skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At art school, we were taught that in movies and paintings, a person's gaze tends to enter in the upper right, and loop around in a C shape, exiting the frame on the lower right. Therefore, it's the job of the artist to compose the image to sweep the viewer back up on the right side, to repeat the cycle.

We didn't do eye tracking studies to confirm this, but in analyzing intuitively "good" images vs. "bad" ones, the good ones invariably catered to this kind of eye movement.

Websites control the eye so differently (and more rigidly) than how representational images do, that I wouldn't expect the two to generate similar viewer interactions.
Flux happens.
There already is one?

Other departments can't touch the SSA's budget-- because it's the SSA's budget.
1. These things are awesome - a very personal statement. Using it in an argument is moot.

2. Foundation of our culture - no. Foundation of our culture (the engineering culture) is about looking around, identifying problems and using rational-logical thought to find solutions. It just happened that we learnt casting before making silicon chips. I have done Mechanical Workshop as a student in my undergraduate curriculum. I learnt nothing new but the fact that most of us want to cling to already established norms. Again, it's an unnecessary exercise.
I really think that in a field that is evolving as fast as this, we should rethink why and what norms and parts of relatively ancient culture should be follow and where evolving and discarding old ideas is necessary.
In the U.S., we call the template spending ballots "primaries".
To assume that humans are basically fungible when it comes to competing in an agrarian society makes sense. To make the same assumption in an industrial society is questionable. To assert so in a technologically complex, automated, digitalized, globally competitive post-industrial society is - being willfully blind. And that is why now is different.
The key to being a net exporter (which is not quite the same as being a "manufacturing powerhouse", but _is_ what China and Germany have in common) is government policies repressing domestic consumption and productivity that is high given the wage structure. As long as your population is forced to consume less than it can produce, chances are you will be able to export the surplus somewhere.

Both Germany and China have such policies, in fact. It means that in both cases consumption (aka "the standard of living" as it's typically measured, for better or for worse) is lower in both than it could be if workers' spending power were allowed to match labor productivity.

http://www.financialsense.com/node/5580 is a good read about some of the issues.
I will be honest. I have been "that" person. I almost never type in urls. If I don't have it bookmarked I will google the name just to get a clickable link.
Check out www.downsizedc.org

They are proponents of ending all offensive military action overseas, and cutting government spending and red tape.

They have an excellent system that makes it easier for USA people to contact their government -- you put in your name and address, and they give you a simple "contact us" form (just a single text area) where you can write your comments and they automatically get routed to your reps in Congress and Senate -- very efficient use of the voter's time!
I see. I imagine it did serve his purpose then.

> that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle

I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
Why would you sell your company for what it is worth now? Why not just keep it and the money it generates?

That's why.
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You are absolutely correct here. When people have more money they tend to spend more and sales at corporations increase and thus the invest and hire more employees to meet the increased demand. How do we get more money in hand? Full payroll tax holiday + New deal 2.0.
The terms of the debt ceiling deal look like it will force one/the other/both:

http://www.editedforclarity.com/2011/08/01/debt-ceiling-deal...
sounds amazing. Will do.
That must be a favorite band director phrase. My director in high school always said it as "Practice doesn't make perfect - perfect practice makes perfect."
you sure as hell don't tax people to create jobs
vs
military cuts ... sending a lot of people to the unemployment line.

so, you don't tax people to sustain jobs, yet you don't cut jobs to lower spending. That is paradoxical.
Except for the gaping hole in the fence, which dictates that the trust funds have to invest in Treasury bonds. Which means the money goes in and straight back out again, and that threats of default carry an implicit threat of "Social Security won't be able to pay out".
I find that this graph summarizes my thoughts on the US debt in relation to the world economy: http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/china-w...

The United States produces so much more in terms of GDP than the next largest nations that it's a stretch to compare them. I think the fact that we produce more than 2X what the next largest single nation produces means that debt may function differently for us. The global economy is complex enough that relative position can mean more than short term profit and loss.

Debt is a bad thing. But the debt ceiling we just fought over extending represents 1 year of USD GDP. In everyday terms, someone expected to make $100k per year being $100k in debt. To me that sounds more like a student loan than a national crisis.

Should we make changes, cut spending and increase revenue? Sure. But we should also keep the bigger picture in mind, and look at our debt as it fits into the context of a global economy.
Interest has not become a huge issue, but in any case - so what? They got the money for cheap, it has (presumably) fueled growth. Beating 1.5% over five years is not difficult - the idea is to borrow money to accelerate growth - increase prosperity of America, which would return more than 1.5%. Not all debt is bad.
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How does she conclude Google tried to buy the Novell patents? I don't see that stated or implied in anything Google or Microsoft said.

If Google is so pure and innocent, why do they invest in Intellectual Ventures?
SPOILERS

I created a successful bothC function that looks more like the simplified version of seqC, calling fC first. But when I switch to calling gC first, I get the following failures. Am I missing something, or is this a bug in the unit test?

PASSED No JSLint errors
PASSED bothC(S, S, A, B) === undefined
PASSED output === "SSA"
PASSED bothC(S, F, A, B) === undefined
FAILED output === "SSASFB"
PASSED bothC(F, S, A, B) === undefined
FAILED output === "SSASFBFSB"
PASSED bothC(F, F, A, B) === undefined
FAILED output === "SSASFBFSBFFB"
Documentation is hard. Let's go shopping.
You take the Keynesian view. It's difficult to discuss this in more than a soundbite, but the Hayekian view is well explained by these two videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

Well worth watching if you haven't seen them.

In short, the opposite/Hayekian view contends that taxation is seizure of resources from profitable/efficient entities and redistribution towards unprofitable/inefficient entities. We saw this in extremis in the bank bailout, and more controversially in microcosm with individual redistribution.

If you accept this -- that "profitable" correlates with "efficient", and conversely, though the correlation is not perfect -- then taxation is not a Robin Hood sort of thing that increases well being, but rather a move that ties the legs of the efficient sectors of the economy -- those that can post a profit even in tough times -- to those that are already underwater.
Having a free floating fx sovereign currency issuing regime such as the US,UK,Japan. The federal debt is equal to the private sector savings. Paying of the debt eliminates our savings. This would throw us into great depression ii. We should have perpetual deficits.
The aerial drones are not immediately near ground troops. A little RC truck would never be very far from them. Therefore, by picking up video signals from the cheap recon device, combatants could know where the ground troops are going to be very soon and from what direction they're coming.

Furthermore, picking up the source of the RC controller would mean combatants could tell exactly where the troops are. In the case of an aerial drone, piloting happens from an air conditioned trailer, often across the globe. So that's less of an issue.
thanks for brining clarity to this situation. why does microsoft consistently belittle the general public by making misleading statements? they are just dishonest people who bash others as a way of furthering their own products. i have grown increasingly anti-microsoft as a result, to the point where i refuse to buy their software or products, and discourage anyone else from doing so.
Thanks for the feedback. I just forwarded your feature request to VidCaster. They're one of our Co-op companies that we introduced to 500 Startups. Their Demo day is tomorrow, so they may not be able to get on that right away. But, thanks for the feature request.
Sometimes they'll strike a deal with the rightful owner outside of court - essentially holding the property for ransom.
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First, both parties have raided Social Security, not just Republicans. In fact, both parties have been complicit in the government's financial misfeasance for a long time.

Second, you mention the money "to pay back the workers who contributed." There was never any money to pay back. Social Security was always a pay-as-you-go system. Current revenue pays for current appropriations. There was never any "trust fund," another fact that smoothed the way for Congresscritters to raid Social Security and replace the surplus with Treasury IOUs.

This system was feasible when there were ten workers being taxed for each retiree receiving benefits. With the graying of the Baby Boomers, that ratio will approach parity. Another commenter on this thread mentioned that the best thing to have done to Social Security would be to build an electric fence around it. A good idea. Too late. Congress has fleeced it.
Exactly. What good are patents for deterring suits if those suing you have a license to them too?
S&P Officials: We'd Do a Deal 'Structured by Cows'

this instant message exchange between two unidentified Standard & Poor's officials about a mortgage-backed security deal on 4/5/2007:

Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous.

Official #2: I know right...model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk.

Official #1: We should not be rating it.

Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.
Tremendous amount of deliberate misdirection in this piece. Some of it isn't even masked. "What does Google's note mean? Let's let them translate using their after-the-fact interpretation tailored for this current fight..." How does that clarify anything?

And this gem:

And if you look at the mobile litigation going on as we speak, ask yourself: who is suing and who is being sued? Does it look coordinated to you? It does to me. It's always the same direction. Android gets sued. Sometimes it's the vendors. Sometimes it's Google.

So either the author is completely unaware of the field being written about, or the author is lying.
You mean like a Al Gore's lockbox? Ahhhh what could have been, what could have been.
I think a lot of the HN crowd will read this and cringe at what they see. Remember, this is sales. It's about "programming with humans". A developer does effectively the same thing with the systems they build. A VP of sales is trying to build a system as well.

The corporate culture is important no matter the department, but you have to remember that sales guys are very different animals. They'll do whatever it takes to make the sale. It's the burnout you need to manage.
Ask HN: Will the US's credit rating downgrade increase Bitcoin usage?
Commentary on this thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2852380 ) includes how the American government can just print more of its own money to satisfy its debts.

That's not my stance--I don't feel I have a full enough understanding of the economy--but I can see how others would come to this conclusion.

Do you think this will spur a significant number of people to use Bitcoin more than they currently do?

Misc: I have no Bitcoins or businesses operating on Bitcoins, just a curiosity. I'm thinking about mining, but that's about it for now.
I agree that is bad for debt holders, but from a political stand point, it is easier to gradually print money to devalue your debt than it is to default.
I listened to an NPR segment on this topic and it seems like Congress has several ways around doing the things that journalists think can be forced through. I'm an immigrant to the US so this a learning exercise for me, perhaps someone else can explain in more detail.
(via angriers@reddit)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_rat...
People with capital gains don't want to pay for healthier poor people.
Prosecutors do not have absolute immunity when it comes to crimes that are only possible with their office.

If they do something bad in a case, they have absolute immunity, but if they break the law under the guise of law enforcement, they don't. Same as cops.
Tearing the healthcare system down to it's nuts and bolts would costs a lot more than to continue reforming. I spent some time consulting hospitals an implementing electronic medical record systems for hospitals. It costs a hospital millions of dollars and thousands of hours to install and train people for these systems. Too many hospitals are too deep in these EMR systems to start from scratch again. Their margins are only around 1-2 percent as it is.

I agree, the healthcare system is a complete mess, but think of it like re-writing software. Sometimes continuously refactoring code is a much wiser decision than completely re-writing the code
US government doesnt sell bonds to fund operations, it is never revenue constrained (because the US dollar is a non-commodity backed, floating exchange rate, fiat currency). It sells bonds to remove dollars from the system.
Right, I'm not arguing the philosophical aspect of employing people for the sake of employing people.

However, laid off militants are likely to apply for unemployment benefits + whatever other entitlement programs they have. So in terms of pure numbers there might be some win, but when you cut $100 of military salary, you don't magically save a total of $100, you generate some liabilities on the other end.

All those military salaries also generate income taxes for Federal and state coffers, so now you've got lower revenues to deal with, too.
And, after interacting with his publishers over the last 6 weeks I can completely agree. Eric was phenomenal to work with... his publishers... less so.

That being said, Eric stepped in. Waived his speaking fee (which is substantial) and waived the book purchase requirement.

In a nutshell, Eric's story is that he moved from code hacking to company / startup hacking. Really, really good stuff.
What does bitcoin have anything to do with the US credit rating? Credit rating doesn't effect the value of the dollar. How much currency out in the market determines that.
I'm not sure that the majority of students will "get used to" a grading system where given their aptitude they will be unlikely to score more than 30% - particularly when their reward for thorough preparation is likely to be a mere couple of percentage points on top of a dismal looking score. If anything is likely to condition the median person into scraping the minimum necessary requirement it's drawing attention to how far ahead their smarter peers are. Smarter peers who have more outlets for demonstrating their aptitude other than dwarfing the average test scores, and who are probably smart enough to realise their test scores are a poor proxy for real life success anyway.

Skewing the scoring still doesn't make exams resemble real life; one doesn't analyse their successes in percentage-points-from-perfection. If we did, most people would have a serious inferiority complex. Interviewers who screen out unexceptional candidates are normal; those who waste insufficiently exceptional candidates time repeatedly proving they're not creative or excellent enough for the job might even be considered sadistic. There's a difference between failing 90% of interviews and staring blankly at the interviewer as I fail to answer 90% of the questions, knowing I'll have to repeat the experience until someone appreciates the 10% I get right.

Likewise compensation packages expressed as a percentage of most productive employees compensation won't garner much interest, even though incentive structures within conventional companies is usually skewed heavily in the favour of less productive employees.

If I were running a college, I'd probably accept the reality that job sorting is one of the main reasons my students value the course...
By the very definition of "blogspam", this is clearly NOT blogspam. Blogspam means taking material from another source and using it for a blog entry, adding little or nothing of value to the material, and then promoting your blog entry.
You are correct in everything you've said. The national "debt" clock should be thought of more as a national "savings" clock...
Out of curiosity, how long do you think it takes to become become an expert in Erlang?
It will be time to stop looking to growth potential as a valid reason for huge valuations, when it seizes to be a perfectly valid reason.

All else being equal, wouldn't you pay more for a company with high growth potential than one with low growth potential?
Actually, we do know when you are on the Facebook corp network and can filter by that, but we rarely gate on that. We have a system we call gatekeeper for controlling the launch of new features. If I'm coding up something new I'll usually just add my own user ID (we call GUIs in Facebook FBIDs) first. The gatekeeper system is a very full featured roll-out system. I can launch to just employees, 1% of users world wide, Facebook users in Peru, viral growth mechanism, etc..

We also maintain a robust employee list that is cached in APC on every web host that you can always call an is_employee style function for any user ID on. The careers site in particular has some employee only functionality that this endpoint is probably checking.
you are wrong...even with freedom of association upheld as a key part of the first amendment, discrimination based on race, gender, age (and more) is simply not allowed.

Section 1981 of Title 42 of the United States Codes (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/1981.html) which protect people from being discriminated against has been upheld.
I'm a big believer in KISS. If you don't have the problems Erlang was designed to solve, Erlang is probably not a good choice. Rolling your own amateur version of Erlang on top of evented Python or Javascript is probably also not a good move though.
First of all I fail to see how taxing people sustains jobs. As a business, if you're having to give more money to the government, and putting less of it back into your business, it would seem you're actually creating an incentive to lay people off as opposed to hiring more. It makes it harder to grow and hire more people if your business is taking in less money. I know it's obvious but. . .

There are a million ways to cut spending. Taking Obama's 2.5 TRILLION dollar "Obama Care" would be a great start. Take out his TRILLION dollar stimulus which was an epic failure and guess what? You just saved 3.5 TRILLION dollars without cutting any jobs.
Paying back creditors in severely devalued dollars isn't exactly meeting obligations. Presumably the ratings would take this into account.

That said, I agree these ratings don't have much basis in reality. As others have commented, look at how S&P and similar organizations rated subprime debt. They're part of the Wall Street club. They might nibble a bit on the hand that feeds them for political reasons, but they certainly aren't going to bite it off.

It's pretty clear that a AA+ rating for US debt is as much of a joke as AAA. The token 'downgrade' gesture just adds to the absurdity.
What will your next phone be? [poll]
Yep. I'm more than a bit suspicious that it's your option 2, given that it's been "Greece"..."Italy"..."Ireland"..."Greece"...Euro-disaster talk for months now without the kind of precipitous one-day decline that just happened to precede this announcement.
The article seems to hint Milk only took the lead after Kevin Rose tweeted a link to the poll.
Thanks for the link!
I will always click on links that have cameras on rockets.

Something so primal and perfect about it.
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Guilty until proven innocent. I'd rather them not output this message at all. It's a bit discouraging as a paying customer to see this as I usually only play the game offline; due to my incredible slow Internet speed. It's one of the better "DRM"s, but could use work.
"Treasury officials noticed a $2 trillion error in S&P's math that delayed an announcement for several hours." - http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190336650....

Says it all.
How is the second claim inaccurate? I'm aware of a few retaliatory counter-suits but none that were initiated from the Android side.
from the S&P rationale section of their press release:

"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act."
Some notes on dashboard design and implementation from Panic:
http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/
What's really rich is where Yahoo apparently thought Facebook would "reach" 50m members by 2010, sewing up 100% of the student population.

What's Wayne Ma up to these days?
I love Dropbox, but I can move my data to a competing service in an afternoon. They're going to have to execute brilliantly to stay on top of this market if it's really worth that much. 10 billion puts them at 1/18th of Google.
When I have to compile your program which uses that oh-so-useful Boost library, I curse you to the skies.
I'm not carrying a bag with me all the time when I'm out just in case I buy something and if it's more than six items well, I don't know how to juggle.

Someone needs to come up with a better plan other than an outright ban.