skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very well put! What keeps amazing me about US politics is that (as in other places) there is a small number, n, of top issues, e.g. gay marriage, abortion, off-shoring work, gun control. I think n~10. Assuming the simplistic approach that your stance on of these issues are binary valued, there are 2^n ~ 1000 different positions available. Since these are highly correlated, the real value is much lower than this, though. The thing is: we are trying to cram all those different stances into two parties! Your vote is in essence binary valued.

Why should I be shoehorned? I am a gnostic, against excessive off-shoring, pro-choice, against gun banning and so on. It's a curious mix. Yet, I have to choose between two packages.
Twitter Client Hootsuite gets an Open Challenger
Ask PG: Timestamps on posts and comments?
I often bookmark the HN thread itself for an article (as I am sure many others do) because of the information content in the comments.

When I go back to a post that was made sometime ago, sometimes I feel it may be helpful to know the specific date it was posted, rather than just "n days ago".

I am sure this has been considered before and discussed, but what is the reason for one format over another?
Strong braking normally == hazard lights + brake lights on new cars.

It's quicker to recognise than a graded red brake light.
The problem is that the type of protection you would typically use for this situation are spring loaded camming devices. These consist of logarithmic spirals that expand when they are pulled. If you fall on one of those in a flake, you are essentially taking a car jack to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-loaded_camming_device
Libertarian doesn't automatically mean Republican, though. Again, speaking anecdotally, I know of a fair number of libertarians who switched party affiliations when the Patriot Act was passed, and the Bush Administration started its warrantless wiretapping program (a program that the Obama administration has sadly continued).
Fascinating. Knowing Jobs' penchant for secrecy, the Steven P. Jobs Foundation could well exist today, only as a collection of charitable organizations under various names.
The US Mint buys brass slugs an turns them into US dollars -- I bet there is a pretty high margin in that business so I don't think they are taking any loss. More like the US taxpayer is taking the loss.
We can debate whether Keynesianism is actually stupid elsewhere. Maybe it's the worst possible policy.

But stupid or smart Keynesianism is not certainly "pro-stupidity" economics in the sense that's obvious aiming to be smart. It's endorsed by lots of apparently smart economists, it uses coherent mathematical models etc.

You might argue that the positions of Glen Beck or George Bush would be smarter to adopt than those of Lawrence Summers. Whatever. You could hardly argue that these folks took a "pro-science" approach in defending their positions.
I don't see why the premise that "There should be as many scientists roughly in each party" is pre-supposed to be true. It's not self-evident at all.
Ask HN: How do you Deal with Multiple Identities?
Today when cementing some things with my new company, I'd realized I've amassed quite a few Google Accounts -- personal, my company, and someone I consult(ed) for. There's also the current day job's whole communications suite and everything that comes with it.

I'm not so concerned with dealing with the amount of incoming signal or noise, but what I'm curious about is have people who have defined who is the "work me", "personal me", or "work me #4"? Or have you done what I've done so far and kept it to a single silo?
It's no euphemism when they went on and added that the average age is 25.
Software is a logical construction. It is a structure of parts that have determinate behaviours, put together to serve a particular purpose. It realises intent by assembling objective materials. When you build software you are building a machine. This is pretty much nothing like writing a book.

The only rationale you give is to imply both activities are telling something what to do. But does this stand up? When you write a book, are you 'telling' the book 'what to do'? No. Or maybe telling the person reading it what to do? In which case, are you expecting them to behave exactly according to your 'instructions'? No, not really.

Literature and software are two very different things.
Pakistani media publish fake WikiLeaks cables attacking India
Agreed. Religion is the differentiator, not political ideology. You can also have rational disagreements about whether global warming is a serious threat.
Maybe they should have noted the average attractiveness and current relationship status of the staff as well?
The iOS and Android App Economies
A good lawyer can twist almost anything into an illegal reason.
Because the default tends to be to say nothing, frequently if you just ask directly for feedback may get it. Its a bit of a back door to the policy.

When I worked for "MegaCorp" we didn't give any feedback voluntarily but if a candidate asked me directly I would let them know. I frequently hired junior engineers* and felt almost a responsibility to give them some input, particularly if their issue was technical. If they were just an ass, I'd likely stick to the company line and not say anything.

* I found most senior engineers are pretty well aware of their deficiencies and almost never would ask for feedback.
Related to the CS science vs engineering discussion:

There is one movie of a lecture somewhere online, where a professor writes "Computer Science" on the blackboard. He than crosses over the "Science" part, and says this class is about engineering. He proceeds to cross out the "Computer" part too, and says it is not about computers, either. I no longer remember where exactly this was, though.

EDIT: Now that i think about it, I'm pretty sure it was on MIT open courseware.
But he is just a piker in ripping off US taxpayers compared to banks that borrow from the Fed at 0.25% and turn around and buy treasury bonds paying 3%
Exactly - without vision there is no reason to be passionate. I spend all my free time (and my work time) on CouchDB b/c I see a vision of a programming model which is much better than today's web, and I want to make it reality. In this sense, passion may mean that I'm unstoppable, because I'll keep doing it no matter what. But really, it's the power of the vision that drives me.
I'm curious how the Ticker object provides more accurate tick timing than setTimeout considering it just uses setTimeout.
Gmail for Android: better Priority Inbox support and improved compose
I'm always amazed when something that feels like a solution to a non-problem is earning big bucks. I mean, note-taking, really?! That's had a wealth of overlapping solutions, both free, cheap and otherwise, going back ... well, thousands of years at least.

But props to the folks behind it for getting $800k/mo revenue out of it. Wow.
You should still advertise the monthly costs even if 12 months is the minimum purchase.
This leads to a very curious phenomenon: pick any 2 random U.S. Citizens of either party. Take them out for a beer and start talking politics.

If both of them are fairly secure in their beliefs, within a very short amount of time you'll realize that they are very close on maybe 80-85% of all these issues, although they each adopt talking points from their chosen party to describe their differences!

This is a natural consequence of only having two parties to choose from. Extremely fascinating stuff.

I wonder how the parallels hold out in multi-party systems?

EDIT: Wanted to clarify that I agree with you that folks have a huge variety of opinions on all sorts of issues. I just wanted to point out that even then, they are much less attached to the issues themselves as they are to the talking points their party has around those issues

It's a strange thing.
It's hard to see this work for smaller startups. Dropbox has always been for smaller consumers, at least the free version. Dropbox for Teams seems like a good step for bigger companies that share a lot of large files. Internet startups probably can just upgrade their individual plans and manage their files wisely.

I'd like a small team version, that would be pretty sweet. 50GB would suffice.
Set-Top Box Shoot-Out
For all the people claiming that this is likely to end in a lawsuit where is your evidence? Do you have any actual cases where a company was sued because they gave legitimate feedback? How much money did the company lose because of this suit? How many lawsuits are there per rejected candidate? Do you know the text of the laws that specifically address this?
Explain to me this: you receive something for free, and your first response is to find out what's wrong with it ?
AirBnb: A Lesson In Building Two Sided Networks
>And what you lose from ad hominem attacks is credibility.

If calling someone out for being rude is an ad hominem attack (it isn't), then calling somebody out for using ad hominem attacks is a 'argument from fallacy' fallacy (it isn't, for similar reasons).

(both are not applicable here because nobody basing their arguments on them)

Furthermore, don't deal it if you can't take it...
The article implies he simply used the cards to buy stuff he would buy normally which put him over the threshold dollar amount to earn the bonus miles. If this is true it's equivalent to getting the miles for free since he didn't buy anything out of the ordinary. I'm assuming he paid the cards off in full each month
Science and religion are about what is, while politics is about what ought to happen.

There's no reason why your views about whether Jesus rode a dinosaur or whether global warming will kill us all should be correlated with your views on issues like "Should taxes be lowered?" and "Should the Government subsidize health care?" and "Should [whatever random complicated policy issue you like]?" And yet, they so often are.

In a two-party system, people who don't spend all that much time thinking about politics often seem to wind up buying their political opinions in job lots. Part of this is due to the success which the Democrats have been having with their "If you don't believe that Jesus rode a dinosaur then you need to support all our left-wing economic policies" line, but this is a serious problem both for Republicans and for Science. (And as a Republican scientist, it's a doubly important issue for me.)
Why is this downvoted? "License an open source formula based on the value of short/long contributions" sounds like LOC to me. Dividing income fairly is the core issue. Solve that and the rest is easy. The problem is that this is very hard.
First Day Review: The Google Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook
USB Typewriter: How it works
Your position on Nuclear power is completely irrational. One easily prevented, catastrophic failure with relatively minor flow-on effects is not enough to fear nuclear power. Regular power sources drip-feed death and destruction on a regular basis, but because they don't all happen at once, the numbers go unnoticed.

Similarly, anti-GM crops is circular logic. All food products we eat are long-since modified from their original native or wild source.

The struggle within science to find a place for the bible within the geological record has been going on for at least 2 centuries. As such I don't see the problem being resolved anytime soon. Some of the towering giants of science have bent themselves out of shape trying to retro-fit biblical tales into natural history, and that doesn't invalidate their other contributions. What I'm saying here is that holding an irrational position on evolution doesn't necessarily devalue a scientists value, as long as they aren't primarily studying evolutionary-related fields. If the person who comes up with a cure for cancer doesn't believe in evolution, personally it wouldn't worry me one bit.

Of all that, I do think the Republicans have a problem with religious beliefs taking over the party. I don't know of any other major conservative party in the world which puts things like evolution in question the way they do. Although I suspect it's not endemic within the party, the moderates within the party should be doing more to establish a more mainstream view as the primary position.
Coffeescript is also great for being terser, making it dead simple to create classes (with executable bodies like ruby) and setup prototype inheritence, for comprehensions, for each iterations, and pattern matching. Also, the generated javascript code is very easy to read. I've replaced all my JS for coffee for 3 months (even making a firefox plugin with it) and never looked back.
Scaling Your Twitter Support, Part 2: Triggering Alerts on Keywords
Compare and contrast with Go. I would claim that Go is better preparation for life. Everyone is equal, but by cooperating you can carve out and control territory, and create influence. Sometimes sacrifices are necessary, part and parcel of the larger strategy.

I could go on, but I'm not a good writer, and hence not as convincing. Suffice it to say that all the points made in the article apply equally well, if not more so, to Go.

Perhaps the author is just ignorant of the alternatives.
Kung Fu for Philosophers
One can safely assume that any given tech startup is 95% unattractive males.
Java by itself as a commercial entity is not extremely valuable. Not really having any clue how to get an ROI out of Java, Oracle like Sun before them is simply hedging their bets that owning/controlling Java IP (of any stripe) may in the future provide commercial returns or business leverage when a Java-based app or framework succeeds (see: the Android lawsuit, the MSVM lawsuit 10 years ago). I guess it's the only logical approach for a company that otherwise has no clue how to monetize a technology as widespread as Java.

Seriously, what did we actually think Oracle was going to do with Java? Get all open and community-minded and crap?
I don't think you'll get to do that even with the relaxed time limits. The lifting of the time restriction means that YouTube is confident enough in its content detection algorithms that they're no longer relying on arbitrary length limits as a restriction on copyright violations. This means that any unauthorized Top Gear or Dr. Who videos will probably be flagged and taken down within hours of their posting.
Comments like this sadden me.

There is a field called political science. There are lots of researchers in that field publishing in journals, attending conferences, writing books, etc. And they've actually come up with some interesting results. In particular: voters do not make voting decisions based primarily on issues. In fact, there's some evidence that the causation often goes the other way.

Any model that starts with the assumption that voters choose candidates based on issue matching starts with fail.

Why should I be shoehorned? I am a gnostic, against excessive off-shoring, pro-choice, against gun banning and so on. It's a curious mix. Yet, I have to choose between two packages.

Because the nature of political parties that can function in any society is heavily dependent on the institutional structure of the government. Again, this is a question that actual political scientists have researched and answered.
Space Matters: Why is Startup Accelerator Space Important?
It's all semantics.

It comes down what's the definition of engineering.

I personally think we shouldn't look for metaphors in other fields with "science" or "engineering" in their names.

A program is a programmer. Developer is also fine, but it implies a bit more than programmer.

Programmer can be someone who just programs the machine to implement the ideas of someone else (product managers).

Developer implies someone who develops these ideas, not just implements them.

I think "Hacker" is a fine word to describe a programmer/developer. It implies a sense of ownership and pride and craftsmanship.
Game Theory and Why Diplomatic Transparency is a Good Thing
You posted a comment arguing that "Asking for a discount" is not a good filter, because it would have filtered out you. You even sound a bit smug like "hah they failed my test, how stupid of them to not give me a discount, now they lost me as a customer". Jonkee is just saying that that sounds like the customer you'd want to filter out, and HN seems to agree.
Glenn Reynolds? Admittedly he'd call himself libertarian rather than conservative, but he's pretty much the closest thing to a latter-day WFB.

On the other hand, despite having one of the most widely-read blogs in the world you'll almost never see him on TV. Both the right-wing and the left-wing sides of the media don't like to show conservatives unless they're angry and fire-breathing. And even the most intelligent of the fire-breathing conservatives (say, Krauthammer) always come off as non-thoughtful.
I started an image bookmarking site 2.5 years ago: http://imgfave.com

Now gets ~40,000 visitors a day and just pays my rent.. so not exactly ramen profitable yet.

A few things I did which helped it grow:

- Got my initial core group of users by soliciting feedback on friendfeed and a few other places. The first version was based on identi.ca and I got some buzz just because it was a novel use of the identi.ca microblogging software.

- Started a bunch of facebook pages around different topics (photography, design, etc..). Got a lot of fans, and posted a new image every day to each one. This was probably the single biggest driver of return traffic.

- Made sure the site is fast. Every time I'd upgrade my server or improve performance in some way (like move files to a CDN) I'd see a huge increase in traffic. Speed is really important.

- Besides that I just gave it time to grow, periodically added a new feature, and sending an email to all my users about it.

Top traffic sources are: direct traffic, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Tumblr, and google search.
Creating a new new tab page for Web apps in Chrome
We are a long way from Chernobyl, the state of the art in nuclear power generation is not at all the same.

Pardon the snarkiness a little bit, but your fear nuclear power because of catastrophes like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island is about as rational as my fear of flying because jetliners in the 50s weren't very safe.
Ha, I guess one of us misinterpreted the statement:

"approximately 20% of active users (7.5% of total users) are paying users by month 29"

Is it "20% of active = 7.5% of total", or is it "active = 7.5% of total" ?

It seems a little ambiguous. But to be honest, I think a more reasonable number is 7.5% indeed!!
JsSfx3.2 – JavaScript compression tool updated.
Legal problems aside, I love this philosophy.

One of the things I hate most about the current interview process is that I take time off from work to do phone screens, maybe a whole day to do an onsite, and in the end I get these empty letters.

I'm always trying to improve myself, so having no feedback leaves me feeling bewildered. To be honest I don't know if I bombed the coding question. I came to an answer, maybe I had a couple hints - but was that it?
Ask HN: Has "Clippy" ever been done right?
As most of you know, Clippy (a.k.a. Clippit), was an "office assistant" in MS Office that interjected itself into a normal workflow to provide help on the current task. It has been criticized as being intrusive and unhelpful by many users and has since been removed from MS Office.

My question to the HN community: Have you ever encountered software that has implement "Clippy" the right way? In other words, is there software that provides context-specific messaging in the middle of a workflow that is actually beneficial and unobtrusive?
I'm a Republican(-supporting) scientist, but I cringe every time I think of that moment.

And ever since that moment I cringe every time I hear Mike Huckabee mentioned as a serious candidate.
No. All you have to do is interview someone in a protected hiring class, and then say something in the rejection that contradicts or is in any way inconsistent with anything you have said or the candidate can claim you have said. Litigious candidates don't have to play to win the lawsuit, either; they can play to settle.
I'm no scientist, but do place a premium on inquiry, falsifiability, and rationality in most endeavors. IMO the Republican party is run by people who are openly theocratic, anti-intellectual, and anti-rational. It is no surprise to me that so few scientists are registered as Republican. I see this as a problem for Republicans specifically, and the United States generally. FWIW, last time I affiliated myself with any party was in 2000, when I was a Republican.
Jason Cohen on Optimizing Wordpress
That's a reason why it is better to tell the candidate on the phone instead of in writing.
Bible News
Kids go on expensive buying sprees in iPhone games
In German the mnemonic was nicely self-referencing: Mein Vater erklärt mir jeden Sonntag unsere neun Planeten. (Translated: Every Sunday my father tells me of the nine planets.)
I have question on regular login/password. How do you all feel when a registration system emails the activation link to your email address? Genuinely curious.
I don't mean a soulmate either; just somebody who is not way ahead or way behind me. Either way, its wasting somebody's time for no benefit. Worse, the 'ahead' guy is stuck explaining why no, its not a bug, you just don't get the design pattern yet.

Unless the skill level/experience of the two match pretty darn well, its a dead loss in productivity.
Indeed you can (despite the attempts of some folks who attempt to claim that you can't).
It's kind of like picking a college major. Where college students invest their money and long amounts of time in a particular major, entrepreneurs (wantrepreneurs?) invest their minds in particular markets. At some point it becomes part of their identity.

I think it's better to decide on a particular market with some definitive action like starting a company or large side project, and if it fizzles out, avoid identifying with it. Being identified with a market that you don't know about doesn't impress genuine entrepreneurs.

Curiosity is different. It's good to be curious. Surprisingly, trying to be curious has worked for me. So has dealing with some of the many things that can get in the way of natural curiosity.
Google's spell checker (Did you mean...?) and gmail's file attachment reminders are two which come to mind immediately.
He's trying to write this up as a neat hack ($300 for an hour of work? where do I sign up?), but all he's really done is waste a lot of other people's time to exploit a silly loophole. I wonder how many man-hours the bank spent moving and counting 300 pounds of coins, not to mention how much tax money was spent shipping the damn things to him. What an unproductive waste.
Key elements for costing out a private cloud computing platform
Let it Snow
"A visa is a visa is a visa."

Nope. A "rewards card" CC jacks up the rates I'm charged. It's the difference between paying 4.5% to process a transaction vs 2.2%. I don't particularly like being forced in to paying extra so someone can go on a 'free' airplane trip. It's not free. It costs me money. And it ends up costing everyone even more, because merchants have to add that 'cost of business' in to the price of everything.
Chinese Startups Profit Big From US IPOs
SERMONES PARA HOY
Node-canvas open sourced
As far as I can tell, Conservapedia is written by two actual conservatives of the nutty variety and about fifty left-wing trolls.
You could start with Andy Warhol's Empire. It's 8 hours of the Empire State Building. Yeah, the Empire State Building... for 8 hours :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_%281964_film%29
I guess you did not get what steve was talking about.
Most Common Mistakes in Screencasting - Smashing Magazine