skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this, like most of the other blog posts by the OK Cupid team, pretty genius. I am glad the people who sit on top of this goldmine of social information have a good sense of humor.

It would be cool to see a statistician guest post. The OK Cupid people are great at coming up with ideas for analysis, but I'd love to see some solid stats behind some of their analyses.
The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to believe in shared offices or small, isolated cube farms. Noise is minimized and there are people around for ease of communication.
Articles about education too often end with platitudes about how we need real debate to make changes occur. I'd argue we need action... preferably from the private sector.

Judging by the lack of comments on this article so far, not many people here follow this issue. The DC public schools are a microcosm of the whole ed reform movement, and an example of how difficult it can be to navigate the politics of reforming a corrupt system.

Rhee has done a lot to improve the efficiency of the district (in terms of getting books and supplies where needed, and using school resources wisely), but at the end of the day, her approach to reform (command and control vs. consensus building) is what will likely end her tenure early.

Right now, the mayor who backed her (Fenty) is in a tight race with a candidate who is exploiting people's distrust in a government that, for better or worse, acts based on what it believes is right for the people, not what the people believe is right for them.

Or, in the tl;dr edition:

When working within the confines of politics, you can get short bursts of successful but temporary reform, or you can be safe politically while accomplishing very little. There's gotta be another way.
I'm actually on Dan's newsletter too and though he seems to be doing quite good, I personally find his domains are overpriced for the quality. It feels to me like he is targeting the domainer market with the quality, but at prices that exclude bulk buyers like them.

I agree with your observation and realize I probably worded my post wrong. The idea is not for you to periodically watch the lists waiting for your perfect domain. That won't work. It is more to just casually browse it, and if one just screams at you, you get it at a reasonable price (< $50) or even at reg fee.

And about the quality of the names on my list, everything is relative. I try to focus more on a niche (startup/service/product/blog names) even though I have quite a few good names available in other markets too. If you are looking for something outside of what I'm listing, of course quality seems a little lower. Five names on my little sampler got registered in a few hours so I believe there is some sort of interest.

In my opinion, most domain name related problems truly cannot be solved with a programming approach. One that can, however, is extracting gems out of dropped and available domains. I'm not saying it's easy, but I plan on working on it!
dislike: target != new

like: everything else :)
Yeah Sox!!

I'm taking this as scientific evidence that liking the Red Sox makes people more attractive.
Confirmed. Thanks for the report!
I worked on Wall St (for a large Commodity-trading company).

Only a small percentage of the IT people worked on those. Mostly we built and maintained systems to track and report on trades, keep track of credit, figure out profit/loss on books, make sure traders didn't bet the company on risky trades, scrape numbers off of websites and put them in a db. We also pulled a lot of numbers into spreadsheets so analysts could make charts to email out to the traders.

It was much as the GP says... long desks, lots of noise and distractions, poor technology base (they upgraded to WinXP with IE6 in 2009). On the plus side, the pay was good (high 5, low 6 figures), multiple monitors, lots of snacks and drinks in the kitchen, catered lunch, good healthcare...
How reliable is usaspending.gov? The $1,361,672,559,288 difference
Just few spacebar and enter wrote this sentence: "What the hel* is this guy on their team and their fans are the best in the world of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books."
Reddit Founders Reunite at Hipmunk (YC S10)
Demonstrating how the BP oil spill was plugged
A possible disaster scenario: connection issues with the SMTP server are causing the initial exception, resulting in webserver connections that are open for excessively long periods of time (unless you're sending the emails asynchronously), since the process is blocked first on the failed SMTP connection, then again on the exception email attempt (and you're still not getting any notification that something is broken, unless you're doing some other kind of monitoring!)
> Can you name a single good or service [1] which fewer people today have than in my parent's generation?

Fresh food. Fresh hamburger was less than $1 per pound when I was a kid in the late 70's/early 80's. It's $5 per pound now. A five pound bag of onions used to be $1, now it's $6.

Home ownership is also increasingly out of reach for younger people. In my suburb, the number of homes affordable on 80% of the median income fell from 70% to 40% in the last ten years. In some neighboring suburbs, it's below 25%.
Reminds me of the heavy metal umlaut video. Props to who ever can find it.
I can't, sorry, Flash doesn't support my OS so I can't see it.
TSA Sows Fear of Photographers
Ironically, his productivity bookmarks have supplied me with so much reading material that it's unlikely I'll get anything done today.
Ask HN: How do you forward traffic based on country of origin?
We are a small, but successful e-commerce site and we have distributors now in 5 different regions. The regions are all country specific and it is very important for our relationships with our distributors that traffic in one country gets redirected to the right country website.

Basically, want we want is if a user is coming from Canada, they go to our .ca domain. If they are in the UK or Western Europe they go to a .co.uk domain, and all customers in Latin America go to .com.br domain. All other traffic needs to just go to the .com domain.

We are on a pretty locked down shopping cart system and we need to preserve our SEO standings for the .com domain.

What I'm looking for is perhaps a plugin or applet that when a user goes to the .com domain if they are in one of the other regions they are redirected or a pop appears that tells them which site to go to.

Anything boilerplate out there that will do this for us? Any other solutions? Also, if they search our brand name and are in Canada, will the .ca domain be automatically at the top? Or will the .com domain, which has tons of links and content on it, always supersede the weaker country specific domains?
It's hard to say since an A/B experiment would only be possible if I owned the "perfect" domain and could test it against a less perfect one.
No, I apologize. I didn't mean to sound like I was attacking you or suggest that you supported it. It just seemed like a good place to interject. It's such a transparent move on Digg's part.
OAuth and the Twitter API
He's correct, this "$10 a gram" question doesn't make much sense. Fortunately, I've studied this topic and can share some knowledge.

There are basically two qualities of marijuana on the market in the US: low grade Mexican imports, and high grade domestic/canadian. You could add a third, a 'midgrade', which would be really good mexican or low grade canadian (mass imported BC bud, aka 'beesters'). (Interestingly, in the UK and Europe, the Mexican equivalent is 'African').

The Mexican stuff sells for $200-$1200 a lb, depending on your proximity to the border. For instance, it might be $250 a lb in Las Cruces, NM, $500 in Albuquerque, and $600 in Denver. This equates to a price of $25-80 an ounce retail varying similarly by location. It is not very fresh, may be chemically adulterated (splashed with gasoline to hide the smell, for instance), is compressed into bricks. Your average teenager or blue collar worker smokes this. . Potency by weight is probably 2-6% active cannabinoids. Smell ranges from hay-like, to mildy sweet and herbal, to old and musty. It's the Budweiser of pot.

The other type is the high grade, aka 'kind bud', 'headdies', 'nugs', or so on. This is typically produced in hydroponic farms in the US, from seeds of Californian or Dutch varieties that have been the result of intensive breeding for quality. As such, it is much more fresh and potent. Sometimes the Canadian material is compressed a bit, but never into 'bricks' like the Mexican. Potency by weight is probably 5-25% active cannabinoids. This is preferred by connoisseur smokers, upscale customers, people concerned about their health and medical patients. That's the type you'll find at the medical dispensaries in California or Colorado, for instance - locally grown, high quality. Smell is fresh and herbal, showing a wide range of floral scents typical to the plant. A beer comparison would be a tasty craft brew from a brew pub or a regional microbrew. I guess the Canadian stuff would be the equivalent of Sam Adams. The prices range from $250 to $450 an ounce, showing little regional variation. My friend has a license to produce for dispensaries in Colorado, and he said the prices there are $175 to $350 an ounce, similar to the old prices on the black market. The price for this type is usually, as noted, $20-25 a gram. More typical is a 1/8 ounce (3.5 g) for $50-60, and a quarter ounce for $80-100. So, it actually works out to about $14 a gram.

And, there HAS been inflation in the price of this in the past 20 years, invalidating this article's viewpoint, but it goes in spurts. The price for a quarter ounce of this higher quality type was about $60-80 in the early 90s, and then became $80-100 in the later half of the decade. It's stayed remarkably stable at that price, and $350-400 an ounce, since then.
I wonder whether word recognition works differently for different languages.

E.g. more phonetic writing systems could tend to encourage looking at letters instead of the whole word. Or, do Chinese people read at the level of strokes or at the level of symbols or some other level?
That's not been my experience, it's like in bugzilla but your oscillating between "waiting on customer" and "waiting on redhat" and the people your talking to don't really understand the problems and so have to ask someone else everytime.
You don't have to limit your leanring to just your undergraduate coursework.

If you are passionate about something and want to get in depth exposure, there is nothing stopping you from

1) reading up all the books you can get hands on on that subject,

2) develop theories and do all the analysis you can do on that subject,

3) meeting/interacting with as many experts on that subject as possible.

If you love it, go for it.

(but yeah, do graduate, that degree paper can carry a lot of weight, especially in getting the first job)
As a back-up plan I've been collecting variations of my "perfect" domain at standard registration rates.

The cost is approaching $10k now but I don't know what the final value might be. There is less than a day left for the auction.
One thing which is surprising with bug tracking is how crappy most of the products are, especially the open source ones. This strikes me as odd a priori since open source is generally pretty good at core programming tools - and bug tracking certainly fits that category.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665602

Much discussion there already.
Thanks! Strange the link didn't work, if I click it works here.
The problem with arguments like this is it makes me feel like a freak for being a woman in computer science. Thanks.
As usual before noon, nothing but a couple cups of black coffee.
Bill Moyers Rewind: Isaac Asimov World of Ideas
Here's a list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives#Uni...

Obviously, this is not comprehensive.
Losing Fat & Gaining Muscle - The Problem
The wire has to come in somewhere, right? Unless we implement Tesla's ideas of wireless power transmission!
At GitHub we use conference tables that everyone sits around, along with a couple of couches if you wanna chill out somewhere else. We spent our first two years working out of coffee shops, so we replicated that environment without all of the additional noise and distractions.

If there's something that truly requires uninterruptible concentration, you just stay home and work there, or put in your noise-canceling headphones and zone everyone else out at the office.

When you work with people you consider friends, the last thing you want to do is sit in an office. For that reason alone, I'm not convinced offices make people more productive. I'd rather keep people happy and the productivity will follow.
Sorry, I just did not want to sound like i am using my original question to promote the site. But you are write, here is the link

http://www.spotli.com

And just to let you know that posting the site on sites like Twitter, FB, etc.. only gets you a few users the first day the post is up and then everything dies out. No disrespect, but this does not seem like a strategy to popularity.
Just interviewed there last week for a PM position.. put in a good word for a fellow HNer!
> Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents?

Could you expand on this? What kind of "workflows" are you building? I can understand programming Excel, but how do you program Word and what do you use it for?
Nice, simple idea. Though the real problem is finding companies that are actually similar to you in all of these areas. I imagine the most unrealistic part is thinking that your teams will actually be similar (taking into account your respective networks, domain expertise, etc).
Peopleware strongly advocates for private offices.
The idea is interesting indeed - and easily doable as well: Entry.all gives you all the links on the front page, you'd just have fetch the main page between regular intervals of time (say, once every hour) and then save the entry information to a database.

Could you elaborate on this? If you can provide better "specifications" I'll implement this and add it to the library.
From the court filing:

Despite being paid millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options in exchange for Hurd's agreements to protect HP's trade secrets and confidential informationfollowing his departure from his positions at HP as Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, and President, HP alleges that Hurd has put HP's most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril.

... and

In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP's trade secrets and confidential information to others.

... and

He was responsible for creating a plan to compete against HP competitors, including Oracle.

... and

And independent analyst stated that Hurd will know "which Sun accounts were being most heavily mined and which HP accounts are the most vulnerable in the large enterprise space".

... and several others. Original complaints here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61873/HP%20Complaint%20w%20exhibits....
I wrote a (quite frankly dull and rambly) blog post about my upbringing to try to figure out why it made me an engineer, and it's pretty much the same. I was encouraged to tinker and nothing was ever discouraged. The only discouragement was lack of knowledge from careers and university advisors at school who didn't even tell me computer science was an option (for uni or a career).

I think that kind of upbringing helps, heck it's crucial. However, a lot of social signals can easily curtail it - peer pressure for not being girly and being called names etc (never happened to me, but I know others it did happen to).
No. Startup founders will adapt. It's what they do.
There are two ways to be rich: Own a lot, or spend a lot.

DHH may very well have spent a large share of his networth.
This would make a great topic for blogs/books/whatever. "How to dig yourself out of a pile of shit."
Inconvenient truths (about the world we live in)

It's because any time someone uses this expression, they are trying to convince everyone that we should adopt their harebrained flat tax strategy, or something. When someone has evidence to assert their beliefs, everyone listens. When someone starts spouting garbage about the "inconvenient truth" about how the rich are being oppressed by a 20% tax rate... well, then everyone tunes out.
I assume you mean as more states decriminalize "medical" marijuana...right? I haven't heard of any that have decriminalized it.
Thanks! You're right those links need a little polishing.
Wow, thanks for all the links! :) I'll put some time aside later this week to watch up on them.

--------------------

When I lost around 100 pounds years ago, I did it on a mountain dew and rice cake diet (not recommended). That introduced calorie restriction, and it worked. After losing weight, it eventually motivated me to find and eventually adopt a diet that was long-term sustainable.

Hopefully the path my father takes is similar. Step #1 isn't always perfect, but it's much easier to take a single step than it is to try and run up a flight of stairs.

A former roommate of mine did the same. He went on an all fruit and vegetable diet, going from around 280 pounds down to about 170. That "beginning" diet wasn't sustainable, but it helped him lose weight through calorie restriction. Now he's a extremely athletic cyclist, and eats a very healthy well-balanced diet. Step #1 wasn't necessarily perfect, but it eventually got him on the right track.

--------------------

A lot of the hard research on refined sugar appears to just be coming into light. It'll likely take several more years/decades before its effects are truly understood. Human nutrition in general is AMAZINGLY complex, as there are so many variables interacting with one another.

I find it's best to question anything anyone says on the internet regarding nutrition. Ensure they cite sources, state their educational background, etc... Even someone who's a Doctor doesn't always know a lot about nutrition. Typically your best sources are people with PHD's in nutrition, active in the field.

Almost everyone on the internet doesn't fall into that category. So when you end up with is a lot of "snake oil" advice mixed in with the good. It's a tough problem that needs a solution: "Verification of the accuracy of online information." It extends well beyond nutrition and fitness. The solver of that problem has the potential to be larger than even Google. :)
The permanent pivot (and other pivot problems)
Thanks! Maybe the following could be added to HN orange nav following 'submit' link:

| <a href="http://searchyc.com/">search</a>
You pay yourself a reasonable living salary, based on location and living expenses. It usually has to be approved by the board, but so long as it's reasonable, you should be OK. The idea is that you're not getting rich off your salary, you should be focusing on growing the company to get rich off your ownership stake. At the same time, you shouldn't be starving, because that will cause you to spend more time focusing on your personal finances than working on the company.
I agree. The rot in our society started with the Reagan Era. 2008 didn't make it suddenly appear; it just brought it back to the surface. The OP has a just grievance, but she's comparing the world she faces to the Mad Men era of social mobility, when her parents were (probably) children.
Google: We're already fast.. fast is about to get faster
Usually less than everyone else as long as they are able to do a little more than subsist. They are taking equity. When other people who are hired on board find out founders are paid less than everyone else, it usually quells any negative attitude towards management
A small correction: "kine bud", not "kind bud".
Not free after a certain time is "not free". It's kind of the worse of both. Free trial feels like scam trick "get them hooked, then when, their dependent rape their wallet." What if I'm not done evaluating when free trial is up? I have to think hard about when to start free trial to make optium use of it's duration. So, I'm likely never to start it and certainly not "right now" when my interest is highest.

Freemium is vastly "superior". Seems fair and of real value. Use this, if you use it so much it costs us "real" money will want to charge you. Use this, if it's all you need awesome, maybe you're just a hobbyist or messing around. But if you're making money and could use these extra features, hey share some of your cash with us.
FWIW, my experience has been different (I work at a proprietary HFT firm in Chicago).

-Open office space (no one short of C-level gets an office). We all work together in a large open space to collaborate better. We have reasonable sized desks though, with 4-8 monitors each

-No dress code (I'm wearing jeans and t-shirt, and shorts/sandals/t-shirt isn't uncommon).

-A lot of C++ and Java. But more Python, Haskell, and Erlang every day. If you can prove your solution is better (mostly faster), we'll use it. It is true that some of the people writing code are physicists/mathematicians, and don't get some SE best-practices. But they're pretty damn smart and will learn if you teach them.

-Best hours I've ever worked (<50 hrs/week). Home by 5PM most days.

-You have access to any tech you need. If there's an expensive piece of hardware or library that will help, it's no problem.

-Catered meals, smart team-mates, good pay.

Incidentally, we're hiring too (Allston Trading).
Home ownership is currently 67.8%. In 1975 it was 64.6%, which means that home ownership is (slightly) more accessible to people today than in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_Sta...

The average home is also 60% bigger.

http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope...

Obviously, these statistics are averaged over the entire country. Some specific regions will behave differently, of course (like your suburb and my hometown).

As for the cost of hamburger, your dollar figure comparisons are irrelevant. I never disputed that green pieces of paper are worth less now than in 1970. However, on average wages in 1975, people spent 13.8% of their income on food. Today they only spend 9.6% and they eat out more.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data...
It's all the truth we've got.
They're talking about the top fifty such phrases. It seems unlikely that there would be a demographic group that is proportionately less likely to use any arbitrary phrase. The only possibility is for a group's phrase usage to be statistically indistinguishable from the average.

Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check: read some of the phrases to someone, and ask that person which group they think the phrases came from. I bet people will guess with high enough accuracy to establish that it's nonrandom.
Linux Mint Debian (201009) released
There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.
I've certainly found them useful and interesting.
Pulse is an RSS Reader as re-imagined through design goggles. What other mundane apps deserve the same treatment?
$400K...you are the CEO...you gotta get paid like one.

In reality it's how much you can afford. If you don't need money..pay yourself $1. If you need $15K to live on...pay yourself $15K.

At least until the company is profitable.

Once it's significantly profitable, you can afford to pay yourself more.