skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really doubt this. I live in a neighborhood where people come by all the time. They don't offer $50 cards or really anything, they just drop off their business card. Which I usually just throw in the trash. Obviously your going to call someone if you have a $50 gift card with them.
What’s up with the ICJ?
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I had to decide if this was a pro-HN comment or not. One could argue that reddit, Fark, and Digg make bullshit known -- known to the world on the front page.

In the end I decided that you mean: People call out the bullshit on HN.
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the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America

Where are the ents going?
Given the razor-thin margins of grocery stores I'm not sure why they don't try a more ad-supported model. Hang huge colorful printed ads over each aisle, charge fees to the name-brands if they want to be placed anywhere but directly behind the store brand, etc. Seems like they could squeeze more profit than they're currently getting.
Likewise, there are large-scale benefits to having a cross-country highway system, even if it goes through states that couldn't afford it on their own.
Eking out performance in script loading
I think it is the combination that does it. I have lots of "discount vouchers" for all sorts of things, which I never use. But I need a plumber and this guy would be it.
Thanks! Very interesting discussion, just let me add two little pieces of information that might be useful to the people who would like to inquire further:

One of the first if not the first to propose quantum mechanical processes related to consciousness was
Evan Harris Walker his book "The physics of consciousness"
(Basic Books, 2000) which makes a very interesting reading.

The latest on this, as far as I know, can be found in the book "Quantum Aspects of Life" (Word Scientific, 2008)

Happy New Year!
How do you do an objective evaluation of a plumbers work? Most plumbing work that needs to be done is pretty small. I call the guy. Talk to him, if I like the attitude he gets to do a job. If he is good he gets a second bigger job. Evaluating based on references would only work for me if I had a big job to get done. But for small jobs, the $50 voucher and a small job from the guy who came and said "hi" would pass my first test. He would get the small job, that leads to bigger jobs.
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But how does that scale? What's the ratio of managers to workers? For every 10 20-something new CS graduates, there's maybe 1 50-something manager. What happened to the other 9? This isn't a new problem, after all the Army needs only 1 Colonel for every 12-16 Lieutenants... The option to stay on as a junior officer until retirement doesn't exist, it's "up or out".
I wanted to comment on cultural differences, though via brief googling I found out that US and Russia have actually very similar divorce rates. In both countries almost half marriages fail. Interesting.

http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.shtml
In the sense of "If it isn't actionable and quantifiable its a delayed failure rather than a goal:"

1) Go to gym 100 times for at least 45 minutes.

2) Sell $30,000 worth of Bingo Card Creator.

3) Take money from customers for 2nd project. (sales > $0)

4) Not disclosed.

5) Reduce food budget to 1/2 of current level.

6) Declare income resulting from wages of exactly zero yen/dollars for December 2009 to appropriate tax authorities.
And you wasted mine. I do see that somehow its "our" time to you. You speak for the whole community now? But I'm not mad about it. You still can't focus on the original problem and offered no assistance to finding the quote I was trying to find. I thought it amusing that DHH and Alan Kay were being confused ;) If you didn't that's ok, that's how humor works.

Lets try not to be mad. You and I obviously woke with different attitudes this past day. Maybe the next will be different.
"Just because I sleep with other men doesn't mean I'm gay!" --this guy I know
May I kindly ask you to correct the link to the german translation on the main article page? It currently links to http://www.heiniger-net.ch/archives/167/langswitch_lang/de, but that link doesn't work anymore. Please link to http://www.heiniger-net.ch/archives/167 as indicated in my original post. I changed the way my blog handles multiple languages.
Thank you very much.
Yes, you're right. It's high time someone blew the whistle on all the silly prattle about revamping our language to suit the purposes of certain political fanatics.

(From one D. R. Hofstadter, http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html.)
Write well about topics you want to be considered an expert on. If you don't have a site or blog about this, you should probably reconsider that.

Business cards -- probably the single best place to invest $20 in your future. (If you desire to do work in Japan, drop what you are doing right now and get these if you don't have them.)
Hindley-Milner type inference algorithim, explained
Godin, or maybe Gladwell (haven't read the book), is missing the point of the "10,000 hours" theory. It is about being "good" at a subject, not being famous for it.

Tiger Woods has spent thousands of hours practicing and is one of the best in his field (and is famous for that). Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role.
My father often tells me to fish where the fish are. In this case, fish are people who a) have money and b) are willing to give it to you to fix their problems.

I have not been to an American user group recently but my sense of things is that there are other places where the fish are slightly more plentiful.

(Hint: they tend to hang around each other. Observing one or even asking for an invitation to lunch, etc, is a good way to find them in your locale. Its not too hard: "Hey, boss, I'd like to get to know you better. How about we have lunch together sometime?")
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It sounds like his family was probably having money problems (they owed more than they had in the bank, or they weren't able to support their lifestyle).

In that context, perhaps his wife was threatening him to "get a stable job that provides us income, or else I'm doing to divorce and leave you."

A good movie to watch on the subject: "The Pursuit of Happyness" (2006)
It's not just in US. In the majority of the world, women are extremely materialistic. Sad reality.
[Ask YC] Free emailing services besides Google apps?
We are currently using Google Apps for our startup's email service (for account registration, confirmation etc.) Unfortunately, Google Apps only lets you send 500 emails before blocking your account for 24 hrs. Anyone know of any other services?
I thought he was saying the lesson he learned from signing up for all those email newsletters was that it was a waste of time and ended up clogging his inbox. He won't make the same mistake when using social networks like Facebook.
Checking your google search, out of the first five pages _none_ are about methane sequestration. They all mention methane because, interestingly enough, methane is a by-product of CO2 sequestration.

I'm just going to ignore all of your barbs. Not really relevant to the discussion. You're right. You shouldn't engage in threads you don't know anything about.
I would like to work at Google or such. Not because of the free soda but because I feel managers in those companies are very smart and technically oriented.
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Dude, mention that it's NSFW. I don't want a bunch of blinking porn pics in my face.
You realise there's an option to disable your wall without spending $40?
"Sturgeon's law applies - 90% of programming jobs are crap."

100% true when this is applied to my country - India. All I find everywhere is another job ad that reads "C/C++/Java developer wanted. or ASP/ASP.NET developer wanted".

I find very very very little people actually looking for Python/Ruby or other nice-language guys. Even worst, people start laughing at me when I talk about Python or Ruby. They feel I'm learning some useless language and that I'm a useless programmer. (hurts me that nobody finds me useful here).

And I agree with Joel. I too haven't met a good programmer who's being laid off or is paid low or isn't enjoying his job.

On other hand I know (bad-)programmers, including a couple of my cousins, who are trying to find a decent job since a year.

P.S: IMO 1.) bad programmer=does his job for the money.
2.) bad programmer=knows nuts except the syntax of a couple of languages.
Global warming: Why the world has taken to chilies
A bad assumption here. It could have simply been that his wife didn't want to see her children go to bed hungry or for them to lose the roof over their heads.
It should be noted that the ads on that page are definitely NSFW.
It's not sitism or elitism. :) Please read my reply to iofthestorm.
I think Facebook's Palantir project also deserves an honorable mention here.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=37403547...

Real-time visualization of Facebook actions (pokes, friend request, etc).
The longest I've ever had a Mac was six years, when I used a Mac Plus from 1989-1995, when I got my dads old IIsi. Then in 1996 I bought a Quadra 605, and in 1998 I bought a PowerMac 7200, and in 2000 I bought a new iMac. In 2001 I bought a Powerbook Lombard 400, and in 2002 I bought a G4/466. Then in 2003 I bought a new Powerbook 12" 1ghz, and that worked perfectly for me for three years until December 2006 when I bought a new Macbook which needed a new motherboard six months later. Since then it's worked pretty OK though it does seem to completely lock up every now and then requiring a forced shutdown, which didn't happen with the old Powerbook 12" if I recall correctly. Our 4 year old Dell PC has worked perfectly and we will continue to use it until it blows up.
Yes. The gorillas are made of solid gold under that black paint.
4) Not disclosed.

Ooh, now we're curious!
Is anybody actually predicting the US will remain the sole superpower for... crud, I can't even come up with a decent time specification for this question... 100 years?

Even assuming the US doesn't have anything called a "collapse", it's obvious to anybody with eyes that there are a number of countries that will inevitably grow to superpower status over time. This is normal, and arguably good, since the alternative ("everybody stays poor") is probably bad. Singulatarians would argue that tech is moving such that people, or at least small collections of people (on the order of tens of people), may become "superpowers" by modern standards.

Even the most optimistic predictions of continued US success don't have it coming at the expense of other success, and the economic phenomenon that less developed countries have much more low-hanging fruit, allowing them to grow to modern standards much faster than the leaders, will not stop anytime soon.

Seems to me the question of whether the US will "collapse" is distinct from the question of whether it will be the "sole superpower" across any timespan past 10 or 20 years. (Slightly later edit: And the collapse of the US won't make China a superpower, it will mean there simply isn't one for a while. Superpower is ill-defined, but it definitely has something to do with being able to project force around the world, and China can't do that yet, except with nukes, and if that makes a superpower, than they are already there, along with numerous others.)
My new year's resolution is to email my 15 months old son daily
Last night, I got this idea to create a Gmail account for my 15 month old son, and start emailing him daily about "things". Let me explain.

Especially the last four months, my son has been a lot of fun for us. Everyday he has been learning new things and making us smile with a new peculiarity he develops. My wife and I point these things to each other and talk about these. But, I always wanted to find a way to document them.

I thought of documenting these into a text file in my laptop. Although I use Emacs extensively and I do a lot of writing, I never got myself to write about my son. I guess that failed because it felt too impersonal and mechanistic. It felt like a scientist writing about a subject.

I thought of having a blog for the baby, but that felt too pretentious. I wouldn't want the blog to be open to public. I am not doing this to show off to other people. Then, who is the audience?

The audience is my son. By addressing my writing to him, now I suddenly have more incentive to write about him. The email is also the perfect medium for this. I will be sending him emails daily, which he can read when he grows up. Email is informal, so it is much easier to write emails than more formal letters, articles, or blogs. Finally, Gmail will be doing all the safe-storing, timestamping, and indexing for us automatically.

My wife loved the idea. She will also be doing this everyday. Since we will both be doing it, chances are we will support each other to keep sustain the practice. I hope to continue this until at least my son is 5 years old. I think this will also serve as an excuse of a diary. I hope when my son reads these he will have a window into our souls.

I wish I had thought of this or heard of this earlier. (I am sure somebody must have thought of this earlier, but my google searches do not return anything.) Anyways, the reason I am posting this to HN is twofolds. If you are a parent, you might also want to start trying this for your toddler. Or, maybe you may think about a creative service to cultivate this practice. For example, you may provide an application that downloads the accumulated emails and puts them together as a pdf, and even orders them to be printed as a book that the parents can give as a gift to the child. Another service might be to deliver these emails to the child daily: this is what your parents wrote about you this day in 2009--2014. Another idea would be to data-mine the child's developmental and health history from these accounts for medical and statistical purposes.
As much as I love me some Founding Fathers, when they lived, 40 minutes got you a few miles away if you traveled with all available speed. Today, the other side of the world is only 40 minutes away on a ballistic trajectory. (And I'm not even counting information warfare where it's less than a second away.)
Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds
NYC Hacker Collective: Revenge of the Nerds
I've been in business for 23 years. I look for the best interest rate on a card, no matter what it is. I don't care about cash back because it's never enough to balance the interest rate charged. If ToysRUs had a better deal, that's what I would use.

Now my wife is my accountant and we have a Amazon Visa card. I don't know anything more than that but, knowing how she investigates all that, I know it's the best deal. The only other card we have is a Discover card because that's the only one used by Sams Club.
Would you finish your talk with a funny cartoon drawing of Muhammed? Where do you draw the line in offending people's religious beliefs?
The insistence for people to be so blithely money-oriented enrages me more than any sort of weaknesses on his part. He didn't even qualify it with "with interesting work". It bothers me just how many people like this I've met, but I'm hoping it's just a misunderstanding; I integrate my work life with my personal life, I feel it's just the way I understand my being, whereas I'm betting these people shut down when they punch the clock and go on to enjoy interesting and fulfilling hobbies at home.

My brother quit being a body piercer not because of the job itself, but because he felt that interacting with people solely for the purpose of a material transaction was banal and ingenuine. He still does piercings, for money, but only if he already knows the person. If you include work that indirectly achieves this goal (working behind the scenes for a company that impersonally sells goods or services to anyone) you have cut out almost every job imaginable in a modern industrial economy. Imagine living your life like that.
I don't get it. Is the $50 only against his labour charges? If the customer pays nothing for the parts too, then he can't subsidise the scheme for long enough to start being paid one the coupons run about by his, now loyal, customers.
Good luck :-)
I think Russia will win the race to the bottom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
If you read down a ways, he says, "... I'm working on the Android and iPhone ports for 100 days straight.
These platforms are awesome! Yuu doesn't even need a publisher! What a great idea!"
He is not arguing purely for throwing money at hardware:

A good engineer would balance the tradeoffs and solve the problem within the existing resource constraints. A theoretical computer scientist would whine until he got a big enough machine to implement the mathematical solution with the least amount of fussing about the constraints of the real world.

The post at the start of the Usenet thread asks if any Lisp implementation can handle inverting a 20,000 by 20,000 matrix. Naggum is arguing that if you really had that problem, you are probably working in an industry where the choice of Lisp implementation is irrelevant, because solving the problem is so lucrative that you could afford to write your own Lisp implementation, if needed. He's saying that you will throw money at both hardware and developers to get the job done.

Edit: He also does not compare Fortran and Lisp.
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Illinois would miss the existence of feds to investigate corruption like Blagojevich the state is incapable of self-policing.
For folks who are excessively literal thinkers and read it 3 times trying to find the "global warming" angle, let me do the work so you don't have to: it is a pun.
This of course was Reddit's business model. And HN could monetize this way if it liked.
"Among other things, that may give a scientific explanation for the habit, not formally researched, of snorting the 'pink fix' (a mixture of cocaine and chili powder)."

Anyone have any more information on this?
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The best moments for me as a parent usually happen when no camera or PC is present. I have learned to just smile, relax and enjoy the moment as opposed to trying to document it.

I do think however that your idea is a good one. I've also thought about starting a website for my girls, filled with photos and videos from their childhood.
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
And if she kicks him out, she can go on welfare.
Based on his anything I don't know why anyone is taking him seriously... but I suspect it's because people love to be entertained.
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Huey Newton predicted the collapse of the nation state long ago, since he correctly foresaw that the global economy would become more important than particular nations. I live in Texas now, but I may well move to California, in light of all this. A China controlled California would be economically better off I would think than a Mexico controlled Texas Republic. Nothing against Mexico, but I am just thinking in which of these new Republics I can get iPods at a reasonable cost.
Several years ago I used to find black pepper too spicy, then one day I put on some hot sauce and kinda liked it, so I started adding a bit to every meal. Just as with programming or music, when you push yourself and go a bit beyond your limit, you get good. Well, after several years of this, I now eat frightening amounts of spice. If I want a spicy meal, I use about 2-3ml of 600000 scoville sauce, which isn't too much in hothead circles but would cause a lot of pain in most people.
The success of the plumber was really marketing, which is the success factor for any business. He never gave away $50, he offered a discount on his services (how many plumbing jobs cost less than $50?). Also, he was driven by money, just not for greed's sake, but for the sake of supporting a family.
It's really a combination of pyschological effects. The effect of FREE, whereby they are getting something that no one else was giving them. Also, the act of giving triggers a response of obligation on the part of the recipient. His presence there is a big deal in enhancing that effect.

I also think there is something to be said for meeting the person that's going to be doing the work. People make more confident assessments when they meet someone in person. It's certainly better than picking names of companies out of the phone book, or internet yellow pages, based on how "plumbing competent" their names sound.

As far as future prospects, the job is nominally scalable, and he can hire assistants to do the work. But he might be a terrible manager.

What I would do next is go to the places where all of the shoddy work was done and market there. There's probably a lot of work to be had fixing up that hospital.

If the plumber was a Chinese manufacturer, would we accuse him of "dumping"?
This is the wrong assumption as to why the wife wanted him to get a job at wal-mart or the like. Sometimes any additional income is better than no income, especially when it comes to having food on the table or not.
Same as last year...

- Lose weight
- Learn C
- Don't waste (too much) time
- Get shit done

I did pretty well on the last two in 2008. Hopefully I can keep it up while making the first two happen.
I never liked the idea either -- it usually just encourages most people to picture their "super self" and then set a ton of unachievable expectations for the next 365 days.

I'll just be renewing my committment to simply do the best I can each day and know that's all I can do.
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Exactly. What I suggest is not to rigorously document. I will be writing letters to my son daily about things. And this will incidentally form a record of what he has been doing/learning, and how do we predict his personality is shaping up.
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There is a Japanese consumer electronics company whose name I can't recall offhand who have TV advertising with the slogan because memories matter, everything matters. Maybe that loses something in translation but I think that's a powerful, emotive message.
This is _not_ Reddit. Read the freakin' site rules.
You do have to be careful though...

(warning! incoming anecdote!)

My grandfather grew peppers and ate massive amounts of them. When he was old though, he lost his sense of taste. It was really sad to see him put Tabasco sauce on everything just to be able to taste it.
I'm seeing signs that hackers are making some progress in getting our word back. Am I imagining it or have others noticed it too? ESR tried to do it in the last decade by beating it over people's heads; the "shut up, build cool stuff and let people find out" approach seems to be working a whole lot better.
Startup now 100% on AWS (they're using AMQP, PostgreSQL, pgpool-II and Rails)