skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are no racial or religious barriers to naturalized citizenship in Israel. Also it would be moronic for a country set up by all the western powers as a home for Judaism to not permit Jews based on religion. This is as absurd as claiming its racist that Immigration in the US allows separate lines for US citizens and for non-citizens. When you claim all Jews are citizens of Israel, you kind of have to make it easy for them to get in, because you kind of aren't a citizen if you have to wait 3 years and get naturalized like everyone else.

Yes you can be racist against your own people. That's like saying a black landlord isn't racist because he thinks all black people are unemployed and won't pay their rent. Of course its racist.

Anti-Semitic speech is speech against Semitism. I don't get how that's hard to understand.
You can also look at aggregate U.S. household income statistics. Only 3% of households make $200k+ in total income, even after you count both incomes for married couples, and including investments/bonuses. And, most of those aren't in tech. So you'd have to have a very particular social circle for it to be anywhere near normal for even senior people to make $200k+. Just by aggregate numbers, low 6 figures is fairly common (16% above $100k), but things drop off rapidly above that (6% above $150k, 3% above $200k, 1% above $300k).
You're not alone, I always use the .org
Gravity has to move at the same speed as light. If it didn't it would cause time paradoxes.
'Tech News Today' yanked from YouTube by Universal for  MegaUpload video report
I'm sure it's not perfect, and there are exceptions. But I'm willing to be there will be a high correlation between high scores and passion.
If you're looking for something, I'd love to chat with you about Socialyzer (http://socialyzerhq.com) I have contact info in my profile
Unfortunately the "difficulty" of the ML class assignments was not in the material application of the things learned in the lecture but instead in the gotchas of Matlab/Octave vectorization. Most of the assignments were in the format of: "Here's a forumla that applies to the element, generalize it to the matrix so there's no for-loops." Which, while challenging for those not accustomed to thinking that way, was not a challenge of applying what one learned from the lectures.

The course was awesome for what it was: a chance for the average programmer to get their feet wet in ML, but the fact that it was hosted by Stanford seems to lead to a somewhat humorous irony that it was pretty accessible whereas Stanford's real-life rigor is supposed to be nothing of the sort.
DON'T LET HN BE LAZY ABOUT SOPA: DO THIS NOW
Delicious Revamps User Interface, Improves Discovery with Stacks
It's not clear what we're doing on the landing page.

What is the subdomain? A subdomain of your domain? I'm assuming that, but I don't know...

What will happen when we connect our dropbox? Is that even what the submit button does?

Just some thoughts... great work otherwise!
SublimeText + Expandrive + Putty + Virtualbox is everything I need for now.
Given that the budget was set at $300 million, any payments over $1 billion are absurd by even the worst crooks in regular government.

A 1000% markup on a project should be illegal however it happens. Sorry, if a company wants to overrun the same should apply as to my mechanic 30% above estimate and you pay the rest. Government would have paid $400 million, sounds about right for a cost overrun to me, not $3 billion.
I dunno guys, there seems to be a big worry here about HN degrading, or trolling being more prevalent and mods banning non-troll entities...

If you've been to Reddit recently and tried to engage that community, you might not be so worried about things here at HN. It's like hot and cold running compassion/rape over there. They either flood you with love, or ransack your house and ruin your life. Dangerous stuff, that Reddit Hive Mind.

It's just something that happens on the Internet: more people = more trolls and perceived-but-not-really tolls. I wonder if someone could do a paper on the average parts per million for trolls in any mass of words on the Internet.
> the more you assist people in solving their problems, the more incline they will be to let their problems rot until you come and solve them again.

I disagree, most people given a chance will try to improve their condition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia
Well, HTML5 is fixing this problem by making new elements. So instead of arbitrary CSS classes, there is a standard element, such as <article> or <header>.
Android Markets
That was the main focus of Sintel. There was a lot of focus on getting the renderer able to realistically handle 4k, which is a resolution standard (stands for 4k horizontal resolution). From wikipedia

As of 2009, the most common acquisition medium for digitally projected features is 35 mm film scanned and processed at 2K (2048×1556) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution via digital intermediate. Most digital features to date have been shot at 1920×1080 HD resolution using cameras such as the Sony CineAlta, Panavision Genesis or Thomson Viper. New cameras such as the Arri Alexa can capture 2K resolution images, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One can record 4K, and Sony's F65 CineAlta camera can capture 4K and beyond to 8K 8768 x 2324.

So it is actually twice the resolution you would expect to see in theaters.

P.S. Don't show your daughter Sintel until you've watched it, it's actually fairly sad.
there is no way to deactivate
If you're going to get that philosophical about "what is a right", you may as well just end up and state that only might makes right. It doesn't really add anything of real value to the conversation.

I mean, what rights aren't luxuries in some form or another? Voting? Luxury. Not being a slave? Luxury. You can still live, breathe, and procreate without access to either of those things.
I don't know that I like how this article is written. It tries to peg him as exceptionally gifted, yet he's only learning basic chemistry (VSEPR theory and Bohr model) at a state school? They use some fancy sounding words, but I just don't think it's really that impressive.
Replying to the OP but with similar to the point above, I cannot plan gift-giving this far out for many reasons. The major one being in 8 months I may have a completely different gift idea in mind.

One suggestion I humbly propose is get me to sign up and purchase one gift first. As part of this process, ask me to input further information on:

- Family members' birthdays;
- spouse/partner anniversary date;
- parent's wedding anniversary, etc;

And coming up to those dates, send me a personalised email like "Hey, Tara's birthday is coming up in a month, check out these gifts we can gift-wrap and send to her..."
I actually bought a Zune. I had an iPod before that, but iTunes on Windows was awful. I bought a WP7 phone for the same reason, I wanted a managed music experience but iTunes wasn't an option for me.

Really, I think that could be a marketing campaign for Microsoft. "Our downsides average out to be slightly better for a small minority of the market! Spend weeks agonizing over the tough decision then settle for us!" I love my Windows Phone, but I'd likely be on iOS if Zune wasn't a better piece of software.
> The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed?

According to one of my college professors (back in the '90s), the simple answer is "our colleges are better." He told us that primary schooling in many countries have long been superior to ours, but our colleges are better and that's been keeping us ahead.
> The least bad used to be linux with Gnome

I like to think it still is. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with Gnome 2.32 on my personal laptop. I'll switch to Arch when Ubuntu ceases support for 10.04, because Gnome 2 seems much saner than unity or gnome 3, at least for now.
The unanswered question is how they went about doing it. If they were really able to increase it to 40% purely by peaking interest, then that's great!

If they did it through other means, however, they're potentially not actually solving any of the inherent problems. They may just be creating quotas and biasing the pool of students they pull from.
Without considering the number of submits or file length you will end up with files that are simply longer and edited more getting undue high scores. A single 100 line file will be scored to be twice as buggy as the exact same code split into two 50 line files.

Considering source file lengths roughly follow a Zipfian type distribution, it seems like at least the top 5% length files would get flagged regardless unless the bug distribution is extremely uneven.
There are a lot of trailers made for Broadway. Even tours of Broadway shows have trailers advertising when a show is coming to a city near you.

A lot of plays (not musicals) might not have trailers, I don't follow plays as I do musicals.

But I suspect the reason there are fewer commercials available to a wider audience is actually due to the type of audience they want to attract. Neither theater owners nor performers/actors want the typical movie-goer to be the audience screaming, talking on their cell phone, or generally doing anything against the rules. At a Broadway show excessive phone use or talking can get you kicked out. Trying to take a picture often will get you kicked out.
YES. DO NOW. OR ELSE.
The early digital cameras had some tremendous advantages even back when Kodak was just strapping digital backs on the rear of Nikon F3s. Those cameras were immediately adopted by photo-journalists. The Lytro tech is at best a mildly interesting feature that could have some use in the future, but their implementation of it sucks.
It's impossible to do anything if you have to look for a completely novel idea.

I like the lean startup concept. Keep the costs low and just forge ahead. Once you've started on the idea, you'll learn a lot more about the field, and be able to innovate in areas that you previously never dreamt of.

Just get going : )
I really like this idea, and it's one I wish I had time to work on myself. I think there's a real need for something like this.

I've come to the conclusion that a project like this would only be successful if contributors are expected to document WHY the code used is written as it is.

Without documentation (an example UI style guide, like the homepage of Twitter Bootstrap) it's difficult to see both the big picture and the purpose of the small details.

Twitter Bootstrap had a great home page right from the start – it served as documentation for the project, as well as a marketing demo influencing you to try it.

So imagine if the contributors to your repo were simply asked to follow a few guidelines, documenting their contributions (say, providing example HTML and using KSS to markup their CSS).

https://github.com/kneath/kss

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writingainterfacestylegui...
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/front-end-maintainabilit...

Maybe ask them to follow a few of the "Object Oriented CSS" principles, so that it's easier to mix and match parts from different folders:

https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki

Principles of separating the "structure" from the skin"; and separating "container" from "content".
I was offering a response to the parent, who was asking whether we should pay for sanitation -- not to the situation in the article. I don't know what the right solution to Birmingham's problems is, and I've never even been to Birmingham, so I'm in no position to speculate. However, if and when the local government is capable of functioning well enough to achieve things using money, then working water and sewers should be high on its list.
> I would have absolutely hated that in school.

Agreed. I was the smart kid on the high school football team, so I was tasked by the coach to tutor some of my lesser-performing teammates and it was an absolutely miserable experience.
Hey David, that's really inspiring. What do you think differentiated you from the rest of them when you first started?
I operate a number of ecommerce sites, so I'll give my perspective. I will preface this by saying I like the concept, and the implementation is clean. Congratulations on your launch - it's nice to see new ideas entering the industry.

First, you should be aware that launch traffic is demographically nothing like customer traffic. If your site has been posted to tech blogs, startup blogs, tweeted amongst your tech friends, etc, then most of that launch traffic is of the "I'm just checking out this cool new site" variety. This does not convert nearly as well as the "I really need to schedule a gift for my wife" variety. Expect your blog links to pay off over time in SEO linkjuice value, not in the one-week short run.

Second, you picked a bad time to launch a gift scheduling service. Well over half of your potential customers have already purchased the items in their gift list. And for those that haven't, they will most assuredly be going to companies with longer-running reputations that they can trust to fulfill delivery timeframes. Expect October of next year to be significantly better.

Third, the UI is probably not intuitive to people accustomed to traditional ecommerce sites. Aunt Millie is probably not going to realize that clicking on the barely-visible arrow icon on the left/right margins will display another product. One unfortunate fact about ecommerce, and one that is likely the driving force behind stagnation in design evolution, is that catering to expectations is usually more valuable to conversions than catering to coolness. I say usually because there are a few exceptions to this rule( think Apple ), with heavy emphasis on a few.

Fourth, impatience. Seriously, it's been a week. It takes time to get to know your customers. As you learn more about them, you'll be able to craft an experience more conducive to giving them what they want, and as a by-product, increase the conversion rate.
Because learning to communicate the thing is just as important as learning the thing itself.
When you've got $10,000+ to spend on doing so, and have a reasonable expectation of that being a wise expenditure of resources.

It often happens that patents appear to have significant overlap, so "the same idea" is a problematic way to look at it. These aren't really evaluated thoroughly until and unless legal proceedings result.
I've experienced something similar, not as bad as you. But, some things have helped me. I'm sorry if this is somewhat cliche, but based on my own thought and decisions I've continued my faith in Jesus and God from my childhood, and this is also consoling.

On the other side, I've almost if not completely become an atheist at one point, and even then I realized that suicide was too final a choice for how little I knew about reality. In fact, atheism also consoled me, in that the thought that nothing lay beyond death meant I needn't fear death, nor anything in life, at least rationally (instinctual fear remains).

Finally, starting from an atheist perspective, that I didn't need to fear life, I realized I was searching for something that I haven't found yet, and that is a large part of why I've felt bad. Suicide again was too final and inadequate an answer to that desire inside of me. My desire and ignorance of reality give me hope I will find what I am seeking, and even the seeking is fulfilling to a degree.
thanks for this, kss is something i've skimmed over a few days ago but i think it really is the key to this whole thing.
Young entrepreneurs are already facing increasing pressure to find economic opportunities abroad. This would only harm many of their internet startups.
I love email and IM and all that of the reasons you stated, but...

Picking up the phone gets all of the necessary information to both parties involved several orders of magnitude faster than email and IM.
According to your link [2]:

"The county paid $120 million in fees -- six times the prevailing rate - to buy interest-rate swaps from J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

Within five years, the bad advice had increased the county's debt by $277 million."

Hmm, let me do some quick arithmetic - is $277M < $3.1B? I believe it is, and I therefore stand by my claim that JP Morgan is not solely responsible for this problem. However, I'm all in favor of sending anyone involved in bribery to jail.

It looks like the real problem is that the county decided to make long bets on housing and lost.
Ah of course, a theoretical graviton being a massless particle. That's what I get for not having a wee Google first.
It feels great to finally get this shipped, so thanks!

There's no question that the workflow inside Blender is not optimal. Fixing this is planned for the 2.62 release. If you have specific suggestions on what you were expecting vs what was actually necessary, filing a report on the Blender bug tracker is a great way to get it addressed.
YES! Agreed. Gotta call/email those ppl in Washington. Get the word out.
Isn't that pretty much the point?
Perhaps you can start the engines before dropping? If only a second or so before? Or is the force that instantaneous, that strong?
Wouldn't the increased competition fomented by increased wages take care of this naturally and organically?

Could you kindly explain who is competing with whom in the policy situation you envision? I'm not aware of any empirical example (raising teacher salaries has been tried, especially in Connecticut during the 1990s) where raising teacher salaries across the board has resulted in more competition for excellent performance among teachers.

One statement in the Jay Mathews article from the Washington Post we are discussing here suggests to me that Marc Tucker (who comes to education reform as an issue later than many other authors) simply hasn't read enough of the prior literature. Mathews writes, "Tucker says that with better pay, fewer teachers would quit, saving money now spent to train replacements." But there are already studies on teacher competence, and the finding of those studies is that the most skilled teachers quit more readily than the least skilled, with the least skilled hanging on to jobs in teaching desperately rather than facing the free-enterprise job market,

http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...

and one of the reasons capable people don't stay in the occupation of teaching, or never enter this important occupation in the first place, is that they don't like being lumped together with less capable people.

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers...

(After edit: the reference immediately above supports the statement in a highest-level comment that was posted while I was first typing this comment, namely The US education system benefited for a long period where many incredibly smart women had career options basically limited to teaching and nursing. As equality improved, some of the brightest prospective teachers instead became doctors, scientists, and engineers. )

Meanwhile nearly all teachers have salary schedules that in most states are strictly on the basis of years in service (with bonus salary tracks for having postgraduate degrees, often from diploma mill "education" degree programs).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2011/02/bill_ga...

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/should-teachers-get-r...

New teachers can't even come into the school, however competent, until there are openings for hiring in a particular school. For this reason (and for the sake of the honor of schoolteaching as a profession and ESPECIALLY for the sake of the children in the current school classrooms), I think some affirmative administrative steps are needed to encourage the least effective teachers to change careers, to make room for more teachers with greater effectiveness.
I don't doubt it is a good and useful service, but how do they get their name out there? Advertising to people who are searching for new cars is insanely expensive.
I'm confused - are you suggesting the sewer is provided by a private company? The sewer system in Jefferson County is publicly run.

And maybe that's part of the problem. Presumably a private sewer company could declare bankruptcy, sell its infrastructure, and let someone else provide the service. But with a public utility, we're stuck.
Basically, people renting out rooms for short stays via AirBnB to strangers, for money, are running single-room hotels. They shouldn't be surprised that they might be subject to the same rules as hotels - either be a licensed lodging house, with all the regulations, inspections and requirements that entails, or don't go into this business.

Folks can shirk the rules or say they don't like them, but there are real reasons why hotels have to adhere to higher standards than private homes around fire regulations, etc. If cities don't enforce these kinds of rules, a landlord could just take an entire building, list it on AirBnB and completely sidestep the local regulations and taxes related to offering lodging. (And I suspect it's the lost taxes that city government are most concerned about right now.)
The market made something that should be cheaper more expensive. Making that other thing that is also expensive now the cheapest option. Nothing got "cheaper" here.
His specific question has a more prosaic answer, I think; optional parens make DSLs easier by making Ruby's syntax more flexible, thus allowing it to stand in for more languages.

For instance, a few years ago, a summer internship project was to build a native debugger for OS X in pure Ruby, and to help with that, I wrote a chunk of X86 assembly as a Ruby DSL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=284238
FBI using Carrier IQ info for "law enforcement purposes"
The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed?

The United States has been surpassed in economic growth rate by many countries. The United States continues to gain by admitting as immigrants many highly capable persons who received their primary and secondary educations in other countries, and there are whole industries in the United States where much of the innovation and high quality comes from people with educational backgrounds like that.
When did this launch? I downloaded it 5 minutes ago, made a quick account and posted a photo of a candle... and since then there have been multiple other users "nearby" that have rated things. I'm impressed how many people are actually using this.
If YC articles have their own decay rate, then they remain on the front page longer. How is that not toying with the ranking algorithm?

I've been on HN for a long time (longer than my already pretty old profile suggests), and I've never heard about this. Apologies for the need for clarification, but this is important. It would greatly affect my attitude toward the site, and I think others' as well.
JB HI-FI launches subscription music service in Australia
Yes, exactly, what are called plugins in Sublime Text jargon can only be written in Python. Thus for example, the illustrations of things you can do with the exciting plugin facility -- duplicating the selected text, or encoding the selected text with rot13 -- involve composing things in Python, of all things, else you are completely disabled.