skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A major problem with this is that the "size" generally refers to the size of the person it goes on, not the actual measurements of the clothing. For instance, a size small "boyfriend" sweater probably has similar dimensions to an XL form fitting sweater, because it's intended to be worn large.

And what if you're buying something with elastic, like leggings? Anyone can get a ruler and see they the waistband is 15 inches, but that information is completely useless if you're trying to decide which one to buy.

Sure, size inflation happens, but legislating that the dimensions of clothing be declared actually defeats the purpose of sizing, which is to tell you generally who should be wearing it.

This is not like the nutrition labels on food. You can't tell how many calories are in a food by looking at it. You CAN tell how large a waistband is with a ruler. Legislating on this would make things very difficult on both clothing manufacturers and clothing purchasers. And it's only misleading to people who don't own a ruler, which I think is a fair burden to place on the consumer.
Which is why vouchers seem to be the best idea. Let the school principals decide who are the best and worst teachers, and let them figure out for themselves what they need to pay in order to obtain the best ones and fire the worst.

Maybe you could have a variable-value voucher system where the amount a school gets for having taught a kid depends on test scores at the end.
It depends who you ask. People who are opposed to prostitution like to argue against forced sex slavery, get everyone to agree, then redefine sex trafficking to include all sex for pay.
Most people find that consulting is like a ladder; you start at the bottom (or jump up as high as you can to grab a higher step) and as you build up experience, you'll be able to a) get better jobs w/better clients and b) charge more. Putting in time up front is pretty crucial. This isn't to say that you can't try to be uber-ballsy and charge a high rate without testimonials - you just might find it harder.

Personally, I get most of my consulting work through other people that I've worked with before. LinkedIn has been valuable to me, as has Twitter.

You can look to the plethora of freelancing sites; oDesk comes to mind as a well set up for both 'buyers' and 'sellers'.

http://www.odesk.com
Not really sure why this is getting upvoted and mine down, but it doesn't matter how large their sample size is since it's restricted to people who voluntarily sign up for an online dating website, specifically okcupid. As okc becomes more mainstream the data is more valid for the general population. But sample size is irrelevant here.
Ask HN: Please review our website: furlango.com
Please give your feedback on our site www.furlango.com

It is a website that lets you find events and things to do around you - concerts, shows, sporting events, devcamps, etc.

Along with your comments, we would be interested in knowing about:

- Do you see a use for this in your daily life? If not, is there additional/different content that will get you into using something like this?

- What sort of events are you most interested in (I understand HN might not be the representative audience, but its still quite a big one in itself)?

- How do you go about planning to attend events with friends (phone/IM/text/emails/facebook)?

- What time frame of event search would you be interested in? This evening? Weekend? Next month?

We would love to hear any other comments and feedback.

(IE not supported at the moment)

Thanks!
I loved that little story about Steve Jobs and Paul Rand in the middle. If you take control of your projects you'll likely be happier for it in the end because you'll feel that what you've created is the best each and every time you start a new project.
But my company is worth nothing and my dog is cutest than my neighbors!
http://www.namecheap.com/ comes to mind as a fully functional and responsive partner to work with.
Maybe we should fire those AGs because they are not making any 'discernible' impact on sex trafficking in their respective states.
The numbers are expressed as a percent share of total income. Inflation is implicitly taken into account by the calculation.
This either means you're avoiding Java now as well (because Oracle is clearly getting litigious about it) or you're spreading FUD.
Not to be condescending, but not everybody buys cars for the image they convey. In the event that they actually prefer form over function, a Pagani Zonda is chock full of actual performance that would beat the pants off of any classic Jag or Ferrari.

While I personally agree that it's not what I would have bought, I'm also not so arrogant as to presume to tell others what to do with the money they earned, or whether or not they should feel free to enjoy their hobbies how they wish.
It's a strange law that ignores reality on the ground and that makes things criminal that consenting adults can engage in without causing any harm to third parties or themselves.

It's like a replay of prohibition and a whole slew of other things including 'sodomy' (being gay is criminal?), smoking pot (I don't but I completely respect the right of others to smoke and drink what they please as long as they do it in a way that does not affect others) and so on.

I'm pro-euthanasia for much the same reason, people should be free to do as they please while respecting the rights of others.

If you like to have a very large number of people in jail you should create a society where lots of ordinary behaviour is illegal.
all quintiles have improved in real terms.

Please, help me understand. What are the real terms?
I have been consulting for the past 6 months and the transition from the 9-5 job to this has been horrible. It has taken a while to get some good projects and I have almost run out of money (I've had several sleepless nights over these months), but I'm starting to see the rewards. I'm starting to get some pretty high paying jobs and I totally work for myself from home/coffee shops.

I have a love/hate relationship with contracting. I love the actual work and the dynamics involved, but I hate not having a monthly fixed budget and always having to fight for high-paying projects. A lot of business/administration is taking up my time which I could by spending on my own projects.

I think I'm most happy at a small company which is just emerging from the startup phase. I like flexible hours, working from home sometimes, dynamic and intense environment, a salary, an office to go to, etc. Best of both worlds I guess.
I think the basic reason we pursue our goals ineffectively is that we are afraid to go at them straight on and, instead, look for activities that appear to be goal-oriented, but are not emotionally difficult.

The comments on the site to this article are quite good too. And the post to which it replied is worth reading. lesswrong.com is definitely going into my reader.
greatwork alexpak. Best of luck.
Nice affiliate link. ;-)
"I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily."

Geocities was the first digital Iram of the Pillars.
I can't seem to find it, but I recall reading a piece at one point that suggested the general disregard for government rules in the eastern Mediterranean goes back centuries, to the rule of the Byzantines, Arabs, and Ottomans at various times. The rulers kept changing, and were generally bureaucratic, so people got used to doing whatever minimum was necessary to appease them, and generally ignore them whenever possible. Hence rampant avoidance of taxation, buildings often built in blatant violation of zoning or building codes, large informal economies, preference for dealing with officials you personally know / are related to, etc.

(IIRC, the author grouped Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt in that analysis.)
are hosting the ads actually criminal? (serious question)
All I'll say here is that it's not entirely apparent that craigslist is immune from liability because of the CDA:

http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho...

That case, the one I believe most people are citing when they use the words "common carrier" in conjunction with craigslist, was about an advocacy group targeting craigslist for allowing discriminatory rental housing ads. "Go sue the people posting the ads", it said. But note also this, from the opinion:

Nothing in the service craigslist offers induces anyone to post any particular listing or express a preference for discrimination; for example, craigslist does not offer a lower price to people who include discriminatory statements in their postings.

This is clearly true for rental ads, where craigslist provides a forum for a huge variety of different real estate ads, most legitimate, in which it is prohibitively difficult for craigslist to isolate the offensive ads. It is not as clearly true for the "adult services" ads, where craigslist has gone out of its way to segregate the ads most likely to violate state pandering and prostitution laws.
“The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission.

Last week there was a post about a woman that was $185K in debt and didn't know it. There were a lot of comments asking how that could happen. Here's an example of a whole country that didn't know how much it owed.
WTF iOS 4.1 wiped all of my contacts
Given the general quality at Old Navy, I wonder if the vast over-sizing of the waist and your observed under-sizing of the inseam are really just artifacts of sloppy work. I've personally gotten pants from the them that were much skinnier than the same size at other stores. I'm not sure how big a sample size Esquire used, but maybe Old Navy just suck at QA.
Cloudant (YC S08) Introduces Java Based Map-Reduce Views
There was a conversation about this a few months ago as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287581 (it might be useful to you)
Actually, wasn't this article in the top just a few days ago?

[UPD:]
Here's the link to the prior submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1670824
Actually, a one-off supercar will more than hold its value. Its value should actually increase (especially seeing as the Zonda it's based on is ending its short production run), as has been shown by the values of Ferrari Enzos which have almost doubled since production ended.

So, from an investment standpoint, it's sound.

Plus, it's his money. He (if it is DHH who bought it) can spend it how he likes, and he likes cars, and has the ability to fulfil a desire. You'd rather he buys another house/apartment? Why? Where's the point in that? Why not take a job in a 7/11 and "get-by" at the end of the week? In fact, why not just put all your money in a low-yield bond and sleep in a tent? Why spend money at all? Why earn money at all?

I will assume you don't like cars or see the point in supercars in general? I was lucky enough to drive a Ferrari F355 around a racetrack a few years back and it was one of the best experiences of my life - because I'm a car fan. A part of me loves them, and my desire to own one isn't as a status-symbol, it's for the feeling I get when I clip an apex on the limit of grip on a racetrack.

Also, from my standpoint, someone who'd rather invest their hard earned money in something sensible than something they truly want isn't a particularly interesting person...
The real terms are quality of living, effective purchasing power, etc. This graph encourages a fixed-pie-size mode of thought, in reality the pie is growing larger exponentially, that changes the nature of the discussion substantially.
It's about income equality, which is unaffected by inflation and overall growth.

Whether everyone has improved in absolute terms is a different question, to which I've heard varying answers.
My technical writing professor always told us to try and reduce the complexity of our writing (I think she used Flesh Kincaid). Perhaps more of us white people have had similar teachers, and took their advice to heart.*

* Unlikely, but hey, I might as well bring it up, since we're talking about flaws in the analysis.
This is a hand-wavy argument. If most people disagreed with the banning of prostitution, there'd be popular ballot measures aimed at legalizing it, like there are for cannabis.
"Keeping an eye on NEO is extremely important, given the large number of unknown space rocks that lurk in outer space."

So it's important to keep track of the few that we know of, because of the unknown numbers of ones we don't know of? And what if we do track them? What do we do with this information? It's not like we're going to move the things or move the planet out of the way. Tracking NEOs does nothing for us, with maybe the exception of mapping trajectories for deep space probes. How many of those do we launch in a year? And given that we don't know the full implications such an impact would have, isn't the psychological effect on hysterical populations enough of a reason to heed "ignorance is bliss"?
"They have every right to do that, and I'm glad they did; it's more honest that way. However, nobody has any business feigning outrage that the AG's then questioned their step."

Well, unless you're outraged the AG ever began their campaign to begin with. Then you might feel outrage that they're following it to its conclusion.

I suppose you have a point that claim should have been "AG's campaign stays as stupid as it ever was ..."
I still think that falls under "(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve". The author may not go deeply into it but I am relatively confident the author would agree with the statement that that step itself could turn out to be a challenge; some of the other lettered steps strongly suggest the author believes that, (g) in particular.
Google Instant: How Google will serve 4x the advertisements
This is part of my next blog post - I think e.g. AngelList and YC are two access points....
I'm not sure many people who aren't already as famous as Paul Rand could deliver that Paul Rand ultimatum and still get business, though.
How about this: there's no legal requirement you label your products in any given unit, but if you choose 'inches', they have to be real 'inches'. You can use your own made-up unit, say 'oldnavies', instead -- just don't call them 'inches'.

(Even minarchists usually find laws -- common-law or legislative -- against commercial fraud acceptable.)
Also, even if there was a good reason for that strange database scheme, they could have simply specified "ON UPDATE CASCADE" on their foreign references, and the database would have taken care of the nasty details. That's what databases are good at. (Or did their ORM prevent them from doing so?)

So this is more an example of "How to make simple tasks difficult" rather than "Even simple tasks have their pitfalls".
I'm not sure the ultra-rich have changed at all. There will be mean and nice rich people, money doesn't give the mean folks any more right to be mean but it might justify it in their eyes I guess. There are plenty of demanding and mean folks in the world. They come in all the shapes, sizes, backgrounds, colors and financial means that you can imagine

For instance, I demand the service I pay for and sometimes that makes me feel like I'm being mean but I'm actually just being put in a position where I have to be more forceful to get the service I've paid for. Think apartment services, warranties and stuff like that. Some companies don't like to give the services they promise without a fight when they lose money.

Besides, you don't get to stay rich by handing out all your money. No one wants to pull an MC Hammer.
Probably not, but it's not so certainly legal that it's crazy to challenge craigslist. It is illegal to advertise prostitution in many (most?) states, owing to pandering laws. To the extend that craigslist is a common carrier under the CDA, they for the most part aren't liable for what people who use their service post. The extent to which the CDA applies and does or doesn't shield them is a (somewhat) open question, as I understand it.

It is certainly fair to point out that the law leans significantly towards craigslist's side of the argument.
Inflation and growth are implicitly taken out of the equation. This can lead to a misleading impression. A smaller relative slice of a much, much larger pie can still be a much larger piece of pie in absolute terms. The poor are not getting poorer, the rich are just getting richer faster.

Also, the choice of timeline is very suspicious. Pegging the start of the graphs at the end of the Great Depression / WWII skews the graph, as does omitting the context of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is more about chart-junk supporting a pre-conceived narrative than anything else.
Google is my friend (According to Scribe)
it's funny you bring this up because we were just discussing site performance at work today. what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience.

if google were far better than their competitors at providing what users want (relevant search results they don't have to dig through) they could take 5 seconds and it wouldn't matter. the added value of getting what you want on the first try at the top of the page would keep people using that product.

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.
How would you convince the decision-makers to loosen the purse strings for a TV ad campaign?

I imagine the decision-makers asking "Isn't our coverage in several legit news outlets better than a TV ad campaign?" I'm open to reality being different from expectation. Just wondering what folks have found to be the case by experience... Was this VoIP company covered in the news after the TV ad campaign or before?
So your programers spend days coding at the whiteboards?
And I guess open source projects don't count as getting things done?
More administrative freedom for school principals is orthogonal to vouchers.

I'm all about charter schools in theory, and still am much of the time in practice, but often the way the funding is structured is ridiculous.

Back when I was in local politics, a charter school opened up in our town. For every kid who enrolled, we had to pay the charter school more than we were paying to educate the kid ourselves. AND bus them there, presumably to add insult to injury. So I'm a little suspicious of vouchers and charter schools even though they instinctively sound like good ideas to me.
Interesting as always. For anyone else wondering what 'spidey' was: http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper
"Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence."

I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.
Excellent point. Will have to check with our guy to see if he thought of this. Thanks!
Aside from the title being a bit on the link-baitish side, this isn't too bad a set of suggestions.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/poll-says-yes-t...

In this poll of New York voters 30% supported legalizing it. Clearly the parent is correct, the use. of "no one" in the quote is clearly not true
> Knowing that the stuff you like with fish is called "sashimi" and the rice stuff is called "sushi" is a good indicator that you are asian.

Probably true statistically, but there are plenty of non-Asians like me who know the difference (sashimi is the raw fish, sushi is that which has sushi rice). But I'll never show up on their tests because I don't have an OKCupid profile and neither food is a favorite (they're okay, but definitely not favorites).
"A smaller relative slice of a much, much larger pie can still be a much larger piece of pie in absolute terms. The poor are not getting poorer, the rich are just getting richer faster."

I don't see where the article claims otherwise.

That said, the point is pedantic: if the share of income in a group gets smaller over time, their purchasing power goes down correspondingly as well. The overall size of the pie matters only to economists.

"Also, the choice of timeline is very suspicious. Pegging the start of the graphs at the end of the Great Depression / WWII skews the graph, as does omitting the context of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is more about chart-junk supporting a pre-conceived narrative than anything else."

And not including the civil war skews the graph as well. Or the depression of 1893. You can always find an argument like that to justify not believing something that you choose not to believe. Calling it "chart junk" is just exaggeration.
It is irrelevant and very disturbing for the discussion. So it may not be exactly ageism, but it is definitely inappropriate.
Hackers & Founders impact from StartupDigest
just out of curiosity, are you making a decent profit out of this site?
If you want money, trade time for money. If you want time, don't make that trade. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Incidentally, the median starting salary for students at NYU/Poly (NYU's new engineering school) is only $62k/year. So it looks like teachers are getting paid the same for 9 months of work that engineers get paid for 12 months of work.

http://www.poly.edu/news/2010/07/26/nyu-poly-jumps-5th-place...
I'm not sure I see the connection between vanity sizing and health. I don't think men think to themselves "34 inches is healthy" -- they pretty much only care how they measure in comparison to other men. You can call it 34 or 40, it doesn't impact the question of "am I fatter than my competition?"

Put another way, I don't think men would be likely to go on diets if you immediately renumbered pants sizes, as long as they were still in the same place relative to other men.
I like how calm his spoken voice is versus his written voice. (And then there's a discussion of this dissonance at the end of the interview)
Two points:

One; most of the people in the lower income brackets are just passing through, instead of being stuck there for life. (There are undoubtedly individuals who, for one reason or another, have not moved up over the years, but transforming these exceptions into the rule is rhetoric.)

Two; "What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long." --Thomas Sowell
You have a good point and I don't think craigslist is an unethical company (quite the opposite). That said, I take issue with the notion that open promotion of prostitution should be legal because the Internet makes it easy and traceable to do so. I sum my position up as "craigslist is a valid target for public policy".
Given that "optimization" has a positive connotation in tech fields, I suggest that we rename SEO to PRE: PageRank Exploitation.
This is a fantastic interview. It has given me a new perspective on how a B2B is started. In my mind it was like building a pretty much finished product and then sending some emails around to people who might be interested. But instead it seems much harder to get the first couple of customers and you want to work really closely with those first customers to get credibility, success stories and last but not least to improve and develop your product according to their needs.