skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does seem that those criteria would naturally lead to a team with equal participation being judged as more intelligent.

What appeals to me most about this article is the idea that a team's performance can be measured somewhat objectively. What remains to be seen is whether the team with the highest performance on the artificial tests yielded better performance in real-world scenarios.

If it's possible to put together a good team based on simple tests, it would be beneficial to every organization.
Right, okay... so let's say I walked into my local bank and took out a mortgage, which was then sent to Bear Stearns, which then collapsed. JP Morgan Chase bought those assets, so I guess my mortgage would now be held by JP Morgan Chase...
Crick's letters: Rivalry among DNA sleuths comes alive
Let me recolor that question:

If you had some Lex Luthor powers, and there were 4 billion people hell bent on killing you, and the only way you could stop them was to use your huge robot army and your giant space lasers as a military force against them -- would you do that?

I suppose the fundamental question here is: to what extent can you exercise your actions of self interest if they mean countering similar actions by others?
The federal deficit was $377.9 in 2008. You do the math. I'll post the link again:

http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html#usgs302
Totally offtopic, but m company did the site for Third Way earlier this year and I love the S3 CNAME'ing I added at the last minute before launch: http://content.thirdway.org/publications/335/Third_Way_Idea_...

Always fun to see a project you were involved surface on NPR. ;)
As for "Win32 compatibility, antivirus software, Adobe Reader and Flash" - let's bolt oxcart compatibility onto your car and see how well it handles on the freeway.

So... you agree?
I advocated that the family should resume the role of caretakers

What do you think should happen to those who are unable to reproduce, or who choose not to, or whose children die before them, or whose children are just jerks who won't help their parents out?
Shut down Delicious? Why? It's a goldmine of crowdsourced links valued by someone (assuming bots haven't taken over...)
>His idea was that if people never saw what was in there...

The problem of course is there's no "there" there. Any funds collected today by payroll taxes, and not used for today's benefits, are lent to the general fund and spent. There are no funds being saved for next year's benefits, much less the current tax payers.

Now, it is true that the Social Security system then holds "assets" in exchange for that cash, namely, government bonds. But this is just accounting fiction.

Imagine you are a new parent and wish to save for your child's college tuition. Here are some scenarios:

A) Every pay day you put some money in a jar. When your child goes to college you take the money out of the jar to pay the tuition.

B) Every pay day you spend every dime. When your child is ready to go to college, you scramble to find the funds to pay the tuition.

C) Every pay day you put some money in a jar, then you replace the money in the jar with an IOU, and spend the money. When your child is ready to go to college, you scramble to find the funds to pay the IOUs to pay the tuition.

There is no substantive difference between B and C.
Your rock, nicely done. One suggestion: Maybe base the calculator off of Gross Income? That number is arguably better known by people than taxes paid. Just a thought.
It doesn't seem to me that the author is directly condemning the number of options, of lack of personal choice, but is one of many people who have sought more... pragmatism? unity? in some of the larger OSS environments.

If this was a conventional business, Microsoft for example, I would probably agree that more cooperation and tech sharing between the Xbox and Live divisions would be a good thing. Increase communication, reduce redundancies, all that good business stuff.

For some open source projects, like Gnome, I get the feeling the shaman is often strong than the salesman. Corporate help aside, the personal/emotional attachment of OSS contributors drives involvement in ways a big number next to market share percentage can't. But even steadfast contributors would like to see the product used, so Gnome and others aren't off the hook completely.

Should Gnome be more cooperative with 3rd party apps? Maybe. Personally, I'm thankful for the amount of quality OSS that let's a company, like Canonical, build on the shoulders of giants and offer a system better tailored for end users. That's where the request for cooperation is more realistic.

Still...

I haven't used Linux IM clients in a while but the Pidgin debacle made me wince a little.
He implements call/cc with Python's exceptions. Pretty clever.
Pandaboard: OMAP4 development board for hacking, dual-core Cortex A9
Great.

I think the key question is whether Microsoft will agree to support it in Internet Explorer. They have a competing format, JPEG XR. It has been standardized. Microsoft's patents on it are royalty free under their Community Promise. It is already implemented in Windows 7 and IE9 and several third-party applications on Windows. They distribute source code that can work with the format on several platforms, but that code is incompatible with GPL and similar licenses (BSD-like licenses are fine.) An independent implementation of the standard that is compatible with the GPL could be developed without legal problems though.
I agree that if it worked, it would be useful.
that would be a major buzzkill. we have it pretty good here.
Emacs doesn't hang either, nor does eclipse, nor java apps I use at work.

I admit, I've never used iTunes, I never installed adobe, and I access VM's from the terminal. Maybe the key is to avoid windows/OSX?
I like the first option the most :)

How long do you think Carol Bartz has until she gets the boot? She's only been there less than 2 years, but is that enough time to salvage Yahoo? I'll take a risk and wager that she only has 9 more months before she seeks retirement on that island you alluded to.
HP board's selection of new CEO raises new doubts
Your university has more resources than you need to do whatever you want to. Identify these and talk your way in. Want to develop something that must be microfabricated? Figure out who runs the cleanroom and contact them. Want to do synthetic biology? Work for a relevant professor and earn your way up to proposing your own projects. Use a teaching lab while there's no class. Figure out who runs the university surplus and grab old oscilloscopes and high-CO2 incubators when they're thrown away. Get the department behind you in order to open doors -- figure out where you want to spend your summers and get there, beating out the unknowns not coming from a research institution. You can do all this while spending the time on your classes required to get by as an average student. When you graduate you might not be able to get a job at McKinsey or Google (well, that's not even true: they like to hear what you spent your four years doing other than partying), but then again, your diploma alone doesn't automagically make you successful in having changed the world regardless of how good your GPA is.

Dropping out makes sense when you read the above and go, "wait, I don't need anything like that": largely internet and software.
> It would be unfair, on the other hand, to run a very different codec after JPEG

Exactly. I found Google’s “study” pretty sketchy, given the lack of concrete detail about this. http://code.google.com/speed/webp/docs/c_study.html

Here’s some of what I wrote in an email to a friend:

Since they’re dealing with an arbitrary collection of already encoded images, there are likely e.g. artifacts along JPEG block boundaries that take up extra space in JPEG 2000. While they have a big sample size, they don’t compare the metric used (PSNR) with noticeable quality degradation.

There's a graph of size distribution (which would be a lot more readable if they binned some of the sizes and showed a histogram instead of a sea of overlapping red plus signs), but then compression percentages aren't in any way related to those various sizes: were big images easier to compress better than JPG/JP2? Small images? Looking at the size distribution, a large percentage of these images are absolutely tiny, the kinds of images that as far as I know JPEG 2000 was never intended to be used for. The overhead of the data storage container ends up dominating the size of the image for very tiny images – I don’t know anything about the relative overhead of JPG/JP2/etc. images, but it would be good to include that in any discussion.

It seems to me like the WebP images have their color profiles stripped. Is that an inherent part of WebP? If so, I hope Google doesn’t encourage people dealing with photographs to adopt it in large numbers. Browsers are just finally getting to the point where proper color management of images is expected; no need to regress there.
But did you write it using the Pomodoro technique?
Kill Yahoo Messenger (there are more bots than users there).
Kind of an unrelated question. But the phrase without the text inside the parentheses would be "How to write a Interpreter". Wouldn't "An" be a better choice?

In this case, what is the best option? to be faithful to the original sentence, or to stick to what sounds best with the parentheses inserted?
The aliens are going to get their a@@@@ kicked... in Afghanistan.
Facebook beat Gmail? Every time I log into Facebook I see spam on the right side of it.
So, through this process, your early access is restricted to sites your friends like?
Thankfully, it appears that this bill has been delayed until after midterm elections. Hopefully that's enough time to talk some sense into our representatives.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/victory-internet-censor...
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Goodwin Procter, but for what it's worth, they are a large and well-respected law firm (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwin_Procter)

Of course, as with anything like this, nothing you read online is going to be a complete substitute for a lawyer. But brushing up on the requirements beforehand will at least make your eventual lawyer conversations more productive, because you can just cut to the chase.
I believe this has already been posted to HN several times.
It also appears some of the word links are broken. ie oeuvre
Agreed on all counts. That said, if you're a tech startup in the US, you almost certainly want to be incorporating in Delaware regardless.
Why Users Read Text Easier With Larger Leading Sizes
"The Most Secure..."

Challenge, accepted.
There is the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org/). I haven't used it much, but it feels a lot like the original Yahoo.
I thought for sure that this was going to be an article about celebrities and their children.
Like others, I use Facebook for photos I want to share with friends and Flickr as a portfolio. Having said that, I think Facebook has a much better interface (why does Flickr still insist my photos need a title?) and having this option is good.

It would be nice to see Facebook improve the quality of standard photos too. They're generally noisy as hell and have rubbish compression artifacts. Compare Facebook: http://bit.ly/bT1bjA and Flickr: http://bit.ly/c0a0FO
Better not tell the Chinese that U.S. treasury bonds are just an accounting fiction.
If I like something, I'm sure I'll know 3 people who will likely like the same thing.
Metapost programming language: Examples
I would not say the length of the program, but the number of possible states (which may not be a computable function, someone correct me, is this Kolmogorov complexity?) which determines simplicity.
As I am always forced bring up in English grammar threads, without a formal (decidable) grammar or an agreed-upon body of work to signify "common usage," there is no formal way to decide whether any statement is grammatical English.
Meaningless: The Rise & Fall of the Chaos Report Figures
I’d try to follow the rule that a sentence should always work without the parenthesis (counting the preceding space as part of the parenthesis). So I would do “an”.

A similar problem comes up with capitalization in sentences beginning with a parenthesis. For example, in this:

(Luckily) Some are already there.

Capitalizing “Some” looks weird, even granted it’s a clumsy construction. But I think it’s probably best to do it that way.
I tried. :)
Maybe you need a more structural employment to balance the need to pay your bills?

After all you can't post this sort of thing every day, and if the first day is successful you will still have the same problem on the next.
Ohhhhh, we're talking about balancing the 2008 budget.. Well that doesn't make any sense, but I'm looking forward to your answers to my questions above on the mechanics of how that would work.

(EDIT in reply: Yeah, that's fine, and I went with it, but talking about percentages of a 380 billion dollar deficit in the context of current events is just plain silly.)
Pshh. The only stars I look up to are light years away from us.
HP Stock Tanks After It Hires No-Name CEO
Technically, Twitter offers a “wrapper,” not a shortener. That’s because in some cases, it might actually make a URL slightly longer (such as if you try to shorten an already short domain name, like cnn.com)

Obviously true of all of them...
No, actually here is what probably happened.

Bear Stearns created a small shell company with a detailed and interesting charter. They loaned this company a large sum of money, in return for a set of bonds. The company used that money to purchase the loans from Bear Stearns. At this point Bear Stearns owns bonds whose value is approximately that of the loans. (Actually slightly more because the bonds are structured to better meet investor's needs.) They then turned around and sold the bonds to investors.

One of those investors (in theory it doesn't have to happen this way, but in practice it does) gets both the most risky piece of the investment, and a contract to run the company by rules specified in the company charter. That investor is called the servicer, and they are responsible for the day to day activities of the company. Which mostly consist of collecting loan payments, paying out the bonds, and making detailed records available to any properly qualified investor. Once the last loan is gone, the company has no assets and goes away.

Your loan is now owned by the shell company (which has no employees and exists only to shovel income from loans and send them out again as bonds), which is run by the servicer. JP Morgan Chase did not purchase any connection to this company when they bought Bear Stearns unless Bear Stearns chose to keep some of the bonds. (They did keep some from many deals, and purchased some from deals they didn't do, so they may be an investor.) Control is with the servicer. However it should be noted that the servicer's hands are tied by the charter, and there is very little flexibility in how they can choose to run things.

Also note that once the deal goes bad, the servicer's incentive is to run the deal in whatever way maximizes the servicing fees they get. This has proven to result in decisions that are counter to the interests of both investors and people who owe the loans. For instance renegotiating a lower loan that people can actually pay generates less in servicing fees than taking a loan through bankruptcy court. Therefore the servicer often prefers driving loans into bankruptcy even though that is worse for everyone else.

Now do you see why this is a mess?
Thanks. I also thought so myself, though it would look and maybe sound awkward with the parentheses, the original phrase should have precedence.

PS. I just read my comment noticed I may have come off as a Grammar Nazi or something like that. It was an honest interest on the rules of composing sentences with parentheses (which I don't know myself).
> "cost to society" would be more directly attributed to the increased time of travel

That's probably what he meant but it's not necessarily how you have to read the quote in the parent comment. I'm still not convinced that a speed limit of 50 would by a bad thing but maybe that's a cultural thing. My memories of my economics class are fading so I cannot counter your argument about the stability of the increase.
Wait—hotels have clocks with Apple dock connectors?
I think in this case it's probably best as is...reading the title as 'Lisp syntax' before English.
sometimes "we're x for y" is an easy summary. sometimes it's a thought process.

the first is ok, the second is usually bad.

i see a lot of startups like this. "we're foursquare for lipstick! women's cosmetics is a $47 billion industry, if we could get just 1% of the market we'd be huge. we're two stanford MBAs, our development is outsourced, and we have no actual women on our team."
What do you think should happen to those who are unable to reproduce, or who choose not to, or whose children die before them, or whose children are just jerks who won't help their parents out?

So this is saying that we should need a government to help out all these old people that do not have anybody to help them.

That's nice, but government aid have crowding out effect on mutual aid societies and the like, and that's assuming that government aid are actually better than family based, charity based, mutual aid societies and other voluntary assistance.

Beside, the increasing wealth of society and technological development should eventually help those old folks out. Charity would eventually be able to buy more food and shelter per dollars.

Look, my suggestion isn't perfect and won't cover all the case scenario. But government is a tradeoff. You might be paying it through taxes, increased bureaucracy, less innovations amongst charity, etc.

All things being equal, I think I consider a voluntary effort to support the old people to be more ethical than coercing people to support these people.
New Twitter Is About 50 Percent Rolled Out. Where’s The Facebook-Style Backlash?
But is our Sun really a single? Consider the hypothesized 'Nemesis':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28star%29
I know. Dmoz is better than Yahoo Directory, but they are both far worse than Yahoo Directory in its heyday.
I guess you've never met David Hasselhoff then. :-)

(I met him once. He's 6'4". I had to look up.)
I doubt they can undo the damage they have done with IE6-8. If someone tried to pitch IE9 to me I'd laugh in their face, no matter how standards-compliant it might be nowadays.

First they make our lives miserable for 10 years straight and now they turn around and expect us to trust them again?

Ain't gonna happen.
We applied with PagerDuty twice (first time rejected at the application stage, second time successful). The other two times were different ideas (rejected at the interview stage).

I'm actually curious now if we set the record for most rejections prior to an acceptance.
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Even if all the vendors in a position to do so put in support for WebP today, it would be pretty much a decade before it got any serious use. Most Cameras take pictures as jpegs, and re-encoding jpegs in another lossy format is a losing proposition.

So anything released today is of necessity in it for the long haul. That said, maybe releasing a spec today from one player isn't the way to go. Google should be talking with Microsoft, Apple, and their hardware partners to look at next-generation technology they can put out, unencumbered by any patents and figure out a 3-year timetable after which they will have the format ready for use in cameras and phones. At the hardware level where the data is encoded off the CCD. Partnering with Flickr, Facebook, etc. they could make sure that these phones and cameras with next-gen encoders work out of the box, on the web.
hahah.

I look up to Tom Brady. 199th pick that was 'too skinny' but still won 3 super bowls and married a victoria's secret model.
Yehuda Katz on bundler workflows
2010 Ig Nobels announced
The prettiness of the solution is bounded on top by the prettiness of the problem. The problems we usually solve aren't very pretty.

Granted, some of that ugliness is of our own creation... but not all of it by any means.
Ask HN: When should you start a start-up?
Perhaps this question is too general, but when should someone start a start-up? When you see a need? Or have a "million-dollar idea"? When you're young/old? Before/during/after college? When you're poor/rich? Etc.
wow. never knew about this. so many mysteries still remain...

I bet you other sentient civilizations have 'iPhones' that can detect star systems like we detect wi-fi signals. haha
The last 4 or 5 I've been in certainly did. These were in and around Seattle, Portland, and Vegas.
Persistence! I'm impressed.
Well obviously not because they would prefer they be proprietary. But if you put them right next to each other, you can have your magically minimal design and still let your users get by when they're short a cord.
I know we're probably going to see a lot of "Wha? Microsoft are a bunch of hypocrites!" in this thread and I urge everyone to just think of how great things would be going forward if we can see some changes like this.

We can't change the past, but we can sure as hell change the future. Glad to see MS trying to lend a hand.
Ruby's Bundler: As Simple as What You Did Before
glad to see this up here.

this is a pretty standard exercise in university programming language theory courses. last year when i took the course, we had to write an oCaml interpreter in oCaml, and had about a week to do it (complete with environments, bindings, expressions, custom operators, higher-order functions, etc...). it was challenging, but paid off as far as contributing to my understanding about how a) functional languages work and b) how interpreters work. an interesting follow up would be to write a compiler for the language as well.

if writing an interpreter is something you've never done before then this is, by all means, a worthwhile activity. it would have been nice had it been structured as a series of descriptions and exercises rather than with the answers posted along with it. so easy to look :)
IE Evangelist Job at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, US | LinkedIn
Thank God for Emacs ;-)
What 'Waiting for Superman' gets wrong about education reform
I'd cut everything that isn't profitable. Cut the employee base to the very, very minimum. Return as much as possible to the shareholders. Start paying a dividend.
Maybe a list of common errors in English usage would be more useful if it were a manageable list. How about the 20 most common errors in usage. I'd bet (but surely there are some studies on this) that the following would appear near or close to the top of the list:

it's for its; there for their; alright for all right; 'the reason is because', for 'the reason is that'; dangling modifiers; missing or unclear pronominal antecedents; and subject/verb agreement.
I 100% agree to what jawngee describes--some HN users have zero sense of humor and come off as condescending, elitist, and self-righteous. In my opinion having a sense of humor is one of the best qualities someone can have and the lack of it is often one of the worst qualities a person can have. Learn to laugh, you'll live longer.
Both of those compressed versions have (different kinds of) unacceptable artifacts, IMO. It'd be interesting to see comparisons at a few other levels of compression.
When you see a need. The rest is just noise.
I'm surprised this submission doesn't have more upvotes.

Possibly because we went through it yesterday, as part of EFF's campaign:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737715
Thank you for your recommendation on this documentary. I watched it just now and it is powerful.

Many sincere thanks!

-Igor