skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"So, this is a great example of the system failing us."

I think you have that backwards, it is an example of us failing the system. From Amanda's comment: "Today I called a Senator’s office for the first time."

What that says for the first time Amanda is engaged in the question of who best represents her views with respect to how we are governed. This is a great news. As other folks have pointed out this guy has been in office since 1975.

So many US citizens walk into a voting booth with a sort of half-baked, maybe completely unbaked, idea about what they are doing there. Worse, anywhere from 20 to 85 percent of the people who registered to vote don't even bother walking in and voting!

The people who walk in with no prep at all are the most malleable by advertising of the "me good! him bad!" type. They form a sort of Gaussian foam distribution of votes where the investment in advertisements can push the median slightly over to one candidate resulting in elections which are won with 1 - 5% of the votes cast.

The "system" that was set up was designed for people to actually invest time and effort into identifying the best candidate out of the available choices, and if unhappy with those choices providing a new candidate the next time which was a better choice. But when people don't vote or vote randomly, they fail that system.

You can proactively improve the system with a simple algorithm,

1) Vote - this is required since the system only responds to votes cast, not blog postings or public outrage.

2) If you like the way this office is working, vote the incumbent, if you don't vote anyone else.

As the algorithm takes effect, the only successful response of the system is to act in a way such that the voters 'vote incumbent'. The amazing power of this algorithm was demonstrated in Russian elections where the media suggests it took large, overt, and fraudulent activities to overcome all of the votes for someone other than Putin. Had those people just 'not voted' it would have not had the effect it had.

So if you want better politicians, vote. If you want to magnify your impact, get as many friends as you can to vote. If you don't have time to research candidates and talk to them to converge quickly on a solution, then use the above algorithm to evolve better representation.

The common theme though is this participate.
Having known people who work in PR, if something needs explaining at 2:30 am, the flacks are making their case, not sleeping.
Hilbert Curve + Sorting Algorithms + Procrastination =?
Children's apps are the new gold rush
I personally like the official site placement. It saves me time. The sponsored link and yellow background is the floor and I'm drawn to everything above it (a problem if the official site is a sponsored link though I guess). It's a different experience from Google and it works for me - Google does not set UE or UI law. We've become accustomed to Google's way though and it's not necessarily wrong to offer a different experience. Getting past the UE expectations of Googlers though must be quite the product hurdle though.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
The Dwolla story is a great one - young, successful serial entrepreneur takes aim at a market dominated by just a few old school players (and I'd lump PayPal in as old school too) and in a few years is processing tens of millions of dollars.

The team is reinventing transaction processing.

Seems to me like a company that would appeal to the Hacker News community but whenever I bring it up, I get down voted. I don't understand why.

What's not to like about it's success so far?
When an engineer at google comes up with a great idea during work hours not sanctioned by google, google still owns that idea and its success. Not the individual.

Same should apply when shit goes bad.
Show HN: Understanding Relationships
Hello HackerNews,
I have something a little different to show here. I'm a PhD candidate in Melbourne, Australia and I'm working on a research project investigating how couples differ in the way they prefer to deal with relationship problems. My goal is to recruit as many participants as possible to complete an online questionnaire. For doing so, each participant will be sent a free report and relationship profile that compares their preferences and behaviours to groups of other similar people.

I'm bringing this to HackerNews to see if I could get some feedback on my project website and pitch. Initially I used Google AdWords to direct traffic to the site, then used conversion tracking + questionnaire data to give me an insight into what elements were lacking. But now I'm at a point where some richer feedback would be helpful.

Most psychological research projects are quite obtuse so I've made an effort to pitch everything in a straight-forward, plain speaking kind of way. These kinds of projects are also typically quite poorly organised, offer no real value to participants and therefore depend on begging for support. My ideal objective here is to construct a website/project that can stand on the strength of the value it offers people.

So, I'm interested in:
1. your overall impressions of the site and questionnaire
2. whether you would choose to participate based on these impressions

Your feedback is much appreciated. Please post any questions you may have about this project.

Thanks for your time.

http://www.understandingrelationships.com.au/
It seems like there's more republican state legislatures trying to pass voter fraud laws than there are actual documented cases of voter fraud in the last 2 years. That's a hell of a statistic.

Of course, there are people's jobs at stake here.
> It's a bit disingenuous to equate some Google employees from doing this with Google as a company doing it.

Um...no, it's not disingenuous at all.
Apple Releases List Of Its Suppliers, Discloses Labor Violations
Hello HackerNews,
I have something a little different to show here. I'm a PhD candidate in Melbourne, Australia and I'm working on a research project investigating how couples differ in the way they prefer to deal with relationship problems. My goal is to recruit as many participants as possible to complete an online questionnaire. For doing so, each participant will be sent a free report and relationship profile that compares their preferences and behaviours to groups of other similar people.

I'm bringing this to HackerNews to see if I could get some feedback on my project website and pitch. Initially I used Google AdWords to direct traffic to the site, then used conversion tracking + questionnaire data to give me an insight into what elements were lacking. But now I'm at a point where some richer feedback would be helpful.

Most psychological research projects are quite obtuse so I've made an effort to pitch everything in a straight-forward, plain speaking kind of way. These kinds of projects are also typically quite poorly organised, offer no real value to participants and therefore depend on begging for support. My ideal objective here is to construct a website/project that can stand on the strength of the value it offers people.

So, I'm interested in:
1. your overall impressions of the site and questionnaire
2. whether you would choose to participate based on these impressions

Your feedback is much appreciated. Please post any questions you may have about this project.

Thanks for your time.
I have a theory: if a company makes it hard for me to get (and compare) their prices, they are too high.

Actually, it started with another observation: if you have to buy the product before you can download the documentation, it's probably crap.
I think what she's getting at is that "entrepreneurship is not presented as an option in fields women are interested in".

I agree that "Starting your own business 101" is probably not in the fashion design curriculum, but it isn't in the computer science curriculum either. My alma-mater has a fashion/business dual degree program where you graduate with an MBA. It was just about 100% female.

The fact is entrepreneurship is hard, no matter who you are. Successful entrepreneurs are successful because they are talented and self-motivated, not because of a degree they got; they are largely self-taught as well.
UUID1s don't sort by their generation time.
It's not quite that simple.

This popped up on Reddit a few days back and in the comments a physician from India mentioned that a big part of the problem is that a) antibiotics are extremely over-used as they can be gotten over the counter and people do not understand that they do nothing for viral infections like the common cold, and b) his patients rarely finished an entire course even when they were directed to.

Both of these factors combine to create a great environment for disease resistant strains of bacteria to emerge.
CES 2012: IPhone 5 to Support T-Mobile Network
The Music of Graphs
Not only that, when antibiotics fail, they often leave your body in a weaker state than before you took them (by destroying helpful gut flora and damaging your intestinal tract).
This still doesn't fix the problems with selective enforcement or give accused infringers the opportunity to face their accusers in court. These are much bigger problems than any of the DNS provisions.
How the City Plans to Finance Its New Software Engineering High School
What's the Most Efficient Design For a Solar Collector? A Sunflower
Except, Google has already admitted this was theirs. Perhaps rogue employees within Google, but definitely not an unrelated third party.
Let's be real here, who the hell cares except whoever's bank account Apple's paying?
If Google were significantly unsure, it is unlikely that they would have apologized and it is unlikely that the would be preparing for "taking the appropriate action with the people involved."

In other words, if it was a simple breech of contract, the steps would be straight forward and easy to list as I suspect that actions which bring disrepute upon Google are covered in Google's standard contracts.
Try put .vim/bundle into .gitignore
Borasky Research Journal Amazon Store - Business and Finance
Thank you to the writer of this. This is actually the reason I only take work that allows me to mainly work remotely. I used to work in an open layout as described and I would be interrupted for every little thing resulting in not much actual work being achieved. Oddly enough the open layout seems to be'the way' for cool startups - maybe in actuality this driven more by the cost savings of having an open layout office versus the alternative. I find it to be a poor setup for having to do anything that requires mental concentration.
Fair enough
X-Ray - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gristmill
aMAZEing - https://market.android.com/details?id=dsgraham.maze
Chain Reaction - https://market.android.com/details?id=dsgraham.chainreactor
Yeah, User-Agent. I read the boingboing post and not the original Mocality post. Thanks.
Will HN go dark in protest of SOPA on Jan 18?
From this poll it seemed the users of HN were strongly in support of a blackout:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3454179
Practical ARM Exploitation (learn to own embedded devices)
Avoid internal getters and setters. This is a different issue vs. object to object getters and setters.
Ok, but in the general case (Sun/Oracle JDK) I'm pretty sure that there's almost no overhead for using an accessor anymore. That wasn't true of early JDKs though.
I called my Senator's office yesterday and my conversation was very different. While the Senator has not decided his position yet, the young lady (god that makes me sound old) told me that they have taken many calls opposing SOPA.

I once had an aide from my Senator's office call me to ask for more clarification on an email I'd sent them about aviation usage fees. I was probably on the phone with the aide for 30 minutes as he took notes and clarified points. It wasn't a fluff call; he was legitimately gathering information to present to the Senator.

Not all is lost; there are still Senators out there, like mine who care about their constituents and listen. Keep the pressure up.
It looks like this is comparing the Gates Foundation's total charitable contribution in 2007 to the US's foreign aid budget for one year. Not to undermine Gates' massive contribution to humanity, but the title should say "gave away".

The infographic plague continues. Surely the author could have gotten more up-to-date information about a 501(c)(3) than five year old data.
I stand corrected, foreign languages are probably also a worthwhile field of study.
Exactly. As I'm reading over all the aftermath I get the feeling that this is overblown. With organization of this size there will always be some black sheep at some point in time. Google should be judged not by what happens, but how they react.
CloudMine Releases Server-Side Superpowers
Why not just use ERB?
Why it’s not always a good idea to give customers what they want
CES 2012: Microsoft demonstrates Surface 2.0, shows off PixelSense technology
A lot of people can't/don't use LESS, which means that a lot of precompiled rules have to be overriden in a tiresome way. For instance if you change the grid sizes you have to adjust a couple different CSS attributes. This tool generates everything in a precomputed easy to digest manner.
DNS provision pulled from SOPA
IOS 6 To Have A 3D User Interface?
Here's an interesting TED talk by Steven Johnson where he argues for exactly what you are saying.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...
LG Nexus Google TV Will Be Out Soon
I don't think that Google Cache acts as a HTTP proxy.
Except for the fact that much of the work done at Xerox PARC during the 70s was an attempt to produce the software that such a device would run, in anticipation of the day, decades hence, when it would be practical (given Moore's law, etc).
A "link" and "correlation" is already well-established[1][2][3][4], and the toxicity of clothianidin in honeybees is not the issue here. The LD50 for the substance and many other chemicals is very well-known for honeybees.

The paper investigates routes of exposure.

Reading the actual paper may help:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...?

"In terms of acute toxicity (based on the oral LD50 of 2.8 ng/bee [23]), the amount of clothianidin on a single maize seed at the rate of 0.5 mg/kernel contains enough active ingredient to kill over 80,000 honey bees. However, the overall level of risk has been more difficult to quantify, as there has not been a clear mechanism whereby honey bees could be exposed to high levels of these compounds – once the treated seed is planted, opportunities for honey bee exposure to concentrations of neonicotinoids over a wide area should drop dramatically (although see [19]). Our results suggest that of the factors we quantified in this study, used talc exhausted during and after planting (the latter would occur during routine cleaning of planting equipment) stands out as potential routes for exposure that should be prioritized for further quantification and remediation."

"Detection of clothianidin in pollen, both in stored pollen in cells and in pollen traps is a critical finding because clothianidin is even more toxic when administered to bees orally, with an LD50 of 2.8–3.7 ng/bee. Given an average weight of 80–100 mg/bee, some of our pollen sample concentrations exceed the oral LD50. This, combined with the result that our samples of dead and dying honey bees consistently demonstrated the presence of clothianidin, suggests that the levels of both clothianidin and thiamethoxam found in our sampling of stored pollen in May of 2011 may have contributed to the deaths of the bees we analyzed. However, our analytical methods do not allow us to determine what fraction of the pesticide is on the surface of bees (contact toxicity, due to drift of soil or planter exhaust) vs. inside the body (oral toxicity, due to ingestion of contaminated pollen or guttation droplets). A combination of these exposure modalities is not unlikely.

[1] US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Pesticide Programs. Factsheet Clothianidin (2003) EPA Publication 7501C; www.epa.gov/opprd001/factsheets/clothian​idin.pdf.

[2] National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS), online database: Crop production 2010 summary (2010) Available: http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda​/viewDocumentInfo.d.... Accessed 2011 July 10.

[3] Laurino D, Porporato M, Patetta A, Manino A (2011) Toxicity of neonicotinoid insecticides to honey bees: laboratory tests. Bull Insectol 64: 107–113. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

[4] US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (2011) PC Code: 044309. Memorandum: Clothianidin registration of Prosper T400 seed treatment on mustard seed and Poncho/Votivo seed treatment on cotton. (2010). Available: www.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/clear​ed_reviews/csr_PC-044309_2-Nov-10_b.pdf Accessed 2011 Aug 1.
The Magic of Thinking Big - Dr. David J. Schwartz
Your username crazygringo contrasts against your personal philosophy in a big way.
Google’s Social-Networking Service Said to Be Added to FTC Antitrust Probe
Uh, wasn't this fraud? And isn't that criminal? As in jail time not just being fired?

If I said I had a fake partnership with Google and started calling up their customers for my competing website, I'm pretty certain I would go to jail.
Yes, but I don't think they can spin it as a "rogue team" really. If it is a team inside Google. That's Google's fault. It doesn't matter whether it's Google's fault because they have poor oversight or too much freedom or because they hire people who are criminal.
Rand Paul and Rob Portman have their states mixed up. I wonder what other mixups exist on this page. It's not going to be too effective to have people calling the wrong representative.
Rupert Murdoch finally admits what everyone else already knew
You cannot know what you will find useful in the future. A broad education helps inform your decisions on a huge variety of subjects, even without realizing it. Learning only what you think you'll need for your future profession is a really terrible idea.
Do they expect me to believe that insecticides might be killing insects?
post it to HN once it's ready )
Why are there no search results for Mocality on HN?
A link to the original source which includes a note from the author of the infographic: http://frugaldad.com/microsoft/
We will never, ever destroy TB. There are simply too many animal hosts for the disease. Hell, you can get it from your dog (http://www.petplace.com/dogs/tuberculosis-in-dogs/page1.aspx). The reason we could get rid of smallpox, the only reason, is that smallpox is a disease found only in human beings. There aren't a whole lot of diseases like this. Polio is one, I think.

But most communicable diseases that afflict humans can also be found in animals. Influenza, plague, leprosy... good luck on those.
Cyclesort - a curious little sorting algorithm
Which senator, or at least what state?
Pinspire.com
GitHub is a fish bowl
If you are in Ruby, you don't get a choice about accessors: "@foo" and "@bar" are private member variables. You have to create accessors for them. Like you said, though, the accessor / property generation command is easy: "attr_accessor :foo, :bar"

Even if the (Java, or otherwise) IDE can generate piles of crap code, I still hate reading piles of crap code, though. Sometimes I just want a "struct" :-)

Now back to my Java work...
If you need a responsive grid with a similar aesthetic, check out Zurb's Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com
U.S. Polo Assn. Men’s US8170 Analog-Digital Black Dial Gun Metal Bracelet Watch
Ballers Battle to Break Out - Wired on Talent Shortage
Maybe you should ask the Stripe people these questions.
This is very interesting, especially in light of certain software development approaches such as XP, where you're told to work in pairs as much as possible. Many people argue that you haven't truly experienced teamwork until you've pair developed for a whole workday together for months at a time. The approach works for several companies, Pivotal Labs comes to mind.

I've personally experienced benefits of that work style, but at the same time I've always wondered if in the process you lose the opportunity to be by yourself and deeply and creatively think about a problem from different angles, without having to share that with anybody while it's still brewing.

On the other hand, you have companies such as MySQL that were almost entirely remote, and still managed to get lots of great technology built, rarely, if ever, working in the same building. That did the trick for them, they were also quite successful.

I think at the end of the day you can have the cake and eat it too. How about this: if you need to do some deep thinking or some heavily creative work, you can do it on your own terms, by yourself, late at night, like the Woz would prescribe. If you need to do some work that you can easily wrap your head around, then working closely together with someone else or a larger team is a likely boost in effectiveness, as it provides you with safeguards and spare pairs of eyes.

Thoughts?
Raspberry Pi Beta Board #8 Photo Shoot
I think you need to add an EBS volume (see page 13, Storage Minimum) for permanent storage.
Our tax dollars at work :P
And I would venture to say that money he donated was the result from ill gotten gains. He is a convicted monopolist. And in all honesty, this money is tainted from perpetuating a monopoly.

And still this company does what it was charged with. We see that with the 'secure computing' in regards to the locked down boot sequence for up and coming Windows ARM devices.

And I bet this "donation" Gates does also encourages Windows as a computing infrastructure.

Edit: why the karma backlash? Have I said something false or misleading? Also, we are not discussing US aid.
Um...yes, it is. Take any 10k+ employee company, can you as a company guarantee that no employer will "do no evil"? That's impossible.

I'm not trying to defend Google here, but just saying that an act made by an employee at a company is equal to a given strategy by the same company is just ludicrous.
10 Surprising Health Benefits of Beer
Really good point, exposure outside of your own bubble can only be good, as long as it's balanced out with actual hard work.
Keep up the heat. Don't back down, guys!
Kudos for typing that out for the purposes of illustration!
Hey Gabriel, I know that DDG promised on http://donttrack.us that you don't send searches to other sites.

This was the first time that I've seen MSN ads, so I did a search for flowers and clicked on the ad I got. I landed on the url: http://ww11.1800flowers.com/collection.do?dataset=11385&... which has the word "Flowers" in the url.

That seemed strange, so I did the search [chocolate of the month club] on DuckDuckGo and clicked on the Microsoft ad. I ended up on http://www.amazingchocolateclub.com/?utm_source=MSN&utm_... which has "chocolate of the month club" in the url.

I tried some more esoteric searches. The search [one fruit a month] returned an ebay link http://duckduckgo.com/k/?u=http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711...

It looks like the "icep_uq" parameter in the ebay link has exactly my search query, [one fruit a month]?

I know you've made "we don't send your searches to other sites" a pretty major policy at http://donttrack.us/ . With these ads, do you know whether searches on DuckDuckGo are sometimes sent to other sites?
how much of the governments money is ill gotten?
this should not be treated as a victory, because the entire piece of "legislation," if we can even call it that, might as well read in lobby-dollars from the old media titans to the cogs of Washington's political machine

Calling this small concession a victory implies that we acknowledging some form of legitimacy in the bill.

(I do think some of the issues SOPA deals with are ones that need to be addressed, but SOPA, in its current form, does all but adequately address these problems)