skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah but politics (at least on Intrade) is much further away than most, and in ways you can predict and exploit.

I have a suspicion the same is true, but to a much lesser extent, of NFL games, but I can't confirm it.
Do you have the impression I'm not voting, or that I'm only considering the major parties?

You and BigZaphod have a problem with addressing my point, that one isn't required to vote in order to voice a complaint about the election/candidates/government/whatever.
Not just vote -- vote for Obama!!!
Great in theory, but you can't secede from the effects of government. Lets say that you built a farm and where completely self sustaining. You never went out for anything, never put your waste onto the populace's sewer system. You never went out for healthcare, or drove on the public's roads, or used any technology funded by the government. What about the education you received at the tax payers expense? What about the past medical care you got as a child that you will never repay. Your theory is so irrational as to be impossible.
> Your site administration is very confusing.

Hmmm ... okay. Looks like I'll have to go back and design a few more pages into the workflow.

> the people managing the content vs the people managing the design / layout
> are two entirely different sets of people.

Thanks for this insight.

> So what is your differentiation factor?

See my reply comment to petercooper.

Some people think they want a content management system for publishing a newspaper, and they don't think of Wordpress as one.
Points all taken, but there's no reason why the site can't be spruced up even if in open source project mode. The better the presentation, the more interest.

Rails and Nitro were released at about the same time. Rails had a well designed site with a good introduction and screencasts. Almost no-one knows what Nitro is now. Same goes for a lot of open source projects - presentation can help build the critical mass in many areas.
Radiant CMS 0.6.9 + plugins.
I promise you that everyone who actually does write a newspaper already does. They do that with sports or just about anything that runs late at night but needs to be printed early.
Nah, I believe same ideas arise all over the world all the time, but we usually only know about our own :)
Nothing at all. Ron Paul was pretty much unknown to everyone who doesn't read Digg.
What about erlang web frameworks on top of Mochiweb ? Is there any?
If they were to argue:

Your vote doesn't count.
Therefore, everyone's vote doesn't count.

...it would qualify as a fallacy of composition. This conclusion is not included in their argument.
Or at least vote for my candidate of choice!
I think Hacker News is now officially looking down and seeing a shark pass below.
But if you have to be forced to vote, how much could you know about the issues? My vote is worth more at 1/130 million than at 1/300 million. Still pretty small, but I'd rather that than be swamped by people who haven't a clue (even though many are that way already).
If you vote based on what the candidates SAY rather than what they and their associates have DONE with their lives, then you are asking to be lied to.

Bush's adult life was: Daddy got him into a good university, which he did nothing with, went AWOL, daddy made it all good. Spent and lost lots of other people's money, went through rehab, became a religious fundamentalist, then ran Texas.

Gore's adult life was: Enlisted to please his father, volunteered to go to war out of a sense of obligation, ran for elected office to do what he felt was his obligation to follow in his father's footsteps. Served as a public official his entire adult life.

If you think that those two life stories are "the same" or that their campaigns can inform you more than that, I don't know what to suggest to you.
Do to the volume of games and # of teams, NCAA basketball is actually the best for exploiting. The book The Smart Money is a great read.

Also, we have some people in the know post on the TicketStumber blog:

http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/category/sports-insights/

http://sports.ticketstumbler.com/blog/?cat=4

My gambling "fund" is up 35% for the year. My stocks are down by a similar margin.
I think I do understand most of the technicalities, using Gregory Chaitin's ideas about the properties of self-delimiting programs as a bridge. What I don't get is what I percieve of as the insistence on "surprises" in the "universe of interest" that can't be seen "from outside". Zooming through a Mandelbrot set visualization, while it can be a great experience, ultimately offers you few surprises, and because there are few surprises, you know that the complexity - represented by the original equation - must be low. And Eliezer seems to be saying the opposite, namely that the are lots of surprises in a particular universe that cannot be known from the system as a whole, because the system as a whole only contains 400 bits of information. If you would write this multiverse program as self-delimiting, the way Chaitin does, where would all the extra complexity/information/surprises found in the "universe of interest" come from?
Well, I could build it as a hosted service, but that means I don't release the code. I'm worried that a hosted service won't be able to achieve critical mass because, in this attention economy, it's difficult to get word out there.

I figured if I make it open source, it will spread faster and further.
The source code is available at this site too and may interest those wanting a Python based master-worker distributed processing pattern for thier own problems/tasks.
A designer of the longsoon chip came to make a presentation -- and he gave it from such a netbook using OpenOffice.org. The MIPS chip is supposed to scale (the manufacturing is a joint venture with some Italians). They are building the next Chinese HPCs out of them...

As a bonus, Windows does not run on the MIPS processor; it never has.

Actually, it is promised to have hardware support for boosting Qemu x86.
Ah, but Radiant targets developers, whereas ProsePoint targets end users.

With ProsePoint, most of the required functionality is available out of the box, or at least, that is the intention.
Really, do explain how inner city poverty is "much worse" than it was in 1900? Infant mortality? No. Access to safe and nutritive food? No. Access to housing? No.

Do tell. "If turn-of-the-century infant death rates had continued, then an estimated 500,000 live-born infants during 1997 would have died before age 1 year; instead, 28,045 infants died" (1)

(1) Hoyert DL, Kochanek KD, Murphy SL. Deaths: final data for 1997. Hyattsville, Maryland: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, 1999. (National vital statistics report; vol 47, no. 20).
Don't ... really ... like ... that ... idea.

That's a labour-bound offering and doesn't scale.
Boston Carpet Cleaners
I drink 1 glass of wine every night. Of course one night I spilled it all over mt area rug, I knew it was bound to happen. I found Avishay Carpet Cleaners here in Boston and was very happy with their service.
Except of course that in the year 2008, the church cannot have you KILLED for "abstaining".

The US government has the power to forcefully imprison and/or kill you. If you want to "abstain" from that system, then ignoring its existence all around you is just being pigheaded. If you really want to abstain, I suggest that you LEAVE. Many people find living outside the United States quite pleasant, and you can rest assured that in most of the other democratic nations of the world, your tax dollars are not being spent to bomb "collateral damage".
Web Stats Imperfect in Video Too
just use a key :/ Not really an issue is it?
Nate Silver vs. The Betting Markets
For the record, on the night before the election:

(Obama is first number, McCain second)

fivethirtyeight.com:

OH: 86% - 14%
FL: 67% - 33%
NC: 59% - 41%
MO: 47% - 53%
IN: 36% - 64%
ND: 34% - 66%
MT: 23% - 77%

intrade.com:

OH: 75% - 24%
FL: 77% - 25%
NC: 65% - 43%
MO: 52% - 50%
IN: 39% - 67%
ND: 27% - 76%
MT: 33% - 78%

betfair.com:

OH: 80% - 18%
FL: 78% - 24%
NC: 61% - 40%
MO: 53% - 51%
IN: 41% - 65%
ND: 31% - 73%
MT: 30% - 72%

Final Scores:

Nate Silver (McCain gets MO): Obama 353, McCain 185

Betting Markets (Obama gets MO): Obama 364, McCain 174

Karl Rove (McCain gets MO and NC): Obama 338, McCain 200

pollster.com (McCain MO, NC, FL): Obama 311, McCain 227
I have 3 kids. It is not charming to open a toy to them.
Here's what happens...

Open outer box -> scissors required for massive plastic bits -> about 20 twisty wire things holding everything in place -> sometimes screws holding more stuff in place.

It's not fun for a kid to watch his parents struggling for ages to open a toy. That's not fun. They don't care about the box, it goes in the bin.
Fantastic idea from Amazon, I've been waiting for this for ages.
All Hail President Hypnotoad!
Every parent on the earth would rather toys just came in a simple box with no screws, ties, plastic requiring a small army of tools and implements to open. Not to mention the fact that the kids can actually play with their toys immediately, rather than waiting ages for the packaging to be dismantled.

This will take off big time hopefully.
The roads were not always a government monopoly, nor were the canals, nor the railroads. All had some government support but they were not run by the government. But at some point it became clear that this was a FAILURE. Without roads and rails and at one point, canals, this countries economy would not function. Sure you can make some high traffic routes private and run them better, I would love that. The fact that I-95 is under construction, and they only work 8 hours a day 5 days a week while inconveniencing me anytime of day is something that no private business would do because they would lose customers. But look at the inability to get broadband in rural areas - it is significantly cheaper to run fiber than to build a road, and you can't even get that done.

So yes, you could avoid paying taxes, but at the expense of losing more than 30% of your revenue as the economy crumbled. I can understand the principle, but pragmatically what you want to do is a pipe dream and economically it will be WORSE for you monetarily. I understand standing on principle on the 1st amendment or torture or policy, but when we start talking dollars and cents, your ideas just don't hold water.
Marriage public records
Tired of searching the web for marriage records? Well look no further. Begin accessing our state by state database today in a quick and efficient manner.
XMPP is most definitely not a message bus, and message buses or message queues are two technologies that seem like the practical/workable implementation of multicast for the purposes of pubsub.

One thing that I think makes XMPP so heavyweight is that it's XML. And it took so long to get off the ground because the documentation was like "here, look, it's so easy to send messages over Jabber, it's just XML" but didn't really explain all the "presence" terminology nor provide libraries for a number of popular languages initially that hid all the complexity and let you actually join to a server. Even the perl XMPP library on CPAN talks about "XML stanzas" -- dude, all I want to do is join a server and send and receive messages, hook me up to an event loop! (admittedly, the perl module in question does this, there's just a lot of XMPP baggage to get around). XMPP also include{s,d} a lot of complexity for things that normally happen out of band for security purposes, like user creation on the servers. I mean, XMPP makes the IMAP protocol look simple.
Weird.. I submitted this link a day ago (with the same url) and the dupe detection wasn't hit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351975
Sieze Today... Tomorrow is Never Good Enough
I have the impression that you are pompous and lazy. I'm driving 500 miles round trip to vote tomorrow. One of my room mates can vote 10 minutes away and he isn't voting. He agrees with Obama but he "knows he will win so why bother". To me it is a sign of disrespect to those who have died for the right to vote in this country, as well as a sign of personal laziness.

In your case you seem unhappy with the choices presented, not the idea of voting. So I'm saying, there are many choices there and I can't see how you can't pick the one closest to your views.

As for if you should have the right to voice a complaint. Well if you can't find a single party worth voting for, then you obviously have either a strong opinion that differs or a very weak opinion. If you have a weak opionon, then STFU. If you have a strong opinion that differs with every party such that you can not vote for a single one, but don't run for office yourself, well then you have no grounds on which to complain because once again, you are just being lazy in not running. Most of the 3rd party candidates aren't even running full time campaigns, but there is no reason you couldn't run.

Seriously, if NJ Weedman can get a bunch of signatures and get on the ballot for his ideas, so can you. So not doing that, or not finding at least ONE party worth voting for says to me you are simply lazy or trying really hard to be a contrarian. Either one makes me contemptuous.
he's far too dogmatic

This is his curse: and many people reproach him this.
His standard reply is, that if he would have ever given way to "compromises" by being less "dogmatic", GNU/Linux would have never happened: it would be infested with proprietary blobs all the way through giving control to others, rather than you, the proprietor, to the detriment of your freedom. Maybe I am wrong, but I tend to agree, if you compare the popularity of GNU/Linux vs. any other Unix, notably the FreeBSD and its variants.

Finally, I like the door knob analogy of Jeremy Allison:

http://twit.tv/floww14

to which e.g. Mark Shuttleworth would also subscribe: this is the only reason for the popularity and explosive growth of Ubuntu. The day this changes (like it did for say RedHat), it will also decline in popularity (completely different than material profit of stakeholders), something a few people already start seeing signs of.
Back where I'm from it is mandatory for every able citizen to vote.
Singularity Hub » Blog Archive » Singularity Summit 2008 Reviewed
Winding down XMPP, for now
I agree...but not exactly on topic, is it?
Are you advocating anarchy then?

"They provide services but they can only do so by monopolizing the service they provide and _taking_ other peoples money to finance the administration of that service."

I just don't get this. How do you expect them to pay for services? And let's not forget that "the government" isn't some magic entity, it's made up of the citizens of the country itself. I'm pretty sure the US government employs more citizens than any other organization in the US.

I would say that many of the services and infrastructure the government typically provides are considered "natural monopolies". It doesn't make sense to have a bunch of parallel roads when you can have one. Same with water, electricity, etc. With the government providing a single "set" of infrastructure you may need X miles of road, pipe, power lines, or whatever, if you had 4 companies competing you would need 4 times as much, which would end up costing the end user 4 times more.

But in fact, the government doesn't have a complete monopoly on roads, since there are privately owned toll roads, which you have to pay to drive on. Would you prefer all roads were privately owned, and the owners could then charge arbitrarily high tolls?
It will probably also lower the total costs for returned items. You cannot re-ship an item when the plastic packaging has been damaged, even if the item itself has not been touched.
Too bad that for commercial use, this information is locked up within Flickr.
What's the difference between reddit and HN with blatant political topics such as this one? Normally I avoid feeding political comments on HN, but with this submission it seems any decency has gone out the window.

I'm going to the polls tomorrow due to tradition and ease of conversation. But if one's default action is to stay home, they'll get more done by sticking with that. Hackers change the world by writing code, not by checking a box and hoping that somehow this time will be different.
If you vote for someone that fucks you over, THEN you can't complain. After all, you voted for him.

Non-voters have every right to complain.
I would like justices that interpret the Constitution as written, and sadly liberal justices don't seem to have any concern for that.
Well, you could always move to remote cabin in Montana.

And mail bombs to people.
Reminded me of "Ten ways to make a political difference" by political theorist Nick Szabo. The article is pretty biased by his libertarian roots, but voting is still at number ten, the least effective.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/08/ten-ways-to-make-di...
Your vote will make no difference. Statistically, you have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery than making a difference with your vote.

Voting is not "speaking for yourself". You are allowed to speak one of two things, neither of which may be what you want to say.

You do have the power to change things and make the world a better place, but not through the political process.

If you stay home from the polls and use that time to read to a child or help an old lady carry groceries, you will have done more good for the world than if you spent the morning voting.

Most of the good things in this world, our vast cultural heritage and our technological richness, have not been generated through the voting booth. If you want to contribute to the material and spiritual wealth of our species, you will find your efforts best spent elsewhere.

If you buy into the hype and feel compelled to vote for the entertainment aspect of it, don't pretend that you are better than those who did not. You aren't.

When the officials you vote for harm other people through their actions in office, those people have the right to complain, even if they did not vote. Morality is not overridden by democracy.
Guestimating the election with twitter
We were sitting around tonight and decided to whip something together to leverage twitter to get some real time election information.

It is ugly and open to bias but we're hopping it might show something interesting.

We're also planning to take snapshots of the map and assemble a time lapse for Wednesday.
2008 Election - Choosing a President (video)
I am a Swiss living abroad and I always vote by mail-in ballot. I don't vote out of a feeling of social obligation, I vote because I believe it does make a difference, however small, and that if I convince myself and people I know to vote, that difference keeps adding up.

If I didn't have the mail-in option, however, chances are I wouldn't vote - even if I was back home in Switzerland. I don't vote for a social perception, I vote because I care about the issues being voted about (note: we don't vote on people very often, we mostly vote on issues; I don't usually vote on people).

Obviously I can't argue with the results of the study. Perhaps mail voting does decrease voting likelihood. At the same time, I'd argue that people who vote out of a sense of social obligation rather than because they have an opinion on the issues at hand would be better off abstaining. If you don't care about the outcome, don't vote. Chances are, if you don't care, you won't have bothered to research the issues anyway, so your vote would merely be statistical noise or, worse, uninformed "vote like my party" trash. We're really better off without your vote then.

This article would be disturbing if it wasn't so pitiful. The only thing proven by this article is that the economist's perspective is awfully limited, and completely inapplicable when it comes to deciding how to behave in the "real world". If everyone behaved like economists as described in this article, most social functions wouldn't be able to exist, and we would probably soon devolve into a collection of pitiful warring tribes.
I presume you will be staying home and reading to a child instead of voting today? You're a much better person than everyone else on the internet. If only the whole world was like you, we'd have completely eliminated everything wrong with society by now.
Americans, vote wisely
He's the least crazy candidate that doesn't have grand schemes to reshape the world from Washington DC.
I found I'm more productive doing almost all development just in one browser (Firefox) and then I fix bugs appearing in other browsers only at the end.

The exception is when I want to do something more complex, then I test feasibility of this particular feature in all browsers as soon as possible to see if there is not some showstopper (like Explorer's JavaScript engine being too slow).

Try to keep markup as simple as possible. It's good both for performance and for cross-browser compatibility. I had many cross-browser bugs disappearing just with refactoring.

When stuck, try to get the same behavior from all browsers, even if it's buggy. It can be easier to get to uniform correct appearance from uniform incorrect one than from the situation where you have mixture of good/bad behavior across browsers.
Definitely post-war and post-Medicare part D.
I will be voting, but I acknowledge that it is purely for entertainment value and that I am not changing the world and that I am not morally better than those that do not vote. In fact, many of them are probably morally better than I.
You're right, and I think this whole submission and thread of comments illustrates exactly why political topics are typically avoided on Hacker News. It quickly devolves into sarcastic comments, and more sarcastic comments poking fun at the original sarcastic comments.

Your comment was just very similar to the things I'm used to seeing on Reddit, but not Hacker News.

Anyway, I'm looking forward the elections being over and Hacker News hopefully going back to it's good old self of mostly technology and entrepreneurial related posts.
The ’08 Race -  A Sea Change for Politics as We Know It
I also appreciated Patri Friedman's take on this:

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/11/03/concentra...
Ask HN: How to monetize a play for fun poker site?
I'm launching a poker site this week or next. It will be based on my OpenPoker server and a Flash client. There are plenty of real-money poker sites out there but mine will be the one and only "social network" where you can actually play poker.

I plan to make it as convenient as possible for friends to hang out together and play poker, the kind of game that goes on in pubs and college dorm rooms right now.

Does this sound like a good idea and if so how can I make money?

I'm thinking of charging $10/mo for subscriptions and perhaps a bit more for people wanting to run poker bots. I can also hook into MochiAds to run ads in the Flash client. Then there's customizing of your poker table, avatars, etc.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks, Joel