skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://trixietracker.com/
We should count the number of prisoners as an extra hardship on our economy. There is the cost of keeping them in prison, the cost of when they get out, the cost of the children they have but are not raising.
I don't know anyone out there.

Your best bet is to ask around at the Chamber of Commerce or other business meetups near you.
While listening to the (IMHO) uninspired Jaydiohead album, I thought it would be neat to create an automated system for creating and rating remixes.

1. Upload a ton of music to serve as seed data

2. Run a beat rate algorithm

3. Mix the vocals from one song with the rest from the other.

4. Present clips of two such mixes to users, who pick the better one.

5. Repeat until you have a best selling album of remixes.
Could your social networks spill your secrets?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144580

http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html
From this point forth thou shalt be known as Flash!

Somehow I doubt that the scores of Flash, Flex developers, designers, etc, will get this memo. It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe's marketing department is able to stick to this. I've found it very difficult to change one's definition of a word or service once it's defined in people's minds. I doubt these definitions will catch on universally.
Atlas Shrugged, was fortunate enough not to have centuries where you were ostracized (and possibly killed) if you disagreed.

Although both sides have some hardcore followers who blindly defend their side regardless of practicality, they both offer value if approached with rationality... and countless opportunities to enter arguments online that go absolutely nowhere.
Disability Benefits 
Florida Workers Compensation Claim. The Law Offices of Bernstein Maryanoff specialize in Workers' Compensation claims and all related Florida disability, subrogation defense in Florida and social security related claims.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0017T7Q00/

http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/index.htm
Count yourself as one of the ones putting them in prison. For the public, it's not a hardship, but rather, an investment. Now, undoubtedly, destructive crime adversely affects the economy and community stability. Let's just hope that those in prison truly threaten enough harm to warrant the investment, or else we're wasting our money (It's always "ours" until you find yourself on the other side, right?) while severely damaging lives of others, such as the children you mentioned.
> it gives a sense of surety in an uncertain world

In particular, a false sense of moral certainty derived from an elitist denial of social complexity.
Is it a good idea to improve in this regard? While the credential pie may be unevenly distributed, it seems that by improving things you may just shrink the pie.

Ending legacies may reduce alumni contributions, thereby "forcing" (1) colleges to reduce financial aid and raise tuition.

(1) I use the term "forcing" loosely. Of course colleges could reduce waste (like the football team) and increase class sizes. Realistically that won't happen.
Re: your youtube video... I've put up LED signs at work before, but they suffer the problems that:

(a) you need to look at it. Mental polling.

(b) It can show a small amount of text. There is little summary information (that we deal with) which benefits. Either boolean data that could be shown with a single light or lots of data that needs more space. Is it really useful, or more of a novelty?

Also, isn't the text-to-speech somewhat interrupting?
There's a strong misunderstanding going on here of what "authorial control" means, though. Anything you can do in a game, even a free-form game, is taking place within a system of rules set down by the game's designers and programmers. Games are interactive, and obviously accept input from the player, but they are as strongly, and really, as exclusively authored as any other medium.

Ebert comes at it entirely from a film point of view -- video game players can (depending on the game) have control of the camera, of the movements and decisions and dialog choices of the protagonist, or even in some cases, control of the narrative! Every movement in a game, though, is restricted (or it might be better to say, "allowed for" or "enabled"), by the designers. Unless it is a poorly constructed game, you can't go walking off out of the game's predetermined accessible areas. Every line of dialog was written by a writer, or recorded by a voice actor (or, if it uses some sort of procedurally generated speech system, is operating under rules built by a programmer and game designer). Some games are more forgiving of "emergent" moments than others -- having gameplay systems which are built to intersect and collide in unexpected ways -- but all of those underlying systems were designed and built with the purpose and expectation of creating interesting collisions.

The problem is that Ebert is framing games like he'd frame a piece of serious film or literature -- defining authorial control in terms of narrative, or at least in terms of character, which is ridiculous. If Ebert ventured into a gallery space and encountered an interactive art installation which created some sort of projection which responded to his body movement, voice, and an artist-chosen soundtrack, would he declare that it inherently wasn't "art" because it wasn't a painting?

I think he's confusing the presence of a protagonist and the use of filmic storytelling tools and cinematography for a classic narrative work, and then sees players diverting that narrative and shaping that narrative and tearing it apart, and decides that there can't be anything valid there.

Narrative can be a great tool, or even a framework, to build into a game, but the rules of conventional narrative not what games are inherently about, and that makes them a misguided criteria by which to judge them.
Open source Mono framework brings C# to iPhone and Wii
The Chips Are Down for Little PCs
I am very interested in all this talk about third party apps for the phone being written in Html + Javascript.

If executed well, it means an army of developers ready to start coding away and tons of libraries and existing apps ready to be plugged in.

If executed the iPhone way, it means mostly crappy mini websites, masquerading as apps, for a while and then a decent native SDK a year later.
Actually my fear was of pandering to the common culture here. You seem to be suggesting the opposite.
"And if webOS is basically web-based, that means that all of Palm's apps will be available on the iPhone, but none of the iPhone's apps will be available on the Palm Pre. Not exactly a winning proposition."

And you'd be right, if they do it the way original iPhone apps were done - scaled down websites running in a browser.

But not if what they actually have is a rendering engine as part of the OS and a Javascript API for things like location, sound, data, etc.

Then you have a powerful SDK that everyone and their little brother already pretty much knows how to use.
Wow, excellent find. I lived in Bristol up until recently and you can faintly see my old home in the Clifton Suspension Bridge image!
Tiltshift photo editor
A Tricky Setup for a Great Keyboard
I'm more on the less-government side but that comic always bothered me.

There are many instances in Ayn Rands writing where she praised the laborers for their hard work. My impression was that she didn't believe that only a few "men of the mind" should be at the top and everyone else does the hard work for them.

It was more about valuing the laborer who works harder then everyone else instead of the one who believes he deserves higher compensation without contributing anything more then the minimum requirements.
The football team is waste? Really? As much as I loathe college athletes, athletics brings in big bucks from alums.
The Zen of Palm - The Original Palm Design Philosophies
There is a more complex breakdown that what you suggest: "For the public, it's not a hardship, but rather, an investment."

For some of the prisoners, for some of the public, its an investment. For some of this same public, some of the other prisoners, it is a hardship. For some other part of the public, the breakdown is different.

The prison issue should eventually come into focus as the complex problem it is. Up to now its not talked about enough for most (including myself) to have a clear opinion.
Is sound art? Is a colored plane art? Is a rock art?

It depends.
this is an artifact of our previous quiz interface; the comments here make sense and we'll change it to be less confusing.
The article is a string of rants about how "developer hostile" Apple is, and how open Palm is, but...

Unfortunately Palm is currently not opening this developer program to the public and has only released the Mojo framework and SDK to a private group of developers.

Aside from that, it says nothing that wasn't already made clear in Palm's announcement. "It has an API, and you can do stuff with it."
I think it took an iPhone for the other guys to get innovative like this. I really like this interface, though unfortunately it'll take more than that to dethrone the iPhone; though I don't think anyone can be sure until they've actually used it.
Silicon Valley is a graveyard
yes, we'll optimize for speed soon (but we hope to optimize at the right time). bedroom and dining room are next on the list. getting visitors is indeed the big challenge. SEO, viral/social, and SEM (in that order) are what we'll focus on. would love feedback in this area as well.
we have a "budget slider" feature for each product category (e.g. show only sofas below $XX). do you think a budget slider for a room makes sense?
Ahh that would be awesome. I have always wanted the ability to have a set annotated, so that i can replay my favs and skip to certain sections easily - is this what it does?
http://www.pictogame.com/
when will these guys ever learn?
Calling the bible fiction is something I'd consider taboo in a lot of the world still, unfortunately. Your, "I probably shouldn't say this" just reminded me of the essay.
Yesterday I too tried to download the new version of windows life; but after 33%, it would not download any further

:(
http://technologizer.com/2009/01/09/palm-pre-vs-apple-iphone... shows these dimensions:

pre 3.96” by 2.34” by 0.67”; 4.76 oz.
iPhone	4.3″ by 2.4″by 0.33″; 4.05 oz.

At least one of the articles is incorrect.
To my understanding, stack-based VMs are more common than register-based VMs, and the Lua VM is noteworthy for being both well-implemented and small enough to read. Then again, it looks like you're quite a bit ahead of me in reading about VMs. I just found this in your "blog thing" yesterday: http://www.bentwookie.org/blog/kragen-tol/2007-September/000... You've got a lot of good links. :)

By "table optimizations", I meant the way it behaves as both a dict and a table, depending on how it is used, and how much they get out of using those throughout the language. (I wrote the above in a hurry before catching the bus, and knew I had missed better examples, but it came to mind from the _Implementation_ paper.)
I know too many people who believe Obama's the best thing to happen to the USA in the last few decades. But aren't familiar with his positions.

Rhetoric and personality go a long way in politics. Well before ability.

Either way, his intelligence and tech-saavy are a plus.
don't count your generosity until its hatched ;). Its good to dream. Its better to actualize.
I really didn't get Shakespeare until I saw it performed. His plays are plays for a reason, after all. That's enough (for me) to blow away the "requires authorial control" theory: no two performances are the same.

Or any book: everybody reads it and has a different mental image of what's going on. (How many people read Dune and saw it as Lynch did?) In a book, you're given fixed words and given free reign on the visual and auditory axes. In a game, you're given fixed audiovisuals and given free reign on plot. I don't see how one could be inherently artistic, and the other not. Only a movie reviewer (where virtually everything is fixed) could claim that lack of viewer participation is the defining attribute of art.
Abused IT Workers Ready to Quit
Effectively infinite risk? So you think a regulatory agency in the US will allow prices of a stock, say, GE to reach an unbounded number and still require settlement in derivative contracts to this? And I would not be as quick as you are in calling a professional stupid for doing something that any professor of finance would tell you is important for smooth functioning of capital markets.

You seem to just not grasp the magnitude of what you assume people should do in this crazy option proposal. It is not unusual for a stock to have a 25% short interest. That means a quarter of the shares are sold short. So you are saying a quarter of shareholders should sell calls to every short seller who wants to hedge? What if most shareholders do not want to sell options, and not give up the upside in doing so (indeed, there is a tradeoff in "juicing" your return, you lose the upside). In fact, most do not, so this is entirely impractical of course.

The whole point is with proper regulation that prevents the case of a squeeze or errant prices that are not sound, you prevent the "unlimited" downside (if a company ever becomes infinitely valuable, we will have other more interesting issues to deal with). This happens all the time--exchanges can cancel trades done at what are called "obvious error" prices. Regulation effectively clips the tail, which is why dealers have no problem shorting shares to ensure liquid markets.
The movie is in production:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

Maybe this is just a veiled promo?
CanvasTurtle
Do you do individual performance reviews in your startup?
In large companies it's pretty standard procedure to do performance reviews. At HP we did 360 degree evaluations where your peers gave feedback to your boss who delivered the news to you.

What do startups and small businesses typically do for performance reviews? When there's only 3 people or so anonymous feedback isn't really anonymous, but it seems like a good process to have to keep people growing individually. How are others handling this?
yeah, there's alot more emphasis on using the thumbs for the most repetitive motions. interesting idea to keep switching. I'll have to give that a try.
IPhoneCTO
Cisco's WebEx now available for iPhone
I wonder how they find IRC useful - doesn't it suffer from the same problems as tracking any other IRC channel?

Information you care about will be pushed off screen, if you set markers it will be as interrupting as any other popup and alternatively requires manual polling...
Io Gives You Super Disco Nuclear Powers with Rubber Handles
great idea.

i made a pinhole camera a few years back from an oatmeal cylinder. here's a picture of 77 Mass Ave

http://bilumi.org/lucy/OATMEALPINHOLE.jpg
I certainly see parts of Atlas Shrugged becoming reality in the current financial crisis. If failing businesses continue to be propped up on a large scale it won't be too many years before the US economy grinds to a halt. If the productive are constantly taxed to help the unproductive the incentive to create wealth will disappear.
Wow, this article has some very tenuous links between Atlas Shrugged and real life. I'm going to just pick on one:

The appropriation of Rearden metal by the government in Atlas Shrugged was compared to Hank Paulson's insistence that the banks (which the government would bail out) had to hand over a percentage of their future profits back to the government. Apparently, these situations are eerily similar because in both cases the government did it for the "public interest".

Notwithstanding the fact that in Atlas Shrugged, Rearden actually invented something of value (which the govt appropriated), whereas in real life, the bankers fucked up their own balance sheets and were coming to the government cap in hand for help. As far as I'm aware, one is theft, the other is repaying a favour.

The only thing eerily similar about these two situations is that they both have a guy named Hank involved.
This should be an obvious part of most managers philosophy.

If the type of job your employees are doing (and type of people you are hiring) provides more value then monetary compensation that you should be aware of that.

This is especially true in software development where many developers would do it for the love of it, if their basic necessities are covered. Many other professions are the same.

But there a many more jobs (and employees) where this is not the case and money is the best motivator.
Agree that she respected manual labor: after all, the heroic Howard Roark character worked in a granite quarry for a time in "The Fountainhead".
14.250Mhz Strange Signal - Any SigInt Hacker Hams care to comment?
Two links to go from:
1) http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?t=187813
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sELEQadGNYE

Hoax? Viral? CW? Numbers Station?

I'd love to get some HAM gear to verify.

Thanks!
I agree. If I'm listening to a good set I'm much more likely to "buy set" than I am to take the time to buy them one at a time. "Buy set" option highly suggested.
I am really glad to see that they are updating it for Django 1.x. I have not programming background but have been trying to decide on a web-focused language/framework to learn, and Django was highest on my list. Up until now, however, there weren't any online resources (that I had found) that detailed getting started with Django 1.x. I've started looking at Ruby/Rails, but may have to reconsider my decision now that there is a good resource available.
Good point. On most other sites like this (such as Digg and Reddit) there's a third factor that's much more influential than the others there, but much less so here -- whether the post is funny.
I've though before that a data driven approach would be an interesting attack on this problem. Take the applications, then 4 years later (or 10 or 20) compare it to the students' records and see what factors correlated best with success. There really is a treasure trove of data here that is just going to waste.
I'm guessing that they're measuring the Pre (or the iPhone) in different locations.
Don't forget the philosopher who made burgers.
Yea pretty much.
That is pretty lazy IMHO. Its a beta site, read the comments above on why there is a login.
That's an interesting suggestion. I think some college admission offices do that. I've heard MIT describe one admission factor it looks for: students challenging themselves with HARD classes in high school, which correlates better with success in upper division courses in MIT than does having a perfect high school grade point average.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-...

Another thing MIT looks for is baby-sitting experience. (I'm not making this up.)
It's a great idea, though I think ImageKind covers most of this.
You can't really buy sets. Sets are basically podcasts that are mixed by DJs weekly for promotional purpose. Unless we collaborate with sites like Beatport or Juno to make this happen.
Just increased the number of incites. "hackersftw" is the invite code
I'm also interested in how small companies handle performance reviews. I've worked for 2 small companies, and find that they can be more opaque than a large company, since the boss is often pulled in a dozen directions, and performance feedback can be rare.

Is there a good way for small companies to do this? This exact issue came up in my head today as a "startup" idea to investigate. Do other companies feel this pain?
That's an interesting suggestion on why to leave well enough alone. I wonder how one would check the economic effect on colleges of changing current admission policies. Daniel Golden's book _The Price of Admission_

http://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges-Outs...

claims that colleges could be much more meritocratic in admission than they now are, but his good examples (Caltech among research universities, and Berea among small liberal arts colleges) perhaps undermine his argument.
Some make money, but most don't. Duke should keep their team, I imagine it makes money. Rutgers shouldn't.

However, I probably should have given an example besides the football team. There is plenty of unglamorous waste to cut at any college. For instance, no college should have 3+ affirmative action offices (no desire to debate on 0 vs 1). As another example, I know of a college with a 7 person math dept and a 3 person statistics dept (each with a dept chair and underworked secretary). If they were combined, you could cut a chair and a secretary.
We use Pivotal Tracker at AboutUs.org. It's endorsed by our CTO Ward Cunningham (c2.com/wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham).
Especially after Microsoft's Cashback.com outage on Black Friday (the worst day for an e-shopping site to go down), I'm surprised they let this happen. This was on the calendar for a long time, and they should've gone to great lengths to make sure they could handle the traffic.
MOBIZ-Opportunities in Mobile
Just because I love developing software doesn't mean I'm willing to make you rich while I get a salary alone. The only people I know who are willing to do that are people who don't know their worth, people that aren't worth more than a salary, and people so new that they don't know any better.
-local storage capabilities of HTML5

-a JSON-based message bus to tap into a wide range of device services, including contacts, calendars, and location

- the platform will allow [...] access [to] most of the phone's capabilities, including calendaring, contacts, music and video playback

-running notification and periodic tasks in the background, providing direct access to the phone's text messaging (SMS) system, and more

This is getting more exciting by the minute.
I agree with you. I think the best developers should get paid accordingly.

I mean that managers should be aware that some workers are not directly motivated by money as some other job types. To get the most out of say, your developers, it might take more then money.

This post summarizes it well, http://foohack.com/2008/11/how-not-to-get-real-and-die-tryin...
News on Technology
The main Django docs are really good and up to date. Not a book, but if you have the concepts down everything you need is there.
Ask HN: Best Django jobs sites?
Besides what a Google search would reveal, are there any sites that people have found to stand above the rest?
Think about this for a moment. 17.5% means that ~ every 1 out of 5 is out of work. Look around you. Does that even seem possible. That number is like the numbers proclaiming that there are 3 million homeless in the US and that men on average have more sexual partners than women (by a ratio of ~7 to 4). Its complete bullshit and if people thought about it for just a few minutes, they would realize it.
"Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!"

FYI Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand and was part of her inner circles.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/greenspan-time.html
Ask HN: How do you code a search box like on Ticketstumbler?
I tried Google, but I can't figure out what the thing is called. If anyone wants to give the actual code I'd appreciate it...but I'll settle for what the concept is called.
Until you look at France et al. and find that they have > 8% unemployment in the good times.
7 is real. I've seen the show. IIRC, he played an FBI agent...
Windows 7 Beta Fail
When I applied under a business name, it took about 3 weeks for Apple to finally contact me asking for business documents. In the interim, I applied as an individual and I was approved immediately.

I finally got first app approved and onto the app store this week. When I first submit, I was rejected exactly 7 days after submission. I fixed my error (wrong version in the Info.plist file) and resubmit the same day I received the rejection email. 5 days after the resubmission my app was approved for sale.

Once I got the email that the app was ready for sale, it appeared in the app store about 18 hours later.