skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We, then, exist to ensure that the union "class" gets to live happily every-after with their wonderful lifetime pensions and healthcare. This is beyond wrong. This is criminal.

Oh, please. Public-sector employees make on average less than their private-sector counterparts, even taking into account fairly-negotiated benefits.

It boggles the mind how you can be such a misanthrope as to believe that teachers' healthcare coverage is a scourge on our society and "criminal". What's criminal is that the richest country on earth cannot educate its children or provide for the health of its citizenry.
Have you EVER taken a tax deduction in your life ?

If so. Then you are exploiting a "loophole" and are a hypocrite.
You might be surprised at how many of us didn't go into CS proper, but can still code. My degree was CMS and I still have to explain what it consists of all the time.
Did anyone else read this as having a subtext that basically implies Google needs to be taken down?

Why is it that when we talk about making search better many (seriously, like gobs of people) talk like the only way to improve it is to overthrow Google. Improvements in search can come from anywhere. If Google can deliver on what the author talks about then that's great. If someone else can then that's great too. The point is to improve search not overthrow Google's dominance, right?

I'm all for the ideas in this article but I was totally turned off by the subtext that implied a need to take down Google. We don't really need a next Google. Google can be the next Google. It doesn't matter so long as the hidden web is indexed.

Why is it that as soon as a company is no longer the underdog we immediately throw them under the bus. Microsoft made PCs the norm in US households and now we love to tear them down (rightly so in many cases, admittedly). Facebook used to be the coolest thing ever and now we love to hate them too. Same with Google and Apple. Why do we hate incumbents so badly?

In any case, yes, let's index that hidden web. But let's focus on the indexing itself rather than who does it. If Google succeeds at doing this will it not count and will we still call for someone else to "disrupt" the new hidden web indexing industry?
I found that wikipedia article pretty interesting. In particular that "over 40,000 public employees in the Bay Area alone earned over $200,000 in 2009." To be fair when you look at the source data: http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?appSession=1633...

You'll see that many of the top paid state employees are doctors, or policemen/firefighters who get paid a ton of overtime.

But you'll also notice things like the director of IT for Alameda County was paid 430,312 with a 266,760 base salary. Where as the direct of IT for San Mateo country had a base salary of 175,775 and had pay around to 330K. Which is probably market for someone like that in the Bay area, but sure seems a lot for a government position.

I think it is reasonable that if salaries go up in a good year, that salaries should go down in a bad year. I'd be interested in seeing the change in government employee pay over time relative to tax revenue.
I guess it's more like 140 mm
Macho cultures are fairer for women
Google Type 3 Error – The Unnatural Link Algorithm
Something that ignores robots.txt?
This is why I'm excited about Light Table, even though I don't think I'll ever use clojure or javascript much. The author also experiments with kind of humble bundle licensing.
If you've ever wanted to know what programming is like, try this game
OK! I'll try to improve it. Thanks!
Sounds like you have an excellent lifestyle business there. Which is great for you, but wouldn't necessarily have done that much for an investor who put in $250k. (I'm sure your friends who put in a few grand each will do just fine, relative to the amount they put in.)

I don't think it's irrational on the investors' part. People with larger amounts to invest want to see a potential for larger returns. Larger returns require faster growth which requires more money up front.

I guess "lifestyle business" is a dirty word to investors, but it needn't be to the rest of us. I think we might see a lot more of them in the coming years, now that it has gotten so cheap to build and operate a Web app.

Anyway, kudos on your success. Bootstraps can be quite rewarding, as you see.
Of course, they were the top people in their fields and so attracted the top students. Having good people coming in helps with a person's production of great people.
Ask HN: What is the Best Method of finding a Co-Founder?
I have just started prototyping out my initial MVP after gathering user stories. While I have what it takes to do some solid coding, my UI/UX experience is lacking. What is the best way to find a local UI/UX person that is looking to jump on board with a startup for sweat equity?

I have attended various events and talked to several people but haven't really found what I am looking for just yet. Are there avenues of recruitment that people have had great success with?

Thanks!
UTF-8 -> UTF-16 conversion was at one point a noticeable fraction of Firefox's startup time.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506431

Since then we've done things such as fast-path ASCII -> UTF-16 conversion with SSE2 instructions. Converting a few dozen bytes is unlikely to make a significant difference, but often one needs to deal with more than a few dozen bytes.
Hmm, TextMate has problems with "5.2 Paired UTF-16 surrogates" in that stress test file.

(Yes, I interpreted the file as UTF-8 in TextMate).
> The Cali budget crisis was caused by a decrease in revenue. Let me repeat that. Decrease.

The cited Wikipedia article says that, but it also says:

"Another source has been the continuous growth in salaries and benefits of state employees during economic boom times, some of which were lobbied by trade unions."

Note also that the decrease in revenue was due to falling incomes as a result of the recession, not falling rates. Spending was on an unsustainable path based on assuming that boom times would last forever.
"The norms don’t encourage the sharing of an interactive, full-color, 3 dimensional model of the protein, even if that would be a more suitable media format for the kind of knowledge that is being shared."

This is simply wrong - when you solve a protein structure is is mandatory that you submit it to the pdb (i.e http://www.pdb.org/pdb/101/motm.do?momID=148) and nearly every journal I read has both color figures and extensive online supplementary materials.
We just launched (in preview mode)..

http://CodePupil.com

We have games where code flies around & u click in proper order http://codepupil.com/game5 -

Also, visual exercises that teach you how to build webpages in a crazy simple/fast sense http://codepupil.com/ex (that's the aim).

Focused on HTML/CSS for now but creating games & exercises for other languages too.

You could say our focus is towards pupils - though you don't have to be young to be a pupil.
Designer drugs for illness & experimentation: 3D print custom reaction chambers
ICU has some UTF-8 functionality. But ICU is really ugly.

http://userguide.icu-project.org/strings/utf-8
That page is misleading when it comes to Japanese text: UTF-8 sucks for Japanese text.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 aren't the only two choices within the whole world, which is demonstrated in their choice of encoding Shift-JIS.
Would have been interesting to see if the quotes made an impact or not, as well. I can't see it making that much of a difference...
Scheme without special forms
I've long thought that the model of "genius" as a "really smart person" was a hopelessly flawed model. There are simply too many different kinds and measures of "smartness" to collapse all of them under such a simple umbrella.

For example, consider the notion that IQ is a measure of capacity. To wit, let's use an extended and natural analogy -- a container.

Consider a notional container measured only by its depth.

A yard of beer is 36 inches (~91.5cm) tall and most people would consider this a lot of beer. This plays out in people who are extreme specialists -- extremely knowledgeable in only one or two areas. But are they geniuses?

So we have to consider breadth. I have a large mixing bowl I use when marinating meat that's about 26 inches (66.04cm) across, and most people would consider it to hold a lot of meat. This plays out in people who are extreme generalists, not particularly good in any one area, but can cut across disciplines easily.

Yet both containers pale when compared to a 55 gallon (~208.2L) drum in terms of volume. Yet the drum is not as tall as the yard of beer and not as wide as my marinating bowl!

But volume is not the only thing that matters!

I wouldn't pour molten steel into any of the containers above. And I've used stoneware that cracks when used with extremely cold liquids.

What about containers with different compartments that can hold both?

We also know about people who have perfect recall but almost no creativity, and creative geniuses that can barely remember their own name.

Can somebody who is a generalist only know about several topics or can they synthesize it into something new and novel?

How about the person that, regardless of depth or breadth, can see far reaching implications -- second, third, forth degree effects -- when new information is presented? Or the extreme tactical thinker that can react to new things with extreme speed?

Napoleon and Einstein are both commonly regarded as geniuses, but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.
There's some cultural ... thing ... that makes it seem bad to donate to charity if you have some other motive, like ego or a tax deduction. I don't really understand why, but a lot of people feel that way.

xkcd's take: http://xkcd.com/871/
This question comes up a lot and frankly I think it's a really bad idea.

I'm a big proponent of the JOBs act but for different reasons.

Let's assume you have 10-15k that you want to throw at a startup. Let's also assume that being an 'investor' you have maxed out your tax accounts (IRAs, HSAs, etc.) and you have a year's supply of rent/mortgage, food, electricity, etc.

So you have 10-15k that you can just blow immediately and not worry about ever seeing it again. What do you do? Buy 5% of a startup?

Unless you are actively involved with the startup your chances of ever seeing that cash again are practically none.

Also, through the sheer fact that a startup allowed you to invest in them being that you have nothing else to give them but money (I'm guessing here) shows you that they are not being serious about it and that money is going to go up in flames.

You'd be better off going anywhere but places like California and buying a house with 20% down.

Why? You get immediate returns by placing it under property management.

If not property buy shipping containers. If not those, go buy oil royalties from producing wells. If not those, throw it into something like betterment.com or lendingclub.com.

All of these investments will give you a yield that, while not guaranteed, is better than the craps roll you are placing into a 'startup'.

Now, I know you didn't want to read that so I'll give you the answer you are looking for.

Even without the JOBs act not being in place, you as an un-accredited investor (which I assume you are being 'ordinary') can invest in a startup as long as they are raising no more than 1M for the first year and you aren't going to be un-lucky #36 of the guys that bought shares with them.

If you really know these guys (and you should if you are wanting to throw your money in the paper shredder) they could organize a SCOR offering as well.
Amazon is hiring for a new initiative in SF
Crashed my kindle fire browser!
I like DuckDuckGo for some uses, mainly those that let me specify the context of the search term (for example http://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefly ). However it's inferior to Google search for local content (from my country) or understanding strange error strings I get while programming.
100 Billion valuation of FB would put its P/E ratio at around 100 – that's high

Here's how I think about Facebook's valuation: I compare to Google. Facebook is the only player that can challenge Google's supremacy. Today, in terms of time spent, they are equal to Google. So at a minimum, they should be worth a quarter of Google's value. Maybe half. Probably not quite as much as Google yet, but close. Guess what. Google is at $200B. So valuing Facebook at $100B looks very reasonable to me. I'd say that at $50B, it would be a steal.
A creative presentation: Two Czech students looking for a summer job in SV
This is an implementation of (as the name suggests!) Scheme without special forms, inspired by John Shutt's Kernel language. See http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1680, and http://fexpr.blogspot.com for more discussion, and http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2011/09/kernel-underground.ht... for implementations.
With police/fire, those numbers are a little distorted because often a lot of the overtime is detail pay, which is paid by private parties (bars, concerts, etc) after routing through the department. So it shows as a government payroll but it's not coming out of your tax dollars.

And I'm sure there are plenty of idiots who got entrenched and earn more than they're worth, but that's the same in any large bureaucratic org, public or private.
Google TV Development Environment Setup
Assuming the Feds pay back the stolen SS funds? In which quantum reality is that going to happen while the inbound SS funds are now in the red, while we run a $1.3x trillion deficit annually, and 10,000 new boomers retire each day for the next 15 to 20 years.

America has at least $100 trillion in entitlement liabilities that can never be paid for under any circumstances. Which is why the Fed has begun to monetize as much of it away as they can without sparking massive inflation.

That supposed point or two of adjustment is a purely fraudulent number from make-believe-land. SS is already bleeding out right now, prior to full scale boomer retirement. All of their accounting lies are premised on the Federal Reserve destroying your standard of living for the next 50 years to pay for the massive red ink that boomers are going to generate in SS.
Hey foenix, have you actually seen the way American governments (state, federal, local) spend money? I think it's almost certain that every dollar you spend on your tutoring business helps people more than the marginal benefit of another dollar spent by state or federal government.

Maybe some European countries do a better job of spending money, but we aren't Europe. Until our governments demonstrate they can spend money well it's good for society for businesses to keep as much as they legally can.

Edit: "more people" --> "people more"
> Also UTF-8 string can't be cut at arbitrary position.

Neither can be any other kind of Unicode string because of Combining Characters. That's why the Unicode standard (or an Annex) recommends algorithms for text segmentation.

(And if you really need to cut at a certain length then you can easily backtrack and find the beginning of the sequence by looking for the first byte with the MSB = 0)
Your age isn't on your website, but my calculation (got Master's degree in 1986 at likely approximate age of 24) couldn't have been TOO far off, right?

I guess age is just one of those topics..... :-)
I hope this trend won't spread to Europe. I do not want anyone to install stuff on my phone or monitor it.
Certainly the ring `Z/nZ` has 0, meaning an additive identity (the image under the natural homomorphism `Z \to Z/nZ` of the 'true' `0 \in Z`). Do you mean that the group `(Z/nZ)^\times` of units of `Z/nZ` doesn't contain 0?

(I think that it's also confusing to call `Z/nZ`, or `Z_n` or whatever you like, the group of natural numbers; rather, it is a quotient of the semigroup (or semiring) of natural numbers by a normal subsemigroup (or semiideal).)
While they reserve the right to change it I'd like to see such a massive change of intent stand up to a lawsuit.
Yeah. I mean 4,517 seems like a big number to humans but meh. You're talking about a highly optimized parser. It's likely going to rip through those quotes in about the same time it takes to dispatch a single unjit'd/unoptimized javascript function invocation at runtime.
Playing devil's advocate I'd say P/E ratio is a flawed metric to use when talking about what some of these new startups are worth. A lot of the newer IPO's represent companies that have significant assets in new areas that we haven't necessarily found the most efficient monetization scheme for yet. Pandora, for example, may not have any earnings, but the value of controlling the source of 100 million users music is no doubt quite valuable. Similarly, one might even argue that some of these companies are undervalued. Facebook's mindshare and ubiquitousness among the upcoming generation is without a doubt a new phenomenon, and so one could say that their current valuation approaching 100 Billion is small considering it's only based on the current monetization scheme of advertising (you would also have to argue at the same time that more efficient monetization ideas exist).

tl;dr- It could be unwise to measure new age technology companies with old age metrics when discerning value

Obviously, there are some outliers like Groupon that do create large valuations with little value (arguably)
At the risk of getting too off topic here...

1. Jurisdictional questions are one reason; in truth, Bitcoin gaming itself probably doesn't violate any US laws to begin with, since Bitcoin isn't legal tender. But our business plan never called for opening in the US, and taking a cue from Linden's preemptive ban on gambling with their funny money, we decided it wasn't worth the risk. We go out of our way to avoid trouble. 2. P2P proxies are too slow to give a good gameplay experience anyway, and disconnects annoy other players in multiplayer games. 3. Providing a fair game for everybody is more important in this case than standing tall on the principles of crypto-anarchy, so we like to know something about our players, especially to prevent duplicate accounts, poker collusion, chip dumping, etc. We know Bitcoin users like their privacy, and respectfully try to strike a balance while maintaining our own security and view of what's happening on the floor.

I should add that this is a 24/7 business manned by 3 people, including me, and two lawyers who signed on for equity, and that I'm also the only coder. It's small, personal, just about right; I figured with 10-20 concurrent players we'd make a profit, which turned out to be accurate, but keeping it cozy, friendly and civilized is a part of the goal and the culture I've tried to imbue in it. Sometimes that rubs against anonymity a little bit.

To bring this full circle, the closest analogy I can give is to the all night coffeehouse I used to work at when I was a kid. It's a small business with a crowd of nice regulars. That's exactly what I pitched to investors, and they didn't get it. Aren't internet companies supposed to be huge and viral? But I mean, who's to say you can't run a very successful small business that doesn't ever go huge, or require seven figures to launch? Anyway, I'm resigned to growing it at the pace it's growing, and I probably wouldn't give away equity now for anything. Not that anyone's banging down my door, lol.
Favourite part of the article: how NYT describes each apple that the tax subsidiaries are named after.

"Braeburn is a variety of apple that is simultaneously sweet and tart."

"Baldwin apples are known for their hardiness while traveling."
Well, maybe they are going after Apple because they are the worlds most valuable company. I think that is reasonable.

Also, the "within the law" argument has a bit less weight when you operate at this level. They have a lot of power to affect the law and its interpretation. I think it's probably impossible or at least not feasible to make laws that force a company like Apple to pay "normal" taxes for some definition of normal, simply because it's an international issue. But that makes an article like this even more relevant because it allows consumers to take this into account when they choose which product to buy.
The level of ignorance and sheer stupidity in this comment is astounding.

- The government isn't inflating the cost of education. Education itself is. The 'technical' courses are requiring more and more expensive equipment and buildings. Combine this with the drop in funding from state governments and that is why tuition costs are increasing. It isn't just specific to the US but is happening worldwide.

- Education in the US definitely needs work but it is not radically worse than the rest of the world. The biggest problem with education isn't with the teachers it's with the general attitude of Americans. Frankly it sucks. There is an anti-intellectual, anti-work streak that doesn't in many other countries. People overwhelmingly PREFER university sports over university science achievements. So blaming teachers and teachers unions is misguided.

- TSA policies are similar to what exists elsewhere in the world so it isn't a US government issue. It is an airport safety issue.

- Of course infrastructure in the US needs work. But again the hold up seems to be with the politicians. How about elect someone else ?
Can you elaborate on that? Why does Unicode suck for Japanese text?
Taking a Photo in Reverse - Funny
Do you by any chance have one or more external hard drives attached? I've been having a lot of lock-up issues while I have six of them connected (through a hub) to a MacBook Pro from 2011 running Lion. It looks like this (also shows it dropping to normal levels instantly):

http://cl.ly/1s3N2r2X1u2J2K010H2i

There's no process running wild from what I can see in the Activity Monitor, but it appears to happen a lot less frequently or not at all when I don't have my external hard drives attached.
Could it be that Intel is making current generation of Ivy Bridge less over-clockable, so when the next generation is due, they just change the thermal conductivity of it, and over-clock it a bit more and call it a new chip?
Yes, that's true! I was hoping to introduce some kind of convention, a starting point. Usually vimrc have some similarities I wanted to consolidate what seems common and eventually show how to combine it with some specific elements (a particular programming language or technology)
What I meant was, do you intend comments to be used for feedback on the educational resource for the benefit of your site users, or for feedback to the author of the link description? If I use comments to contact the link author, and they update the link or description, then my comment will be out-of-date. (Which is not to say that users observations on linked sites won't go stale, but less so.)
That isn't "working on an iPad". That's a dumb terminal.

For those of us who can't rely on a permanent connection, it's a useless and somewhat risky concept.
I think the last part hit it on the head. The average android phone buyer likely isn't savvy enough to know the difference while doing a quick run-through in the store, and the manufacturers know this. Bloatware increases their razor thin margins, so they're strongly incentivized to put it on there.
The richest country on earth spends nearly twice as much on education per student as any other country on earth.

Our college students now carry one trillion in debt, more than all credit card debt in America. That debt went to pay for university facilities and extraordinary teacher benefits and salaries. Meanwhile 50% of graduating students can't find a job.

There's only one place for the blame to go, unless you intend to blame the students. The teachers and their unions have been given resources that other first world nations would kill to have.
There are some rumours that other big players will start a bug bounty program soon. So I won't be surprised if Microsoft will pay for vulnerabilities too.