skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, camels can carry twice as much as the Alpha Dog, so you'd actually need 250 camels.

Camels don't even need to eat every day. They eat pretty much anything that grows in the desert. It looks like they can eat "up to" 10 lb/day. Being a desert animal, the camel has a exceptionally efficient kidneys, so they don't need to urinate a lot.

There's a reason people have used camels for thousands of years in the desert. In the Middle East healthy camel costs around $1000. That cost must include food, breeding, training, etc. It's hard to imagine ever getting the price of an Alpha Dog down to that level.

I also have a hard time believing that a camel is less resilient than a human being in its native environment.
Could you explain how 5 card draw is more skill based than Hold 'em? This is not in a combative tone, I really want to know.
Actually, disney makes very poor use of the characters that they keep rehashing. If mickey mouse was freed, we'd see tens of thousands of creative works every year based on him, instead of the handful we're getting now.

The value to society of leaving disney the ownership of mckey mouse is a net negative. More people would make more money on a freed mickey mouse.
I used to think "jump the shark" referred to something like this: after a slow asymptotic climb, a precipitous drop in popularity representing the leading and trailing edges of a shark's fin respectively.

It wasn't until a few years after hearing this phrase that I learned it came from a Happy Days episode.
Not sure if this is too adorable (adorkable?) for Hacker News, but it's certainly relevant!

It's a bit irrational to put this much effort into a job app-- but it's also an incredibly strong positive signal.

For early-stage startups, passion for the space, the people, makes a huge difference. You don't just want the right skills and talent (which Margot also had in abundance), you want people who care.

(And of course, we're hiring a lead designer and engineer: http://www.ridejoy.com/jobs/. Don't worry, preparing a slideshow is not actually necessary.)
I'm still convinced that Logo is very hard to beat for a truly first-ever language. Drawing is fun, and Logo is all about drawing. It develops basic logic in a progressive manner.

But yeah, Python would be the best next step.
That's how jQuery implements it for jQuery.fn.queue, and I think I'll revise it that way too.
I like it, couple of potential problems though:

1) If I'm on the provider end, am I in a race with the entire planet to get the job done first? Is $0.75 worth that?

2) Since the task can go beyond information, an exchange between buyer/provider is needed, how will this happen? File transfer might be easy, what if I'm request something requiring physical access (put air in my tires)? Will you monitor it somehow for tasks than can be completed by people over the internet, will you host files, etc?

3) If you are transferring files, how do you provide privacy?
Meta-question: board games like chess and go are entirely based upon skill, but are there board games similar to Monopoly or Catan where you have the board, pieces, cards that grant abilities, etc. which are based entirely upon skill?

You'd have to eliminate dice entirely and make movement solely the choice of the player, within a defined set of rules. Cards wouldn't come up randomly but would be earned based on objective criteria. Conflicts for position/status/etc. need to be settled objectively as well.

I can think of a number of computer games which might fit the criteria, but I'm unaware of what's out there in the physical board game world.
tic-tac-toe and go also require as much luck as chess.
The Wall Street Journal and Climate Change Denial
An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about climate change denial signed by 16 scientists claims that the number of “scientific heretics” continues to grow.
Wow now that's a great use of an awesome piece of software. I wasn't expecting that.

Putting myself in the shoes of an employer, this would be an instant win. It shows she took the time to put something together that's more than just a resume. However, I don't know how well this will fly with a large multi-national company (think IBM, Alcatel, etc). That's why I like startups, they're usually filled with happy people and good ideas.
Chess/Go/Checkers are one category of game where luck plays no part, but not the only one. The thing they all have in common are 2 players and perfect information.

Then there are games like Stratego, which have no 'luck' but require you to make decisions based on imperfect information.

And games like Diplomacy, with no random element but a social dynamic. I'd assert that this game has no 'luck', but someone else up thread defines luck a bit differently and says that it does. :)
>> I wish there was a Railsy alternative a fifth as good

Radiant CMS http://radiantcms.org/ . I don't even know Ruby well and I find it easy hack on, add extensions, and take features away that would get in the way of the client using it.
Awesome! But.. why comic sans in the signup?
I'm sure they insisted on it, but they could have done more than flattening the style on their buttons. Having Office as the lone desktop app is going to piss off more Windows developers than it's worth. Choose your own baby/bathwater, forest/trees analogy here.
Is this a serious issue with current electric cars? I would assume there's something you can do with a heating mechanism or something for the batteries when they're in danger of getting really cold and losing their charge.
I don't have prices at hand. But a look at my Quicken database revealed that my total food-related expenses (groceries, school lunches, dining out, etc) were:

2001 $12K (family of three)

2011 $17K (family of five)

I was surprised when I compared these two numbers first time. Gut feeling was that food prices went up a lot.

Housing costs:

2001 $10800 (aparment, rent)

2011 $14800 (house, PITI)

Edit: formatting
My comment explains why I think Drive will fail, because of the business model of the company that is behind it. Google's advertising model necessitates evil things to be done with the content their users upload. And my prediction is users are going to start spitting up the free ice cream Google is serving.
If you play Cities and Knights (Catan expansion), the contribution of luck to a victory decreases by quite a bit, methinks. The game is much longer (play to 13 or more points) and involves a heck of a lot more strategy. There are more ways to win. You can also play with cards instead of dice (or like me, build a quick web-based cards prototype because I was too lazy to go physically buy them)
All I really wish for is non-Steam and possibly Linux.
Show HN:Foursquare for events ... http://www.plangr.com
There's good game design around luck (randomness) and bad game design around luck.

Monopoly has a lot of randomness, and it is hard to design a strategy to mitigate bad luck, which is probably why it isn't worth playing more than a few times.

Settlers of Catan and Texas Hold'em Poker both involve randomness, but a good strategy will mitigate bad luck (for example , in settlers, avoid holding a lot of a commodity to not be crippled by the monopoly card) and exploit good luck.
I just look forward to sharing the fun of learning with them

There is no end of fun in learning with children, as I can attest as the homeschooling father of four children, one now grown up.

http://learninfreedom.org/

(I will have to remind my oldest son, a computer science student in university and hacker, that I could use his help updating that website.)
Have been in private Beta and I love it! Keep up the great work!
It was $10,000 for 16 people. 10 days. Food and private chef included. That's about it for amenities.

You can find great places on http://homeaway.com/
Yeah, I think the Hold'em players skip 5 card draw because it is less of a skill based game.
"...distort reality..."

A lot of people said that about him: it was his famous reality distortion field.
Any proof on those dice being biased? I am truly interested in this now, surely some geeks tested various game company's dice.
You can reach me here: dave (at) focial (dot) com
I agree with you (almost) entirely. My family got a Commodore VIC-20 when I was 8. I started "programming" immediately. Except that my "programs" were actually a series of PRINT statements, with an occasional input required for pagination. I was just writing stories, but doing it in BASIC. I distinctly recall being confused by the meaning of 'string' (the metaphor for stringing characters made no sense to my young brain).

I played with computers non-stop, however. To the best of my recollection, my first real programs started around the age of 12 or 13.

Changing the way we teach mathematics would probably do much, much more to improve our future than pushing programming on younger students.
Coding with pencil/paper is in the same league as coding on the whiteboard. It's not nonsense and you know it too. You just deliberately missed the point of his post just so you could brag about being from MIT and all the stuff you worked on.
I'm all for giving people more liberties to do what they want with their money and I see nothing worse about letting people invest their money in whatever startups they want, though a reputable investment mechanism should be established so as to minimize the risks of scams, etc. There are many other ways for a fool and his money to be parted (casinos, lotteries, booze, overshopping) and those aren't illegal.

Going back to the reputable investment mechanism, I think this is needed not only for investors, but also for startups. No startup company wants to deal with thousands of different ownership voices - its better to have a concentrated voice (e.g. VC fund manager) raising only the largest issues. Rather than encouraging individuals to invest (like Kickstarter), give all individuals the ability to invest in funds created to invest in specific startups (e.g. Turntable fund, Pinterest fund).
Not all new businesses are called "startups" either...
This seems like more of an issue with titanium. They should fix this. If I start jacking with my file save settings it it going to cause problems when my team members start opening my files. As much as I don't like MS having control, titanium should support files that windows produces.
Because the font-family for the input is set to "'Tangerine', cursive", and for some reason 'cursive' defaults to Comic Sans on Windows.
A Better border-radius Mixin in LESS
It was almost certainly the caller. Unsub would be an unsubstantiated caller. If I had to guess, I'd go with Burrell Smith.
>> I wouldn't be able to remember my own name if you made me stand at a whiteboard to program in an interview situation. Fortunately when I interviewed at Google they let me use pencil and paper.

i don't think the top comment means literally a whiteboard. i think his argument is that if you can't program relatively basic things away from a computer, you don't really know how to program.
> Elsewhere, the bill creates an equally sweeping immunity against law-breaking so long as the law-breaking provides information to a “cybersecurity exchange

There's a germ of something that could be useful in there. If you a) have knowledge of a security issue and b) can't get the vendor to respond, the options available aren't great. Being able to get men with badges to go bang on doors before full disclosure could help users, and provide a certain amount of satisfaction for security researchers. Maybe a commemorative helmet-cam dvd could be included.
I think you might be onto something here. However I'd focus heavily on the designers who don't know github. Because hackers 'round here are going to tell you to just use github, because it make so much sense for them.
I think psd versioning is outside of github's core competency. We've used distributed version control for design files, and it really doesnt support a natural workflow. Background syncing just seems much more natural as a solution to the problem since the files tend to be very large, and are compounded by rapid generation and disposal of many many versions.
Really liking this. I'd be curious to hear how you've approached the storage problem?

Are the full files for each revision saved? Or have you developed a way to store only the differences?

With large PSD files, the former could get expensive quickly, which makes me wonder the same thing as ARolek asked, what will pricing be based on?
Disagreeing with Buffett is an express ticket to Looking Stupid. But.

As Buffett notes, gold demand is an index of fear. And yes, generally returns on gold reflect the extent of fear. Were this the only return case, the whole thing would be subject to tautological collapse.

But it's not the only return case. Sometimes fears come true. Governments debase or revalue currencies, regimes collapse entirely, equity assets are appropriated. (Anyone care to guess what happens if foreign investor interests in the Chinese stock market collide seriously with vital state interests?) In these edge cases, gold is one of the few assets that carries value across the transition.

To which comes the reply, if the U.S. government falls you'll have worse problems than asset preservation. Certainly true. But when those problems get resolved, asset preservation will work its way back up the priorities.

It strikes me as lousy investment vehicle -- but I think it's a mistake to dismiss its political and economic importance entirely because it doesn't make sense in our particular context. The whole point of its importance is its commentary on that context.
Good work. This is truly much better than any of the similar services I've seen in the past. I especially like that it's an easy lookup for what looks to be the complete array of crimes in all areas; and, the heatmap is helpful. What is it normalized based on?
I think that is a fair prediction.

A follow up to that is to ask whether accreditations mean anything at all at this point. A high school diploma from a public school is known to be not worth anything presently as it doesn't even certify if the recipient is literate or knows basic math. Employers and colleges know better to rely on a high school diploma as evidence of anything, this is why they still have to test for skill level.

Are college degrees worth anything either? That is uncertain. Few employers validate whether someone really has the degrees they claim. Tech shops don't accept a bachelors in lieu of a programming test during an interview. Whether one has a degree is considered quite irrelevant since it is known that there are developers with no certifications or diplomas whose talent and skill surpass that of Computer Science diplomates from the finest institutions.

Why even bother with credentials with they don't really indicate anything useful.
Why do you assume that the Windows Store won't include desktop applications?
Yes.

But only for people on Win7. Which does nothing at all for those who still use xp.
I'm still cracking up: They make you sign your name in Comic Sans on the invite page. :-)

Also, really neat concept overall. Can't wait to try it!
Unix and Node.js
Super Bowl 2012: Twitter Favors Eli Manning Over Tom Brady. | Word News24
Github Down? anyone know what's going on
Just noticed i couldn't push my code to github ... checked to make sure it wasnt just me and it appears its not ... anyone else having issues?
Thanks for the comments.

1) I'm still wresting with myself on the best way to handle this. My thought so far is that you "reserve" a request, so you mark it as spoken for and no one else is allowed to touch it. This gives you some preset amount of time (5 min? 10 min?) to finish the task and send it back to the requester for approval. Thoughts on that process?

2) Yeah, the plan is for it to be a hard rule that all tasks must be able to be accomplished using only a computer. Hopefully that + the $1 fee + a "Report" button on each task would be enough to deter people from posting invalid stuff too often, and the rest can be handled case by case. As for hosting files, for the MVP I'd probably just ask people to link to the files elsewhere (public Dropbox folder, etc.) and see what the response to that is like.

3) See #2. I'd love to avoid hosting files if at all possible because of 1) privacy issues and 2) hosting costs but it might not be feasible to just ignore this feature altogether.
What makes Settlers fun is that there is a good deal of randomness (luck), but you can play the game in such a way that you more often than not luck is on your side.

For instance, having access to all five resources leaves you in a better position for trading and buying, having diversity of numbers guarantees more often than not you'll collect a card, and having access to ports means you can have favorable trading.

There's also a good deal of diplomacy involved, because if someone decides to shut down your resources with the robber or refuses to trade with you because of some ribbing you can really limit your chances to win.
I really like DJ Shadow for this kind of thing. Try "Midnight in a Perfect World": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzHRGoKca0
> Hedging against the apocalypse is a silly reason to own "gold."

In the last 100 years alone there were at least 2 such "apocalyptic" events: the Russian revolution and the communists' grab of power in China. Granted, there were a couple of lucky stock-owners that didn't see their holdings going to zero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group#Hi...), but generally speaking it would have been much better for a "White" Russian to be carrying gold or jewelry on his way to Paris in the 1920s than to carry worthless Tsarist stocks.
Freelance "Business Guy"
A little bit of background; I am a recent graduate with degrees in both Finance and Financial Economics (Undergrad/Masters). While in school, I was fortunate to land a few internships (Consulting/Finance/Risk Management) with some top companies (KPMG/PwC/Qiagen N.V., etc), including a startup (now defunct), where I worked for 1 year.

Here's a few things I can help you with; Industry/Market Research, Financial/Business Models, Customer Life Time Value Analysis, Cap Tables, Actionable Marketing/Growth plan, Pitch Deck, VC/Angel Investor research, and any other thing you don't feel like doing :)

Why am I doing this? Because I need the money. Why should you hire me? Because I'm probably cheaper than any other "business guy" you're thinking of bringing on your team for equity...plus I'm learning to code (Front-end dev.)

I can only take on limited amount of projects at a time, so if you're interested, send an email to eddyelo[at]gmail.com
I'm a big proponent of resumes that show personality and break the mold. Do a search for examples of designer resumes and you'll see how much of a person can be expressed through just the design choices, while still expressing all of the relevant content that you expect.

I've heard from resume screeners that a lot of them are told to throw out anything that doesn't match one of the standard formats, or that has color. But do you want to work for a company that imposes such arbitrary, or at the very least stale, rules from the get-go? I think the corporations (generally larger ones) that have these kinds of restrictions could be missing out on the most creative and self-driven employees.
"The vacation culture of Europe and the leveraged culture of the US are about to lose out to the thrifty workaholics of China"

Whether the Chinese have a better work ethic than Americans, I don't know. I'm also unclear what you mean by "lose out to." China has a billion more citizens than the U.S. They should be producing more than we are, but at around $5k per capita GDP, they are way behind our $48k per capita GDP. They may work hard, but they produce less, likely because they use manual labor for many of the things we automate.

If they're outcompeting us in the price of exported goods, it's because they're willing to work dirt cheap (by our standards). As they get wealthier, they will have higher standards of living and their production costs will rise. Perhaps ours will have to go lower as well. But I hardly think we want the average American worker to strive for the life of the average Chinese worker today.

You do have a point regarding borrowing vs saving. We westerners tend to live beyond our means, and that is biting us in the butt now.

But again, are we "losing out" to the Chinese because we take more vacation? Exactly what do you think success looks like?

A lot of people would say that working 24/7 to get a yacht but missing your children growing up IS losing out. The reward is not worth the sacrifice. And that's really what the post is about.
For those interested in playing Settlers of Catan, but don't have the game or enough players handy, it is available on BSW, a German site that also has an English interface. The quality of play is generally quite high & competitive, for this game and many of the others on the site.

http://brettspielwelt.de/Spiele/Siedler/

There are also a number of the other card/boardgames mentioned in the rest of this discussion which are available on BSW.
Find a co-founder online
Bill to make open access mandatory
I went to grade school in Redmond, WA. Interestingly, there was seemingly no Microsoft presence at all - it was all Commodore PETs and Apple IIs.

I wonder if the attitude in some schools is "everyone has a computer at home and knows how to use one now", so they shrug their shoulders and feel like there's nothing left to contribute. The kids print out or email their homework from their computers, so maybe they think that's all buttoned up.
email swthang on fivver.com
Principles of game monetization
His comment is that as long as the supply and demand for dollars remain in balance the value of the USD does not change. The reason the dollar maintains value is because people and companies need to pay trillions of dollars a year in taxes and loans in USD. Which is why despite the fed dumping a lot of money into the economy we have see so little inflation over the last few years.
I went into the demo expecting more of reapplication of git workflow (with some sort of staging area equivalent) for design, but after playing around with the demo it's clear the combination of auto-saving and milestones is both simpler and more elegant. Amazing work guys!
Aw, thanks so much! I was absolutely blown away by how Ridejoy reciprocated; I honestly wasn't expecting that at all. (I may even have teared up slightly, but I'll never tell!) They're an incredible team and I am so lucky to be working here.
Sigh, every site like this reminds me how much I miss Google Real Estate Search - why did they kill that.
Southwest Airlines iPhone app sends passwords, usernames in plaintext
They may, ala iPhone & apps vs. web apps -- but I'm forced to take Sinofsky's word at face value at this point.
Even after rewrites, Google Wallet retains gaping security holes
Glad you like it. We got the testing/config system working in a day. Of course, we've spent time tweaking and adding features since