skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll note I'm not in any way making an argument against food stamps; that's an unnecessary argument. I'm arguing in favor of a fiscally responsible government - we had one of those 12 to 13 years ago, and for most of US history we've had a responsible government that kept our debt and deficits low. The greenback became "good as gold" because we were responsible with our currency (once upon a time).

You want to spend $50 billion a year on food stamps? Ok, slash it out of the military, social security, medicare, the NSA / FBI / CIA / HSA / TSA / whatever. You want universal healthcare, ok, disband the US military, or slash social security in half. Something will have to go, one way or another, sooner rather than later; the piper will get paid.

With a $1.3 trillion deficit, it's irrelevant if you argue that the food stamps are paid for by taxes, or if you argue the military is paid for by taxes, or if you argue social security is paid for with taxes. Because bottom line: $1.3 trillion per year is not paid for with taxes. Something is not getting paid for with taxes, it might as well be food stamps as any other program currently.

As another simple example of the inflation spread - if the Fed holds interest rates down, which is part of what the QE programs do, it generates inflation. When you get a mortgage adjustment at 4% courtesy of that Fed program, it is generating inflation by the difference in money you now have versus what you otherwise would have.

If the Fed props up property values with the QE and trillion dollar mortgage purchase programs, that causes inflation as home owners acquire value they otherwise wouldn't have.

Any artificial value, created by the Fed, and shot into the system, must inherently become inflation. Your dollar loses value accordingly. And since 1967 or so, the dollar has lost about 86% of its value.
ASP.NET Repeater and User Control pattern
Random piece of feedback, in case it's useful (I'm guessing that the Quartzy guys will read this): My father is a professor of chemistry, but wasn't interested in Quartzy because "the university already has software which keeps track of all our inventories". Apparently the health and safety people decided a few years ago that there must be central records of all chemical inventories in case there's a fire or other disaster.

... and they're paying a lot of money for this. So if you're looking for an area to expand, you might like to consider going after the "we'll help you keep track of the labs which report to you" market rather than just the "we'll help you keep track of your own lab" market.
Oh, and on your point #3... Right now, I intentionally do not allow you to initiate a text conversation to a phone number. There are a few issues and challenges with that (particularly in spam prevention, and in having to know the user's carrier).

So in other words, you wouldn't be able to use your second phone and decide on an impulse to send a message to 867-5309.

On the other hand, you could tell the other person to initiate the conversation to you. "Hey, TEXT me at philiph@txt.gs. Yeah, I know it's confusing. Just put the email address in, where you usually put phone numbers."

Then once they texted you, you could text them back numerous times, over weeks or months, until they "/stop" the service.
> It would be a serious blow if the study had concrete evidence but the legal threats managed to delay publication until after IARC finishes its review.

In fact, it would probably result in liability. We can only hope that they have their heads handed to themselves if true.
> tech people could easily have gone to med school.

Some, but mostly not. The non-tech professions that offer high pay (medicine, law, banking) all have very different barriers to entry than tech. There are a lot of folks who made a ton of money in tech who didn't have the 4.0 + ridiculous extracurriculars to get into med school, or the Ivy-league background to get into a bank. I think those barriers make those professions less meritocratic than tech, don't get me wrong, but they are what they are.
I understand that, however it's not the Governments place to establish "rights". Regulations Yes! it is in their power to regulate But "rights" are something much more they are not established by the government only recognized by it.
I guess that makes sense...when an incident like this comes up, it's impossible for anyone at any part in the chain (from the chief to whoever hired the contractor) to justify: "We just didn't think we needed to track every time someone wanted to look up private info"

Given that such a computer system probably has a lot of redundancy (or machines spinning) to make sure that cops, at any time, can call up info and do everything else through that network...logging 10-100K logins would be pretty trivial.

Given that you weren't asked to do the auditing feature in the first place, did you also build any kind of suspicious-behavior detection?
> When you talk about tire deformation, this is rare and would not happen before many years of disuse.

My Ford owner's manual says otherwise. According to it, the tires will be damaged at a prolonged period, if the car sits at the same spot. Maybe not deformed per se, but damaged. It's recommended that the car should be placed on supports if long-term (say, more than a month) storage is required.
This man's documentaries are amazing. It is a shame that one of the techniques he pioneered--the reenactments in 'Thin Blue Line' have become part of the ruin of documentaries. When 'Thin Blue Line' showed reenactments, it was to reinforce uncertainty, so you could easily see the conflicts in the statements of different witnesses. When the Discovery Channel uses reenactments, it is a cheap trick to dramatize the past, and implies certainty where none exists.

Many of Morris' files are about belief, knowledge and certainty. Take 'Mr. Death' for example. It's about a guy--not necessarily a bad guy--that thought the Holocaust was implausible, and tried to prove it. The problem was he didn't know as much as he thought he knew, and his tests were fatally flawed. The had the hubris I've often seen in engineers that science conveys certainty.

If you want to see another side of Morris, his commercials for Miller High Life:

http://errolmorris.com/commercials/miller/miller_ducttape.ht...
Obama signs the USA PATRIOT Act and the 2012 NDAA, only to propose a Privacy Bill of Rights? The goodwill gesture of a hypocritical administration is vain and illusory. To trust it is to be fooled.

As Bush tried to say, and in retrospect became the first instance: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Let us not shame ourselves in this instance.
"[Obama's] DOJ Urges Supreme Court to Halt Challenge to Warrantless Eavesdropping"

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/scotus-fisa-amendme...

Yup they really care about privacy.
Here in the U.S., the purpose of life is building up as big a margin as possible for how screwed you will be when you get old/if you get sick.
Collaborative consumption sites have unique challenges in earning user trust. Anyone know of successful UX tactics other applications have used?
Note that you can earn $50 for referring someone. Shameless plug -- here's my link:

http://www.quixeychallenge.com/?ref=spicyj
Likewise in Ireland, under certain conditions[1]. Interestingly there are ongoing proposals to unify all EU data laws to make business easier/less expensive between EU countries and the "right to be forgotten" is one key feature that is being championed.

[1] http://www.dataprotection.ie/ViewDoc.asp?fn=/documents/right...
The Neglect of Mental Illness Exacts a Huge Toll, Human and Economic
I think you're drunk too!
Two new species of fish found able to regenerate a lost fin
It makes sense to want everyone move to Vyvanse which is still protected by patent, but if you can game the system so that people are still forced to buy brand-name Adderall even though the patent is expired, that works too.

(Worth noting that Shire makes money on all three -- including the generic version of Adderall. Which seems more than a little suspicious)
Apple must make Macintosh a standard-Letter from the past
Your Circles, now in Google Voice
I just noticed that one of the HN editors changed the title of this submission (I'm the submitter).

TO HN EDITORS: For the record, I did not try to juice up the title when I submitted this! The original title that showed up on my RSS reader was "Patton Boggs Lobbyists Threatens Scientific Journals with 'Consequences' If They Publish or Distribute Diesel Exposure Data" ( source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/links-22312.html ) I just shortened this title to less than 80 characters.
This is a minor quibble, but I'm curious: why did you change the icon?

I quite liked the green hummingbird you had previously. The color was maybe a bit too dark and uniform so it didn't stand out as much as it could, but the shape was beautiful and recognizable.

I'm not a fan of this wooden thing on your new icon. To be honest, my first association was something in an outhouse :)
"YC just funds consumer web apps", heh.
Well, electricity is certainly cheaper to charge a car battery than it is to buy gasoline to travel the same amount, and cheaper price for a commodity generally implies uses less energy. Does your gallon of gas take in to account the cost of driving it around the country instead of being transmitted over power lines? A quick google search found that there's only a 6-8% loss in power in transmitting the energy across the power grid, but only 30-40% of the energy contained in coal can be turned into electricity. That is more telling of coal power plants than the general principle of charging cars off the grid.
Yes, I actually meant a marketable product.
I like the idea, but how enforceable are those and how will they enforce them? One of the things about information is that you don't really have any way of knowing what other people know.
IPhone 5: Curved iPhone 5
Ask HN: Database Engineering/Design Blogs that you follow?
What database engineering/data science blogs do you follow and why?

I'm trying to find a few authoritative sources to follow that discuss database design, architecture, and sciences.
Do you have the Mail Box in your garden? – Mail box from The Garden Gates
An amazing utility: pv
New Avast 7 (Free Antivirus) released
Mozilla is readying an OS agnostic app store
It's worth noting that the government clampdown on this drug also happens to be extremely advantageous to the pharmaceutical giant who makes these drugs. I don't think Shire is blameless here.
I think this was more telling:

> “I come from a long line of sysadmins. My father was a sysadmin, as was his father before him. I have apprenticed at the feet of some of the greatest sysadmins American BankCorp has ever seen.

The lineage would mean that they've been in the business for 30+ years now?
I run an open source project called mRemoteNG. We can use all the help we can get. As far as I know, there's no place to match projects needing help with people looking to help projects.
Yeah, not mentioning the filtering for high contrast makes this more confusing than it need be. Actually, the main link is worse than just not mentioning it... it says "randomly choose 3-by-3 pixel patches" and leaves it at that. Saying "random" rather than "random then filtered" is worse then just saying nothing and letting the reader guess that maybe there is something going on in the choosing.
If you made $250k and lived off $50k/year, after taxes and about 6 or 7 years you'd have $1 million in the bank. After 10 years you'd definitely have enough to generate a perpetual income from your invested wealth.

But that's, again, different from STRIKING IT RICH(TM).
First of all, inflation is not exceptionally low.

Calculated using the 1980 CPI, inflation is off the charts at about 9% right now. When it was last that high, Volcker was taking extreme actions to crush inflation with high interest rates.

In 1971 when inflation was as high as the Fed's current bogus CPI, Nixon installed price and wage controls.

The Fed CPI intentionally understates inflation by leaving out food and energy prices, which are prime inflation meters. So they get to hide the radical increase in the cost of a gallon of gasoline, heating oil, and food, over the last decade.

The CPI was adjusted during the Clinton Administration to hide the real rate of destruction.

US income in real terms has not increased at all since about 1965. The US Dollar, according to the Federal Reserve's own numbers, has declined by about 86% since then.

So no, real wages haven't increased at all when you have to calculate off of that decline.

It's trivially easy to prove it: run wages against the cost of a new car, the price of oil, the average price of a home, the price of gold, the price of silver, the price of a gallon of gasoline, the price of a gallon of milk, and so on. You'll see the same blatant trend line. How much did those things cost in 1965, and what was the average wage? For your own benefit, take a few minutes and run those numbers; you'll see that the US standard of living has gone nowhere.
Apparently the picture was from a body-sculpting contest. If you enter a contest, you're probably expecting some publicity.
By the way, a much better and more detailed commentary can be found here: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Bill Buxton is currently a Research Scientist at MSR and he more than knows what he's talking about.
Why You'll Receive a Zero on Your Next Assignment
I really liked your first person account.

But by saying this:

"[1]Ultimately, what burns out most people isn't the indignity of the work, but the dependency on dumb luck: the fact that there is no guarantee of work in / reward out."

Aren't you discounting the future value of making contacts that can be helpful even if you don't land a lottery job?
I've tried to get my hands on their stuff in the past, and one of the issues appears to be that its considered 'national strategic' which is code for this stuff gives our military and advantage over other guys. And that was as close as I got to getting an answer for general availability.

That being said you can sign up as a developer and get a 'kit' which has like two eye pieces and various support stuff for like $20,000 but that was not something I could invest in to satisfy my curiosity :-)
Kinda upvote. Isn't the point of skunkworks is that it comes from an employee's initiative, and for a long time it's not even known by the C-level management?
thanks! We discovered that labs on Quartzy are already on their own using the reporting mechanisms for exactly this purpose. Here is a quote from our testimonial page (http://www.quartzy.com/testimonial/):
Quartzy is ideal for keeping an up-to-date chemical inventory (required by most Lab Safety Compliance Offices) and helping my labmates know what is at their fingertips while planning their experiments.
Lab Manager, Tufts University
Link Building Strategies For Website Traffic
I won and am greedy: http://www.quixeychallenge.com/?ref=Melyan .
I get the same feeling now that I've adopted TDD. I've lost that magic of spending most of my time debugging code.

Now I just define the outcome I want, assert that a unwritten function produces that outcome and code the outcome. Sigh /s
The Shocking Truth About Microsoft Connect
Scoble: Hit man of Silicon Valley?
Fixed mindset -- “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it.”

Growth mindset -- “[W]e can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy.”

A fixed mindset and a growth mindset are not mutually exclusive beliefs.

As I see it there are three dependent factors in accomplishing a complex task:

1.) intelligence -- raw computational power (impacted minimally by sleep/diet/use)

2.) knowledge -- data stored regarding a given task (impacted immensely by attention/research/exposure)

3.) wisdom -- the application of 1 on 2 (impacted greatly by experience/composure/analysis)

Knowledge, and to a lesser extent wisdom, can come as a result of investing time and energy. Wisdom is an amplifier of intelligence and knowledge; it can produce an order of magnitude increase in efficacy with very little change in either of the other two.

Both can be true...
Say Goodbye to Bad Facebook Cover Photos | Aviary Blog
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 For Dummies
Play games? Hacker News has a Steam group
Unfortunately, spreadsheets have pretty severe limitations as general computing environments.

I'm working on this problem, so comments like this are like crack to me.

Please say more. What severe limitations? Can you imagine a more powerful spreadsheet that didn't have them? If such a spreadsheet existed, what could be done with it?
Mailchip has a really nice site and is very easy to use considering email campaigns can get pretty complicated.
The callback style that NodeJS uses fits perfectly with FIX. After implementing QuickFix/J And building scaffolding around it to allow all the nice bits you will need like multiple notifiers on message received and mutexing multiple threads to a single communication thread. I think there are a lot of advancements that can be made.
I am in love with Hype and I've used it on several projects with startups and web agencies to make animated demos of mobile apps, HTML5 presentations, etc. Excited to explore these new features!
Amazon.com's many bots feud over book-prices
When I look at it and see that five out of the eight tabs are disabled, I begin to wonder what I did wrong.
"Thinking man's detective" is a very unusual phrase.
It's like "rich man's Rolls Royce" or "tall man's basketball player."
California’s New App Privacy Policy Requirements
Why the World Is Desperately Seeking Linux Talent
EDIT: So I got a coke and thought about this a bit. I like your point, but I feel like maybe the high-noters are high-noters precisely because they're ruthlessly self-critical and growth-minded. Ever see someone who was really good at something cringe after what you thought was an amazing performance, because they missed, e.g. the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night? They're better (honest?) at seeing their mistakes, and they're better at addressing them. Maybe that's the natural talent?

Aside from the tone, maybe, this article is not 'one for the masses.'

Jony Ive didn't just sit down and whip up the iPod, to use Spolsky's example. We don't see the blood/sweat/tears that goes into it. From Ive:

One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong ... It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.

Obviously Ive has the creative ingredient. And some are going to be predisposed with talent. Michael Jordan may have had his famous "4am club" where he hit the court every morning to just drill, but so did Scotty Pippen, and he never hit the Jordan high note clutch performances that make my jaw drop watching 20-year-old replays. So I see your point, that talent matters. But the other way to look at it is that Jordan was just better at learning from his mistakes in those 4am practices.

So no, this is not some pedestrian piece of feel-good soup. Great work, in programming, design, anything, is about repeatedly pushing a boundary, recognizing where you messed up, fixing it, and repeating that all over again. The people who do this best are the people who believe that by iterating they can get better. This works even as you get all the way up into the stratosphere of a field.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl...
Their queueing system sucks; random people keep hopping into the top 15 slots, bumping everybody back. Not worth your time if you have other things to do.
If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_mobile_phone_platf...
If you want to sequentially execute a block of code with a variable that takes successive values, a for loop is probably just what you want. Nothing wrong with that.

If you want to process a sequence of values, and filter, aggregate etc., a for loop is probably too low-level; with judicious use of some libraries, you can work to a higher level abstraction. This is no different in C than it is in Haskell; it's just harder in C, because C is low level to start with, and doesn't have very powerful abstraction features.

The real risk here, I think, is using the wrong language to solve a set of problems, rather than using the wrong feature.
Is it just me or was this article entirely about lambdas and higher
order functions? There wasn't a single example that captured a
variable outside of the scope of the function and passed it
around.

Lambdas by them self are incredibly useful but a closure has a lot
more benefits. Your API can return functions that manipulate values
through references without exposing exposing the value and giving a
lot of flexibility.

Personally, I consider higher-order functions and lambdas convincing
enough to have them added to a language, but it takes more than that
to convince a broad majority that does not have much exposure to
functional programming. While showing how cool you can sum things up
with Haskell is certainly nice, the degree of flexibility and
usability that is added to APIs is much more convincing.

Edit: Had to write this in a hurry and now came back to make it more
substantial.
Nintendo reportedly looking into expanded video content for Wii U
I reached out to Quartzy just after launch since we operate in the same space and can say they are class act.

I'm unsure how many founders take a 30 min phone call on a couple of HN exchanges, but they did (thanks again).
I was not a fan of the old icon[1], but the new one isn't better. Way too much detail on the new icon at smaller sizes.

[1]:http://static.tumultco.com/press/media/HypeIconShadow.png
I did consider building some kind of fraud detection system since there was some suspicion of... treachery. But I didn't know enough about the domain to believe that I could implement something that would work reliably.

In fact, my doubts about my domain knowledge is one of the main things that motivated me to build the auditing feature. If something went wrong I wanted to make sure that I could only be blamed for legitimate mistakes on my part.

I'm sure the same thing happens with larger systems.
| A good question for Moser/Dweck would be: is the physiological response of a child to a mistake a function of their blood glucose levels? I suspect that it is: | anecdotally, people are a lot more optimistic and willing to explore an issue instead of yielding to to surface obstacles if they're on a sugar high.

I wondered this as well. Even if it's not necessarily glucose-focused, there are a ton of angles. Depression? The two ends of manic/depressives? Sleep -> mood -> mistake response? Talking to an attractive member of the opposite sex and having it go well/not well?