skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
winner!!!
It's interesting to look at this kind of data, but there are a few correlation-causation flaws. For example, the final graph is titled "How Bad Grammer Affects Car Resale Prices". We cannot say that the bad grammar is the cause of the lower sale price, only that it is correlated. It is just as likely that undereducated individuals are correlatively more likely to own less expensive cars and use poor grammar.
> Why is all this reporting about factory conditions focus on Apple, i.e. Foxconn? Is there proof that factories operated by Foxconn are worse than the typical Chinese factory? Or is Apple pushing them to Draconian measures, e.g. guards with guns, child workers, etc.?

Quite the opposite, really. The founder of China Labour Watch has outright said that workers in Apple's factories are a lot better off than those in others (he specifically cites Dell and HP)[1].

Not that Apple is anything close to perfect, but its odd that they catch all the flack when other big names are doing worse. Or not so odd. Apple's famous secrecy seems to keep them from shmoozing the labour groups and journalists, which is part of why they seem to get a much shorter end of the PR stick than the conditions on the ground would dictate.

[1]http://blog.laptopmag.com/labor-activist-apple-best-at-audit...
so we'll have to change our massive amount of python 3 code?

yeah okay sure

(j/k nobody uses python 3)
Both the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are more made-in-america than the Lincoln Town Car (but not by much).

What's worse, the Lincoln Town Car got the worst score possible for expected ownership costs (1 out of 5) and had a 55/100 overall score. (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/lincoln/town-car.htm)

Compare to a Camry's score of 93 or the Accord's score of 90, with 5 and 4 points for ownership costs respectively.

Lots of foreign cars are made in America, several of them are far more American-made than American cars are.

Check your own car here:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/MadeInAmerica/page?id=13795239

Or see the Consumer Reports article on it here:

http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/06/how-much-of-you...
Unfortunately, it doesn't load past the spinning popcorn for me, and I see some failed GET requests in the network log.
Jon Mumm used to be a professional counter striker. Read his article here: http://eseanews.com/css/index.php?s=news&d=comments&...
You need to first trigger the export from the website, THEN the zip will be available for download.
You make sure you write Stanford and not Standford...
If you're in Dublin go to PubStandards. Won't be hard to find a startup looking for a team.
> In Amercan airports, you're treated as if you're doing something wrong by being there.

I think that's a very interesting point you hit. Lots of the comments here on HN talk about border guards asking why US citizens have been gone for so long, and how they got that much time off work, etc.

American authorities frown upon the "go travel for a while" approach - you should be in the motherland, working. It's not OK to explore and understand how the outside world works.
It definitely still works. The user has to have requested the link for the file to exist.

I requested mine, so as you can guess it is downloadable by anyone.

http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/joshmattvander-export.zip
By all accounts, Foxconn factories seem to treat their workers significantly better than other Chinese factory owners. Several reports have shown this.

The reason why the media chooses to focus on Foxconn, and Apple in particular, is for the easy clicks.

I'm not saying that conditions in Foxconn factories are ideal - they're not - but they're much better than some of the truly awful factories that can be found in various developing countries. It's a real shame that the media chooses to ignore them.
Yup. But they were talking about starting salaries on the Fog Creek thing. $75K right out of college for a young adult opens a lot of doors. But I definitely agree that being 30 with a kid, rather than 22-24, would be a lot harder on $75K.
I suspect it is a combination of two factors. First, Apple customers are considered (rightly or wrongly) to be affluent, and therefore the kind of people who can choose to boycott something for ethical reasons (as opposed to the people queueing for 6 hours on Black Friday to buy a TV, who are deemed to be purely price sensitive).

I suspect the other reason is simply the fact that Apple is a market leader (dominant in certain of its segments) and so as a journalist it makes sense to go after them, as your readers are likely to have heard of them or own one of its products. A lot more consumers have an iPod than a Dell computer.
I've love to hear about this as well.

As for me, I've gone through Google Notebook, now Docs - one big Ideas doc for undevelopped ideas, then as ideas get developped, they get their own doc. And now also Trello, which is great. On the dashboard, you see only card titles, and this allows you to hide complexity.
Sure. I'll just say that it would be a rare major journalism outlet in this country that wouldn't post a retraction like this when this kind of fabrication came to light. I don't think PRI has behaved particularly impressively here.
When did he pick apart things in this story that seem true? This is hardly the first piece of evidence suggesting that factory conditions in China aren't great- there is a wealth of evidence. If you want something to watch, check out China Blue, for example.

The point is that this will do damage to the existing, unchallenged evidence, because it'll have some kind of guilty by association attached to it.
Nice. Slow to load, but worked.

I wish I could specify preferred theaters. In my area, there are many theaters nearby, and the closest isn't the best.
My uneducated guess would be that working in the iPad factory is a whole lot better than working in the fireworks factory, but everybody knows the fireworks factory is bad, so there's no story. Apple has created a ponies and rainbows perception.

What's probably really relevant, though, is people read stories about Apple. So if you're a journalist and you want people to read your stuff, you write about Apple and not no name fireworks companies.
The right thing to do is a buy a USED car with decent mpg. Saves massive amounts of energy creating a new car.

Of course it's not the "patriotic" thing because it would collapse a good chunk of the economy built around Detroit if no-one bought a new car for a year.

I don't expect everyone to drive a 15 year old car like I do, but I simply do not understand why people buy brand new cars when the previous year model with only a few thousand miles will be thousands of dollars cheaper.
Apple is a very high profile company with an extremely positive image and strong brand loyalty.

If even a well liked company that people regard as being highly ethical can't manage to maintain humane working conditions while building products in China then who can? That story is all the more impactful because many in the audience will own devices made in those exact factories, or have close friends or relatives who do.

If you did a story on how some tiny company nobody's heard of making frobnobbins and how bad their factory conditions were people wouldn't care as much because it lacks that connection and that sense of import. For example, one response to such a thing could be "well, just stop making frobnobbins then! they don't seem so important", but when you own and highly value the output of those factories the tradeoffs get put into a much sharper focus.
First commercial spaceship to launch to space station April 30
Cloudpaging - software virtualization for the future?
Saving Your Children from Online Dangers.
My name is in the credits for Python for iOS as I provided the pure python patches for urllib to even work in the first place :)

There is also a link in the credits next to my name for my github repo which contains the original patches, plus some new code I just uploaded (shpy - a pure python shell-alike, with bash-like file name globbing and file download + unzip)

https://github.com/pudquick/PythonForiOSPatches

I also was involved in working with the requests/urllib3 maintainers to get these modules working in Python for iOS, as it didn't originally ship with ssl support.

My original patches could self-install with a simple one-liner copy&paste, which then gave you the '_rp' module (now included in the app).

I will add a similar one-liner for the installation of shpy (and better documentation) but should you get it installed, operation is as follows:

from shpy import *

shpy()

Currently there is a bug with raw_input where the prompt is printing after text has been entered, so I'm working around that right now.

I also plan on adding untar support, PyPI pure python module installation, and WebDAV.

If you have questions, let me know.
Honestly I am seeing simply randomness here.

If you plot any piece of random data, and then sort by frequency you'll get a graph that looks more or less like this.

I think you should verify your data in two ways:

1: Plot the graph for each year separately, and see how correlated the years are. If the rankings are the same year after year then you have something, otherwise it's just random.

2: A second thing is randomly divide American and non-American each into two groups by model (just randomly assign each model into american 1, american 2, non 1, non 2). Then plot the data for each group in each place, and see if the rankings are the same - if they are, then the American vs not distinction is valid. Otherwise, again, you just have random data.
Not only don't you need to change the code you shouldn't. This change has been introduced purely for code which tries to maintain Python 2 and Python 3 compatibility.
Good to know! Just wondered if there were any interesting connections here... This American Life is carried on NPR, funded by Bill Gates, doing a hit piece on Apple Factories (which are also Microsoft factories, but this isn't the Agony and Ecstasy of Bill Gates). Definitely there are some financial connections involved given that as you said This American Life is carried on NPR stations but I don't think there was a planned out conspiracy.

If my radio station played Bill and Melinda Gates Underwriting spots, it'd probably influence the culture of the station - does this have any effect on NPR's culture and did it effect the presentation of the story? Payola is a tricky thing...
> The "unwelcome mat" may be damping tourism growth by discouraging repeat visitors rather than outright discouraging all visitors.

I agree 100%.

I managed a hostel in Ecuador for 6 months, and most visitors from Europe had a forced stopover in the US on their way to Latin America. The horror stories were amazing, and many people vowed to never again cross into the "land of the free".
I think we can probably all safely agree that they've cleared the bar without arguing by how much. PRI, by the way, has no oversight over TAL; you mean WBEZ.
It's not. Critics need to generate media attention by attacking a large popular brand. The same thing happened to Walmart. Target does exactly the same things (low pay, poor benefits, kill small downtowns), but Walmart is bigger and draws more media attention.
It's much more important for you to help your friend come up with a real world problem that he can solve (whether or not it uses his technology), and for him to start solving that real world problem for customers. Dont bother thinking about VCs until he has a proven scalable business opportunity.

I'd be happy to help brainstorm that (sutter at gmail)

Arcane machine learning challenges, by themselves, aren't very interesting to VCs or customers. But solutions to real world problems are.
alright this is just sloppy then ಠ_ಠ
Posting is one thing. E-mailing every member is another.
+1 in support of sonic.net in the Bay Area. They are total pros on everything from installation to customer service. Plus, they're building a last-mile fiber network in SF!
Back when I was studying in Michigan this topic came up one night over beer. Almost everyone there knew a friend of a friend or family member who could get them a decent employee discount on American cars.
If you care about cities, return that new iPad [on Apple's new campus]
Pragmatic Unicode (Ned Batchelder - PyCon 2012)
"What's really tragic here is that the truth in Mr. Daisey's story will get dragged down by the weight of his lies."

I don't think his story taints any other particular investigation of Foxconn. But I think his whole story is now hazmat.
Let me put in my zip code. There's no reason why I should _have_ to share my location through the browser.
As an American, the worst treatment I've had reentering the country was in Seattle, so as always, YMMV.

In any event, ESTA and really everything they put foreigners through is an embarrassment and everyone responsible for it - from Senators and Representatives who voted for these provisions to the people who are working on the border, should be ashamed of how they are treating people who visit our country.
Emailing every member is easy to do when you have every member's email address. Their last mail to me, 7 days ago:

Towards our 10,000 member goal, we heard from 9,025 folks over the last eight days, and we couldn't be more grateful. Some of the Summer Pledge Drive has been eliminated, but with your help, we can still eliminate some more.

'twoodfin is right to be cautious about valorizing WBEZ.
Whether or not it's public content and the privacy policy says it is, Oink botched it.

If they were going to release all the data they should have said so.

The archives not being generated until a user triggers the export indicates to me that it's just sloppy coding.
I'm surprised that Portland doesn't rate higher in Subarus. It always seems to me that 30% of all cars there are dark green Subarus.

Also, why is Salt Lake so high in used-car prices? Large Mormon families?
Looking at all the pics that Kevin has uploaded made me incredibly hungry. He has eaten some nice looking meals.
How to Fight the Temptation to Give Up
Social Media: Ethical Obligations for Lawyers in the Modern Era II
A question I received today: Does Antiqua delete private repositories from Github automatically?

Answer: http://antiqua-io.tumblr.com/post/19405267478/does-antiqua-d...
All the data is public. You could probably get it in a less concise form from Google.

There is no story here, other than "Oink allows the public to download public data".
21212 - Rio/New York Startup Accelerator Demo Day
Note, I don't actually think Ireland is the ideal place, but I do think its a reasonably good place to do a startup.

1. Yes, I agree that it is not near as strong as the bay area, but with the likes of Startup Bootcamp, things are improving on this front.

2. The Python and Ruby Ireland user groups are probably the two most popular programming language user groups in Ireland. While that doesn't mean that they are good, it certainly raises the odds over people who don't attend user groups simply because it shows they are enthusiastic and wish to learn more. Doesn't say anything about overall numbers, however.

3. I disagree - I attended Startup Weekend Dublin the weekend before last and the startup scene (including successful entrepreneurs) is quite vibrant and alive in Dublin - and growing. Personally I was amazed that my group found not only mentors who knew the industry of our project very well, but also potential customers at the event itself and that through a small bit of emailing we got a phone call with another industry leader.

4. Outside of say Startup Bootcamp, I certainly agree with this point.

5. See my comments on Python/Ruby Ireland and Startup Weekend Dublin - I find the community of like-minded indivitduals to be quite vibrant and growing every day (when I started attending Python Ireland, an average meetup might have 4 or 5 attendees and I did not know anyone in the startup scene - now meetups have 30+ attendees and the conferences sell out and I know tons of people in the startup scene, including other hopeful entrepreneurs like myself, successful entrepreneurs, investors.. etc)
This probably works well for Fog Creek, who have a small crew and very talented senior people (who, importantly, did not get recuited out of school). But I view this as problematic for larger companies. The core problem of course is that students aren't very good programmers yet. They can hack and solve problems, and have a handful of favorite technologies, but they won't have the breadth they need to be really good at things for a few years yet.

The danger is that if you then build a culture where everyone gets recruited out of school, everyone is swimming in the same pool with equally narrow skill sets and no one develops the required breadth. So you get "architects" who know their field really well but can barely write working code on a modern system.

This works great for the true elite who will learn this stuff on their own, of course. But even then recruiting from schools tends to incorrectly bias decisions on things like grades, which correlate at best weakly with hacking talent. You'll miss some of those targets who were slacking off in class working on their own projects.
I really like this post for the guy's writing. The point he is making isn't exactly novel, but the way he says it is so down to earth and conversational that I felt like he and I were talking about it over a beer. Because so many bloggers are condescending or preachy, I'll read a post and nod my head and move on with my life without really lingering on whatever topic. I understand but from a kind of 3rd person perspective as if x topic applied to y people but not necessarily to me.

Now that I go back and read it again, I can't decide if the post actually did that to me, or I read it wanting to believe it would.
It would seem logical in that downloading the app it shows intent to purchase eventually and the structure of iOS allows for less distractions than browsing via the web.

If I'm using an iPad app, it occupies my entire screen and has my full attention (minus alerts that may arrive) and therefore I'm less likely to pulled away by something else (twitter stream, messages from friends, links, etc.).

Also, if I'm launching a shopping app, it's also done with intent to shop.
> part of the US tax code ought to be devoted to getting people to travel outside the US

I think that goes against everything "the government" in America is currently about. Do they want you to know that many European countries mandate a minimum of 6 weeks leave a year? or that the murder rate in America is 10 times any other Developed country, or that the American school system is a train-wreck, or that..... etc. etc.

I feel strongly that the whole point right now to is discourage Americans from learning about the outside world, lest they want to improve a few things at home.
The solution is either to negotiate better, or appreciate the nontechnical work.

If the cash-only founder is really just an angel, and your agreement with him should be that his cash gets rolled into the seed. Perhaps at better terms.

This probably means that you need to hire the sales guy, create the marketing material, legal, etc. When you do that, you might discover that the other guy was actually doing hard work all along even if he wasn't coding.
Write it down on your phone? Or the back of your hand?
Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?
How do you guys tone down your ideas to make something feasible but still relevant?
>Was still able to do all the things a 25 yr old guy wanted to do

Yeah, at 25 its easy. When you're 37, married, two kids, etc.. My minimum required salary is well over 100K
I think right about the perfect time to buy a car is after the initial 5 year break in - preferably with someone else doing the break in.
I think you're missing an important piece in your summary. The original page-rank algorithm was based around the idea of authority. A site might contain content entirely relevant to your query for cancer, but if it has no authority then its probably not what you're looking for.

But this no longer works because the original indicators of authority have died out as the web has become less of a network, since search enables everything to exist in isolation (at one of my work sites we just trimmed the majority of the links from our site).

But if you can determine which people have authority, then you can use their browsing habits in order to allocate authority to websites again. Instead of website having and giving authority, you start giving an authority (per topic) score to users, and then use their behaviour to determine authority in pages.

This last aspect is, I think, what jacques is pointing out, and its not that the social graph gives relevant results (which as you say, everyone knows about), but that it gives a different mechanism for authority (which yields better relevance).
True, Planet Money rocks my world. Check out the Econtalk podcast with Russ Roberts for where they get some of their inspiration and data. It's a much deeper economics dive, hour long and tends to be Hayekian as opposed to PM which is firmly Keynesian.
I was surprised with Chico, CA's high median price for used cars.
IE9/IE10 will have a goldbar at the bottom of the screen so the green arrow is a bit misleading...
I think you're confusing government agencies that have oversight of some kind with those that operate unchecked, like the military intelligence services (NSA, CIA, etc).

They have decades-long histories of doing illegal shit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
Whichever "pg" they have (not the real PG it seems) likes thai, vegan, vegetarian, indian including: Vegetable Delight, Tacos, Special Vegetable Curry, Pasta Primavera, and Damascus Hummus. Also noted a book "Notes from Underground". And provided a picture of some food labelled "Amazing".

Four square ids in the export's contained csv can be mapped to real locations via Google by searching for: https://foursquare.com/ put_id_here

All of the pg reviewed items were from restaurants in Columbia, SC.

They should probably close this hole.

BTW- Kevin Rose's favorite food is Filet Mignon at Switch Steak, 3121 Las Vegas Blvd. S (Inside Encore), Las Vegas, NV 89109 and he eats fries he likes frequently at Zuni Cafe, 1658 Market St (at Rose St), San Francisco, CA 94102
I can't even find the words to explain just how much I agree with this article.

There are several times when I've been absolutely amazed at how horribly I was treated while going through boarder control, and I'm an American. --They even treat us like criminals, so the bullshit foreigners have to go through with ESTA, getting their fingerprints and photos taken and whatnot is beyond embarrassing. I live in Norway now, and when people I know are headed to the US, I actually feel the need to apologize about the treatment I know they'll receive, even though I wrote to my senators protesting a lot of these policies that our government voted in. I can only hope that one day they'll realize the injustice of what they've done.

I'm thankful that most countries - especially countries in Europe, haven't been vindictive and forced the same treatment on Americans, although I wouldn't blame them if they did.
This solves a problem that I have all the time. Existing movie aggregators are a pain to navigate the filled with ads.

I like the Rotten Tomatoes integration. Nice work.
> 2. Less intensive maintenance schedule, my town car will never need its timing belt changed, nor a valve adjustment.

Which is also the reason it gets terrible mileage and is horrible for the environment. It's an unsophisticated hunk of junk, basically.