skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
internally, everyone in charge of such projects can fall back on the prestige and instant attention assumed from having such an obviously detailed, polished work.

Reminds me of what I heard happened with American cars. The more space your team's components had under the hood, the more prestige you had in the company. As a result, American cars kept on getting bigger and bigger. American companies kept on ignoring the small car market, which left an inroad for foreign companies.
Our country continues to operate a defined benefits plan while most businesses have moved to a defined contribution plan.

A government-run defined contribution plan would almost certainly have to have some kind of guaranteed payment floor to be politically viable, which would encourage serious moral hazard in investing.

I also wonder how many companies can offer defined contribution plans because their employees are also automatically part of a defined benefit plan (i.e., social security).
I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! - PT Barnum

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:P._T._Barnum
Anastasia Ashley Anastasia Ashley – Best Wallpapers
I can't read the comments for this article. It makes my brain hurt. Everything from 9/11 being an inside job to increase the national security net to the concept that the USA exists as a totalitarian empire.
Ah I meant to be more clear. I didn't mind registering for the site as there is good photography there. And thanks for the reminder on how to find it otherwise.
It might be easy to do in a spreadsheet, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do in a politically realistic way.
I'm still using my iPhone 2G and 3G
you didn't answer my question...
At this point, what with the cornucopia of social fitness platforms, I'd like to know what makes your product different and better.

I'm slowly developing a tough skin against platforms like these, but I'm still vaguely interested, because no one seems to have done it well yet (they all just seem to join in for the hell of it).

The fact that you even use a .com and non-cute name already puts you ahead of most people.
There's a typo in your comment. You said "your own" e-book. Just because you paid for it doesn't mean you own it. Amazon does as much as it can to pretend that it's your book so that it can justify charging full price for what is actually much closer in practice to a rental.
If you provide the link, accurately describe your role in their delivery and to clearly list the company which developed them (Font at least as big as the one describing your role).

As you develop your own works, pull this stuff out.
At a glance, I like it. Hard to compete with Traineo and SparkPeople though. Maybe if you carved off different niches of weight loss with sub-micro sites, with things like "losing the baby weight" or "people over 400 pounds" etc.

You might want to jump on the Tim Ferriss "Four Hour Body" bandwagon and milk related topics like the kettlebell swing.

I had a related idea that I doubt I'll develop. Sort of a cross between this and Kickstarter where a user could sign up and their friends could "bet" them that they can't reach a goal weight.
I really liked your site, however while browsing a couple of things struck me as odd:

1. The yellow "we're in beta" alertbar. The alertbar usually tells you that the website is trying to do something fishy you don't want it to, like popups.

2. The inconsistent menubar. On the front page, if I just want to check out your site without signing up, there isn't one. When I click "Browse MinuteBox" a menubar shows up, but it disappears when I click "Profile" and forces me to hit the back button instead of going to another page.

On another note, I know you're beta and everything, but I see no requests. Which means I can't really check out what that (the most important) side of your site is about. I don't know what you could do about it besides making fake requests, but I can't really see what your site is about at the moment.
Short hair styles
Short hair styles are not just the 'new' look. They represent a broad variety of choices and how a particular style will look on you isn't always easy to know.
Show HN: A (very) simple todo list site I wrote
My first real ruby project. I chose to use Sinatra because it seemed really quick to learn, as opposed to rails.

The idea behind this site is that you group items using the colours on the left. For example, when I'm going shopping I group all shopping list items in blue. You can click an item to strike it through, which I've been using as a sort of "done" state before deleting the item.

I've been using this tool a lot lately, and it has helped me pay attention to the finer details at work.

http://www.listabulous.co.uk

Code for the site is here:
https://github.com/AndrewVos/Listabulous
Fixing Social Security - it's always up for discussion and nothing ever gets done about it. The frustrating part is that the solution is somewhat simple, but politically it's untouchable. Here's my quick & simple solution for the problem:

1) Phase out Social Security benefits if your income level hits $50k that year.
- This aspect of Social Security is perhaps most baffling - why does someone who is making $250k a year on their pension and 401k distributions getting the same amount of Social Security as someone who's destitute and barely getting by? "But I paid into it, I should get something out of it!" goes the argument by rich people. Really? I pay into my car insurance every 6 months, never been in an accident, and I don't get a refund check when I'm done driving! Social Security is insurance, it's not a deferred savings plan. Social Security is really called FICA, and the "I" stands for insurance. It's insurance in case you don't have enough money to survive in old age, and the benefit payouts should reflect that. Someone making over 100k a year doesn't need another 25k a year in Social Security benefits to survive.

2) Take away the cap on contributions. Last year any dollar you made above $106k wasn't taxed at the 6.2% FICA rate. Why?

3) Make the Social Security Administration an independent entity free from Congress's whims, and more importantly, free from Congress's hands dipping into its pockets every time they need cash. Social Security should have a huge surplus right now in cash, as over the years they've always had more pay-in than pay-outs. Too bad Congress took all that money and spent it. Social Security is full of government bonds right now, essentially IOU's from Congress that "we promise to pay you back".

Combine #1 and #2 and you have a simple solution to both decrease payouts and increase pay-ins. Add #3 and you're assured that this institution (which isn't some evil socialist creation but really should be thought of as "poverty insurance") can be a self-sustaining, solvent part of our country forever.
Please note: Romer writes about "dealing with the LONG-RUN budget deficit". The short-run deficit MUST be high right now.

In the current policy debate, debt is often invoked as a reason to dismiss calls for expansionary fiscal policy as a response to unemployment; you can’t solve a problem created by debt by running up even more debt.

It assumes, implicitly, that debt is debt -- that it doesn't matter who owes the money. Yet that can't be right; if it were, debt wouldn't be a problem in the first place. After all, to a first approximation debt is money we owe to ourselves. The overall level of debt makes no difference to aggregate net worth -- one person's liability is another person's asset.

The level of debt matters only because the distribution of that debt matters. Borrowing by some actors now can help cure problems created by excess borrowing by other actors in the past. Deficit-financed government spending can allow the economy to avoid unemployment and deflation while highly indebted private-sector agents repair their balance sheets, and the government can pay down its debts once the deleveraging crisis is past.
Seems like a silly argument. Sometimes, people choose something different than they expected they would have enjoyed more.
Are digital electricity meters (which I gather Wattvision requires) common in the US? Most homes I know in Australia still use an analog/physical device counter.
I don't understand how it works from that website. Maybe it's evident to Kindle owners, but from the outside it makes little sense. E.g. the "(absolutely risk free)" in the "Lend a book" button as opposed to "(always free of charge)" in the "Borrow a book" button makes me think there are hidden charges or something shady going on. Or maybe it's all free, or these charges are just evident? I don't know.
Another point Steve Blank talks about this in Stanford series of talks on customer development: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2060 [video]

He mentions any type of PR, Press including TechCrunch coverage shouldn't be sought after before contact with the customers and is part of a strategy and not a random tactic. And this is typically after you figure out what business you are in, who your customers are and how do you scale demand for the company (Product Market Fit).

A lot of the valuable lessons and negative comments that Josh took in that early TechCrunch post could have been gathered and learnt in a non-public fashion during customer discovery and development.
Startup Quote: Brian Chesky, co-founder, Airbnb
What's wrong with Mozilla Developer Network HTML and CSS references?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference

Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.
Do things that won’t scale; it will teach you.

- Brian Chesky (@bchesky)

http://startupquote.com/post/2777912065
There is an excellent comment on Reddit by an ex-Jeopardy player who explains how the buttons work and why it matters with AI.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/f253c/watch_ibms_wat...
The six year old born into poverty doesn't get a choice, regardless of race, because the chances are very high that he's the son of a single mother who either has access to a support network (grandparents, aunts/uncles) and works day and night OR who does little and relies on assistance and disability.

If that child is African-American, circumstances are often crueler. 1 in 9 black men (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html) in the key fatherhood ranges for 20-34 are in jail or prison.

The cultural issue is that in spite of (or because of) government intervention, the African-American family is in shambles. Public assistance essentially requires that able-bodied males get out of the picture, which is a large contributor to the fact that a two-parent household has been the exception for several generations. At the same time, society has become more cruel to the poor -- factory jobs don't exist, you need a car to function in society, and tax policy encourages the decay of cities in favor of suburbs, which are segregated by class. (no car, no life in suburb)

Most people in technical fields don't get this. The vast majority are from middle class backgrounds and got started with computers 'on their own' at home. There are no computers at home in poor families with a few hundred bucks a month in income.
Cassandra as distributed counter (at Twitter)
I've also seen people use redis, MongoDB. Wonder if anyone has done some comprehensive tests as to what works better in this use case.
devs, esp polygot/startup devs, need sysadmin xp/knowledge.
Big fan. Been using it for a few weeks. Really enjoy the competitive aspects (challenges, badges etc.) - good for the motivation.

Not sure if this is a reasonable business model but I'd certainly pay for an iPhone app..

Perhaps premium features? Admittedly I can't think of anything off the top of my head..
That's why I stick to borrowing books on BitTorrent...
Let's see. 1994. If you've got a 66MHz Pentium on your desktop, you are living large and cutting edge [1]; most are still on 486s. If I recall correctly, we're still talking single-digit megabytes of RAM being the most you could reasonably expect. Browser authors are still feeling through the hardest text layout problem since TeX, and browsers are expected to do it realtime, on processors that today we'd consider low-medium end embedded processors. A problem still giving them fits, I might add; how many of us still feel our browsers render slowly even with machines a hundred times more powerful? Yes, we don't render the same pages, but that just proves my point more, the desire to do these computationally expensive things was there in 1994 but a page that takes 1 second to render today is, well, not even guessable back then because you probably ran out of RAM.

It wouldn't have mattered if they had suddenly had an attack of the stupid and tried to implement the hopelessly-idealistic-for-1994 CSS spec. It would have sucked anyhow. It would have been slow and buggy and basically ruined the entire idea of CSS for years. It's better that they didn't try! There's no way they could have functioned with anything other than "Can I make this work?" and "Does it completely hork up my rendering engine?" being their two basic top priorities.

Always fun to step back and remember just how bad we had it all back then. How we'd have killed for a $300 netbook!

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium
I find that being part of the Hacker News conversation really does serve as a proxy for my need for interesting conversation, and I'm sure many of you will agree.

I can't count the number of days where I've had a boring work day but interesting HN day.
Retaliatory feedback was a huge problem eBay faced. They "fixed" it by removing the ability of sellers to leave any type of feedback besides positive. It seems like an extremely difficult problem to tackle unless you're willing to intervene and investigate every time someone reports that feedback is retaliatory.
SCADA isn't exactly mainstream technology. It's used primarily in factories. Having worked in industrial automation areas for quite a while I'd estimate that the number of people doing security testing on Siemens PLCs is a very small community.
The poverty trap is a great article. The thing not mentioned is that you need two incomes to get by. "Poor" people generally have one.

Even folks who make more money can fall into this sort of realm. Say you have a couple where one person makes $100k, and the other $50k. Then children arrive. The person making $50k faces several years where their salary is essentially paying for childcare exclusively.

So you face this bizarre choice. Pay an outrageous sum of money and have people making $11/hr raise your children, or drop out of the workforce and become nearly unemployable when the kids get older.
I'd get RSI in my eyelids.
Good point. If this is the case (not that likely as how would an iOS dev shop market itself if it could not market itself?!), then either a) paint broad outlines of the specific coding you did (e.g. Live updating and synchronization of CoreData store over carrier pigeon network) or b) start building your own apps and marketing them.
Sweat the details and corner cases
It is very much a mainstream software security research topic.
The quota is on the ongoing mail, not the storage. Many ISP are using this method to limit spams or virus propagation from their clients. I think google does it too.

But this is not original. On the net I found Freedom, initially published 23 nov 1999 which includes outgoing mail quotas (http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/arch-...). For the initial date, check at the bottom.
Content, please?
Ah, this really bugs me everyday... anyone know how to get round this? Currently I strip out all color profile data, but don't know if thats the "right thing to do" for images going online.
It doesn't work – the referer is checked.
Yes, the issues deficit hawks are raising are worth addressing in and out of themselves. But not because of deficits they generate!

What majority fails to understand and minority who understands it is too afraid to acknowledge is that for countries like US or Japan with independent monetary policy deficits truly don't matter. It's just another variable central bank deals with when executing monetary policy algorithm.

US public debt seems unsustainable to you? Go check Japan's debt (in reality it is japanese people savings)!

Japan's real problem is aging population, not its' World record public debt.

P.S. some good reading on WHY deficits don't matter:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/galbrait...
First of all, dupe.

Second: the headline is incorrect. The (hardcover edition of) Volume 4A won't be shipping for another week (January 22th.)

Finally: Volume 4A has been available in part for quite some time now (the first fascicles were published in 2005), and in whole for over a year (if you put all the paperback fascicles together.) Still, the publication in hardcover is certainly a milestone.
Color management is a pain. I would love to get my hands on some kind of simple guide.
This is a terrible article. The heart of the projected deficit is increased medical spending -- if you don't deal with that, nothing else matters much, and vice-versa. Social Security is projected to be in balance for decades, then modestly out of balance for some time -- there is no rush to adjust it, and when we do the adjustment will not have to be dramatic, because although the expenditures are huge, so is the dedicated revenue stream. Finally, the "bipartisan" commission was bipartisan between rich centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans, and it foisted a deficit-increasing preference for reducing taxes on rich people into its report.

Fred Wilson, Paul Graham, Bill Gates, Larry Page, etc. ... these people are extraordinarily rich, in important ways the richest people the world has ever seen. Their perspective and interests do not and should not stand for the tech community, let alone the country or the world. The HN community could stand to be a little more skeptical of their pronouncements, and a little less slavish about enforcing the existing status hierarchy which upvotes every blog post they see fit to publish.
The fact that google has the same idea doesn't mean that you can't make an offering in the same area, it just means that you need to compete in ways that are hard for them. Ie, I think their service and API looks great, but I am totally turned off by their (lack of) customer support. If there was a similar offering that offered great support, I might be willing to give that a go.
I think this site includes many of the hidden costs. Clicking the "Defense" dropdown, you can see many of the categories of spending you mentioned (e.g. 90B on veterans, 18B on "Atomic energy defense activities").

http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2009_US.html

It's a nice site for budget issues, among other things it doesn't go the lazy route and look at federal spending only.

(Interesting fact the site reveals: including state/local budgets, education is the #2 expense in the US. The military is #4.)
> keeping this passion up is the really hard part which might be one of the key factors to startups that hit big or fail.

This story got buried yesterday (and I will resubmit it since it deserves to be read), the story of the making of a Sesame Street iPad app, the struggle with the limitations of the hardware for professional 3D animators, the success (as exhibited by the engrossment of the author's kid).

In it, the author describes legendary Hayao Miyazaki's work process: inspiration than lots of hard work:

> When I worked at Pixar I witnessed a lecture by Hayao Miyazaki describing his creative process. He explained that he locked himself in a small room, sketched, and dreamed, awash in pure creativity. He would then emerge, and for the next three years: "much suffering."

We wanted to get the app out for the holidays, and it was early October. It wouldn't be three years, but we wouldn't get much sleep in the next few months.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108125
How do these relate to the syntax?
I did all of the design and code on this.
"give them to terrorists that aren't officially affiliated with them"

I'm not convinced that this will happen, although I used to think so. Those terrorists could turn on Iran. 'Suckers you gave us a nuke, but now we want more or else.' Any proliferation at all would alter the balance of power. The Iraninan regime know this, and I predict that the only thing the regime wants more than to destroy Israel is to stay in power whilst watching this happen, and giving away nukes would not necessarily bode all that well with this goal. Terrorists with nukes could usurp power in Iran before they even lay a finger on Israel.

add: In my opinion, the most Iran can hope for is a direct confrontation with Israel that involves nuclear missiles, which ideally would see the decimation of Israel. These missiles will be fired from Iran. But I think there would be an Iranian uprising or some type of coup before that occurs: the people of Iran like themselves more than they hate Israel, and definitely don't want to suicide for it. Israel also has counter-measures to defend against it.

Iranian controlled mobile nuke scuds parked in south Lebanon - that's a possibility, but not now at least. I don't think the Lebanese would like that very much, and what if they're sabotaged by Israel or confiscated by Hizbollah? Risky.
That's either dangerously close to the line of the unprovable, or simply on the wrong side of it. Or "undisprovable", if you prefer. At some point a sufficiently "subtle" impact on behavior simply drops below the noise floor of normal human interactions, which aren't exactly a continuous party of peace and love no matter how you slice it.
I live in China, which I wouldn't even call totalitarian but rather authoritarian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism#Difference_betw...), so I can't find much sympathy for the 'totalitarian' part.

But I think a decent knowledge of history would reveal that the US functions in many ways that are similar to how historical empires functioned.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/US_milita...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we still have many colonies, but a huge amount of spheres of influence across the planet? Yes.

When we are studied 500 years in the future, I suspect the US' historical role during this past century or so will be likened to the role of Britain at the peak of the British empire.
IE 3 which was released in 1996 had (partial) CSS1 support. I remember it being as fast as Netscape 3. (But that might be because bandwidth at that time were the bottleneck - rendering speed were not an issue, since it were still rendering faster than than the data arrived).
A few months of suffering to make a great iPad app
1.) FYI - Your car insurance analogy falls apart in aggregate because some people do use it, but the element of luck is what you can't account for, so we use risk tables. There's no refund for you because other people got unlucky - you're paying for them to absorb your risk. Social Security isn't insurance - it's a progressive tax for the purpose of generating a small pention for everyone.
> nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow

I reject collective guilt entirely. My ancestry is one of immigrating away from hardship, my great-grandparents were literally dirt poor, and despite it, my family has always been very cool and welcoming to people having a hard time of all backgrounds.

I have no collective guilt, and reject the idea as counterproductive nonsense. I'll lend a hand if I can be of assistance to someone who has taken responsibility for their own life, but I think it's dangerous and perverse to let people like the author saddle you with guilt even if you've never been part of the problem, and always part of the solution. It's perverse - I encourage you to accept none of that guilt and shame and bad feelings they're peddling. None.
Tell HN: I got a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt.
Lesson 1: a good review didn't fix the problems that my startup had, and we still failed.