skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When people say "jobs" they usually mean "access to an upwardly-mobile career path".

Most of the goods and services that I purchase, anyways, are enabled by some sort of expensive and heavily regulated infrastructure. Every physical object that I buy was produced by a factory and purchased at a large retail outlet. The main services I pay for are communication-related (cell phone, internet, etc. - huge infrastructure there), automobile maintenance-related, and liability-related (e.g. insurance), medical-related, and the occasional meal at a restaurant. The only ones of those that one can do as a small business are automobile repair and food services, neither of which are the first things I think of when I hear "upward mobility".

Basically every highly-upwardly-mobile profession relies on expensive infrastructure (communications), access to an enormous pool of money (insurance), good relations with government regulators (law, medicine, insurance, communications), access to a large distribution channel (retail), or manufacturing (retail). There are some peripheral service professions (advertising, real estate brokership, stock brokership), that rely on having a good relationship with a wealthy clientele, not to mention a good relationship with regulators.

Basically, upward mobility relies on existing infrastructure of some kind, and if someone who isn't you and doesn't like you controls it, you're fucked.

So, you know, they could write web apps, since no one really controls the internet. Maybe. And they probably won't get VC funding. Or get bought by a company, unless they're really profitable. Or get advertising deals.

It's only in web app land that 2) is possible without manufacturing, and the Japanese are at a steep disadvantage because of the language barrier.
Heh, sure, why not? It now has apple-mobile-web-app-capable=yes.
In terms of income, I'm talking about medians, you're talking about means. If you want a solid indicator of how prices and wages affect people, I would suggest looking at the median values, which are not skewed by wealth disparities.

Also, you have to take certain factors in to account, such as the utility of the purchases in determining the effects of food prices eclipsing inflation. DVD players may have gone down in price, but that doesn't help much when you need to eat.

Also taking into account stratification in food quality (as mentioned above), availability, etc. is also important.
I don't think anyone in Congress runs their email off a Gmail account.
It's not about useful life -it's just about performance.

Your write performance will be better if you have TRIM support... that's all.
And people say that colonizing space is a waste of money. I bet this one star would pay for the ship to get there!
I made this poster a while back: http://dailycheckbox.com
>More evidence that getting noticed is largely chance,

Or chaotic flocking behavior. :)
I have two thoughts. One, this is really cool. And two, I wonder what Hipmunk thinks of this?
It definitely has a very similar feel, watching the movement over time.
The last graf contains the link.
If we were confident that the friction of immigration exceeds the allure of better wait times, then we can say with some confidence that better wait times simply aren't that important to people. Or at least, not as important as making more money, or retiring to a warm place, or hanging out where the action is.

If it doesn't rank next to those other reasons for immigration that all exceed the friction, I would suggest that people stop defending the US system by saying it's better than Canada's system. It isn't better enough. If you like it, fine. If you don't like it, fix what you don't like. But arguments that it's better than Canada should be accompanied by evidence that it exceeds what is actually an incredibly small amount of friction.

I mean, come on, it's not like you have to learn a new language or give up your love of Hockey to move from Canada to the US. If you have a university degree the whole thing is fairly painless.

p.s. On second reading, I see you talking about driving across the border for "Medical Tourism." To my understanding, this is inconvenient for seeing a GP or a specialist, and while some people consider it worthwhile for an MRI, it is not possible to buy into US medical insurance that would cover anything really expensive.

So effectively, medical tourism is equivalent to being completely uninsured in the USA. I don't think anyone argues with a straight face that being uninsured in the US is superior to being subject to the horrors of Canadian medical care. My understanding is that people argue that being insured in the US is more convenient than being a Canadian. If I thought that being insured in the US was superior to Canadian health care, I wouldn't reason that driving across the border for an MRI somehow gives me the best of both worlds, I'd want US insurance so that I could drive across the border for a heart transplant.

And for that, I'd have to move to the US and suffer the same slings and arrows of outrageous deniability fortune suffered by Ms Drabinsky when she tried to insure her family.
Hacker News as downloadable e-book.  Daily
You could get fairly high quality IDE's at low cost ex:Borland Pascal long before GNU became an issue.
there are a number of adult content tube sites that have some really quite excellent taxonomy, categorization and deeper search functions - surfacing the content that each viewer wants is a unique experience for each person

Many of their video player experiences and social features are excellent too

Please name names.
Launch Startup Conference Gets Good Reports
Interesting article, but can I nominate that last line chart for a worst-graph-colors-of-the-year award? Even after finding out that they are, in fact, different colors it's hard to find any country in it, much less with confidence.
Sounds like a humble brag to me.
I am not sure this will feel that inconsistent:

- Page Up scrolls the page down

- Up arrow (eventually) scrolls the page down, too.

Looking at it that way, the only exception is be single finger drag. I guess that 'has' to be that way because otherwise dragging a finger down a bit would be too different from lifting it shortly, then clicking a bit down.
seconded.. trying to go a legal route will cost alot of money and resources.. and do you actually even have any international legal recourse? not clear how without any real business or trademark. Social pressure works wonders though
Just so you know food prices as a percentage of income are actually down from the 1950s-1960s heyday of the middle class. Food prices in industrialized nations are a red herring. It's the difference between eating beef and eating pork. If it's really a big deal go to a fruit & veg store that sells Grade B instead of Grade A, you'll find the price difference for a few more spots on your Apple to be quite amazing.

Food prices are an issue in developing nations, in North America it's just a political talking point designed to conjure up images of starving children used to justify 'farm aid' most of which ends up on Park Avenue.

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/farming_park_a...

Most malnutrition in North America is caused by diet choices and not the inability to afford food. Food prices are increasing because there was a huge bubble of cash which we are trying to reinflate, food is the new housing. Look at commodities which do not trade on a futures exchange, they haven't risen in price. It's pure speculation that people will pay more for food than they currently are. If it's really an issue then perhaps the US could stop putting 25% of it's corn production into the gas tank.

Also, the CPI is rigged to present the picture that massive inflation isn't an issue in the US. If you believe the CPI is an accurate reflection of inflation in America I've got a bridge to sell you.
They replace steak prices with hamburger prices

This seems like the sort of thing they can only do once. Just curious, do you know when they did this?

As for my food expenses, month to month variation is bigger than any increase. Which is surprising, seeing as I've been actively trying to eat more for the past year. But I guess healthy food is cheaper than the crap I was eating two years ago.
BBedit was more useful for me than vim (at the time).

Recently I find Visual Studio is a nice IDE and last time I compared them Eclipse was clearly worse (it's been a few years). However, I have used a wide range of things from early versions of Borland Pascal and various things I can't even recall on old versions of Mac OS etc.
The Cobert Report summary: http://ca.gawker.com/5769950/
A quick PHP script just to generate a printable calender http://pastebin.com/zrHCRAQH (just HTML http://pastebin.com/vi8FWybe)
Someone should make one of all the lists that don't include themselves.
We have a company that is registered with the same name, and I'm filing for a trademark right now.
Any company with that many employees is not going to be using Gmail in the first place.
The author stumbled over one of the most important pieces of data - GP's per 100,000 people. The author notes we have the lowest doctor:population ratio, adding:

"And that’s after spending way, way, way more money than anyone else"

The problem is that we don't let the market decide on the right number of doctors - the training of new doctors is a function of the number of residencies, which is jointly controlled by congress and current physicians.

So we artificially restrict the supply of doctors, which inflates (and I would argue is intended to inflate) the salaries of all doctors, while also shifting the market equilibrium to a lower quantity of medical services provided [1].

[1] here's a graphical example for people new to economics:
http://www.colorado.edu/Economics/courses/econ2020/section6/...
I prefer the German word for CS. They call it 'Informatik,' because it's all about information.

I agree that the terms 'science' and 'engineering' are both abused by those who seek to legitimize their disciplines in the eyes of the public.
Yeah, just contacting him and asking him what's up was my first reaction. I want to make sure that's not a bad idea or that I don't say something that could complicate things in the future.
Interesting blog. I've read a few of the top posts, and noticed that we have a similar approach to life. Never realized it was considered "Zen". Heh. But then again I tend to read books with philosophical/Zen themes.
But 15 years ago was only 95. I mean, that's not old... that's only....

Dear god. >_<
Understanding and using a grid as well as the golden ratio are not tricks. If you think they are your just don't understand why designers, artists, photographers, etc. use such techniques. What is more,
just because the author here doesn't go into all the uses of the grid system in general, or talk about a particular grid framework like 960 or Blueprint doesn't mean grids are not valid.

This guy knows his work. A look at his portfolio shows he uses the grid for more than "equalizing padding of like elements". Again, alignment, relationship between elements of content, hierarchy, all work together. On simple pages you may not benefit from a grid, but complex designs with tons of elements, and irregular blocks will always be easier to obtain more precise results with block placement and typography with a grid system. Look at the designs at 960 and tell me they could have been achieved as easily without a grid. http://960.gs/
The 37 Signals answer is a good immediate reaction, but there is some due diligence that Google can do here, that can be used for longer term product development, as well as a sanity check of the current state of their product:

* Review the original intent with the 10,000 limitation. Was it a precautionary measure that turned out to either be justified or incorrect? Was it a technical limitation that has since gone away with DB, browser or bandwidth improvements?

* Ask the customer about their usage patterns. Can they be served with an alternate, existing product (LDAP, mailing lists, Google Docs spreadsheets)?

* Run some stats on a sample user base and project what percentage of other users will hit this limit at what point.

* Is there an opportunity to develop a new product, not for this user in particular, but something that uses contacts in a different way for those users who have a legitimate need for this many 'contacts' (large mailing list support within Gmail)?

* Start logging the number of users with this complaint internally, so that demand can be measured even if the user doesn't file a feature request.

Regardless of whether you personally think someone can maintain 10,000 relationships (they certainly can't), you can always learn from the unexpected ways other people use your product, and figure out a way to either improve it or create a separate product that can interact with it.
Interestingly, 2 companies which are similar'ish to AngelList got funding this past week, Lendio and CapLinked. CapLinked is by some former PayPal guys and backed by Dave McClure and Peter Thiel.

Wonder if there is a need/room for multiple such platforms in this space?
Data point: I live in the USA, and I've got Crohn's disease. I take medicine for the chronic condition, which keeps it in remission 99%+ of the time. But when it flares up, I need to see a doctor pretty quick -- not just because it hurts, but also because the pain is an indication of bad things happening to my intestines.

The thing is, I can't get an appointment to my GI doctor right now, or even tomorrow. So I can't get a prescription for the heavy duty drugs necessary to bring it under control, not without a significant wait while I'm in pain and my ileum is turning into scar tissue.

My solution is that when I vacation in Mexico, I buy and bring back a personal supply of prednisone. The downside of this is that prednisone is nasty stuff that I don't want to take, it's not as effective as the real treatments, and it's got much worse side effects. But I don't have a way to get the real stuff.

So I'm pointing the finger, at least in part, at the regulations here in the USA. By artificially controlling the number of doctors, and/or constraining our access to pharmaceuticals, we're creating the situation where I am unable to get the treatment I need. This has nothing to do with economics or even insurance company policies, really. It's all to do with nanny-state government.
One of the sites I used to work on has dropped from a consistent #1 (for the past 7 or so years) for its key terms to bottom half of page 1 in the past couple of days. Traffic is down maybe 20%. I can only assume it's related.

The higher results now though are Google News for things totally unrelated and lots of ticket websites (which are kind of related).

The site itself is hardly spammy and has several well-written articles posted per week. It's practically the go-to site for this area (local tourist office points people its way for instance).

Not my problem any more but coming so soon after I leave, it looks a bit like a FU I left behind!
This is fantastic! Not just the algorithm, but the explanation, the fact that there's source code readily available, and the canvas demo. Please, do more!
>> There are too many non-trivial algorithms that you are just likely to not rediscover.

> I agree, but would also (respectfully) ask, "So what?"

Well, if you're trying to sort big arrays with bubblesort, you may have to wait a long time...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1421381
My seemingly underserved usecase for these sorts of tools is:

I want to go somewhere this weekend or next weekend. I don't know where, but I'm ready to get out of Dodge. Show me some cities for these weekends with how much it'll cost to get there.
Processing examples for Nature of Code book and tutorials
There is actually a valid argument that investing in planetary / stellar exploration and exploitation is a net win for humanity. The 3He on the moon is probably the closest example, followed by the hydrocarbons in Titan's atmosphere. However there is the 'egg' problem of a viable industrial base off planet. I suspect that colonizing the moon has at least 'bonus value' associated with 3He supplies in the Chinese moon plans.
I am more aggravated by the fact that when Reader installs an update, it re-adds an icon to my desktop.

For the life of me, I can't think of a single reason why I would ever want to launch Reader by itself (and not by launching a PDF file).
> I'm still not decided whether I should learn Ruby on rails or python or Lisp

If you're interested in learning new stuff and building web apps, you might want to look at Groovy and Grails, because Groovy would be easier to learn for someone with a Java background.
Exchange isn't much better. I've heard of people having contacts 'magically' disappear when they reach absurdly high numbers such as this guys.
If you haven't seen the boids pseudocode page by Conrad Parker it's definitely worth checking out: http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/boids/pseudocode.html

Here's an implementation I wrote last month for fun: http://breefield.com/lab/flock.
It doesn't have much bias in terms of direction (there's no wind, or patterns to follow), so there's generally one large swarm. Click-drag to create repellers, boids follow mouse.
The white center of each boid shrinks at it's velocity increases, and the inverse happens to it's red direction line. Purple specks indicate perceived center of nearby flock. The rest is just aesthetic.

It's always super interesting to see other implementations in action, so please share more in your comments, if you have them. I'd certainly love to see them.
I used flocking in a game project in college (getting ad-hoc starship fleets to get into ad-hoc formations) with another condition: When the basic requirements are met, each ship should also try to align with a master "fleet admiral" ship, and the group of boids under consideration was limited to only ships specifically defined as part of the fleet.

It kind of worked, there were issues with stragglers and making it look organic that I couldn't fix in time. If ships got too far outside the formation sometimes they would only try aligning with the leader instead of catching up first. Also, when they did get in formation, they were eerily good at matching the leader's alignment: all ships would turn in unison and kind of ruin the organic feel of the pure flocking algorithm.
I think it's a testimony to the readability of Python that I've never even programed in the language, nor am I familiar with the finer points of the list syntax (a[::2]?!), and yet this mucked up piece of shit nonetheless gave me the first impression of a prime number sieve. I actually still don't understand how the sieve works, but it somehow just looks like one. Or is it just the case that assuming every obfuscated loop is a prime number sieve is disproportionately likely to be true?
Control Multiple Computers with a Single Mouse and Keyboard
Wonder whether the Google Apps has it's own profit and loss as the bottom line? The response is suggestive of Google Apps team being funded by ad revenue and not really having to care too much winning and keeping it's own customers. Can anyone shed insight?
In your code the devil is in the data-type.
I greatly disagree it's a mere talking point. True, it's very difficult to starve in the U.S., but that shouldn't even be a baseline consideration for anyone, let alone a first world country, let alone the wealthiest country in the world.

Many health issues in the U.S. are caused by the inability to afford healthy food. Not the organic, grass fed stuff at Whole Foods, just even moderately healthy food.

Subsidies for ethanol aren't helping, but the problem is much greater than that.

Here's a great map outlining food deserts in the U.S., a major issue in nutritional health and related directly to poverty and health issues.

http://maps.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/foodenv5.aspx
How to mine data from the Internet for free
That is indeed us.

Why we have so much wealth is due to broader economic factors. Add up robotics, automation, outsourcing, there really isn't a role for middle class labor anymore. You're either programming the machines or you're working at wal-mart. Which is all kinds of medium-long term concerning once you start wondering what happens when there's no middle class anymore.

If you're programming because you like it (most of us), then you're just lucky to be where we are. I'd still be doing it if it paid crap, it just so happens that it pays extremely well right now. Don't let it go to your head :)
And regarding your point (1), the slides also lay out the interesting case in which the typical-case asymptotic time complexity

a1 N^b

is far more favorable than the worst-case form of

a2 N^b

The first form is generally deduced through extensive experiments with typical data, while the second is (often) easily proved with just paper and pencil. The first is the more important in practice, but the second is what's quoted in textbooks.

There are so many algorithms in which a1 << a2, which enables all sorts of problems to be addressed that would be otherwise intractable.

The linear programming/max-flow type problems the slides mention are a major case.
I can make a set of all the lists that don't include themselves.
I have noticed that any degree program that ends with "Science" is generally not science. "Social Science" and "Political Science" are two of the big offenders.
To be honest I continued to work on my Clojure flocking code long after it was working.

I actually took this code as challenge to learn how to put together idiomatic, fast Clojure code that read better than the original Java on which it is based.

Of course, nearly a year later since I wrote this version, I can see ways to make it even faster (nearly on par with Java and faster when parallel), cleaner and more elegant.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2251171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070056

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000253

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850761
And the handful of people who ever face this problem will move on to some other solution.
For now. If you reach out directly, they should be able to help you. There are a good number of east coast students (and from elsewhere) already in the system.
They shouldn't think, they should start copying and in the process make it better.

Bear with me: imagine you could see where your friends have traveled on this map. You enter a budget range much like you do and it shows you the options. Then, you could see any pictures your friends took on such trips. And with a FB message/email, you can ask them how much they spent, where they stayed, what places they loved, how the food was, etc.

Okay, who has built this?
The Inner-platform effect
This is a very notable article.