skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"That senator, is where you are wrong." (Okay, calm down Keith Olberman.)

No, the United States is not a fraternity; I think a better metaphor is that it is the biggest baddest street gang there is. It should be no surprise that we are inclined to look after our own first.

I agree that Microsoft has no obligation other than following the rules and paying its protection money.

But America has an obligation to protect American workers ("by the people and for the people" remember?) "by putting them first during these difficult economic times".

So, they should change immigration law. And populist talk like this is often the first step towards that end.

In the end, I don't think it is meaningful to label this idea conservatism or liberalism. It is simply political pragmatism.
dearadobe.com
Arlington, VA? What makes that area particularly good?
They lost? They may have recently lost a battle, but overall have been winning the war since 1980.
Most of the immigrant workers I work with also got their education in the U.S.
you need a work space and the understanding that no one can disturb you when the door is closed or your headphones are on.
dammit OK this is the third comment. after this I'm closing the window. however that is a good strong argument.

actually, it appears to be a good strong argument. I can't say for sure. it's not totally clear to me as I don't know a damn thing about statistics and as far as I remember a median was a type of average. iirc median represents absolute middle; by average you probably mean mean average.

I really have no idea what you're saying, so I have no answer. unless you're making an argument for becoming a serial entrepreneur, since you'll probably have a startup which succeeds sooner or later, if you start young enough. that must be what you're saying, five fails in a row won't matter if number six is a win, and on average, it probably will be.

that's easy to shoot down, though. first of all you might need a lot more than six to beat the averages. second and more importantly: this post was a response to a specific person and that specific person is very probably still in college. I believe he has not created any startups yet. I could be wrong but I am very confident in this particular hunch. his next startup will very probably be his first, so the chance that it will fail remains very very high, since the averages are currently against him.

So no, I don't think that is my mistake at all. I think the mistake would be on the part of anybody attempting to over-generalize, from my specific answer to a specific person, to learn broader lessons for the startup and aspiring-startup communities. but I didn't post this here. that might have been a mistake, but it wasn't mine.

the specific person I'm responding to, OK - he can say "but my other startup might succeed." he'd have me there, maybe. but my reasons for believing his startup will fail, I think it's fair to assume that means his next startup, which will be his first, and could be his only. so yeah, my logic holds.

boo yah.

I appreciate having to work for that, though.
sickens me how unloved Fireworks is.
How to be a d-bag.
I had a Turbo button on my first computer. What was it supposed to do? I think I always pressed it because, hey, faster is better than slower.
Arlington, VA?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444217

Arlington, MA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington,_Massachusetts
I mixed up cool-to-hackers with cool-to-general-public.
isn't this why twitter is useful?
In 10 years "they" will still be saying learn C because C is nothing but a glorified assembly language with some syntactic sugar. C shows you how your computer works.

It's possible to be a solid C programmer (ie clear understanding of pointers, stack vs. heap, etc) while still not having the depth of knowledge one gets from understanding at least some assembly. When I first learned about the concept of stack overflows (ie as explained in Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit: http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html) my understanding of C really expanded, mostly through the added insight provided by thinking about C in the context of assembly.
It's Semantic (openness == poetic harmony)
high paying start up founder jobs?

snicker
sigh
sob
yeah agreed. People forget about the 'too many choices' problem. You can do anything with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and for most not many people math exercises is not the 1st thing that comes to mind. Not to mention there was that wsj article that links procrastination with abstract tasks...

With Brain Age everything is already done for you and it adds lots of pictures and audio feedback which makes it more fun and interesting as well as being an impartial referee for multiplayer matches
As I wrote on Twitter: People should stop obsessing about how to become famous on Twitter, and start focusing on being worth following instead.
Maybe it does good things, but the interface is awful.
I love that Tibet is one of the most remote regions...looks like even more so than the middle of the Sahara.
also, a nokia phone directly (with SIM card) connected to one's computer can give you a sms gateway with a regular phone number (short codes cost on the order of a few thousand US dollars a year)

frontline sms can help a lot, too.
Look very nice. I don’t live in Chicago so its hard for me to come up with an address besides the one you have on the page as sample. I should be able to type a zip code only, an official name or a city name to get information as well. I think that information isolate enough an area for you to perform a meaningful search.
Well I just played around with it, but here's my feedback as someone outside of chicago:

1) You need a simple front page, "Live outside Chicago? Signup here to be notified when we add more regions!"

2) The functionality and mapping looks real good, but is really something users are looking for when looking up representatives? It seems to sort of clog and confuse the UI being there on the right. I'd probably move them below the fold or at the bottom of the page and instead put anchor links or further info links on the right.

3) RSS - awesome. Email alerts - awesome. Perhaps add the email alert form on the page itself instead of require an additional page view.

4) Need a more clear link to the front page, the logo at the top I'm more apt to click on is the one for Windy Citizen rather than RepSheet.

Overall a nice clean app that I'll use once you expand to cover my geo area.
It would be hot if anything new was happening with it, saying that the video gives away enough of the concept that there is nothing stopping someone from implementing it themselves. I personally think the dude should go open source with it but I also understand the pain of releasing your child into the wild before you think it's ready!
Best and worst Macs of all time
We'd flee if there were anywhere to flee to. The charges are ridiculous, but all the carriers just tout all-you-can-text plans for $10/mo and people buy those.
In all fairness most any video game requires more mental effort than TV due to their interactive nature. These "brain training" games are pretty good for what they do - filling the niche also occupied by scrambles, sudoku, and crossword puzzles.
This needs to be integrated with EveryBlock like yesterday. Have you talked with Adrian recently?

Also, this would be helpful not just for electeds, but for candidates - if I was in the IL-5 district, I would like to see information for all the people running all in one place.

[EDIT] More feedback from a campaign manager of one of the IL-5 campaigns and a clerk at the Seventh Circuit, who presumably know what they're talking about:

A step up from Civic Footprint

Links to ISBE and FEC disclosure

It needs to do intersections

It would also be nice, given that neighborhoods are a little ill-defined, if it gave you an easy way to click over to an adjacent neighborhood. If you type Lakeview, you get Tom Tunney's ward here. If you live next to Lakeview High, however, you're in what they define as Ravenswood, and you're Gene Schulter's ward

[EDIT TWO]

RepSheet lets you...
• look up your elected representatives...
• see the political zones you live in...
• and track news about your reps.
political zones?

Needs county board badly
In Defence of Penmanship
I imagine it takes a toll. It's easy to say "Don't listen to them, they don't get it." It's harder to actually ignore constant hate mail.
1) For notification of expansion...could we use a facebook group? We've got a twitter account at http://twitter.com/repsheet

Will respond to rest of your (awesome) points in a second. The Chicago Sun-Times is tweeting...!
If you really want to push the envelope all the time AND you can't deal with mild email-based criticism then yes, you should shut down.
History of the Playboy centerfold
Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please Turn Out the Lights?
yeah I went with my Android phone - and the barcode app the compares prices; there was positively no deals with any margin higher than 10% (tax money) vs even other local retailers.
Careful! I thought so too, but MBA's get pissed when you send things they can't edit, because then they have to use email to submit comments back to you.

PDFs are a really valuable tool when you don't want people to modify your document, and you have the political capital to refuse changes.
My crystal press release ball says, "March 1, 2009--Thanks to all loyal fans, we're back! And we're telling all our haters to fuck off! [...]"
Ideas for De-Bullshitting Education
I don't get it. Isn't this exactly what every operating system already does to feed random numbers to userland? Is this just a reinvention of entropy pools? I'm pretty sure this is why the OS provides both a blocking and a non-blocking interface to getting random numbers.

Also, consider that if it's taking a long time to compute random numbers, that might be because you're doing it insecurely.
One of the interesting things about php is that it does NOT lack support for many of the cool paradigms and libraries it just has a very ugly way of showing it.

Continuations really aren't that hard and are represented by a very simple class. As far as tail call elimination goes right now I am ignoring it (I know that means it is not technically r5) SAYING THAT I have an idea for reformatting such cases into an iterative form (sort of likes rubys redo) but it's on the pile labeled optimization.
Bucking the economic tide, wireless app dev is expected to increase
Assuming the comment claiming to be from David Pogue is actually from Pogue, this whole blog post seems to be 100% speculation.
Way to ignore the slippery slope. Microsoft isn't a public works program. Also, all the Stratocasters should be manufactured in Mexico. And hey, why shouldn't our garments by manufactured in the Marianas Islands by women living in caged compounds?
Is Obama's handheld a BlackBerry or something else?
1 Billion birds die because of windows each year; clever ultraviolet decals could fix that
Interesting - my approach is to have the entire thing written in php so there is no incurred "cost" of having to install anything or compile from one framework to another.
PowerShell ABC's - W is for Widening
The 5 Ugliest Eco-Cars: Because Green Isn't Always Pretty
no, just fire the pointy-hairs. if somebody is uploading word docs to a wiki then they're not qualified to work with you. don't waste your time.
Silicon Valley’s Fork in the Road
And it provides the content too. So are you more likely to print out math questions and do them daily to stay sharp, or to play the game?

I always dislike the 'oh this isn't that great because I could do it myself' argument. Brain age makes it easy and fun.
Well, I find the majority of new cars to have dull and boring designs dictated by the wind tunnels.
You're advocating a $100k+ teleconference room to people who work from home?

The tech is awesome, and I've used HP Halo rooms, but they really aren't meant for home deployment. There's just too much physical setup needed (aligning cameras, tvs, etc) that I doubt it'll ever work for that purpose.
Open Source Security Apps with Commercial Support
I work from home and it's awesome. It fucks with your sleep schedule but other than that it's great. I do go into the client office a lot more than I thought I would, though. And when I say working from home I mean working from cafes. Working from home in the literal sense sometimes gets annoying because my neighbors have noisy kids. I've learned how to say "Grandma, look at me!" in Spanish. And about a thousand ways to say "shut up" or "don't do that" in Spanish as well.

The kids make me wish I had a flamethrower, but so do people who talk in the office, and the kids are at least cuter than the office people. Except some of the chicks. I sure hope they don't read that. Anyway, working from home is basically awesome, but yeah, you do need human contact, and context for conversation.
You make a good point. I didn't say conclusively that it's the colleges' fault, but it's worth looking into nonetheless.

The way I see it it's not really a lack of education but rather the mentality that hard work isn't worth squat and people will get the world handed to them on a silver platter for just Being Awesome(tm). It's a mentality that many kids in my generation grew up with, what with gold stars and the constant news of Wall Street investors striking gold by making a few lucky bets.

More American talent can be exposed if we can rid ourselves of this false sense of entitlement and convince people that if they want to get rich (or get a decently high paying job) they need to get their ass in gear and start working and learning.
One feature we thought up was (partially) refunding tuition fees for those students who create content to help fellow students (or those a class/chapter/unit behind them).

That's a very interesting idea. I've been looking for learning environments that encourage learners to be collaborative rather than cut-throat competitive.
Sleeper CES hit: Emo's great-sounding "invisible loudspeakers" for TVs and laptops
Single cell 'can store memories'
Grand Central isn't going anywhere...everyone saw Google pruning their offerings now they are expecting full scale cuts.

Relax people Google still makes money, lots of it. They are just being a responsible company looking out for their future.
> where hardly any immigrants live

Applies in Germany, too.
Candidates - jots it down

Everyblock - What are you envisioning? One of the things that people like about RepSheet in testing so far is how simple it is. It's like a single-serving site. Everyblock doesn't really do anything with elected officials. It's a different slice at local. They show you what's been published near you, we're showing you the politics are your address...

During research, we found lots of political lookup tools. We noticed a few things:

1. They gave you A LOT of data. More data than the average joe could digest or ever care about. I'm bored to tears by most local political stories I read...and I've written and edited a few of them as a reporter. We want to make it super easy to get into your local politics without overwhleming the user.

2. They had names that situate them as targeting "people who really really care about local politics" RepSheet alludes to the fact that politicos are all crooks. It's kind of silly, but it shows that we're not aiming for political zealots, non-profits and academics as our audience. We want to make something for the average joe who wants to see who's representing him and then suck on an RSS feed or daily e-mail with updates of their activities.

3. Their lookup tools were 5-6 step processes that require you to input your address, state, zip...all separately.

So we want this to be dead simple. Fast and only give you the information you really want. I think there's a sweet spot somewhere between what we're offering now and what other lookup tools have.
From the article:

>Users aren't stupid.

So don't act like they are. A already setup Linux machine is in fact more usable than a random Windows machine.

I started using Linux when I was 13 and I hardly knew anything about computers except playing games and using a browser. I was impressed by the functionality and elegance of the KDE desktop that the then popular Knoppix CD provided. There were a lot of cool stuff you could do without much hassle (except playing games) more accessibly than Windows and it got me hooked. Also there weren't viruses and anti-virus software so I felt I could safely mess around and install stuff. My younger sister (she was in the first grade) also enjoyed drawing on the computer and my mom didn't mind using Mozilla to use the Web.

Even a 5-10 years ago Linux was very usable and stable. Hardware support was I guess spottier but if someone gave you a configured system you would enjoy it. Thats why I think vendors should concentrate on improving and polishing existing releases, proving support for many applications. It would be very good if RedHat started supporting desktop machines for the retail market, maybe using resellers to protect the RedHat brand. I wish CentOS had the same huge Desktop community like Ubuntu does. Regular users don't have to endure the growing pains of Linux.

Also I hope appliances running on a virtual machine like Xen would spread. Virtualisation is the true path to reliability and IBM for example figured that out back in the seventies. The desktop Linux should not try to emulate windows machines but turn-key IBM ones. We have the processing power, the memory and the storage to do it so why not?
Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?
One of my favorite movies is the 2004 film Primer which was written, directed, scored, and stars a mathematician and software engineer. Aside from the obvious (gems like Wargames, King of Kong- stinkers like the Matrixes and Hackers) what other (good) tech films are there?
The Mega Containers Invade
"Money matters to the degree that what you want/need can be obtained by the exchange of money."

Well said. It depends on what somebody's basic necessities are. For me, necessities includes books and music and the occasional trip to the city and a good meal. I could live on less, but I'd be miserable if I didn't get to enjoy those things frequently. If I had to use a worse computer than the one I have, I'd be less happy. So for me, making money is a means to more effortlessly obtaining the things that I want. I think that's healthy so long as the things that I want have value.
Neat idea; unfortunate name.
TripIt Launches An API. Travel Sites, Please Use It
FeedBurner: The 411 on the 502
Ioke is not a Lisp
Thanks for this input.

Added the "Live outside Chicago?" link to the footer. But don't have time right now to setup a form. ;( If we get 50 emails today I'll setup the form.

With the sub form, bit of js is a nice idea, also will do.

As far as the maps, it's a bit of eye candy, generally people like maps. It's just cool to see and leads the eye down the page. Not sure how informational it is right now, but might be in the future.

Not sure about the front page nav link issue. I think it's pretty simple but only way to really know is to get feedback and observe people using it. I'm sure it will undergo some changes soon.
Well, I appreciate it. I was 9 years old and had no idea.
I lurched to a halt at this:

# Would you rather type this?
oldest({"Vincent": 25, "Lincoln": 200})

# Or this?
(let ((ages (make-hash-table :test 'equal)))
(setf (gethash "Vincent" ages) 25)
(setf (gethash "Lincoln" ages) 200)
(oldest age))

No one who understood CL would ever write the latter. They would write:

'((Vincent . 25) (Lincoln . 200))

... which, yes, I would rather type.

It would be surprising if during the 50-year evolution of a language known for code ≈ data, people hadn't thought of a notation for literal key-value pairs.
(Off topic :)) Do you find you're truly productive working so many hours a day? (I assume it's coding work?)
Zip code only works. So does town only. We've ammended the js prompt on the start page to reflect this.
How big does a niche have to be, to be worthwhile?
My thinking was like this: Microlocal + Geodjango = perfect for Everyblock. I thought it's a great fit since they don't do it now, but this would be a great complement.

(Personally, I really don't think people are going to go to 18 different places for crime info (EveryBlock), politics (RepSheet), delivery (GrubHub), and so on. Someone's going to integrate it all and create a billion dollar business. Note that all three of those are here in Chicago. Hint, hint.)

Well, if it's going to be an RSS feed, let me choose 1) my language (I get a lot of Spanish for my 'hood) and 2) my sources - I want the Reader, S-T, and Trib only, for example. I got the Biloxi Sun-Herald in the list for my address.

Yeah, I used to use vote-smart, which forced me to find my zip+4, which was just completely a huge PITA. But the intersections and neighborhoods is a good idea.
There is a special place in my heart for the SE/30. It packed the power of the Mac IIx (68030 @ 16MHz) into the original Mac form factor. I used one for nine full years, not counting the time it spent as an SE. Still ran Photoshop and Netscape when I retired it. No other machine has ever treated me that well or been useful for as long -- most don't make it half that far.

I'm happy the 9600 made it into the list though -- that was a screamer.
May I suggest geolocation, so that they don't even need to enter their address. With a simple "Wrong Address?" link in case the geolocation fails.
Step One: Define "conservatism".

No, seriously, stop for a moment and define it to yourself. I want you to come up with a serious definition, too, not "those assholes who hate darkies" or something like that. Come up with what they stand for, what they stand against, a serious definition of some kind.

Step Two: Determine if we've actually had a conservative government for any period of time since 1980 that have actually acted on the definition of conservatism.

I've posted this as a meta-message because you can get different answers depending on what perfectly legitimate definition of conservatism you adopt.

If you define it solely in terms of reactionary defense of the status quo, conservatism is politically dead, since the status quo has been, is, and will continue to never apply in our world. It moves too fast for that.

If you define it as isomorphic to the Republican party, then it has been in charge and is discredited... but I don't find this a very good definition, as we already have a perfectly good word for "Republican".

If you define it as involving cutting taxes, it has had some success, although only some.

If you define it in terms of libertarianism, i.e., "smaller government", then it has not been in charge since 1980. We've actually not tried "smaller government" in a long time. It's hard to even identify a year since 1980 where it was winning the war, let alone claim it has been winning since then.

"Conservative" and "liberal" are really such ill-defined constructs that using them seriously without defining them almost always indicates weak thinking. For example (and I'm not saying mattmaroon said this, it's just an example) claiming that "conservatives have been in charge since 1980, conservatives stand for small government, conservatives have been a failure therefore small government is a failure" is very bad logic because the meaning of "conservative" keeps shifting throughout the argument.

Social conservatism has had a much better run than fiscal conservatism or small government, which has had almost no traction since the New Deal or even earlier. A couple of years of exception, but even those years it was mostly lip service followed by expanded government.
> ... rock bottom on Alioth Shootout ... Two years later ...

Are they still rock bottom?