skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'd be glad to have an API at all. right now, if you want to get donation reports on attempted congressional members you have to go to d.c. in person and individual print each report on their printer and pay for it. it is effectively impossible for any one to accomplish without thousands of dollars plus hundreds of hours. oh yeah, and the reports are images, so then you have to translate them into data.

the more APIs the better. definitely tracking money is vital, since we've all come to assume the government is in evil corp's pocket.
I've put significant work over the past 6 years into an open source programming language called Sleep. I have a small community and I love programming in it and that is enough of a reward to me.

That said, I've attracted my critics too:

Subject: better name would be STOP

From: NothingPersonal (62.132.1.121)

Date: September 27, 2004 at 10:08:34

Please. Just STOP. stop stop stop. don't inflict yet another half-baked, il-concieved abortion of a scripting language onto unsuspecting developers. Yes, you had fun writing it, but the only niche it fills is the one in your head that renders you incapable of mastering any of the other numerous scripting options already available to you.

I know I'm supposed to be nice to you because hey who are you really bothering, and selection of the fittest will surely see sleep sleep it's way to a quiet and peaceful death. But while on it's way to it's inevitable demise, sleep is bound to take with it some hapless developers,
who will in turn inflict it on numerous doomed projects, and all that spells misery for all concerned.

While I'm at it, I also have to point out that the very last thing I want to read when browsing a language reference is pathetic, self-important humour.

I'm urging you to do the honourable thing. stop sleeping, and wake the f* up. Take down your cargo-cult website (it even has a wiki! it's _bound_ to be a success!) and spend (alot) more time researching your foundations before embarking on such follies again.
that's interesting because at first i kept thinking i'd opened tabs to some geographic region and that was their flag.
Don't take it so hard; the writer just meant "she" wasn't really "ashley".
And so does http://whitehouse.net
The President of the United States now has a blog.

Unbelievable only a year ago, really.
Nice summary. When switching from Subversion I exclusively did his first workflow, which is essentially treating git like svn ("it's like subversion but you have to commit twice").

Recently I've been transitioning to a workflow a little more like his second one, and I see the benefits, it's just hard to remember the commands and what sequence they need to be executed in.
Yes, you mentioned that in http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html

That explains the dismissive comments. The angry and really mean ones can be explained perhaps as people feeling threatened for whatever reason?
Question to those who assumed the schema would be more complicated: Why? Maybe I'm not as good with DB design as I should be, but what parts of Wikipedia did you assume would garner more complexity? Their data layout is pretty flat and I'd actually be surprised if it was more complex than this diagram.
If it's like a startup, does that mean that there's a >90% chance of failure?

Or do you just mean, 5 ways to govern well?
I'm not sure, but at a guess it would probably be either Lee Daniel Crocker or Brion Vibber.
You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is that in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital goods, based on your expectation of utilization. You must have an idea of utilization because that's what determines cost and hence profit. That's the link I was talking about and it doesn't contradict your parked airplanes example at all.

The original question we were discussing was whether buying excess resources was economically sustainable. I think we can agree that economic sustainability depends on profits. Higher costs reduce profits and therefore threaten economic sustainability.

Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always strong. No, it's not always strong, but it is strong enough for entire industries to focus on exactly that issue.

People are fired right now because they cannot be "utilized". Planes are rented away so they do not rot in AZ hangars. It's because machines lose value over time. Owning them without being able to make money out of them means you lose money every month. So spare capacity becomes a huge problem if growth doesn't meet expectations.

Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and reduces costs. If your expectations are wrong, you haven't spent the money buying the hardware either. Many dot coms would've been very happy to accept that logic in 2000.

But of course you pay a premium for that flexibility and if it turns out your growth expectations were right, you may have been better off not paying that flexibility premium. It's an insurance contract against the risk of wrong expectations.
I found Dave Eggers Ted Prize speech to be funny and inspiring. http://www.tedprize.org/video-talk-dave-eggers/
Below is a list of Ted Talks, my top five which blew me away, followed by some other favorites. Enjoy!

Top 5:

Zander on music, Hans Rosling on World Development, Bolte on Strokes, Lessing on Creative Commons, and the DNA Folding one

Some other favourites (full list here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/favorites/id/564):

Putting photos together - magically (Photosynth)

Design of the Universe

Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

John Francis - Planet Walker

Theory of everything

Evil

Liberal vs Conservative Brains

How Kids Learn
Or just run the command

git branch -m origin github
BBC prefers to call it "key words"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/obama_inauguration/78406...
Screenshot

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png
That talk was absolutely amazing. It was incredibly inspiring.
AMD sells cell phone graphics business to Qualcomm for $65 million
doesn't have comments (to avoid trolls and spam) - and its basically a "hip" way of saying a press release in a conversational tone. I think its ok.
I think it's fascinating how interested people are in quantitative analysis of speeches. How many times did he use the word "I". Which president said "I" the fewest times in an inauguration speech? What's the tag cloud look like.

Obama gave a beautiful speech today -- no doubt the use of language and delivery are a large part of that, but I find the beauty of his speeches is in the ideas.

Too often politicians fall back on flowery, patriotic language that lacks meaning and substance. Obama's speeches seem, to me, full of purpose and direction. They clearly communicate values, priorities, and objectives.
When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, it remained on the surface of the water for quite some time before sinking. Why does a heavy aircraft float for even a minute?

What an odd question to ask.

1) They can be seen floating in air, why not water which is 800 times denser?

2) The weight seems to have an issue in the asker's thought process. Battleships float, and they weigh about 600 times as much as an airbus 320.

3) Maybe there is something about the "sink eventually" time constant that causes confusion. Perhaps battleships get an exemption because they remain floating for long periods. If you can live the lie long enough, people will believe you.

Now let's review some answers we get at fluther by "tapping the collective":

There is air inside it, making it somewhat buoyant. Think about how a submarine works.

Using a sinking object to explain floating is not going to win points for clarity.

like the titanic. when the ship was cracked into half, the other half stayed like 1 minute before sinking into the deep sea. i would say its due to the buoyant force by the water acting on the ship is temporarily higher than the weight of ship because the ship breaking into two releases the water contained in the in the ship. Or probably the sinking of the other half of the ship displaces the water to generate force to support the remainning half.

A whiff of truth passes through this answer, but it is fleeting. "the ship breaking into two releases the water contained in the in the ship"?? I can't even begin to fathom what leads to that statement.

They are designed to do so.
The bottom half is a sealed compartment (full of air), they do eventually sink, but by NTSB saftey guidelines they are required to remain aflote for a certain period of time.

Ignoring the "by definition" aspect, this answer has truth in it, but I like the part where they stay afloat for a "certain period of time" because of NTSB requirements. I imagine a plane buoyed solely by the power of government mandate.

(And just to clear some of the misinformation in the article's comments: A rear door of the airbus was opened and did let water in, and the pilots allegedly neglected to throw the "ditch switch" which closes various openings to prevent water entry. The engineering team for the airbus deserves a big round of applause.)
Photosynths from the Obama Inauguration Events
I like the DSL-ish style of routing (http method, url pattern, handler method/block). The same thing is used in Sinatra (http://sinatra.github.com/):

get '/' do
'Hello world!'
end
A better idea for microsoft would be to get back into writing great software. Their main business as always been software. If they can do this they don't have to buy anyone. Buying these companies doesn't mean they'll get all talent with them.
Welcome to the Nerdery: Sierra Bravo Corp
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_f...

?
John Doerr seeks salvation and profit in greentech.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/john_doerr_sees_salvation...
A House Optimus Prime Would Love
Blue State Digital built CHANGE.GOV, and this is pretty clearly a continuation, although the impression I get is that they've brought a lot of it in-house.
I also got prescription computer glasses a few months ago after using non-prescription reading glasses. They seem to work well, and I paid extra to get the anti-reflective coating too. I spend 8-16 hours a day staring at computer screens. I wish that my boss would replace the ancient 21-inch CRT displays on my desk at work with a flat screen LCD--even with good glasses, the displays are fuzzy (and I'm sure it's the displays and not my eyes now.)
Inauguration of the White House Blog (a celebration)
Format of the NY Times version makes it a lot easier to make comparisons:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/washington/200...
Stupid title, good (old) point.

I think solving this issue could/should/will be done by whatever ends up really nailing item 18 of Paul Graham's "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html):

"18. The WebOS. It probably won't be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does. We've already funded several startups that could be candidates. But this is a big prize, and there will probably be multiple winners."

I'm imagining something (begin hand-waving) like a VM image hosting service that lets you take your VM from hosting site to hosting site; which knows about your friends' VM images; and which is to VM images as ZumoDrive is to FUSE fileystems.
the way I read it, the OP's "new jobs" would be jobs created in the private sector by people making use of the data. I don't think he was referring to the cost of creating the API itself.

The API could be created as a F/OSS project and be done with that line item ;).
For watching the inauguration, Plain Old TV beat the Internet hands down
XHTML is also pointless when it's served up at text/html
I forgot about your difibrillator example. If you actually use it it's not useless. If you don't use it you can say with hindsight that it was indeed useless (apart from giving you peace of mind maybe).

But it's a bad example because you don't own more or less defibrillator. Either you own one or you don't. And then it's not an ecoomic question. Because the answer to the question what is the right price for saving my life is always the same: All I have, all I can borrow and all I can steal.
No more results: Obama Administration Kills Results.gov Website
It's amazing what happens when good designers think about their data structures, rather than write first and refactor later (or don't).
Which year?

I'm UT CS BS, '08.
What? No. He has to spend 15 hours a day checking email and tweeting like Gary Vaynerchuk says! Social media!!
'I use Linux every day, but sometimes I get a bit jaded about this kind of thing.'

Perhaps you should be pickier about your hardware, and select a laptop that ships with your OS.

I have no issues with WPA or suspend, ever. Ubuntu, as a large and major distro with many package sources, doesn't really get dependency hell either.
Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe. Seriously....Amazing. A must for everyone.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mu...
/firstlady/newborn/text !?
Conceptual Algorithms (RubyFringe talk by GitHub's Tom Preston-Werner)
Pretty, but a histogram would have done a better job at presenting this comparison.
Mexican Billionaire Invests $250m in The New York Times
Yes it is nice to have a well designed database. However, it is part of the nature of business to be full contradictions and exceptions. That is reflected in their data models and applications.
probably because of government contract, but also because in the DC region WebTrends is well-known as an analytics tool
An oldie but a goldie: Sir Ken Robinson's talk on education and creativity delivered with such panache: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...
How the iPhone and Poor Apple Management have contributed to the Downfall of Apple
Sen. Ted Kennedy collapses at inauguration lunch
Thank you very much for sharing this. I will be using this to verify my solutions for the exercises. I am planning to work through the book slowly but thoroughly.
jcarbaugh won't say this, but the Sunlight Foundation to which he works for is pretty much pushing the government to adopt API standards. They were the folks who were partially responsible for this great link among other amazing products.
Bill Strickland's talk inspired me to think about what can be done by one person. Also he has a great casual speaking style.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bill_strickland_makes_cha...
A diagram of hyperlinks would show it's complexity.
I personally expected Wikipedia to have an uglier schema because of hacks they would have to do for performance issues. I expected a lot more denormalization and duplications.
the David Deutsch one.
dm @joeyb Bleh, this Gordon guy is boring me to tears. Your turn next time. Bar ltr?
voting records, and USGS information would be nice too
there's a lot of stuff going on in the background right now. i'd give it a few days before confirming they killed it. could be an oversight/mistake, or in the middle of being revamped.
The Browser Wars (graphic)
I think the cloud is a great opportunity for startup with great storage needs; it makes the whole startup creation cheaper.

On the other hand I will not dump a hard fetch technology on a big company cloud or an important piece of my application on some cloud no matter how soft. Given that there’s no real proprietary/ restitution agreement between you and cloud owners it doesn’t seem Wright. The last point I want to make is the Mainframe to PC comparison which appear to be shifting the other way around; It was proven unfit for evolution and probably will be again.

One advice to startup, store only space hungry data on the cloud (huge non tech files, images, music etc ..) we’ll see what the future brings next.
Twingly inaugurating world’s first federated microblog search
Exposing The Dreamworld We Believe to be Real.
Beyond the cutting edge
It's little off the beaten path, but I guess I really like food. Dan Barber's parable of foie gras was really interesting and moving to me.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_barber_s_surprising_f...
Having /includes/ under document root - and trying to fix this via a robots.txt entry (??) - wouldn't reflect well on Obama, if they actually had any meaning :)
I just did & unless I'm missing something, Alcoa was sued for anticompetitive practices.
"Because the consumers save much more money than the producers lose, the net economic effects are positive. The report also reinforces the truth that unpaid downloads do not translate into lost sales in anything close to a one-to-one ratio."- probably most interesting part of the article
2 years ago $19.95 got you 100MB RAM, 4GB disk, 50GB transfer and a slower technology/CPU. Now you get 360/12/200 with Xen and SMP -- http://tinyurl.com/7jvrx4
I think I'll make a checklist with all these. I'll post it later when it's going to be more complete.
Well that's at least tons better than hiding the entire site with hundreds of Disallow entries, when they could have just done /*.
Clojure extends the syntax of Lisp to include first class support for data structures other than lists (vectors, sets and maps).

Vectors are the [ ] structure you see. You can use ( ) to specify a number of function bodies which differ on arity e.g:

(defn foo ([x] x) ([+ x y])

So it's not to stand out more, rather it's extending the Lisp syntax to make items other than lists "first-class" whilst retaining the homoiconic properties of Lisp.
Most wiki software caches rendered pages in this case.
It seems like making everything yellow is like dropping out the brightness a little and reducing the contrast. I feel like I could adjust my monitor to do this.
You're making assumptions about what that directory is for. Perhaps it is used to store static HTML pages that are included from IFRAMEs on other pages.
and permalinks.
Ruby Warrior: Coding game designed to teach Ruby and A.I.
Spatial Query: JQuery for Vector, Matrix, Polygon and LatLngs
I am especially interested in the domain-generation part. I've wondered how it would be convenient for an infection to phone home to its owner (call her Mallory). There are several interesting requirements for such a communications channel -- it must not have a single point of failure; extremely difficult to trace to Mallory after the fact, even for a powerful (e.g., governmental) entity; it doesn't allow convenient hijacking of the channel by an external party.

According to the article and related articles, this worm generates domain names based on the current date. Probably many of these domains are owned by innocent parties, and many are unowned. At some point, one of the domains will serve Mallory's payload. The question is whether it will be a new domain that she registered, or an existing, innocent-looking domain she has hacked (or otherwise convinced to serve the content she wants -- perhaps steganographically via a blog comment or something?) If she registers a single domain, it seems likely she will be able to be tracked down by following a money trail. So my guess is that she's found some sites who have been "convinced" to serve her magic content, and tweaked the constants for the domain-generating algorithm so that the worm will land on these sites on a day of her choice in the future.

Of course, the magic content isn't up yet. The sites she's found to host it won't serve it until the correct day, otherwise white-hats would be able to play their computer clock forward and figure out what domains served the content on which day.

And she can bundle her public key with the worm so that she can verify her own payload as opposed to some hijacker's. (That part's easy.)

This is cool. The tough part is finding people willing to serve your magic content on the right day. But I bet that's not too hard in practice. I always wondered how people would control a botnet -- some old bots used to use IRC, but that has a single point of failure (the IRC network).
Part of the reason behind using hope and change from the beginning was to use the rhetoric of the Clinton years (guy from a town called Hope) and take away their edge.

It's going to be interesting to see what the new messaging will be this time around- the inaugural had interesting water imagery.
Where to find stock images?
Do you guys know of any good source of stock images that can be used on blogs/web sites? (free or inexpensive is better)

I searched recently on Google, but the free ones I found had very low quality. I would like to get recommendations before paying for such a service.
Lean hiring tips
It's a little early for the critics to shower praise on Palm's new device. Right now, the Palm Pre is just a demo. It doesn't even have a release date - according to Engadget it is supposed to be out in the "first half of 2009." And yet this columnist declares the Pre's UI is better than the iPhone's. How about holding off on statements like that until you have actually used one of these devices.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/13/palm-pre-everything-you-e...
I just can't find any meaning in this tag cloud thing. Never did actually.
I'm willing to bet this won't go anywhere (at least in the US) until residential upload speeds are increased.
How about letting me give the government my email, and then they could email me instead of snail mail, or let me see government correspondence with me online.

A friend of mine got a traffic ticket that he paid incorrectly, and had a wrong address on file. A year later he got arrested during a random broken-taillight stop with a ridiculous amount of late fees. He asked if he had any other tickets outstanding, and they said they couldn't tell him - there was no system for lookups like that. He could only make sure he had the right address on file and wait for further mail. That's a pretty ridiculous system.
The site has been operational for less than a day. Let's compare at the end of administration.
If you're not making a profit, all photos on flickr are CC licensed.
"What business model, again?"
The problem isn't that Microsoft can't create good products. The problem is that its priorities can be different from the priorities of many users. Microsoft concerns itself with its ecosystem more than anything. Apple doesn't do this and Palm is splitting from their's with the Pre.

Apple's attitude is, "we created something great and you should want to develop for it and if you're a user with legacy stuff, you should just migrate". That's fine most of the time with consumers. Likewise, their programmers have gotten used to making little tweaks when a new version of OS X comes out to make sure things work well. Microsoft, on the other hand, has tried to keep everything working even if the company that created an add-on is now defunct. It's chained them up. Something relied on a bad behavior of IE so that behavior must be kept even if it is sub-optimal for many things.

The Pre looks cool and I'm getting one as soon as it comes out (Sprint customer who doesn't want to switch carriers). However, it's completely new. It wouldn't be a platform to move Windows Mobile users to. Palm has created something that looks really great. But Microsoft really needs to decide if it's willing to let go of the legacy compatibility that Windows Mobile has going for it and require the people who have made Windows Mobile applications to suffer a dead end and port to a new platform.

It's easy when you're at the bottom to embrace change - you don't have developers and customers to loose. Microsoft has a lot to loose. Break compatibility and people can migrate to competitors as easily as they can migrate to your new model. Of course, the other side is that if you don't make the changes necessary, you can start loosing people because your product gets old and kludgy.
Definitely the crows talk has been my favorite.

A quick summary if you are not convinced. This guy has trained crows to interact with a vending machine. I am surprised by how intelligent they are. Go watch it!