skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This already exists, it's called legislative history, it's in the Congressional Record. It's a document of all submitted bills and their admendments, floor discussion, hearings, etc.

If we presume that Congressmen are actually trying to get away with something, even parsing all that stuff won't help. B/C they'll take the real discussions some where else, they'll "amend" the first bill to completely replace it just before the vote, etc. And when we consider the enormous dollars at stake -- these guys are managing 25% of the US economy -- there will be so much going on that it's just not possible to follow what they're doing.

If you want transparency, you have to build for transparency. You may have to sacrifice some things to get it. If complexity is generating opacity, you need more simplicity. If _size_ generates complexity, and / or diversity of purposes, you have to scale and or scope down. If that means government "does less", that's a tradeoff for transparency.

Me, I think transparency is a pretty high priority in a democracy, I'm not sure how you have reasoned debate without transparency. That fits happily with my opinion that free people generally do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves, but there are other opinions of our current situation. But if we _must_ have a big government to do this that and the other, we are going to sacrifice some degree of accountability and reasoned discussion to have it, because we are clearly at the point where it's just about impossible to tell who's doing what in our government.

That is, unless you believe the rhetoric of whomever it is marketing some viewpoint seemingly closest to your own, and prefer to blame the other guys for the whole mess. There is, of course, no transparency problem with making such assessments.
i.e just about the same analysis as mkn's, only less confrontationally phrased.
What happened to the 9 programming languages to watch in 2011
Some cultures (US, in my personal experience) spend quite a bit of time convincing themselves that terrible things can't happen to them. For instance, I could be hit by a bus tomorrow in a freak accident and suffer a more painful end than a soldier in Iraq. That's not to say that Iraq isn't much more dangerous, but danger exists for everyone.

I feel for the soldier you're replying to because he is at odds with society in this regard. However, he's not at odds with reality because bad shit really does happen and I admire his not being so quick to label it some kind of illness.
House of Reps to post all bills, resolutions, amendments as XML from 01/01/12
Old news, you can sideload any apps, move on.
Maybe they are listening?

Perhaps I should start demanding other stuff on here...
Minimalism was the idea! Glad you like it. Right now there's no option for selecting sites, but I'm planning on adding one. What sites do you read? Currently supports Hacker News, NYTimes, NPR, Associated Press, and The New Yorker.
Yeah, I needed a side project to keep me busy :)
Check out:

http://toolbox.no.de/

http://search.npmjs.org/
Perhaps you could just be more narrow in your searches with `npm search`? Perhaps instead of searching for "asset management" you could just search for a tool that does browser javascript bundling and then search for another tool that does css bundling. There are fewer of each of those and you can refine your search further by looking for specific things like bundlers that do node-style require()s versus AMD-style requires.

Plus, on http://search.npmjs.org you can see how many people have starred a project. You can star a project yourself with `npm star`. For a lot of projects you can click the home page or github links from the project page too. These are really useful to get a quick glance of what the API is like. If a project doesn't have either of these then it probably isn't worth using.
There's also this solution in development by Google. http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...
Not if Google agreed to run it purely as a dumb pipe.
Great tool! Very intuitive for the novice photographer struggling with cataloging his/her pictures. Love the highlight feature that lets you collate pics that are worth sharing versus those that are relatively ordinary and best kept under wraps. All in all, I'm impressed by this particular application of image recognition technology. Kudos and keep up the good work!
This page, and your entire site in general, are very interesting. Thank you for taking the time to compile all of these links, I'll have to start sending them to my teachers :)
true, ONE advantage. Except the image quality sucked so hard it was impossible to use these digitals on anything but smal pictures on black and white newspapers... for a good couple of years

"one killer feature", by the way, is which is what the lytro brings too: take a snap and adjust the focus along with your editor, which is an excelent feature for a photo-journalist. Take a snapshot of that occupy whatever street before u get pepper-sprayed, then adjust to the most dramatic face before putting it live. Awesome!
I took part in a discussion of this idea about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198941 There's a paper in there you would want to read as research for that essay.
Uh oh, I haven't even updated my clients to Rails 3.1 yet. Definitely not good to fall behind more than a major point release or two with Rails. I have a very old client running Rails 2.3.x and it's always a pain when they need the occasional update and Rake doesn't even work anymore.
I'm not a ruby person, and this post by Joe Damato made me want to stay as far away as possible from Ruby -- but perhaps it would be helpful in your case

http://timetobleed.com/the-broken-promises-of-mrireeyarv/
Mass hysteria in North Korea
Are Women Too Complacent in Silicon Valley?
What is actually going on here? Is this acting?
Talk about an excellent problem to be running into.
Israel's venture capital funds are disappearing
Unfortunately, that requires repeating the entire body of the loop, and so isn't workable/acceptable for our purposes. If you'd like to see the original conversation that led to the current compilation, it's all available on the GitHub issues.
In practice (for developers that write javascript well) it takes about 10 seconds of glancing through node package code on github to determine quality.
Vint Cerf: SOPA means 'unprecedented censorship' of the Web
Aman Gupta.
Here in Lisbon we have antennas inside the subway tunnels since 2006.
I read through their "full report" (http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/files/FSTbookletFINAL.pdf), which is barely more than a press release, and the only mention of how they conducted the study tells me it was a poorly controlled experiment:

"The crop rotations in the organic systems are more diverse than in the conventional systems, including up to seven crops in eight years (compared to two conventional crops in two years)."

Also, be sure to keep the source of this study in mind:

"Rodale Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to pioneering organic farming through research and outreach. For over sixty years, we’ve been researching the best practices of organic agriculture and sharing our findings with farmers and scientists throughout the world, advocating for policies that support farmers, and educating consumers about how going organic is the healthiest option for people and the planet."

For me, a poorly conducted experiment by a very biased source, who doesn't publish any details on said experiment, and which contradict most conventional wisdom should be met with great skepticism.
I'm not in the target market, but the differentiator here is mindshare and/or data analysis. One must have superior data or a superior ability to analyze data acquired. "Hypelocal" is also currently the target of groupon, google, foursquare, yelp, square and many others (all with mobile apps). Good luck.
Just compared "chinese food baltimore" search results between Google and Wolfram Alpha.

Google gave me a list of ten places in my area to get chinese food including phone numbers, locations (mapped out and in text) and links to all their websites; Wolframalpha gave me general nutrition information about random foods.

One could go on and on and on, of course, with similar examples.

All that this shows is that some tools are better than others at certain tasks.

Google search is still better than all competitors at many, many things. However, (of course! it ought to be this way!) some of their competitors are better than Google at very specific things.

How is Google's failure to do as well as another search tool at a single task indicative of why Google is (no longer, I think it's implied) any good?
Thanks Porter, that really means a lot!

I had a previous startup I worked on for 1.5 years on the side, and I think I would have met the expectations you mentioned with that. I've had more luck with Buffer, and I'm delighted to be working on it full-time with a great (still small) team around me.

If it helps, here's a little more details on the transition from "on the side" bootstrapped to full-time (and funded). I worked "on the side" for about 5 months before going full-time. In that time I took it to ramen profitability and brought on board my co-founder Leo. We spent a further 5 months working full-time and bootstrapping it. In that time we jumped on a plane to San Francisco, and after 10 months total time we got into AngelPad incubator and got a little funding. Shortly after, we hired a good friend of mine as our first employee. So, 5 months "on the side", 5 months "full-time" (10 months bootstrapped), and then funded after that (but with good traction & revenue, we have found our scalable business model). I think this may be a good path for other first time founders to take, since it's hard to raise funding without a previous track record, but once you have traction it is much easier.

Let me know if I can ever help with anything, I've followed you on Twitter :)
Thanks for the tips – I do look forward to the stuff that Isaac and friends are cooking up with more metrics, but I'd still like to see more collaboration and less duplication :)
As someone who has been de facto boycotting Apple (the last Apple device I've owned was an iPhone 3G) over annoyance with their iron fisted control policies, I wish you were right that this would damage their corporate brand, but I don't think it will.

Most non-geeks just don't care about this stuff one way or another. And most geeks either rationalize it or post how annoyed by it they are from their shiny new MacBook or iPhone.

I think this course of action is incredibly stupid of Apple regardless of public perception though. If they ever did manage to get Android killed in the way they seem to want to (Jobs' 'thermonuclear' option), don't they realize that would make them the 90's-Microsoft of smartphones? Is killing Android worth a future in which they have to cede control of the app store, debundle mobile Safari, or offer the user a choice of browsers, etc?

Given their corporate culture of control, having a relatively strong competitor is actually a VERY GOOD thing for them, especially when they are still pulling in record profits quarter after quarter even with the competition.

Of course, I don't expect they ever will actually kill Android, they are just guaranteeing Google is going to go after them in all the same markets using Motorola IP, forcing widescale settlements. In the end nothing will be gained by anyone except the lawyers.
Is there life inside black holes?
I certainly agree that writing proofs and algorithm concepts is a heavy bias towards CS grads. The issue there isn't so much with the concepts involved with the particular problem as with the structure of a proof and the approach to those problems in general. Once you've learned about induction formally, it's much easier to use it in a proof, even if you can understand what it is anyhow.

On the other hand, I'm not sure virtual memory is such a concept. I'm under the impression that virtual memory is a topic tons of people are talking about and that it's hard to get away from it even if you're a programmer without a CS degree. Of course, this could just be the result of my being a Linux enthusiast.
Francis Cianfrocca
Indeed, the cultural problem is one of the main points of the last section of the post :)
I would point out that Wolfram Alpha claims gold is at $1577 USD/oz versus $1597 USD/oz on two other gold sites. A big difference? No, absolutely not, but if you want to know the price of gold, you probably want to have faith that they get the gold price right.
Yes, this is truly a good kind of problem to have – but a problem none the less :)
"who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp"

If I read the blog post correctly the claim is not passive mind reading. The claim is that the user has some training to issue the sorts of thought commands that can be reliably picked up. If I think "call mom" it doesn't do anything. But if I think "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right" maybe it can interpret that correctly as my preassigned shorthand for "call mom".
"There ought to be one obviously best way to do each thing, for the sake of maintenance and readability."

In what way does a constriction of convention relate to readability or maintainability? The languages I'm most productive in have many ways to write readable code that accomplishes basically or exactly the same thing. I've always considered it a mark of a language's elegance and power that there would emerge multiple ways of expressing the same problem. But maybe we're thinking about different scopes here. Can you give an example?
I certainly agree. However, I haven't actually seen any pure problem/solution interviews--and this is just for internships where you wouldn't expect the companies to be as thorough. I had questions ranging from "find and fix the problems in this code" to "how would you design a library to do..." to "propose a solution to this problem and prove it works". This might be because I mostly talked to smaller companies.
Carbon Bicycle Wheels
Agreed. What made me (and presumably the author) post this article is not the relevance of the result, but how much of the page is now taken up by advertising.

I'm a marketer, so I do certainly like advertising, but what irks me is the sheer vertical volume of the page taken up by monetized ads.

Google does not consider a site quality of the top 1/3 of the page is ads, yet here they take the space on the page which has the most attention. It is their search engine, yes, but at the same time I think no one can argue that they are making the monetized links take up more and more space in order to boost CTR and their bottom line.

They are a company after all, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
> it was probably for talent or IP or both.

Or for anti-competitive reasons.
Note to downmoderators: this is a quote from WarGames. If you haven't seen it, you're missing out on a foundational piece of geek cinema.
As I understand it, a lot of work has been put into Rails 3.x series so that it is easier to upgrade your apps.

It should be a lot easier to go from 3.0 to 3.1 or 3.2 and hopefully from 3.0 to 4.0.
‘Whatever’ most annoying word ~ Daily World News
All Our Ideas in the Wikimedia fundraiser
I think you're barking up the wrong tree. This is _not_ borderline offensive. Don't be silly. It might be a stupid oversight, but yeah I think you're getting a bit offended by nothing.
If by 'silent crashes' you mean the process dies leaving no trace in Rubyland you might want deep OS/C++ expertise moreso than Ruby...
Key/Value storage built in?

I love rails :)
What Amit Gupta Wants For Christmas
Bad title: I thought you were dying of starvation and needed urgent donations.
Best Tutorials for Enhancing Photos
Photoshop is the world-wide standard for photo enhancements, but with so many features it can be tough to know where to start.
It's difficult to fathom how the authors interpret the data on page 14 as not supporting the hypothesis that there is a male/female variance ratio of circa 1.1. Figure 1A is a generally bell-shaped curve centered around 1.1. In Figure 1B, almost all of the points are below the 1:1 line, whereas if you plot a 1.1:1 line, its a perfect fit. In Figure 1C, the x value where the regression line intersects a zero gender gap (i.e. no evidence of cultural bias), is at a variance ratio of about 1.1. All of the evidence the authors present points to an underlying variance ratio near 1.1, yet somehow they conclude the opposite.
> I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.)

Be more precise. If you can distinguish two classes, you can convey anything through EEG, however slowly (think 'bits'). With error, use error-correcting codes and you can get relatively high accuracy.

Pedantics aside, I agree in sentiment. Even with invasive techniques we can only roughly decode movement.
Obat herbal untuk penyakit jantung
Kini telah hadir Obat Herbal Untuk Penyakit Jantung. Xamthone merupakan obat herbal yang terbuat dari kulit buah manggis. Dengan pengolahan menggunakan teknologi modern dan mengandung khasiat yang sangat baik.
His saying that the backend is crashing.
Not this time, this project was written from scratch in Java 6. :)

It's possible they learned Java at some earlier point in their lives, but my understanding was the team came from embedded/systems C backgrounds and I think they just did what felt right.
Nah. Making a nicer, more informative npmjs.org is totally doable and likely an eventuality.

Making a package manager that only occasionally triggers the rage of picky programmers is one heck of an accomplishment.
Duplication of effort is a non-problem, and any attempt to "fix" it would reduce contributions and discourage innovation. With good metrics the best solutions will rise to the top over time.
Would you rather them call it an AT machine? I guess it could be "@machine" in that case.
Point being -- if you can't choose which to leave out, then you have only half redundancy -- which is acceptable, if not optimal.
As a current PhD student working in this area, I caution you about getting too excited about the Emotiv EPOC. We've got one in the lab we've started to work with as a potential low-cost EEG system. The out-of-the-box software is kinda hokey, so you may end up with an expensive novelty you use once or twice.

On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these devices are actually strongly influenced by, if not heavily reliant on, facial muscle movements.
Well, I don't think cdata's response sets the stage for other, well-informed HN readers to distance themselves from jerrya's position. cdata is not speaking from a position of significant power or influence--actually I think cdata's hands are tied somewhat in terms of tactics, acting as a quasi-official company spokesman. IMHO this area is the most adventurous of mkn's remarks.
Looking good raises personal and sector status, but someone can come and steal your thunder or undermine you, but if they fail, that can be used to your advantage (they give you ideas and customers) or else one can more easily fail upwardly at that point.

Reminds me of the album title: "100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong"

Seeing a bunch of me-too bands could be good for Jon's ego if he can laugh at those wannabes, but alternatively being seen as niche and undiscovered might be better.

For me, I think releasing numbers (of a social network) would be more about conferring legitimacy more than anything else, and secondly, increasing competition, which I think is good if you can win.

Fred Wilson: "We like category creators — people who are the first to develop a company and a market — as opposed to copy cats." http://www.women2.org/a-vc-fred-wilson-talks-on-building-mob...
Geekdom Video Tour. Build Your Startup & Build Your Team
The problem is metrics. How is this problem addressed?

Ruby and Python seem to suffer the same problem with a lack of feedback on the quality of offerings.
Ask HN: What is a creative use for my first gen PPC Mac Mini?
I have an original Mac Mini. It's small, quiet, aesthetic, and for my everyday needs, useless. What is something useful or creative or fun that I could do with it?
This may have changed, but that wasn't the case when I bought my G2 and switched to a 500 min/unlimited data plan about a year ago.
Forbes' 30 Under 30: Technology
people like you make me love HackerNews even more
Thanks for the details, I am not an android developer so I was not completely sure on how the intent system and URLs interact.
The SO software is actually quite good for accumulating lists. It's the SO community that does not allow these questions. From what I can tell the SO moderators are evangelically convinced that any question involving an opinion (other than Jeff or Joel's) is the slippery slope to death by tragedy of the commons.

It's like someone read Clay Shirky as Atkin's diet.
In Ruby, the Ruby Toolbox does a good job of providing reasonable, automatable metrics. https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/
Hey guys, thanks a TON for reaching out and helping me get this fixed. Through the efforts of Aman Gupta and my friend Ryan Stout, we were able to track down the source of the problem.

I really appreciate your help!

I promise to write up a blog post talking about my unique setup and how I fucked it up to lead to this problem.
I'd say every minuted wasted reinventing the wheel is a minute that was not spent solving interesting problems.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you talk about fixes that would discourage innovation or contribution. I'd say I suggest the opposite, in fact :)
We (CloudFlare) are in a pretty nice position, in that we can present a simple UI to our users (site owners) that allows them to fully configure the apps we serve without requiring them to touch any code. Giving site owners the option to present site visitors with a UI where they can opt-in sounds like a really novel and practical idea, and one I would personally like to experiment with implementing. Thanks for the suggestion!
Agreed. Although there are many videos online of using the device successfully, the people who tried it in our lab found it/themselves very difficult to train. And it was due to lack of trying...we very much wanted to control things with our minds.