skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be possible that there's a disconnect between "I'm offended by seeing street poverty on a daily basis" and "the system for dealing with poverty in SF is broken".

Unless your plan is to turn all homeless people in SF into Soylent Green, in which case you should run for mayor and good luck with that.

You propose to reduce property tax to 1%. Property tax is what pays for schools, it's not some kind of source of government waste as you seem to imply.

You probably don't know this, but this year, schools in SF were shut down for a extra week each year because of lack of funding. That's a week of schooling that my kids were supposed to have and they aren't getting because it's impossible to bring in the correct amount of money to keep our schools open. How would you propose to pay for schools if you slashed property taxes to 1%? (Hint: bake sales only take you so far.)
Luckily google sucks at squashing startups and ends up buying them for ridiculous amounts of money.
Google AdWords Telephone Reps
I have spoken with people who answer the phone at the toll-free #s that are now provided to anybody signing up (or thinking of signing up) for a Google AdWords account, and I have not been impressed. In fact, I've been distinctly unimpressed. The representatives are profoundly misinformed, somewhat rude, and generally unpleasant to deal with if you're hoping to discuss anything remotely nuanced.

These representatives are also setting up AdWords campaigns on behalf of small businesses, and as representatives of Google, they probably have some credibility in the eyes of people who lack enough knowledge to spot them for the ignorami & charlatans that they might be (in my 3 calls, each person made claims which were provably wrong). In my experience, the Google phone reps say "backslash" when they mean forward slash, and refer to domain names as URLs, and it goes down hill from there.

In defense of the mediocre phone reps assigned to new Google AdWords customers, it should be pointed out that their level of knowledge & service is comparable, and often better, than that offered by many big companies selling SEM with field sales forces to SMBs. So even though I'm disappointed with the quality of reps that Google has, it certainly can be worse. Talk to a business owner who purchased a managed SEM campaign from his phone book/yellow pages sales representative for greater details on "worse."

Anyway, I can do what I need to do with AdWords without phone support, so I'm not really negatively impacted by their incompetence, but it got me thinking: Is there any other way to have telephone support at that scale? Can it be anything but mediocre? Do you think these folks are remote workers, or reporting to a call center somewhere? Did Google give up on making their advertising platform simple enough to not require human "explainers" & "sellers?"
Care to place a specific upper bound on "so popular"?
Women can’t Screw up any Worse than the Guys who ran the Banks in Ireland
So to me it seems that the people building tools for collaborative science need to start with a system whose sole goal is to produce papers :) How to do this is a fun problem.
Thanks a lot for the review jbrennan.
* The sharing part would be moved . Would you suggest replacing it with a "how to" dialogue ? like how to add and remove tasks ?
*Would you also prefer the tasks being there with a completed sign rather than being removed from the list ??

Again Thanks for your time ! It means a lot getting the first pat on your back for your work !
Google kills Hotpot
What your dress code is also sets how you want to look as a company. I would presume that many investment banks are on the more formal side of dress -- partly because formal clothing tends to cost more and banking is a profession which wants to see itself as cultured, upper class, and wealthy.

However, I would ask if you have worn a nice tailored suit. It's really very comfortable. The quality of the material is pretty far above what most casual wear is made out of. The main cost seems to be in the time getting dressed in the morning and the extra care needed to not damage your outfit, not necessarily in comfort.

That said, I personally hold my own style to a little higher standard than many tech companies (generally long pants, collared shirt, closed-toed shoes).
Ordered! This looks like fun. :)
Mobile App Privacy Continued… (Pandora follow up)
Here is a snapshot of India that is helpful to folks not living here.

The 2011 census just came out. What is the literacy rate? 75% only. That means 25% Indians can't read or write. Thats 300 million Indians that can't read and write. 300 million. Thats a big number. If you focus on that number, you will think that India is in a bad state. Doing pathetic. No hope.

But you need to go back a bit. In the last 10 years alone (from 2001 to 2011), the number of literate people in India has risen from 650 million to 900 million. That is a huge jump. A shift of 250 million people to literacy in 10 years.

That is India. Statistically - when compared to other countries - seems to be in the dumps. But improving at a rate that is crazy to comprehend.

India is like that dorky adolescent kid with warts and pimples popping up all over the face. Give her 20-30 more years.
Steve Wozniak says would consider return to Apple
The only place where 'India' was mentioned for the link you provided is at the last section towards the end of the page. It just talks about technological advances and how people are related to that, but it doesn't say people are migrating countries because of that.
Kickass MCV for your Javascript Apps
This was the same in my curriculum, and I'd throw in Compilers and CPU Architecture & Design as well.

There's nothing like building a simple OS, compiler, and pipelined CPU to transform "the computer" from a magical black box into a supremely powerful, interesting tool.
Get Your Terrorist Alerts on Facebook and Twitter
The Day Fred Wilson Dumped AAPL
Epsilon had warning 4 months before breach
Perhaps I was being unclear with "...in nature". I meant that it was academic in origin, and still much of the work is academic.

Right, and I'm wondering why you don't consider Google's work to be academic? I'm trying to nail down your definition of "academic".

Is there something about Google's work that is qualitatively different? Is is simply that it's not performed on the campus of a school?

Beyond the scope of NLP, suppose we're discussing two chemists. One works at, say, Merck, while the other works at a university (perhaps on a grant from Merck). What's the difference between the work that the two are doing?

EDIT: in the interest of not being snarky, I may as well come out and say it: your comments gave me every impression of an elitist attitude.
Majority of these points are also valid for why you often get free tshirts at events, from small gaming events up to huge expo events.
The Square unit uses the headphone jack. It exchanges data through tones being sent back and forth over the speaker and microphone pins.

Since there are no unpublished APIs being used, no App Store terms are being violated.

You can do a lot when you can send and receive serial data over a port. Millions upon millions of devices that you never see or know about communicate in this very manner.
http://evolyte.com in the loop on Wabash/Lake. We've been autotuning the internet since 1994. The G Funk Era.
The second one does not exist (maybe wrong URL?)
Poll: Do you typically follow users or repositories on Github?
Just curious.
What's Github?
My take on the subject when reading was "If you think wearing a T-shirt is a bit of an FU to the man, you're almost assuredly already the man"
They're called cam porn sites.
I agree. And from what I have read/seen as far as Unity goes is that it is not ready for prime time just yet. On the other hand, Gnome 3 looks pretty awesome. Just saying.
As I've said before here I see Amazon as the biggest threat to Google. When I search using Google I'm doing research. When I go to Amazon, I have my wallet in my hand. Even if I'm still researching which particular product I want, whether I'm shopping for a toy, a book, a game, or whatever else, I'm buying it.

I waste a lot of money advertising on Google. My next marketing campaign will be through Amazon, because I don't think I'm the only one who sees them this way.
Raising awareness is also a largely bullshit concept. It is the banner people who accomplish absolutely nothing waive around to feel like they've accomplished something. The only time it is valuable is when awareness is being raised about previously unknown information (which is what Wikileaks does).

Also, the argument is not silly. You absolutely lose something by taking 2 minutes of the 34,790,000 minutes or so you have. You lose 2 minutes. The better use of those 2 minutes in support of Wikileaks would be looking for a new leak or more realistically, circulating information that they've recently leaked.
Wow! I can just hear the lawyers salivating now...
This topic comes up from time to time on HN. Here's what I did to dive back into mathematics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108924
A couple of things...

- Did you steal your header image from somewhere? It looks like you took a screenshot and managed to leave a fragment of the scroll bar in it...

- Why are there blog posts completely unrelated to cars in the front? In fact, they are so far from cars that they somewhat alienate me (because they are about shoes, sex, and/or being bald.)

- Links shouldn't shrink the way they do when you hover over them

- I might deserve a sports car, but I don't know if you deserve my personal information

- I think your entire page seems to have an a case of identity confusion; it isn't sure what it wants to be and it reflects that very obviously

Hope that helps.
I couldn't agree more - very helpful stuff here
"It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up." - Vince Lombardi
Indeed it did. Thanks for the follow up.
Writing to a Text File
User-Centred Design for Engineers
I wear collared shirts 365 days a year and as soon as it's warmer again I will trade my peacoat for a casual sports coat again. I went to work like this in startups and huge corporations even if it meant I was the only one not wearing a t-shirt at the office.

The good thing about being a hacker is that you can wear whatever you want. :)
Right. And yet it's hard not to feel that swell of pride when your child 'overachieves' on some milestone. But often when a child hits a milestone early, it's actually because they are doing something differently than age-equivalent children or adults do it. And that something may well be an intellectual dead end. The niece in your story may be tagging the name 'tiger' to something like length of tail, or surrounding context. And I could write books on the need for serious investigations into what kids mean when they use certain words.
Ah, I meant academic, as in "came out of a university." Sorry I left that unclear.

I wasn't saying it was "qualitatively different," but that it did not develop speech recognition. It was the work of many, MANY brilliant people, and to say Google developed it would be avoiding so many details.

The same with the chemists. There's nothing inherently different simply because of the fact that they work at different places. Suppose chemist at university develops chemical A for some process X and chemist at Merck develops chemical B for the same process X. Both are equal contributions; certainly it would be wrong to say that chemist 2 solved process X.

Is that more sensible?
The JavaScript Age
This was expected, Unity isn't ready yet.
It's too consistent to be a typo. It appears twice in the article, twice in one of his comments here and once in his job posting.
I would be surprised if the Chinese government _didn't_ stipulate that the social network would have back doors for "official business".
China liberalised its economy in 1979 and India liberalised its economy in 1991 from Soviet styled socialism to American styled capitalism. Both countries grew rapidly from respective years. It's nothing to do with democracy/non-democracy, IMO.
What's most interesting to me here is that this is a plan for building a user base, not a customer base. Mint's customers (i.e. the people that provided revenue to Mint) were the financial services companies that paid to pitch products to Mint users. Without them, Mint doesn't make any money, and yet they do not appear in this initial plan. I'm curious to know whether Mint had a "get users first and then figure out how to monetize them" or if there was a parallel strategy for getting customers that isn't reflected here.
On continually improving
Google Has Bought the World
If it's not hard to get, why hasn't Google gotten it yet?

The problem isn't that they don't get it at an individual level. It's that they struggle to see how to make money from it and have tried to get it complement search. That's my take on it.

To put it in perspective, Facebook did $2B in revenue last year. Google did $29B. In otherwords, if Google owned Facebook outright, Facebook would be about 6.5% of Google's revenue.

But that's why I said as long as Vic focuses purely on social, they'll do OK. But if they get sidetracked by a 3-year plan to get to $1B in revenue... which will be like a mere 3%, that's when things will begin to fall apart.

And that's why these sorts of things are easier outside of Google/MS. For a startup company $500M in revenue is pop the champagne. For Google and MS that's when you start thinking that there might be a business here, but make sure it doesn't canabilize the business that brings in $20B a year.
My startup story: from big idea to thriving business in 8 short years
There is a subset called "pure Prolog", which is restricted to Horn clauses. But regular Prolog (with extralogical features) is not functional, and definitely not pure. For instance, the proof_me predicate in the following program will be true, only once:

:- dynamic bla/0.

proof_me :-
\+ bla,
assert(bla).
How To Make SIP Calls Over IPv6 Using Linphone (on Mac, Windows, Linux)
I don't see any mention of database. If you can't save or retrieve records that's kind of limiting, no?
Using LittleSnapper (or equivalent tool) to take and archive screenshots of well-done page designs is a really good way to enhance brainstorming.

After months or years of doing this, you build up an asset that has real value to you and other designers.

You should consider posting your screenshot library - I'm sure quite a few designers would be interested in it (or at least links to the pages, to avoid any copyright issues). New webapp idea?
Interesting timing for me -- I've been working through "The Art of Prolog" (MIT Press, 1994) recently -- I'd done some Prolog in school, but never beyond the ``here are a few weeks in a programming languages course'', and the logic programming discussion in both SICP and ``The Reasoned Schemer'' had made me want to go back to the source.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn the language in a more or less rigorous way. It won't make you a production Prolog programmer (any more than SICP will make you a production Schemer), but it starts with a firm grounding in the theory of logic programming, and works that up to a good grounding in Prolog step by step, before spending the latter half of the book working through idiomatic Prolog solutions to a bunch of standard (once-standard?) problems (a shell, an interpreter, a compiler), as well as problems more in line with Prolog's traditional uses (ELIZA, an expert system).

The book is here:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Prolog-Second-Programming-Techniques/dp/0262193388

``The Craft of Prolog'', which this post mentions is in the same series, and provides somewhat of a more pragmatic view of the language. I may get to that next. Meanwhile, ``The Reasoned Schemer'' provides the entry of ``the Little Schemer'' series into the field of logic programming, using the MiniKanren logic programming system for Scheme.
Bing for iPad App
Going through their application... I think their Challenge should be to really revamp it. I feel like I have to click Save after ever field or I'll be redirected to some random page when I click "Next."
If other HN readers have used certain softphones to make SIP calls over IPv6, I'd definitely be interested to hear about what works. (thanks!)
Nikki and the Robots: Open Source Videogame Written in Haskell
don't build it yourself

Sorry, but what a bunch of FUD.

Any seasoned sysadmin can build an array with such low requirements. It's a different story when you need high IOPS or extreme availability - but none of that was asked for here.

Wazoox listed the off the shelf parts that you need, from there it's a matter of being able to operate a screwdriver and configuring your favorite RAID controller or soft-raid.

Of course you can double-up and buy the feel-good solution from a storage-vendor (DELL MD1000 would be the standard in this range). But in this case it doesn't seem worth to pay a markup for essentially the same hardware.
"It's a win/win to provide sub-par product"

Only if sub-par means limited scope. If sub-par means buggy, you might damage your reputation.
Actually I'd be surprised if they did a last-minute switch back to Gnome Classic for 11.04 given Shuttleworth's penchant for decision by fiat and history of using non-LTS releases as nothing more than extended betas/UI playgrounds. (See Pulseaudio, Empathy over Pidgin, Indicators, window buttons--and that one was actually for an LTS!)

No, Shuttleworth has decided that Unity is the new hotness, so we'll almost certainly be getting it in 11.04, which will make us all glorified beta testers again. This'll be the first release since I started using Ubuntu that I won't be upgrading to immediately. My business productivity--which is what I use Ubuntu for--is more important than that.
ACER DX650 REVIEWS AND SPECIFICATIONS
Piggy Bank by Harry Allen for Steuben
Haha, I get that part. I guess I don't understand the upside of keeping notes and todo lists on the computer.

I have flat lists of things in text files that I manage with Emacs, but it's stuff I only look at occasionally. I tried using org-mode, but I didn't see the big advantage over text files.

All the right now in-the-moment ideas and todos I write on paper, partly because I like to draw arrows between things.
I wouldn't want to wear the t-shirt of the company I work for (even though I like said company), because it feels too "rah-rah-rah, we're so great!" to me. But I love to wear t-shirts of vendors and platforms that are awesome (GitHub, for example, or Twilio, if I used Twilio.)

And man, I would never wear a LinkedIn t-shirt. Pinnacle of lame (no offense, LinkedIn people, your product is very useful! But not cool.)
Heavenly haze: Remarkable rainbow cloud towers over Mount Everest
Phoenix Concept Car by Kenneth Cobonpue
Gnome 3 is great...if you have compatible graphics processing.

Ubuntu (and Gnome for that matter) are facing an interesting challenge there. Do you try to take Windows head on and assume your target customer is running new hardware? or do you try to keep the installed base of Linux users happy? Many of those are using Linux on older hardware precisely because it's still pretty snappy on those machines, while Windows is too bloated. It seems hard to have it both ways.
10 Free Wordpress Photo Gallery Themes
No; no I wouldn't.
Time Warner seeks judgement to stream Viacom content to iPad
I immediately throw away any free shirt that is L or larger. I think the best thing would be to order multiple sizes.
Agreed, and thanks for bringing up women's sizes. I wish tech companies (and especially tech conferences I PAY for) would realize that men's shirts are not unisex. They're for men. Whenever a women's option isn't available, it definitely feels unwelcoming.
'The Crow' to Be Remade by '28 Weeks Later' Director
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, best known as the director of 28 Weeks Later, has been tapped to direct Relativity's remake of The Crow.
I saw this being announced in the new version of maps for Android and thought that it was a nice addition. Never even knew that they had launched this as a product. I'm not a frequent reader of the Google blogs but it seems that this was the only way users were alerted of its existence.

Hopefully they will attract more users through pairing this with maps. It seems that it's better to have it as a feature to what is already a successful project than try and start it on its own.

EDIT: typo
The Catholic Church specifically teaches blind faith is wrong, so maybe you don't understand Catholicism as well as you think you do.

Edit - Catechism reference: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PX.HTM
We (India) are prospering because we are united.

Pakistan and China are trying to help India 'break free' but I am sure they won't succeed.
Here in Uruguay, I've worked at a software factory (Urudata) that expected us to use a suit. I'm used to suits, so I didn't mind (I also like looking professional, and a suit signals that).

Now I work for a financial institution, so a suit is expected.

The US seems to have a much more lax attitude with respect to attire (especially for professionals, a University graduate is expected to look smart here). The "stick it to the man" point the article makes is beyond me.
really? I did not code that anywhere - all I am doing is javascript and jquery for setting up the form - but nothign gets downloaded except images and code.

are you sure you went to cardealerquotes.ORG

I do not own cardealerquotes.COM

I agree - downloading anything without permission is no bueno.

If this is really happening on my site - I have an issue. But I do not see it.

I would really appreciate it if you can confirm this is or is not happening on .ORG

I do not think I got hacked. But...

Thanks for the retract. I am trying hard. Working in a startup is easy but your own is very very hard. Gut wrenching.
Regarding Simplicity
You can still switch to sweatpants when you come home. They're also more comfortable than jeans!
Foreign state intel. ;)
Richard Branson's Virgin Oceanic sub to feed deep-sea data to Google Earth
Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers.

This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?
They're not strictly 'killing it' they are to develop it into Google Places.

Back in SXSW Marissa Mayer spoke of consolidating some of their local efforts:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-mayer-we-do-have-too-man...
Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks
Apple’s First Revolutionary and Magical Device at an Incredible Price
I second The Reasoned Schemer as a fantastic introduction to logic programming. You can get miniKanren and its variants here - http://code.google.com/p/iucs-relational-research/. They'll run in pretty much any R5RS Scheme.

If you're a Clojurian you can give my bells & whistles implementation a spin: https://github.com/swannodette/logos. It has good performance, tabling, pattern-matching, and disequality constraints.
I've been using Opera for years, if I did need anything I'd use UserJS (Greasemonkey done properly, built-in). I have no extensions, and only two userJSs (youtube download, and gawker fix). I have adblocker and firebug as built in functions of the browser, I have custom searches instead of things like Tineye extension that I have on Chrome.
"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. "

~Randy Pausch, Last Lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo)