some people could loose the train if they don't jump.
Annoucing Nodul.es for Node.js
voice, gmail notifier, readability, chrome to phone, priceblink

voice is my favorite
Hint: Rackspace lost badly (21% of the sites they hosted got blacklisted in the last 90 days). Netsol won with only 1% of sites blacklisted...
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. They still exist. =P
Gartner: Microsoft "dominates" enterprise email and calendar
For me the power of a trie over a hash table has always been the ease of implementation. Hash tables have a lot of corner cases that tries don't have. I can write an entire trie in the time it would take me to just write the part of a hash-table that deals with collisions. Nevermind resizing or rehashing!

This is why Judy arrays seemed a bit odd to me. I feel that if I put as much effort into making a super-fast hash table as the author did into making a super-fast trie, I feel like it would perform as well or better. That's just a gut-instinct though and I don't really have any data to back it up.

I suppose an exception could when the median key length is very short, tries tend to be better since a secure hash function could take longer than a very small number of memory lookups(especially since some of them will be cached).
That's what's known as a "high-concept pitch." It gives people a broad idea of what the thing is about and gets people excited by connecting it to something that's already well-loved, but often belies the actual details and intentions behind the thing. The bigger and more iconic the comparison, the more smoke and mirrors are likely being used.

For example, "Inception" could be pitched as "Like 'Ocean's Eleven' meets 'The Matrix'". It's not inaccurate, but all it's actually meant to convey is "It's a heist movie with trippy visuals." If you go into the theater expecting either of those movies, you're probably going to be a little bit confused.
Obvious question the author was somehow too lazy to research: what kind of terms could facebook ask for that Apple wouldn't agree to? Is anyone qualified enough to chime in?
I fully expect the Republicans to come into the majority in the November elections, and for McCain and Mitch McConnell to keep their shrill promise to gut the Obama healthcare law of its protections. And oh yes, I am a conservative republican.
My sister turned out just fine, and my brother also seems to be doing alright. I had a bit of trouble my first couple years away from home, but then since I supposedly had issues when I went to preschool it probably isn't attributable to the home-schooling.

We weren't just kept to ourselves, though. We had weekly get-togethers with other homeschool families in the area, and in the summer we all were in various Parks & Rec sports leagues. Those probably helped us a lot.
Any authentication situation where there is a distributed secret is fundamentally broken. Unless every app developer runs their own proxy that holds the secret key, and then validates incoming requests from their users before forwarding them on to Twitter, OAuth can't be expected to validate that a particular client was used to send a request. End-users of the app could be validated by their product key or similar (individual secrets). Obviously running a proxy is not practical for every app maker but it's already being used for a lot of situations (e.g. IM clients with push on the iPhone).

I don't think there is any protocol besides PKI with client-side certs that can guarantee authenticity of the client from the API's perspective. The app developer registers a secret key with Twitter, and uses it to sign individual certificates for each user that buys their app. Twitter can then verify from the certificate that it is receiving a request from user X using client Y made by the app developer.
The consumer good industries suffer side effects of bubbles and their eventual busts but I can't think of a bubble that was created in the consumer good industry. It's just not capital intensive enough for that.

What about the dot com bubble?
so that you can read lisp source instead of
[:+, 6, 7]

However the parsing is probably the easiest part so punting makes sense as you can get down to the stuff that matters and add that in later.
Many private health insurance policies feature annual out-of-pocket maximums (for deductibles, co-payments, etc.) so that you do not have a potential limitless liability for out-of-pocket cost-sharing during a given plan year - unless, of course, you happen to hit a lifetime limit on benefit coverage under the policy (another common feature - one that I believe the health insurance reform will phase out). Under the terms of such out-of-pocket maximums, once you hit the annual limit, you may have no further liability for deductibles, co-payments, etc.) during the balance of the plan year. Double check the terms of your policy.
Wild guess: facebook wanted Apple to have an open API to retrieve users' music listening preferences.
And interestingly their unemployment rate is lower than ours* (at least since 2004). Evidence that providing more government services doesn't lead to people just sitting on their asses and cashing their welfare checks.

* http://globaleconstats.com/wp/2009/08/25/the-unemployment-ra...
I agree, with a caveat:

Distribution involves an endpoint: me+device. Netflix has me, and millions like me. On any device. I watch on my PC, my Mac, my Wii, my iPad. My 5 yr browses for shows on the Wii and the iPad. So Netflix has the advantage of customers and devices.

I spend $20/month on netflix. I have spent a total of $10 for TV shows on iTunes.
Argh, a truly good article marred by one thing: the assertion that BitTorrent is a competitor for NetFlix. This notion just won't die - I use BitTorrent, sure - to get stuff I can't pay for, because nobody is interested in selling it to me. But I'd much, much, much rather toss NetFlix their $9 every month to deliver what I want without the hassle of BitTorrent, and that's the canard that the entertainment industry just can't get past. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's cheap. $9 a month is cheaper.
Birth control is not 100% effective, and it often used incorrectly (though not on purpose). Once a woman is pregnant, she may not know for more than a month, at which point an abortion or adoption is an extremely difficult decision.

In any case, accidents happen, yes.
Just because they didn't listen to the OP doesn't mean they don't listen to other developers. Where I work we often cycle between customer-facing development and backend, we ignore what we aren't working on at the time and even then we have to prioritize.
How To Give Your Game Dynamic Background Music
Why is the double rotor design not more popular than the way most helicopters are made?
Haha, I wouldn't suggest it. I still post there, but it's basically a dive bar of old regulars and some old trolls (who are now a bigger proportion, but have been around long enough that they're sort of endearing, like the local drunk). Very little technical content, and nobody ever writes/submits stories any more, although there is occasionally technical stuff in the diaries (Luke from prgmr.com still posts some stuff there). I think early 2000s was its peak, it was on life support by around 2006, and from 2008-present it's been the walking dead.

An interesting question (to me) is what killed it. One might be that Rusty Foster increasingly lost interest in too much active sysadminning, and eventually added a $5 registration fee, which he thought would raise the quality of the userbase, but actually ended up completely killing any new registration. Another might be the rise of blogs. Although I like the submit-to-K5 model, blogs do make it a lot easier to just post on your personal blog and link somewhere if you prefer. I think there are especially economic incentives to write good content on your own blog rather than on a community site these days (you can make a little money from even a personal blog, get pagerank/prestige from it if it's attached to other projects, etc.).

Of course, that's exactly the part I'm ambivalent about, even though I do it too. I think something's lost when you go from 100 people discussing in a community (whether it's a site or a mailing list) to 100 people each trying to build their personal brands.
We're free to not take paternity leave, if we choose.

Maybe most people here enjoy spending time with their children more than they'd enjoy earning 100% instead of ~80% of their normal pay.
I've found that reddit is a pretty disgusting, hateful place. I refuse to go there anymore.
Currently, if you are continuously covered by health insurance, you can usually move from one insurer to another without being disqualified for a "pre-existing" condition. If you let it lapse for any period, you're in deep trouble.

Disqualification due to pre-existing conditions are regulated out of existence by 2014 under the recent health care law; some classes (e.g., children) are protected earlier (as early as this fall, if memory serves). One of the major drawbacks of the bill is that it is so complicated, almost no one understands it.
Youtube goes to a great deal of trouble to only have ads on verified content.
Absolutely. We're looking at longer term ways to preserve the massive unified game space while insuring that people start out in fun areas (others playing nearby, some room to play, etc.).
Excellent point

Further, the article is only an announcement that some benchmarking would be happening later...

But (linked directly from the wikipedia article), this article gives benchmarking and a good argument that a "Judy array" is a rather over-engineered solution: http://www.nothings.org/computer/judy/ (and that article is linked to the wikipedia article).
That at least helps explain why there aren't more existing (popular) apps that are hybrid apps that (at the very least) look the same on both. I just got an ipad to try and I was astounded by how bad the scaled mode for non ipad apps is. Sure, it is functional, but really ugly. I would have expected apps that at least didn't have to be scaled up. I was making the assumption it was largely a matter of "recompiling" for the support.

It seems to me Android got this particular aspect a bit more right. I guess we'll see as those tablets start to come out, although Google bloggers are making it sound like most apps "just work.
Wouldn't a completely flat tax with a fixed deduction/rebate achieve that? Say, 25% of your income minus $10k. The marginal rate is always 25%, the average rate is negative for incomes below $40k and asymptotically approaches 25% as it increases.
I think a child's social skills are very influenced by the type of environment at home.

Many families homeschool because they want to intentionally "protect"/isolate their children from the mainstream. This is very common with religious families that choose to homeschool so their kids (1) are exposed to the family's values and belief system to the exclusion of others, and (2) aren't corrupted by the evils of the outside world. That's a perfect recipe for social awkwardness.

Isolation is not a primary component of the homeschooling/unschooling approach. In fact, if your goal is to expose your kids to as many cool things and people as possible, more unstructured time doing things in the real world may actually make them more socially skilled than their peers.
I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen:

1. It's event-driven and javascript.

2. It already is.

3. It shouldn't be a turf war. It isn't for everything. But, I'd rather write in javascript than erlang, scala, haskell, etc. and I'm sure others would be in the same boat.

4. Heroku, etc. are starting to host, so it kind of already is. Any fast, simple web-based service could be a good candidate for node.js.

See: http://debuggable.com/posts/understanding-node-js:4bd98440-4...
I did not say it was 100% effective (which is exactly what I meant when I said they may not have decided to become pregnant), but it is usually the first line of protection against an unwanted pregnancy.

"an abortion or adoption is an extremely difficult decision."

The decision, however difficult, is still a decision which is precisely my point.
How Apple Keyboards Lost a Logo and Windows PCs Gained One (2007)
Definitely a big thumbs up to Pusher for enabling us to scale well past where we expected to fall over. We pushed a peak of 500k messages/hr on Monday and averaged 169 simultaneous connected players that day. Crazy.
This sounds a lot like the Montessori philosophy
Science explains the "impossible" soccer kick
Very interesting stuff, specially for those of us building our dream mmos (http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/)

I wouldn't have gone the route he did though, I probably would have invested the original million dollars in something a bit safer than a software company that yields less profit.

After working on my game for a year now and don't ever see myself selling it if/when I release it.
I'd much rather live off a little bit of money and make the game I want.
You've only compensated for the loss of income for a total of 480 days, though. That'll let one parent work 75% for about five years, while earning about 95% of their full time salary.
This will not happen until the journalism-bubble bursts first.
We still have to understand how a 191 million $ company can be a bargain at 2 billions. Was preventing Dell from entering the datacenter worth that much?
Invoice Bubble (Online Invoice Tool) Made Completely Free
Will the Book Survive Generation Text?
Astute. I think you're dead right about the studio catalogue.

Unfortunately, the studios are still trying to protect what they view as their major customers: Retail chains (WalMart and Blockbuster) and cable companies. They understand those business, they've made money with them, and file sharing and secondary markets are negligible in those environments.

I've never thought about Netflix's agreements with third party distributors. That's a good question. Originally, I assumed some money was changing hands but maybe not. Maybe Netflix looks at it as a form of loss leader and a strategic advantage in the long run.

It seems like every company that comes out with a set top or mobile device now eventually includes Netflix. For consumers, Netflix is becoming a feature that's just not anticipated, it's expected.
Can you describe what you mean by socially awkward? I am not entirely convinced that what is considered social by most people is desirable.
I've never met a home-schooled kid who wasn't social awkward.

I guess you haven't met any of the hundreds of homeschooled kids I have met. To most parents who closely observe the social environment at many schools, it's easy to set up better situations for social learning through a family's own active social interaction with neighbors, friends, teammates, and colleagues in the community. Many homeschoolers, when they are asked, "What about socialization?" respond by saying, "It's one of the reasons I am happy I homeschool."
2. not fully paid by the employer, but funded in no small part by taxes on the general population?

Actually it's all paid by taxes.
Ask HN: possible to get job in Melbourne, AU?
I am looking to relocate, at least temporarily, to Australia be closer to my sister and her family outside of Melbourne. Are there job boards, or startup related forums I could check out to get a feel for what sort of work is available?
As a life-long unschooler, I'd answer with an emphatic yes (though I don't actually plan to have kids of my own). Letting me direct my own education was without a doubt the single greatest thing my parents did for me in life.

"Last year Shea’s son wanted to do more math so, deviating from the strict un-schooling line of thought, they placed him in an online math course."

This sentence struck me as odd. This could only be construed as "deviating from the strict un-schooling line of thought" (whatever that means) if they placed their son in the course against his will. But the article explicitly states that he was interested in learning more math. Many of the unschoolers I know take take formal classes in subjects that interest them.
The End of White America?
There are more social activities these days for home-schooled kids, shared co-ops, and chances for them to get together to socialize with peers. I'd wager for every awkward home-schooled kid there's one in school who is bullied or made fun of. Not all social skills kids learn in school are good ones.