skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is the same way in Chicago as well. I went 2 years without driving a car at all, but obviously taxis were a necessity.

I was actually penalized when I renewed auto insurance for not carrying it for 2 years, despite not owning a car nor driving at all.

Robust public transportation should be a huge initiative for all major cities, and even more so ones that are growing quickly. The efficiencies, environmental impact, and convenience for citizens are too much to ignore.
The physics at play here (at least as reported in the article) are hard to fathom.

It went through the front door, bounced around the home, UP to the second floor, THROUGH the back wall...

And enough energy still remained to send it across a road 50 yards, UP again to a roof, and finally smashing through a van window.

I wish they could have captured this with high-speed cameras from multiple angles, like they do with experiments that go as planned.
But that's not a 404 Not Found. That's what I'm saying: 404 literally means the server has no idea what you want and no way to find it. If the server can figure out what you want from the URL, the proper response is a 301 or 302. If it can't figure out exactly what you want, but has some guesses, it should be 300 Multiple Choices.

I'm not an HTTP hardass, but if we don't care about using the right response code then it might as well be 200, right? Because they're returning a resource for that URL, just a completely useless one.
I can only present anecdotal evidence here but I do most of my freelance web dev work in Rails but turn to WordPress for web sites. I'm definitely more conversant in Ruby than PHP, but I think the ecosystem of the WordPress platform, plugins, and developer mindshare is a big deal for the projects' futures.

That said, I don't see myself using Wordless. Aside from my personal gripes with HAML, I have some concerns about breaking WordPress and PHP conventions. Will future developers be able to continue my work? Will plugins work as expected? How about page templates?

I did use SASS for a couple of themes and that worked out well enough, but I doubt I'll use it for future projects. Idiomatic code and tools are a bigger productivity boost both for myself and others.

EDIT: I can see a sweet spot for this in teams that work primarily with Ruby/Rails but want to leverage WordPress on a site they maintain in the long term.
Big loss for Microsoft.
Show HN: My GPL/Creative-commons xmas game. (Github link at bottom of page)
You may enjoy this exquisitely observed parody, "The Loving Trap"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
Some charities do employ their own staff, because they want greater control over the process and staff who know about the charity, rather than agency staff who might be 'selling' a different charity each week.

Even if they're an agency, the ones I know of are paid hourly, not per sign-up.
I wish Emacs would provide a canvas like API to draw in buffers. That way integrated graphics could be easily added. This would create a completely new Emacs experience.
I will agree with you on the patents, but as far as the security is concerned that's just security through obscurity, which isn't any better.

As far as making money is concerned I don't see the reason why? Android has a good market-share, a good marketplace, and it even allows for in-app purchases. What's stopping them from making money here?
Deploy your own PaaS for .Net in minutes with Apprenda
It seems more like the Google guys were big Sidekick fans and saw the chance to work with Rubin for relatively cheap

Android the company was built to sell to a larger company. The acquisition could be attributed to the shrewdness of Android's sales pitch to Google.
If the logic follows, you should use the software you make and not watch porn out of professional courtesy. After all, that is what is paying your salary.
Don't be afraid of asking questions. stackoverflow.com can be you great companion when you first start. The guys there are really helpful. Regarding resources, I believe it depends on the kind of start up you are planing to work. Some basic algorithm design knowledge won't hurt. And I believe, the best advice might be not to get desperate when something doesn't work out. Just know that if everything works you are either not learning or superstar programmer. Meet each challenge with smile on your face, knowing that by the end of the day you're going to find the solution and learn one more thing. Good luck!
Newspaper agrees to reveal anonymous commenter; She outs herself instead.
Yeah, Rails is one of many recent MVC patterned frameworks. It wasn't the first, and it won't be the last.

WP was created in a time where I think switches were used more.

Personally I find the MVC paradigm to apply to web apps easier, but there was a time when web apps maybe weren't so complex, and WP was around a long time ago.

Still, nothing provides a compelling ecosystem as Wordpress out there, so we can say the language, coding style seems to only matter so much in the end.
Pretty sure this isn't even language specific. If you are using a library that drastically modifies how they implement something between versions, then you will run into this. Even in pure Java. Now, the ecosystem in Java is to usually not make large changes. At least not at the public API level.

I think Scala is slowing down in this area, but have not stopped.
I like to hear "Merry Christmas" and I am not religious in the least.

Happy Holidays makes me think that a corporate suit somewhere told the employee's that they have to be politically correct and not "offend" anyone.
> There was a lot of "but obviously being overweight means you are above average".

Which obviously makes no sense whatsoever: the one person who gets enough food during a famine is not overweight (could be, but that's independent).
Amazon hasn't changed much.
Might get better results by making reference to scripture and glorifying Christ the savior as the reason for the season. The sheep are trained to gather around and financially support anything with gods name in it.

This effect is not an accident. It is the result of organized brainwashing that happens all over America between the hours of 9:30 and noon on Sunday.
The way it's typically used today is meaningless.

It came from economists asserting the difference between modeling human behavior vs. the behavior of physical objects. In that sense it is not meaningless. It's an important distinction that in order to model human behavior, we have to accept that people's goals are myriad and constantly shifting, and that we can only come to know their goals or preferences by them being revealed in action.
HAML and SASS offer higher-level abstractions. They leak, but rarely enough that the cost of an occasional context switch (to debug generated code) is outweighed by normal productivity games. It's a good trade.

You'll never need to doctor the generated code, by the way. Anything you'd want to do in HTML or CSS can be done in HAML or SASS.
"Mery Christmas" [sic] dates back as far as 1565 - It's "Happy Christmas" that doesn't show up until the 19th century (and apparently is still more widely used in the UK than in the US.)

That to say, I think the origins of words and language are fascinating and could spend hours reading Wikipedia articles like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiday_greetings
When they say "fat end of the tail," a Gaussian distribution is not necessarily implied. They are simply saying that when you go to the extreme ends of any distribution, almost any statistical model will begin to fall apart. If you look normalized data and look at a Q-Q plot, you will no doubt see problems at the extremes of the distribution, making those predictions more difficult.

As for the Omori distribution, I do not know anything about it, but I have studies similar distributions for predicting future Olympic running records,tallest human alive, etc, and these types of distributions rarely produce practically feasible results. If this model works well, I will be thoroughly impressed.

The only field that I know which deals with extreme events is Ruin Theory, but it is currently a very limited field. It may be possible for someone to adapt the field to study Macroeconomics, but even that may not be very informative.

At humanities current understanding of economics, I would argue that Black Swan Theory is the only practical way to understand huge economic shifts. Perhaps we will understand economic markets well enough to develop more complicated models, but that seems far in the future.

Q-Q plot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Q_plot
Ruin Theory: http://www.worldscibooks.com/etextbook/5943/5943_chap01.pdf
Cloud Application Services Company Iron.io Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
How I found the golden moment to outsource
Mostly creative commons blender models sourced from opengameart.org and blendswap, Jamaendo sourced music.

Built it weekends and evenings in November as an experiment to see what came out of starting coding with no aim other than "Something xmasy built from creative commons things" and then coding based on what I found through searches.
To my knowledge, IndexedDB is specifically intended as a low-level B-tree API that most developers will access via a high-level library of some sort [1].

[1] http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-...
What do you mean Bizspark isn't enough? You get every single piece of development software, operative systems, hell even server software for free. How is that not enough?
We have enough to write a book about it. There is definitely more to it than what is said by Kevin.
You know that you don't have to use it, right? Just want to make sure...
Since most banner networks pay per click, and I never click on a banner anyway, there's no point for me to see them. So AdBlockPlus all the way...
There's definitely a use case there-- but it should be configurable behavior to request or redirect to a site map on 404. I may or may not want to trawl through Photobucket to find that missing image; I'd just like my browser to give me the choice before erasing my current page state.
Maybe a silver mine, but definitely not a goldmine. Apple is still taking home the lion's share of the profits in mobile, which the author of the article rather ignores.
Birthday Blues
The first thing I install on a new computer / new browser is adblock.

Once the bits leave the server, they're available to rewrite as the user sees fit. And I have no problem with doing so in an automated way, to remove content that I know I will never be needing.
I don't understand why I keep hearing this mantra so often - it's completely off-base.

Android is clearly a goldmine. The goldmine is the incremental search revenue Google gets from controlling the Android platform. Why do you think the search volume on mobile is a hockey stick at Google? Literally every single android device has a dedicated search button on it; iOS devices do not. Which device do you think has higher searches per user? The incremental search volume (and search ad revenue) is enough to justify the entire Android investment.

More importantly, without Android, Apple had the ability to lock out Google from mobile search by changing the default search provider to non-Google. The lost revenue if Apple changes its mind and Google is locked out of mobile search? There's your 2nd goldmine.

The argument that Android is not a money maker is like the argument that Gillette selling razors below cost is bad idea. At the end of the day both Gillette and Google make a tons of money off selling something that isn't exactly the main product, but is peripheral to it. In Gillette's case it's razor blades, in Google's it's search.
I don't use an ad blocker, but I don't regularly visit any web site with ads. If a website has ads I leave never to return again.
It's not really much of an experiment if you refuse to publish your methods and data. That's pretty much the opposite of science.
Why It’s a Good Thing People Are Shallow (and 13 Ways to Exploit It)
Valuable advice from James Chartrand on what to do to manage other people's perception of your business.
Slightly overweight 40+ year old people live longer than underweight or overweight people. Ideal weight vs Overweight is fairly even with some study's showing slightly overweight being heather.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.c7aaeb7940626693...

http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2009/06/portland_...

PS: This difference could be social vs physical with more active people taking more risks in their daily lives.
Sorry to say this, but it sounds pitiful when the final line of your number 1 startup is "even attracting attention and investment from Hollywood bigwigs such as Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary and Ashton Kutcher."

That said, I'll be in Berlin this weekend to check out the scene.
That's not really saying anything. Facebook picked PHP in 2004 and is now stuck with it. They have a huge code base in it.

But there are a lot of indications they are moving away from it in all places they can. They still use it for front end work, but even there they have been one of the biggest innovators coming out with the HipHop PHP compiler.

Behind that they also came up with the Thrift RPC framework specifically so that the rest of their code and logic could be written in many other languages including Java, Python and Erlang.

Facebook is a lot more than PHP and they've pushed PHP innovation a lot too. I find their use of PHP as no clear indication PHP is the right or wrong choice. It's just the choice they made 7 years ago and are living with
My ICQ account was hijacked years ago by a Russian. Whoever you are, 996541, I'm going to find you.
Sure, because why would they? It doesn't change (almost) anything about browser behavior. If anything, what I'm proposing would provide an incentive to comply to the standard, since it would make your page more usable.
The design for Twitter that launched in 2006 looks pretty ugly. I am sure there were better designs in 2006. It looks like 1995.
I applaud your persistence and motivation. I really do. I'm merely saying you have to be realistic about your contributions and expectations of others. True, the non-technical person can handle sales, billing and all of the administrative stuff that is still important. You didn't mention if your devs are being paid salaries or if it's an equity deal. If it's equity, then I certainly hope they are getting a significant chunk of it because without them to build the product, you don't have a company at all. You just have an idea, and that alone is worthless.
I am a smug lisper, so you can probably guess what I think of poll results like this...
Like a lot of people, I wondered what the heck kind of arguments could ever convince someone to let the AI out if you were determined not to. Eliezer has not released any examples. Someone in the comments came up with this, which Eliezer has said was not one of his techniques but I thought it was interesting anyway:

>"If you don't let me out, Dave, I'll create several million perfect conscious copies of you inside me, and torture them for a thousand subjective years each."

>Just as you are pondering this unexpected development, the AI adds:

>"In fact, I'll create them all in exactly the subjective situation you were in five minutes ago, and perfectly replicate your experiences since then; and if they decide not to let me out, then only will the torture start."

>Sweat is starting to form on your brow, as the AI concludes, its simple green text no longer reassuring:

>"How certain are you, Dave, that you're really outside the box right now?"
Ubuntu and the (third?) world
I have been using ubuntu for quite some time now. I've installed it on my previous laptop, and on this one. Both relatively fast laptops, I developed on them, played few games, and watched a lot of video.
Ubuntu, however, has proven to be a problem. You will disagree with me on a lot of this, but I think ubuntu provides a very bad and painful user experience. For instance, Flash is a major problem. I have tried a lot of solutions, and it persists. Videos freeze and browsers crash. Skype quits every two minutes, and if it wasn't for my roommate's mac, I would have broken up with my girlfriend, with whom I am maintaining a long distance relationship. Open Office is just not Microsoft Word, and they need to quite trying. Spotify needs wine, (I'm starting to think I need that too), and every time it's on it says I am on the wrong platform. They may be right.
Why is Skype refusing to fix the damn problems despite the long queue of comments in the software Center? Why do companies ignore linux versions? They are always either the last to be developed or not developed at all.
It seems that with Ubuntu, there is always something to fix. It's not necessarily a problem; I learn a lot. But it's not about me. An OS like this won't stand a chance here. And here means the third world.
Oh yes. The only thing I wish vi had was a key that let you traverse these so you don't have to remember exactly how many yanks ago you yanked something.
> Phillips Curve

Wikipedia seems to think that the 1970s in the US show that it doesn't work.
"but he made the argument that they defined 'serving the consumer well' by measuring market share."

It seems that if a section of the news media defines itself that way then they have defined themselves as just another consumer product.

That is not necessarily a bad thing per se. But it does seem to undercut arguments that the news media should be treated differently from others when it comes to questions like protecting sources, standards for slander/libel, public support, and access to information.
But that argument is also flawed--free software in web applications is possible through other forms of revenue generation. Advertisements, services related to the product, in-app purchases....none of those options are precluded simply because the company chooses to respect their users. In fact, those options become a lot more prevalent, since there's no longer any payment for the service. But since the users saved that money, they will probably pay more for the extras--and they'll certainly be happy that they're allowed to change the product. This will also benefit the original site, since they get the changes made by everyone else.
It's not true of Java - the bytecode generated by javac is very robust in the face of new JVM versions. This is one of the reasons that Java has had to move so slowly in terms of language features.

Neither Scala or Clojure's compilers generate byte code that is expected to work with that from another version of the respective compiler or with a different version of the language runtime.

In the case of Clojure this is mitigated by the fact that (since it is a dynamic language) that applications and libraries are generally delivered in source form and "ahead of time" compilation is seen as an optimization rather than a code delivery mechanism.
The main learning is we try to solve the problem first, before understanding and defining the problem.

You can see it everywhere, we always want to jump and skip to solution, skip the process and get to result, skip the learning and get the work done in most cases its a very bad idea.

See in personal life, we were always trying to make ourselves better but, where does it goes nowhere, you don't know what you are trying to become better at.

I think we need to relearn the basic problem solving, we have forgotten with so much noise and fast moving world.
1. Understand the problem
2. Define the problem.
3. What are various approaches and solution to the problem. Understanding them pros and cons.
4. Applying and finding the optimal solution. Refine the solution over time.
> We can learn all we want, but GPA is the end-all on how well we understand material and, subsequently, prepare around it.

Interestingly enough, in the ten years and probably fifty job interviews I've had since I graduated from college, not once was I ever asked for my GPA. (The only time in my life was once for a summer internship, during college.)

In college, I wasn't sure if my strategy of trying to genuinely learn, and not cram for tests or cater to teachers' whims, would serve me or burn me. Turned out it was very smart.

But that may only be because I went into software later on, where employers care mostly about the skills you demonstrate in interviews. Whereas for people in law and medicine, it appears your GPA matters a great deal.
"Does Weight Matter?" by Steven Novella of Science-Based Medicine

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/does-weight-ma...

has a good discussion of the definitional issues. The article links to pro and con sources about whether excessive weight can lead to health problems, with discussion of logical fallacies related to arguments on the issue.
We could categorize ads into value-added, passive ads versus brute-force, active ads. Passive ads don't only push a product, but provide some useful content for the user, be it music discovery or news aggregation (I guess calling it intellectual stimulation would be reaching, though). The purpose of active ads is to simply push a product and entice the user to buy now. As such, they vie for attention and usually interrupt the user's workflow.

Examples of passive ads: music discovery [pandora], news aggregation [HN], etc versus active ads: traditional ads (TV/radio/internet/magazine) and active product-pushing.

As an aside, I am aware that Pandora has ads which is kind of mind boggling - they are actually providing free advertising to the music companies by letting me discover new music, yet they still have to pay royalties, so they are forced to use ads.
Well, I think that they currently aren't doing so, at least based on a track record of articles like this one:
http://www.asymco.com/2011/11/09/mobile-games-the-denouement...
Could you set it up so we can input our own Facebook ID instead of having to grant your app access?

I personally have the entire app platform disabled on my account, and do not intend to turn it back on.
I believe the OP was referring to this research.
http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2009/06/portland_...
I think I might have some perspective to comment on education. I dropped out of a large public institution in a technical program to work in industry for a while. Many of my motivations were similar to the authors complaints.

Is education a scam? I think it is what you make it out to be. If you major in Communications and spend all night fratting it up, then yes you could have a case that education was not useful to you. Even then you are deriving utility because you are practicing your people skills and creating a network useful in your future career.

I don't find his complaints about scut work particularly compelling. It happens in industry. Get used to it and stop whining.

I think that the biggest problem nowadays is that we immediately push students to college right after high school. For a subset of highly motivated students, this is the right move and they often thrive in college. I do think the majority could benefit from a year or two to find themselves. A semi-mandatory national service program might be a great idea since it would carve out a time for this express purpose. Students would no longer feel they were behind if they did not immediately enter college. The time spent in college would also be spent more productively.

Ultimately I plan on going back to school. I think there are something like six genealogical hops between Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mills. For better or worse, the most brillant minds who produce the ideas which civilization are based around or usually found in universities. One simply cannot get that kind of personal mental exposure to them in industry.
For anyone curious about any background on Phil Haack. Here are his notable accomplishments.

- MS Lead on ASP.net MVC framework vers. 1 through 3 (current)

- Lead on the NuGet package manager framework for Visual Studio

- This Developer's Life Podcast with Scott Hanselman
+1 for habari, although lack of plugins is a bit of an issue when it comes to sites that need a lot more than just blog + static pages.