skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why does it make the U.S. more competitive and vibrant if we tax working Americans to give money to non-working Americans?

Because recipients of unemployment insurance are likely to spend the money right away. That's how stimulus works: The government must spend money on things, fast and furious, so that the manufacturers of the things will experience enough demand that they will keep their own factories open.

Otherwise you get the classic deflationary spiral of (e.g.) the 1930s.

For more explanation than I could possibly provide (dammit, I really should have taken an econ class...) here's Bruce Bartlett at Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/12/04/depression-deflati...

"Banks, businesses and households are all hoarding cash, not spending except for essentials. This is bringing on the deflation that is crippling the economy.

"The problem today is that velocity is falling faster than the Fed can pump up the money supply by buying financial assets, and very low market interest rates mean there has been little net increase in liquidity as a result of the actions the Fed has taken thus far.

"What Keynes figured out is that when conditions such as these exist, the federal government must step in to raise spending in the economy and thereby increase velocity. This means running a budget deficit, but that is only part of the solution. As noted earlier, spending just to buy financial assets does very little good.

"We also know from the experience with tax rebates in 1974, 2001 and 2008 that this doesn't do any good, either. People mostly save the money or pay down debts. Thus, rebates just become another form of exchanging assets that add little to spending (and hence velocity).

"Keynes argued that the only thing that will really work is if the federal government uses its resources to purchase goods and services. It must buy 'stuff' -- concrete, computers, paper, glass, steel -- anything as long as it is tangible. In other words, the government must spend the way households do, by buying things."

---

One easy way for the government to spend like a household is to hand money to desperate households and have them spend it. The fact that this also helps newly unemployed people from growing hungry is just a nice side effect.
Wipee List and Twitter
No it is not, but the anti net neutrality lobby want to present it as "see, no one really believes in net neutrality"
To Arrington: If Europeans are Lazy, What Does that Make Calacanis, Rose and Zuckerberg?
With my current project I've been having trouble being noticed. I've been featured on Mashable but that's about it.

Differentiation is pretty tough too (but integration has been easy!).
Trying to make money off of P2P and failing is so amazingly ironic. Karma's a bitch.
It depends what you use coffee for. Given that the brain adapts very quickly to caffeine, you lose most benefits from the stimulant effect if you drink constant amounts (and there's a point at which you lose all benefit, even if you start drinking ridiculous amounts of it).

So, it's probably not worth it if you drink it regularly, because it doesn't make you much more alert in the steady-state.

This is unrelated to the other issues it may have.
That would've been really bad advice for some people. There is a lot of successful B2C software out there.
I think you are being overly general - but I am sure there is a large percentage that fit your generalisation.
The Entrepreneurial Year in Review
Ask HN: Gaming Startups
So I'm watching the video games awards on TV and I realize there seems to be a gap between the internet entrepreneurs and the pc/video games entrepreneurs. However, both companies start with programmers and designers.

There are tons of independent gaming companies, started by just a few guys. For example, the winner of this year's independent game award goes to World of Goo. Do any of you entrepreneurs develop games and would like to share your experiences?

Also, the biggest difference I see between websites and games are the animations. Are there any guides out there to get people who are interested in developing games a quick boost?
http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html

The main point:

>People for whom writing comes more easily may rest their hands fairly heavily on the paper, but their forearms and shoulders move as they write. Their writing has a cadence that shows they’re using at least some of the right muscle groups. They don’t draw the letters with their fingers; the fingers serve more as guides.
I have tried many a fancy pen and always come back to the sweet dime-a-million Bic Roundstic.
thank you for bringing some sanity to this discussion. I read hacker news as an escape from the looters and moochers of the world. I hope this remains a place for people who produce and love doing it.
Really, it sounds more as if Google wants cohosting than a "fast lane" or other special treatment.
>That's "evil" somehow?

The farmer is farms land stolen from Native Americans.

If we go by the odds it isn't some farmer taking out a small loan at Wells Fargo, most wheat is grown by big agribusiness.

The yield on the wheat is so high largely because of government funded fundamental research into agriculture and biology, including genetic modification, which has revolutionized things. Much of this publicly funded research is done by universities under grants from the NSF and such, and they are allowed turn around and sell the resulting patents to the agribusiness conglomerates. Not exactly a free-market miracle.

Wal-mart often demands public subsidies from small towns in order to put their store there, leveraging their massive outside scope and bargaining power with suppliers to be able to make their case to the municipalities.
Finance Hack: Get 0% card offers as a way to refinance debt.
Yeah I started crossing my z's in Calc II because I was getting them mixed up with my 2's.
Good luck guys, the world needs more UI metaphors.
I have no idea if this is right or not, but I just thought I'd mention how I conceptualized the problem: I thought of the distance from point A to B as Y. I thought of walkways as simply devices that reduced Y by n times t. n is the velocity of the walkway and t was the time spent on it.

Therefore one would want to maximize t while maintaing the highest possible average walking/running speed. E.g. it might not make sense for me to stand still on the walkway but I'd tie my shoes on it and try to reserve sprinting for regular surfaces.
I was a civil servant for awhile. Politics frequently got in the way of our department's work. Political initiatives would interrupt the ones we were working on and would frequently change based on whatever they felt like legislating that session or whomever was newly appointed. Not every department would be like that, but in a lot of cases there's too much outside influence by politicians to get any real work done.
Demonstrate how it is different from a raffle.
Doesn't it make someone to hold off on looking for job? Which in turn would mean that they are not contributing towards creating anything. Wouldn't that in turn slow down the economy even more? If you don't create anything useful you just end up not having anything to trade for.
I grew up in San Diego, and I'm a great UI programmer...but I'm working full time on my own startup.

Good luck finding someone!
Stress and lack of exercise are killing elephants, zoos warned
"... I've been having trouble being noticed ..."

Is the trouble getting users or just being picked up in the press? (both non-trivial problems)
I'm curious - why use the word "politics", why not say "democracy"? i.e. "Democracy frequently got in the way of our department's work. Democratic initiatives would interrupt ones we were working on ..."

I point this out because our society often denounces politics but enshrines democracy. Yet no one can logically explain the difference between the two. It's a fascinating cognitive dissonance. Perhaps you can explain?
Not sure if it will work, but try:

1) Rendering an undirected graph via graphviz's neato tool.

2) Rendering to svg, which might let graphviz not have to keep as much rendering information in memory at any one time.

3) Asking about it on the grapviz-interest mailing list.
https://mailman.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/graphviz-i...
Democracy is the will of the people, politics is the will of the politicians.
I see it as 3 types of jobs really:

a) government job as described in the post
b) corporate job as described in the post
c) start-up job

Unless you are getting equity there is probably no reason whatsoever to work in the private sector.

the beauty of government jobs is that you work for 20 years, and then you can retire, where you get 50% of your paycheck as your pension.

I know for many wokraholics the mentality is that money solves everything, but most people will elect to get a slightly lower salary in exchange for a higher quality of life.
Read the article to the end. He concludes by stating that if all this is possible, the economy is fucked.
You know that classic problem: You are going to a city 50 miles away. Would it be faster to travel there and back at 30mph, or at 40mph leaving and 20mph returning. (hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean)
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> I'd argue that parallelism and functional programming are topics far more vital to an aspiring computer scientist than things like web frameworks and SQL.

Hell, they're even important for the aspiring web developer: being intimately aware of the flow of state will make any centralized, stateful bottlenecks in your application painfully obvious.
What is this mysterious "will of the people"? How is it measured except through the politicians the people elect? If the politician relies on polling to make every decision, is that "democracy"? Or should we have direct democracy with each decision being subject to a popular referendum? Although, even a referendum is not the "will of the people" - it's just the will of the majority. Perhaps then we should demand complete 100% consensus for every decision enacted?

As a reader of hacker news, I assume you like to think of yourself as a person of science and reason. But when you summon phrases such as "will of the people" you have left that world. The phrase is empty - it provides no information, and contributes nothing to the discussion. Would you mind more precisely defining what you mean by "will of the people"?
I'll bite - this strikes me as worse than Akamai, because anyone can get on those Akamai servers if you're a customer of theirs. Only Google will have access to these servers - I'd almost prefer that the Akamai arrangement would be against the rules.

I know, I know - this suggestion seems crazy. But maintaining dumb pipes is critical to maintaining the separation between content and carriage. We've already seen the cable companies get into fights over bundles of channels - and putting servers inside the networks would essentially turn websites into the new cable channels.
Luckily, I read this. So, am I one of them?
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Safer, Better, Faster: Addressing Cryptography’s Big Challenges
Couldn't anyone come at least close to the same advantage just by signing up with Akamai?

Besides, this isn't about making other sites slower so that your's seems faster, its about building an additional physical infrastructure so that your site actually is faster while not degrading anyone else's performance in any way.
Update/confirmation: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutralit...
That follow-up was really weak. You're basically sitting there yelling at Michael & Gang with your fingers plugging your ears without having anything conclusive or supporting. You absolutely dismissed every single credible entrepreneur as living a life of satisfaction and laziness, to a degree. I don't think anyone is arguing the fact that entrepreneurs don't spend every single waking hour in front of a monitor... that's not the issue. So what the hell are you arguing? Where's your street cred at if you're going to sit there and call bullshit on everyone?

I'm sorry, but you have completely missed the point of that entire video. If you want work-life balance, you WILL lose. That's the nature of business and competition.

Bring the downvotes on (if this story ever gets bumped up).

EDIT: I hated the content of this article, but why did it get deleted??
“There are three big issues facing cryptographers,” says Bart Preneel, a professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. “Cost, speed and long-term security.”

Funny, I thought the primary problems are usability, usability, and usability.
Devil's Advocate: iTunes made it compelling to buy a 99 cent track instead of downloading it for free. Surely there must be something to it?
Chat
I went in this site and found alot of cool people. I didn`t think chat sites like this were this awesome.
No worse than "gems" ;)
Gregor Heinrich has a good paper on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which I believe is an extension of Latent Semantic Analysis. It is a model which can be used to group documents based on semantic content. He gives the mathematical details and the "punchlines" for implementation. The model takes as input a collection of documents and outputs a topic label for each word in each document. The documents can be plotted in K-dimensional space, where K is the number of possible topics, by using the proportion of each topic in a document as its coordinates. Documents which are closer to each other have topics more similar to each other. You could then use your favorite clustering algorithm or a simple distance threshold to decide which should documents should link to each other.

The paper is here [PDF]: http://www.arbylon.net/publications/text-est.pdf

C++ implementation: http://gibbslda.sourceforge.net/

(note, I haven't used the C++ implementation).
How do you explain machine tools?
Also discussed here: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/14/packaging/

On HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397426
Lua Interpreter in Flash (Alchemy Port)
More info here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm...
Very general; not much information. Should be useful to beginning undergrads.
Detroit bailout bill may lead to more debt-investor insecurity
After reading this article I would like to know what kind of training climbers engage in before climbing Mount Everest. It seems to me that at the types of elevations Mount Everest is working with, the preparation you would need beforehand would be quite intense. Not only that, but the technology you would need to offset whats happening to your body at those heights would be interesting to investigate as well.
That's like saying ESPN's marketing budget gives them an unfair advantage over my fantasy sports startup. Cash, and the ability to exploit it, is certainly an advantage, but if it weren't the market wouldn't function.

As long as I can still get reasonable speed connections (like what I do now) I can compete, even if they're a little faster. I just have to make a better product. Now if they're slowing my service down to unusability, that's an unfair advantage.
All CS/ECE students would benefit from reading it. I'm sure you already did though.
What an amazing press hit for the telcos. They just completely pwned the WSJ. So badly, though, that there's a chance the paper will turn against them once they realize how they've been used.
The Social Life of Routers: 1960s sociology experiment could hold the key to better Internet routing
The chicken and the egg is probably the biggest problem. The new users don't want to join/buy because you lack content/users/reputation etc
I'd always understood that a lot of the deaths on Everest were the result of wealthy people not preparing properly for the climb. If you've seen the IMAX Everest movie, you see the incredible shape that team was in...and they still had a hard go of it. I imagine attempting in anything less than exquisite physical condition is asking for trouble.
Not necessarily. In Haskell the oneliners are frequently short enough to fit on one screen.

For example, I recently needed to do some Run-Length Encoding:

import Control.Arrow
import Data.List

encodeRLE :: (Eq a) => [a] -> [(Int, a)]
encodeRLE = map (length &&& head) . group

decodeRLE :: [(Int, a)] -> [a]
decodeRLE = concatMap (uncurry replicate)
How do I downvote with no down arrow?
It wouldn't have worked if iTunes also let you download the music for free.
Good question. I sent emails on http://uploadthingy.com to about 20 blogs that I thought would be interested a while back - what happened? Nothing. Nada. The service is now profitable and growing every day. Going to try again this week. Not expecting too much. Adwords rules - at least for now.
Content Types, HTTP And You
Distribution is and always will be the #1 problem for new web startups.
True but a bit torrent client + google means that song is just a few clicks away.
Oof.

I had a brainbuster of a time earlier this year when I had to enumerate all possible valid schedules at a university... and this makes it look like an absolute cakewalk.
If you are interested in why climbers die on Mount Everest, read Jon Krakauer's amazing first-hand account of Everest's worst disaster:

http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_i...
Should the ability of search engines to index something determine whether or not you do it?

I understand SEO is a practical necessity, but in the grand scheme of things, it sounds like putting the cart before the horse.
Is this going to become like that thing about airplanes on treadmills that move backward at the same speed as the plane, where everyone is 100% sure they have it right?

I see the reasoning that if you walk on the treadmill you enjoy it's speed for less time - but that's not what you care about. You care about how long it takes you to get from the start of the treadmill to the end, and if you walk you get to the end faster.

So if you can walk 100 meters in 1 minute, and that's what you do on the treadmill, you will have covered an extra 100 meters in 1 minute.

Or you could cover that 100 meters on the ground, and it will also take you 1 minute.

The speed of the conveyor makes no difference - that is totally fixed, the only difference is do you cover that 100 meters on the conveyor or off of it.

I typed and rejected many examples to give you, but none were intuitive. So if it's this hard to explain then I'm 100% sure this is going to become like that airplane on a conveyor belt.

People are going to argue about this forever.

What is it about conveyor belts that makes it hard for people?
this strikes me as worse than Akamai

In what way is Akamai bad?

And if Akamai isn't bad (as I don't see any way to say they are), then how would Google doing this for their own use rather than paying Akamai rather astounding fees be "worse"? I'm failing to see how this is anything other than intelligent and efficient use of bandwidth. Bringing the content closer to users is good for consumers. It doesn't cost the consumer anything, it doesn't cost the telcos anything (it actually saves them money), and it allows Google to provide better service.

The only argument I could see against it would be, when does it end? Does Microsoft have to build a CDN like this to keep trying to compete with Google? Yahoo, I believe, already has a very favorable agreement with Akamai, so they don't. But everybody else that has a very large web presence might want the same privileges. But, since it saves telcos bandwidth, and they're the only ones that would need to accommodate these new local servers, it's probably perfectly reasonable to let them decide who they want in their data centers.
I agree with Lessig that there shouldn't be a problem as long as access to fast pipes is merely a matter of money. But I fear this is a slippery slope. It wouldn't take long until different types of content were priced differently (porn) or until network providers became subject to blackmail by fanatics asking for censorship.
I've not seen a good concise, intuitive definition of 'network neutrality'.

Under the abstract definition "you should not be able to make special contractual arrangements with telecom companies so your services are faster than your competitors", yes, this is a violation of 'neutrality'.

If the only special contractual arrangements prohibited are those implemented in router software, then no, installation of edge-service-accelerator machines is 'neutral'.

But it looks like a loophole to me. In both cases, company G pays telecom T a certain amount $X, and thus gains a competitive advantage in reaching people downstream of T.

Whether that competitive advantage is sold from T to G via router software configuration (S) or physical-space cooperation (P) should be irrelevant.

In fact, method 'S' might be more economically and environmentally efficient. There's no mixing of operations/facilities. Each party has incentives to maximally scale what they do best -- G big energy-efficient datacenters, T big divisible pipes -- and lesser physical space/power demands are placed at network bottlenecks.
This is my school's: http://acm.ccs.neu.edu

It's okay -- I was involved for a couple years, then got sick of it. We've had some decent speakers.
It doesn't replace running all code on both client and server, but for certain use cases it does.

For example, you have a blog post with comments and a form that allows you to post new comments. When a person visits the page, the HTML of all current comments is loaded. The code to generate that HTML is on the server. But say that you want the interface to be very responsive, and when someone posts a new comment, you want to be able to display that comment in the list with others w/o waiting for the response from the server. Ideally the same code that generated the HTML for the original list can be used to generate the HTML for this new comment -- but on the client.

(Of course, to actually store the new comment, you need server side code, which I'm not saying it will eliminate at all.)
Quite. He could afford to have a custom iBentley made if he wanted to. Also I don't know how the SL55 stacks up in this respect but if it's more reliable than average, then that's a frugal choice too. Remember it doesn't mean cheap it means best possible value for money.
Historically, the most likely censor is the net neutrality enforcers themselves, the FCC.
There "spending money on things" and there's creating long-term value. E.g. if a government builds roads, dams, space shuttles, nuclear power stations, aircraft carriers etc other large pieces of infrastructure then the entire economy reaps the reward many times over in the future, in addition to the jobs etc created in the actual building of the things. But giving people who could be working on projects like this money to do nothing instead is economically very short sighted indeed. Remember time is a sunk asset. Once it's gone, it's gone. That's what's being wasted here, people's time.
If you ever need to solve such a thing just swap miles per hour to hours per mile:

So .0333 + .0333 = .0666 (i.e. it would take you .0666 hours for each mile you need to cover). Or .025 + .05 = .075

Clearly the second is better.