skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will address the last paragraph first, because it is such a common and extreemly dangerous misunderstanding.

Every tank made represent a cost, indeed quite a high cost, as does every other piece of military technology. The money that has been spent on a tank cannot be spent e.g bridge repair in Minesota or even a nice vecation for you.

Yes the defence contractors have been hansomely paid for their services, and yes they have properly hired somebody who would not have had such a good job.

But have they made wealth? No. On the contrary. An engineer who works for a defence contractor cannot at the some time make a more fuel efficent car engine or a cheaper high speed train/monorail. The cost of the wars is not just the money and lives that goes in to it, but also what is not created. What could have been.

As for haven't produced I should perhaps be clearer -- if you expect that your standard of living should increase then what you can buy with your income needs to increase too (either things have to become cheaper or you have to make more money). That has not happened, and while I am not an economist it would appear likely that it is because most of the jobs the middle class have today is make work jobs (too many manager jobs, too many useless compliant jobs, too many lawyers, etc) jobs that, like our defences contractors above don't actually produce value.

Add to that the housing bubble and the higher cost of colleges (both fueled by the idea that no price is too dear for either and cheap credit) and a lot of people can appear to be productive for a long time before the mirage is revealed.

As for the record profits, that I suspect are mostly lagging indicators (e.g. RND being brought to the market, with nothing new in the pipeline) and a lot cheaper tech.
"The decision to manufacture in China has also raised eyebrows. Will TangiBots be produced in a Foxconn-like factory..."

My impression is that Foxconn is a much nicer place to work in China than most other places, so... for the sake of the employees I hope so?

Anyway, if Makerbot feels threatened by this they should probably take a good look at how Redhat operates. A piece of hardware should not be their only product. The fact that these new guys are catching flak from the community at all suggests Makerbot already has at least part of this figured out though.
Knocking the price from $1800 to $1200 looks pretty innovative to me. I would like to buy a makerbot, but the price has been too steep for me to indulge my curiosity - I'm not a whiz at 3d modeling and there are other things I like to spend money on.
OP: I'm curious to know whether we've ever crossed paths. It looks like we're about the same age (assuming the age you listed on some game website I just found is accurate).

I was born and raised in Minneapolis, graduated from the U of MN with a Computer Science degree in 2003, and pulled up stakes to move to Seattle as soon as I could.

If you were ever in debate, speech, or quiz bowl in high school between 1997 and 2000, or if you attended the U of MN between 1998 and 2003, I'm guessing we did at some point.

In any case, congrats!
Do women who cook talk about cooking more? Do women argue about it more? Why is it different for one sex than the other?
Ask HN: Digitalizing board games?
Let's say I wanted to create a video game called Bonopoly. It would have Monopoly's game mechanics. Is this legal?

What if I changed the game board to a circle. Is this legal?

What if I changed the name to B!, changed the game board to a circle, and allowed you to go either way around the board. Is this legal?

Can someone draw a line in the sand for me? (Obviously, seek a lawyer and whatnot - but just as general advice...)
An entire article on dates and not even the slightest mention of timezones?
You can try the MetaOptimize Q+A forum:

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/

I started it so that people could talk about the practice of ML, and the technical details that too often are not discussed in academic publications.
Personally I think that's an event only argument. I couldn't care less what day of the week a blog post was written, for example.
The main draw of 3D printing isn't to replace the lower cost manufacturing we have in China et al, but to decrease the cost of producing prototypes. As Amanda mentions, this, coupled with a number of other new innovations, will finally allow hardware startups to iterate like their software brethren have done for decades. This can only lead to an explosion in hardware innovation.
Using a nazi website as a source, really? The Assange fanclub has really gone downhill
The jungle of APIs
I guess what I love so much about HN is the generally high amount of content that is relevant to me, which seems to be hard to find elsewhere on the vast expanses of the internet. I can read articles from HN all night, but it doesn't feel like a waste of time. 99% of the time I'll have learned quite a lot by the end of the night.
SCAM ALERT  Motor Club of America
Never in my life did I expect that "Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City" would be true again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSbz_ciFSn4&t=1m09s
Welcome to DreamStake
Interesting that you would mention the scientific method, then offer no evidence for your theory.

I said what I did because I have seen it happen countless times in a long career that has included a lot of writing. I have the evidence. When someone makes a performance claim about the contents of a book, the book then becomes nearly irrelevant to the outcome, which hinges on the claim.
Better yet, go crazy with daylight savings, moving everything by 5 hours.

The sun will be high in the sky at 5-7pm, generating power when we need it most.
Why git and github are "adopt" on thoughtworks technology radar
"2 hours ago" is actually more informative than "1:08 PM 23 Aug". The latter requires a location to be exact (1pm where? Is this being localized? Do you guys use daylight savings?) and the former does not.
Eventually, companies will own the rights to our genes and we will merely license them.
So you don't prefer them and that's why I shouldn't do something?

I'd also prefer that your website not high jack the back key-command so that I could go back to Hacker news without clicking the back button in my browser.
I'm guessing they do actually care about screenshots, given that they have been recently restricting the ways they allow people to display tweets.

They did change the format they used when displaying individual tweets, I'm guessing this was intentional.
Show HN: Livewire: Livescript microrouting library
I can tell you've never been to Australia.

EDIT: http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents....
(Sorry for the horrible background, the data is there)
There isn't a government debt crisis but there is a personal and household debt crisis. That is why there is a lack of demand. Government cuts on top will make matters even worse.

If something radical isn't going to be done (such as printing money to pay off household debts - see http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/manifesto/ ) then at least some classical government stimulus borrowing is needed to (partially) compensate for the household sector's debt reduction and soften the landing.
Big Data on Heroku - Treasure Data Hadoop
Are Disclosed Password Hints Really that Big of an Issue?
How is the relative timestamp not machine-readable? Can the computer not be programmed to parse If (4_characters_after_timestamp == " ago") {$timeoftweet = $now+$timestamp} ?
Great point about displaying event dates. I think there should be some display guidelines based on the type of content the date is describing.
No, my reply to you wasn't about claims made in a book, only to say that I had some experience with publishing.
I find relative dates to be the most useful, most of the time. The scenarios where needing the exact date or time come less frequently.

The argument for screenshots is valid, however, sites like failbook where you see the post progression as X minutes ago still provide you the quick glance benefit of relative dates.
That will happen more as they move from Asp.net webforms to ASP.NET MVC. the aspx extension has become shorthand for "someone still needs to upgrade that"
When we look at human prehistory we're talking about a small number of individuals living in a small area, so a single ancestral diet is a reasonable approximation. Foraging was indeed more efficient than hunting in terms of calories, and yes the majority of food consumed would not be meat - I certainly wouldn't advocate an all-meat diet. But obviously meat was a valuable or even vital source of some nutrients (the very fact that humans continued to hunt when foraging is more calorie-efficient suggests that meat was necessary in some way), and I find it hard to believe that a diet that eliminates meat entirely could be healthy.
A lot of classical psych studies get completely different results when run in non-Western societies (I'd link but Wikipedia cites a print publication |:). There's a tendency to view everything in the West as "the default" and deviations from that as culture bound. So to answer your question, it would be a pretty tenuous extrapolation from Chinese to American workers.
If we actually got new water every day it'd be arriving on meteorites.

Of the water present on the planet, 97% is salt water which is unusable for drinking or agriculture. Of the 3% freshwater, 68.7% is locked in glaciers. So, 1% of the water on the planet is liquid and most of that is underground. We don't really have a lot and things like fertilizers damage what we have.

It turns out that the amount of fresh water is relatively constant. If we want more in places that have less then we have to manufacture it from seawater, steal it from our neighbors by cloud-seeding, or rely on the weather cycle convert seawater into fresh water and then distribute it.

If you live in Dubai, you aren't waiting for it to rain. You're building desalination plants and processing seawater.
I was working towards vegetarian. Long story short, I'm now working towards the Dr. Terry Wahls diet: 9 cups of vegetables per day, please meats, legumes, supplements. Think troglodiet, cave man diet, super Atkins (which I prev thought was bullshit).

My health's improved. My psoriasis is going away.

Ditto my gf, a full vegetarian for years. Muscle pain and inflammation going away. Other benefits.

I'd probably be a vegetarian if I had more time. 9 cups of veggies per day is a lot of work. To completely give up meat, I'd have to work even harder to get the proper nutrition.
Samsungs completely original new "Apple" store in Australia.
The reason why relative dates are used is that you don't have to worry about timezones. You either have to get client's timezone and reformat dates, or use static timezone and let users do the conversions in their heads.

Personally I prefer relative dates, because that's the information I'm looking for. I don't care if some screenshots break; there shouldn't even be any reason to take screenshots of tweets etc.
This. How can you display a time and mean something if you don't know what timezone the user viewing it is in?
Many of those regulations were lobbied for by the industries themselves, though. Regulations are a great way to keep competitors from entering the market. Not that this excuses the lawmakers, but it's a bit more complicated than us vs them.

Planet Money has a piece on it recently: https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/22/155596305/episode...
This is the wrongest thing I've read in ages.

a) Who cares about screenshots? "I'm going to the pub on Thursday" suffers from exactly the same issue.
b) Nonsense. Of course relative dates are machine readable. But anyway, web rendering != API.
c) These examples are not ambiguous, they are merely less precise

And less precision is, indeed, often what a user wants. That's why we don't print "posted 124568080nanoseconds ago". Simplifying to a reasonable unit, appropriate to the application, reduces cognitive load on the user. Most people struggle to tell you today's date, let alone knowing how long ago an arbitary timestamp was.

I like twitter (who maintain a relative date on the top-right of the feed entry) and gmail exactly the way they are.
Now I know...

Why on earth?
The leaders were probably commenting 3 years ago when the site was, from other stats on this page, 95% male. I see quite a few women who regularly comment: DaniFong, Dove and tessr, off the top of my head. Never mind those that don't mention gender or IRL identity, or have user names that are read as male.

"I don't notice any women here" =/= "There are no women here".
There isn't any defamation when the thing being said is a fact.
Here's what I do. First, the markup:
<time datetime="2011-08-27T19:1­5:38Z" pubdate>27 Aug, 2011</time>
So, time in [ISO 8601][0] format. Run JS to transform '27 Aug, 2011' into a relative date.
If the relative date is >1 month (or, whatever you'd like), then just display the full date.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Perfecting the DateRange Picker
I think that it may be the case by law that the donor cannot select the individual recipient of a donation if the organization wants to retain tax exemption.
Not surprising. It always seemed like the campaign against Assange was more about an attempt to, in their lingo, "substantially degrade" the coherence and operational effectiveness of, rather than to outright neutralize, either him or his organization.

Even if he's done more than his part to play into the interests of this perfidious campaign. Had he gone to face his trial in Sweden (like, you know, a man) he probably would have acquitted, or at worst, been made to face a comparatively light penalty by now. And perhaps salvaged some credibility for himself in the process.

Not that the campaign against him wasn't overzealous and clearly politically motivated, etc. Of course it was, but that's not the point. But it's safe to say that the juggernaut of vested interests behind it can be more than pleased at the fruits of their efforts, thus far.
Gmail is a great example because they show both the relative date as well as the actual time, so you get the best context.
I'm trying to improve things with my site: https://www.shicray.org/

A lot of freelancing sites are just a race to the bottom, people outbidding each other. My app has a standardized menu listing of services and you pay the same price regardless of provider. Then we compensate each provider differently (more or less than list price) based on feedback ratings.

Sorry for the spam but it's pretty relevant. I'd like to hear your thoughts on helping freelancers.
>> "In modern publishing, there's no need -- books are printed, one copy at a time, when they are ordered."

> Cite?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_on_demand
No, every company which had a defined business model fell into one of the five categories.
From another MN to SF transplant with a similar story, congrats on making the leap. :)
Crush All Hu-mans(aka, the Robot Economy)
Constructive solid modeling in your browser
Meanwhile, rivers run into oceans.
The headline is incorrect. It's a proposal by some writer, and nothing that the city is putting into place. Quoting: 'OK, OK, OK, there is no actual "plan." I'm not handing him "The Plan." The plan is here, in this column, and I hereby give it to the mayor'

Moreover, the idea isn't feasible. Excepting a few key bridges and other bottlenecks, it's very hard to put up tollbooths for bicyclists since it's easy to take another route. Cars are easier to toll since most people would rather go 60+ on a toll road than ~20 on a surface street.

As a driver in the city, I'm surprised that the author doesn't want more people biking off of the streets. More cyclists means fewer drivers, means less crowded roads for the author of that article to enjoy.
ridiculous argument and bad misinformation. relative dates are better for users in any context involving event freshness/recency, and they are machine readable by using many well-known markup techniques, including the microformat he mentions.
The quest for perfection may be futile.

DNA is also code, and it's full of bugs. That code lives for hundred of thousands of years, if not millions.

Biological processes offer the suggestion that your system can be functional in the face of constant failures and random variations in behavior.

Biology can even offer a very high reliability rate. While we get sick all the time, and people are born with all sorts of genetically disadvantageous traits, many key processes are mind-bogglingly reliable. (No sight v No sense of touch: Compare the rates of blindness to the rates of congenital analgesia type 2)

While the math behind CS offers tantalizing guarantees of reliability the reality of software development and developers deliver a reliability far lower.

I think it is a fascinating thought experiment to imagine a development process where instead of writing any code, all you're writing is tests (or feature descriptions) and let the code adapt to the environment you've defined.
And...looks like everything's fully funded now.

Between this and the Tesla museum crowdfunding has given me optimism about the world we live in these days.
I read the following quote somewhere (paraphrased since I don't remember the exact wording):

The apprentice hacker hears of an interesting problem, gets excited, rushes off to his computer and starts madly writing code. The master hacker hears of an interesting problem, settles back in his chair, stares off into space and says, "You know, I think I've seen something like this before..."

At this point, your goal should be to expand your knowledge base. Your end goal should be to have a sufficiently good understanding of enough different tools, technologies, and ways of thinking that you can decompose anything new into ideas you already understand.

So here are some random suggestions for what you should actually do:

You have to have a balance between theory and practice. Try to build specific things like a blog site, a game, a raytracer, a media player, a website scraper, whatever tickles your fancy or scratches an itch. Try out different languages, libraries, IDE's, tools, operating systems. Exposure to different layers in the stack, different philosophies and different problems will increase your skills, help you learn the sense of the right tool for the job, and help you develop your own style as by combining the strengths of your different experiences.

Likewise, math and theory will help your skills reach new heights, especially after you start to feel comfortable with programming. You can accomplish a lot if you don't know much theory, but theory will give you a deeper understanding of many situations and make your thoughts clearer and more effective.

Your general programming abilities will improve if you learn high-school algebra, graph theory, automata theory (finite automata, push-down automata, and Turing machines), regular expressions, and compiler design. Geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and linear algebra are helpful for physics or graphics-intensive programming. Number theory and abstract algebra are virtually required to study modern cryptography.
Create an `@media print` css rule that displays absolute date/times (with time zone). That's just about the best of both worlds.
Sure, but that seems harder than attempting to shame developers into changing the way they display timestamps.
I'm interested to see what gets sold here. The open source hardware movement has been awesome, but at the moment, it seems to only have resulted in a large hobbyist movement, and hasn't quite affected mainstream consumers yet. Perhaps these guys are going to partner with some of the more successful kickstarter projects and sell them in one spot?
My cloud BI is absolutely free (https://my.infocaptor.com) but I make it from the enterprise downloads.

I have now an idea how to keep the service free for ever and charge only for certain things.
On Self-Confidence
Between me, you, aaronbrethorst and azylman that's a pretty good MN expat in CA contingency already represented in this thread.
It's not just metal. It's full of "tech" and "science" and "future" and "enthusiasm" and even "fun".

Re-adopting the 1980-1981 logo would send a signal that I would love to hear. That Microsoft is rebooting Microsoft and that things are going to be new and fun again.
This is true in the US, but not necessarily in other countries.
"I'm going to the pub on Thursday" isn't likely to be archived and referenced at some future date.

Unless you Tweet it. In which case, your statement (and the relative, human-parsable time) and the timestamp (absolute, machine readable) are both present.

Repetition and redundancy can increase robustness and strength.
This is so thinking-outside-the-box! I'm amazed with that technology. Thanks for sharing it here. If this takes of (it probably should, but I don't know if it will), imagine people in a few years being able to write and read directly with the kind of the symbols that appear at 4:45 in the "Idea"[1] video!

[1] http://www.8pen.com/watch?v=1
"Thus, by consistently championing basic values such as reform, social improvement, free trade and individual rights, the Economist stands for values that are timeless, proven and certainly not outdated. Indeed, on many of today’s hot-button issues, the Economist’s brand of what might be called liberal libertarianism is—depending on your perspective—'politically correct' in the best or worst sense of the term. For example, it has emerged as a leading voice—critics might call it an alarmist one—in the global-warming debate. It also strongly advocates national gun control in the United States, favors abolition of capital punishment and has 'come out' in favor of gay marriage."

In other words, The Economist defies categorization by political labels used in the United States. That's one of the things I like about reading The Economist. What I first liked about The Economist, when I first started reading it in the 1980s when I lived overseas, is that it has better reporting about countries outside the English-speaking world (as I can verify for Chinese-speaking countries) than any other newsweekly in the English language. Oh, and The Economist uses a variety of English that is international, but still rooted in educated usage in the environs of its editorial offices in London, so an American reader like me can learn many interesting idioms of English from other lands, especially Britain, by reading it. The Economist is the one print magazine subscription that I will never give up as long as the publication stays in print (as it has managed to do since 1843) and it is a favorite source of good stories to submit here on Hacker News.
Awareness of Entity Issues
Money-back guarantees virtually invariably raise sales in A/B tests. I have never seen one decreases sales in a statistically significant fashion. I have never seen a guarantee meaningfully increase refund rates. (No customer of mine has refund rates worth mentioning. I will literally mail paper checks to people who bought my software five years ago and my refund rate is below ~2%.) If you have data to the contrary, I bow to the data.

As it happens, I have a product launch coming up. I will offer a money back guarantee, and I will do it in an A/B test. If I am wrong, and the guarantee statistically significantly decreases sales, I will a) have a cow and b) donate a cow to charity. If I am right, you don't have to do anything, because being consistently right at this sort of prediction makes propositional bets with authors a distinctly inferior way to increase one's income versus just being consistently right at this sort of thing.
I just signed up. If already owning a startup isn't a prerequisite, this would be a great opportunity for me to switch from my current environment and day job to focusing on building something full time.