skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious how schoolteacher salaries affect salaries in other occupations. Could you explain what you mean by that?
If you look at it from the point that anyone who uses a social network, by virtue of ease of use is an expert, and only 5% of social network activity is effective for whatever purpose, then yes, Gary would be correct.

Unfortunately, I believe that the effective level is a lot lower than 5%, so Gary may be off somewhat in his clown assessment.
Lazy evaluation gets rid of the need for one common macro pattern (conditional evaluation of an expression) and makes the macro/function mismatch go away (the (reduce #'macro arguments) kind of thing - although fexprs also avoid this problem).

However, you need monads to express other patterns of control flow (exceptions and dynamic scoping, for example) that are possible with macros. The problem is that you have to do everything through bind. Macros don't have that restriction.

But the one thing that makes macros irreplaceable is the fact that they can operate at compile-time. This is what I meant to emphasize when I wrote about automating programming.
Ask HN: Beauty/Fashion Investors?
Does anyone know vcs/angels who invest in the beauty/fashion market?
I have a problem with this: I'm extremely curious and I wind up going down long paths to find the ultimate solution to problems, when I could have just asked someone about it. I do it because I learn + remember better, and because the "How" is important to me. My problem is that wanting to know the "How" is often at odds with getting stuff done very quickly, and that being someone who gets stuff done quickly often becomes your personal brand - something that you are known for. So tradeoffs between the two aren't encouraged in the workplace- it's often one or another.

Thoughts?
Well, there are many truly democratic systems that nobody has tried yet. For instance a system where any citizen can vote on any issue. To prevent the tyranny of the majority, there can be rules set up. A system where people decide where their taxes go, how much to spend on healthcare, science, education, warfare.
Scientists cure cancer, but there's no money to be made.
Precedence and precedent have very different meanings. I think you meant to say that there is a precedent.

That said, it sounds like a definition of random is clearly specified and it was not met, so precedent isn't important.
Sorry about the slow reply. ParkGrades is a GREAT idea. There's similar things put up by the city, but they typically pale in comparison. This also does a pretty decent job of find all of our local parks near us (which many sites like this have failed miserably at).

Excellent call to action. "Search for Parks" is the #1 thing to do at your site and you put that basically front-and-center all over the place. Many developers tend to miss this. Good job!

A few things that I thought were curious:

- After searching, I see "Museum Amenities" and then filter-like links which will reduce the result set to locations with certain characteristics. The title/purpose of this block here creates some end-user conflict on how to interact with it. You might consider changing the name to reflect it's purpose rather than it's description. (like "Filter by Amenity")

- On the park search page, consider a different way to your "Advanced Search" description underneath. I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me to do, so you might want to have some sort of text fields with greyed-out, pre-populated examples. Try to use common conventions anywhere possible. Look at advanced search forms and try to get good ideas on how to lay them out.

- The links to connect to Facebook, Twitter, RSS on the main page is offset from the elements themselves. In other words, the area to actually click a link is about 10px left of where they would line up with the image they represent. This was giving me unusual visual feedback on what was clickable and made me "miss" the click when I tried to click through. You're probably losing some valuable click-throughs here.

- It looks like you're using Drupal for this site. I've noticed lots of areas where the design could be "tightened up". If you're still testing the market, that's one thing, but consider paying attention to this in the near future before any large-scale launches. Additionally, I think Drupal is a VERY extensible and fantastic CMS, but it's a BITCH to configure and manage. Keep this in mind going forward as you don't want to be too invested in a product that will ultimately hold back your site's long-term ambitions. Once you've validated the market, you should be thinking about how your technical choices will affect your product in the medium-long-term (1-3 years). Many people will say It's hard to plan this far ahead (especially with technology's current pace) but if you know that your site will really require the flexibility of Drupal versus a simpler CMS, you'd be better off knowing that sooner than later.

- Open up your comments! There's no reason you can't use something like Disqus for handling it. You get better engagement and is one less hurdle for eventually acquiring users. (I've seen an implementation somewhere which onboards a Disqus account into a native user registration after a certain amount of repeat engagement with a user.)

These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head. I can go into detail about any of these if I was ambiguous.
Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote.

I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man". I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as such a bad thing (or is such a bad thing) is a bit closer to a root cause of America's problems than the idea that making people click ads is the best way to make a buck today.
Why is TechStars NYC run by a non-entrepreneur?
Ask HN: Best software for a focused HN-like site?
I looked at Pligg and Drigg but they both seem like they suck. Features I'm most interested in:
- Simplicity
- OpenID and/or Disqus integration
- Easy of management (spam removal, banning users, etc)
- Some kind of spam prevention...recaptcha, etc.

Why:
I'm making a focused news site and I figured that it'd be great to let users submit things too. It'd be relating to free-speech / net neutrality topics, or anything related (personal freedoms, world news where applicable, etc)

I'm decent at PHP and I've written a few useful things in Python, but I don't really know Django and there has to already be something out there that does this. What software does HN use? Is THAT open source?
It's the competition that helps you up your game. It is much easier building something amazing if you can hang out with other people also building amazing things- breathing space is not necessarily a good thing when you're a startup.

The anecdotal things you learn over coffee or lunch can turn out to be invaluable down the road.
Is Git a NoSQL Database?
[Facebook Millionaire: All I Need To Know, I Learned Playing Starcraft]
TED: Beware of Online "Filter Bubbles"
It was much worse, all the "winners" were the people who submitted their applications in the first 2 or 3 days.
hosted/saas james?

http://wiki.apache.org/james/
If any Hacker News people are interested, we can create a chat channel labelled something like "hackernews". On Europe, US, SEA, and so forth.
Congrats guys. I beleive this is going to be huge, especially for enterprises.
In eagerly-evaluated languages such as almost-anything-other-than-Haskell, there is much less need for monads or other weird contraptions that make it difficult to reason about the behavior of the program. When Haskell fits the problem, it's very good, when it doesn't, you probably need to employ non-portable compiler tricks.
It wouldn't be a fallacy to say that since he is talking about his competition, he is not an unbiased source of opinions on the topic.
Great question. The web being text oriented - I believe that typography is one of the most important aspects of a great website (visualization being the other).

If there's one seminal book - that would be The Elements of Typographic Style:
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

That's a deep dive into it though. If you're looking for a shortcut you can get a quick hold of them here:
http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Typography-Gavin-Ambrose/...

At Future Simple (http://www.futuresimple.com) we think about that a lot, sometimes agonizing over it. We still have a lot of work to do :) - as any designer will tell you - we are never satisfied with our work...
According to dutch teletext, the error was a very simple one: not all applicants were entered into the draw. It does not give further details.
Wine and diamonds are pretty obvious examples.

It's a lot easier to find examples where things are all pretty much equal except marketing. Toothpaste, soap, all sorts of consumable household stuff where the only differences are color, perfume and marketing.
(60 Easy Tips to Be the Opposite of Dead)
Far more complicated than that. You won't scale james to millions+ of mailboxes as we're planning to :)
I wasn't criticizing Apple. I think it is the opposite. Apple is great at consumer products, while MS fumbled recently with consumer products, but MS has had success with B2B.
Podio is a great app. A build-your-own-app Tool is usually not that great, but they really worked out a good way to do it. The variety of apps you can create out of the small pool of functions they provide is much bigger than you'd expect.
"Let your users leave comments, answer simple questions, upload data as attachments and interact with each other using their email clients."

Q: So a customer can reply back to one of your emails and it turns into a comment?

thanks
If your application relies typically on user's facebook data like pictures, friends etc, it makes more sense to have it inside the FB canvas. Also, your app is likely to pickup more traction when it is inside FB. You can focus on the development rather than worrying about how to get advertisers in. Once it is viral you can probably put up a link to the stand alone website inside the canvas.
"Xbox + Kinect + Skype + headset + two sets of friends = social game platform at scale day one." Game changer.
I think bringing this sort of transparency to a startup could be really interesting, especially to the HN community. Go for it! Even if it ends up failing miserably, it'll be a useful case study into what transparency can do/not do for a startup.

On another note, I remember Kevin Rose saying how he always wanted to put up live web cams at the Digg offices back in the day and basically let the community watch Digg being made. It would be really cool if you guys setup a calendar with your meetings, made it public, and live streamed those with a chat room where the HN community (or anyone else) could literally take part in the discussion and lend a helping hand to the startups creation.
> without any evidence that this elitism is warranted

What kind of evidence would you accept?

And if you won't accept it from R. Gabriel, P. Graham, P. Greenspun, and other "household" names, why should the rest of us bother sweating to assemble a watertight case for your wastebasket's eyes?
Initiative and referendum

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Initiative_and_referen...

are old ideas of the Progressive movement of a century ago, and they are blamed by some observers for the mess that California is now in.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489519
With a little bit of coding on your part - yes.
I am unable to access the website so I viewed the video here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiokpr_coffeescript-the-coo...
Yes, I fail at simple math.
For a over a month now we've been using the service, and it's been smooth sailing without a hitch - really impressed and interested to see what these guys do next
No. Exhaustive key search is vanishingly unlikely to yield results.

The universe contains about 2²⁶⁵ elementary particles and has existed for about 2¹⁰⁸ femtoseconds. So it probably cannot have done more than about 2³⁷³ classical computations. You can easily use triple-AES-256 to get an effective 512-bit key, dwarfing the possible computations the universe can have carried out for the foreseeable future.

The world GDP is about US$58 trillion per year, which is about 2³⁶ dollars per year. A computer that can test keys currently costs at least 2⁻⁸ dollars, although probably more, and cannot test more than about 2³⁵ keys per second, although probably less. There are about 2²⁵ seconds in a year, so that's 2⁵⁰ keys per year per processor, or 2⁹⁴ keys per year per previous year's worth of production.

So, suppose the entire world economy were devoted to producing computrons to crack a single crypto key. In N years, you can have tried ½N² · 2⁹⁴ = N² · 2⁹³ keys.

To try 2¹²⁸ keys, you need N² ≈ 2³⁵, so N ≈ 2¹⁷, a bit over a hundred millennia. (If you are willing to accept some chance of failure, say a 99.9% chance of failure, then you can skimp a bit and only try 2¹¹⁸ keys, N² ≈ 2²⁵, N ≈ 2¹², only four millennia.)

If bin Laden used AES-256 instead, you need to try 2²⁵⁶ keys to be sure of succeeding, so you need N² = 2²⁵⁶ / 2⁹³ = 2¹⁶³, so N ≈ 2⁸⁰ ≈ 10²⁴ years, which is 10¹⁴ times the current age of the universe. By comparison, the galaxies of the Local Group are expected to merge into a single supergalaxy in only 10¹² years while other galaxies are too far away to be detectable, star formation is expected to end in only 10¹⁴ years, all planetary systems are expected to have decayed in only 10¹⁵ years, and the supergalaxy is expected to have fallen apart in only 10²⁰ years. We're talking about a timescale ten thousand times longer than that. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe)

So the mere computing power of the TLAs is unlikely to yield results by brute force. Their ingenuity, however, could find a better way than brute force.
Sad that i didn't even notice...
Programming error voided Green Card lottery results
I agree, what he doesn't say is how much effort is often needed to get all of the moving parts working together. For example, integrating Devise with RSpec and Cucumber. And then switching to an ORM such as Mongoid. A good tutorial like Michael Hartl's teaches the basics of Rails but putting together your basic starter app can get complicated. Sometimes it takes combing through a dozen (mostly outdated) blog posts to find how things are supposed to be done "Time.now".

I recently put together several detailed tutorials along with application templates that generate Rails starter apps using Devise, OmniAuth, RSpec, Cucumber, plus options for jQuery, Haml, etc. I loaded them up to my GitHub account and initially I was surprised at how many people were expressing appreciation and encouraging me to do more. Now I think I realize, it's not easy for many people to keep up with the ever-evolving Rails habitat. There's really a need for guidance that goes beyond the good intro tutorials and shows the steps need to assemble the pieces for real-world projects.

edit:

Here's a link to my GitHub account with the various example apps and tutorials:

https://github.com/fortuity
It should be noted that point 4 "Raising Money" applies in the case of being accepted in to a startup incubator as well. I am currently working with my lawyer and accountant because I was not incorporated before I was accepted to a program that included financing. I am essentially going to have to "buy" my shares with the software I developed, but my cofounder is going to need to be issued options to avoid this entire mess, so she will be leaving a small amount of money on the table.
Job market is great for tech, but it really depends on the type of work you're interested in. I'm interested in playing with more cutting edge web tech, and that is primarily in Seattle, Boulder, Silicon Valley (of course), New York. There are always exceptions, but I've not been very enticed by the offerings. In South Florida, there is a lot of Android dev work happening with some great groups and education programs going on here to support it. Military defense engineering is hiring a lot in this area along with some big name corps like Citrix, Microsoft, and Lexus Nexus. I've found a lot of jack-of-all-trades positions that are opening up where you'd be an IT/Dev/Support/Networking guy for a small biz. (Personally, blegh...) And there's plenty of call center work. (Gag)

I haven't been personally looking at work here, but I know there are some resources around which focus on the South Florida job scene. No lack of work for people who can go out and find it. If you'd like some introductions, I can certainly help you get connected if you'd like. Feel free to get in touch. (my first and last initials at nobulb.com)

Cheers!
"Wadler created ML to help automate proofs".
Minor nitpick: actually, ML was designed by Robin Milner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)
Yeah, once you say "unbiased" it already is.
Sort of agree but with image sensors it's a bit different: even if your process allows you to jam more and more pixels onto the sensor the number of photons landing on the entire sensor doesn't go up unless you're willing to schlepp a larger lens around. Also, the smallest printable dot on photo paper hasn't improved that much in recent years.
Orange labs is very interested in the space.
The other side of this is that because we're all so connected, there is a lot of noise in the system. Your awesome app can and will get drowned out by the collective output of millions of teenagers on their iPhones.

Although distribution methods have evolved considerably, most of the traffic(and thus, the power) is still held by the same "old media" newspapers and traditional Hollywood celebrities.
What software is most popular for doing this? I wrote my own when I was in Venezuela, but I imagine there's some popular stuff already out there?
I don't care for MS, but I do grudgingly respect .NET from everything I have seen. And while it is hip to use Apple and run RoR, Django, Erlang, or any other next big language and stack, .NET is huge in the corporate world where the stack is decided based upon politics and who plays golf with who instead of by the developers.

And yes, Apple doesn't compete with .NET, that was sort of my point. They different products to address different needs—iOS/desktop apps vs web based CRUD apps for insurance companies (example corporate industry).
Internet Search: The Reality of Link Buying and Comment Spam
HN is open source (more or less - the source base code is, not all the latest tweaks to rankings etc).

Head over to http://arclanguage.org/

The Reddit software is also open source, I believe, and may be another option for you.
Do you mean to imply that patent trolling shouldn't affect how we develop software? I hope you don't, because then you're suggesting that we remain at the behest of those who set patent policy. No other way to say it, that's just a bad plan.
Twilio is awesome because setting up Asterisk and acquiring phone numbers is a big pain in the butt and requires knowledge most web developers don't have.

Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that.

Receiving email is just slightly more work, but still well within the comfort zone of most developers:

$ cat /etc/aliases
comment_reply: "|/path/to/email_handler"
I was in fact thinking of such common uses as the loop macro.

> But the one thing that makes macros irreplaceable is the fact that they can operate at compile-time.

"Sufficiently smart compiler" is the standard strawman argument. It's not a sufficient response, but it is actually pretty astounding what can be handled at compile time.
XServe and WebObjects.
you can throw in as well web2.0 expert from the recent past, security experts, cloud experts, Big Data experts ... ie. current buzzword wave riders
Yo Dawg I Herd You Like Games...
It is interesting that he says the Everex machines (from 2007) were "pretty much intended as a way to get up and running in your Chrome browser".

It's funny how quickly things get ingrained into us, such that we barely remember not having them (Chrome was introduced in late 2008).
Not sure I'd like to work at a company that requires their interface designers to be lickable. I'm sporting a playoff beard at the moment and don't even find myself lickable, never mind going to work every day worried that someone feels the same way.

Also, why hypothesize problems without providing an inkling of the solution? Is urbantag to be a socially graceful, incentivized LBS where users can control their data? I'll hold back until they clear that up.
Thanks Mike! :)
I don't agree with you, I went to the MIT 100K business plan awards the other night and there were very few types of companies of what you talk about. I think you're basing your assumptions on reading too many TechCrunch-ish articles that focus on the consumer web-based marketplace.

For example, the winner of the MIT 100K contest develops sanitation devices for third-world countries. Read more over here: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/11/sanergy-wins-mit-100k-b...

I can think of tons of other examples, but don't have time to go list them out. Just don't read a website like Techmeme or TechCrunch and think you're really getting a total picture on the startup scene. I can tell you stores of many of my friends working in high-tech ceramics and crystals, and new recylcing technologies...
Cell phones signals really are killing the bees, study shows
Rolling a die isn't truly random either. Given the same environmental conditions and the same force vectors, you will always get the same result.

I think their definition of true randomness is flawed. It does not matter whether it's truly random, rather it should about whether it's random to a point where it's out of the operator's control and ability to predict.
sedachv actually got my point. The standard need for macros rather than functions is to handle staged computations, distinguishing between names and objects. Lazy evaluation really does strike right at the heart of this, unlike something like "object system".
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin" - John von Neumann
Sergei Brin: Windows is torturing users
I met the Mailgun guys and they seemed really sharp so it's good to see them getting money. I wish this had been around a year ago - there are so many odd corner cases to managing a transactional email system, it's a pain to deal with. Companies like Sendgrid are only handling one small part of the problem. Good luck and congrats on the funding!
Ask HN: 99 Designs for PR. Interested?
We're building 99 Designs for PR (a PR marketplace).

We think PR firms charge way too much, with very little accountability and transparency. It's also difficult to figure out which PR firms are good, and which suck.

We are building a marketplace that will help you get PR help quickly, reliably and cheaply.

Interested? What do you think?

Want to join our beta?
prmarketplace@gmail.com
Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
The products that are being developed by the new startups in the Silicon Valley are gradually shifting from technology to entertainment, like Hollywood. Google was still a productivity-tools oriented company, while Facebook is mostly Hollywood style entertainment, a new TV if you wish. This can be evidenced by the fact that Google is never blocked at work places, while Facebook is almost always blocked as a productivity killer. The people that this new TV show industry attracts are naturally different from the people that the makers of productivity tools attract.
Perhaps this would be a good publicity stunt to draw attention to the issue.

"Release our data, or we'll release yours"
This is called sophistry, and it had already been debunked by Socrates 2500 years ago.

He made a lot of eloquent ennemies in the process, which probably didn't help during the trial that sealed his fate.