skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems totally off topic for YC.

But, strangely enough, a handful of friends and I discovered this anatomical feature when we were kids...maybe seven or eight years old...and developed it to a pretty predictable art form. We called it "skeet". Which, in modern/adult terminology means something altogether different (though also involving bodily fluids). I haven't done it, or tried it, in over 20 years. So the ability seems to be completely atrophied, but I remember what it felt like now that I'm thinking about it. I reckon I could make it happen again with a bit of practice.

And, so I don't actually know how to tell you to do it at will, but I know it can be done, because I've done it, and seen a few other kids do it. Some were better than others (much longer range, and dramatically better accuracy), but I don't know if that was a factor of more practice or if some people are built significantly different.

Anyway, if a bunch of seven or eight year olds can figure out how to do it without guidance, I'm sure a grownup with a hackers mindset can handle it.
The article mentions automatic transmission too, and that the bike would have to 'read the mind of the rider' to know when he's going to sprint, wouldn't it be possible to measure the downforce on the pedal to indicate the difference between the riders 'desired speed' and the current speed ?
You could also try a collision library like OPCODE. I wonder whether there are already Lua bindings out there?

Chipmunk physics is another open source project with simple collision acceleration.
Technology & The Decision Landscape
China relies on its ability to sell cheap goods to the world.

Problem : the more people buy Chinese goods, the higher the Yuan is supposed to get. Therefore, they would lose their initial competitive advantage, because a higher Yuan would mean more expensive Chinese goods. It's the classic path for any prospering country, at some point it has to become a "normal" rich country, adapting to a lower growth.

Solution : China buys a lot of US debt so it can artificially deflates its own currency. Because they sell a lot of Yuans, their currency is deflated = chinese good cheaper to the world = strong demand = especially from the US because of the stronger $, Americans can buy more Chinese goods.

You see it's a complex situation, and we can even argue it's a kind of win-win situation because Americans can afford more goods as well. But this strategy is unsustainable in the long run and could damage both countries if the worst case scenario happened.

Basically, China has been holding the ball underwater with the consent of the Bush administration, because of the susmentioned "win-win" deal. A lot of economists have been very critical of the former administration because such large amounts of money could put America at risk. Now that the crisis has stroke, this threat is more pertinent than ever.

Anyway, the Chinese governement has absolutly NO lesson to give to the Americans in this case, it was entirely their initiative and no one forced them to buy US debt, it was their own strategy, and it didn't come with any sort of guaranty that the $ would remain strong. The American people could blame the Bush administration for letting this situation happen tho, but everybody enjoyed it trough an increase in buying power.
What's the temperature/pressure of the water?

:)
My business involves education and development. The nice thing about game changing technologies and fast growing industries is that you can have your cake and eat too.
All of this news of Apple becoming the next evil corporation really pushes me away from buying a Macbook for college in the fall. However, it makes a Product (red) Dell with Ubuntu look even better...
Acts_as_conference 2009 talks are online
UC Berkeley's eighteen hour hackathon
> It's far less complex than you might think. If China did not buy US debt or other debt then there currency would inflate which would harm their economy in the short term.

Why? If they create stuff, and don't print any money, then shouldn't their currency deflate? For each bit of currency, there is more wealth.
Colonel: US Army has working electropulse grenades
Neon Genesis Evangelion for good measure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html
The simple answer is, they don't have a choice.

Some number of dollars flow into their country every year. Some number of dollars flow out. The difference effectively ends up in the hands of the government. They have to do something with it... because if they do nothing with it, they are effectively exchanging Chinese goods for nothing more than cheaply printed pieces of paper.

They government can't spend US dollars inside of China. The only thing they could do is buy American exports, and American assets.

If China were somehow to launch a stimulus plan that was fueled by American production, than that would have the effect you are suggesting. They could have Americans come over and build their roads and schools for them, with American materials. They would improve their infrastructure and we would get our money back. But this is impractical, and China gets the long-term benefits, not us. In fact, we get screwed in the long-term, because the return of all those dollars to America would cause inflation.
The AAA credit rating is in terms of US dollars. It would make no sense for the Fed to not have an AAA credit rating.
Ah, I see, you're right. Actually taking the time to read more of the referred to page on quirksmode.org does make the intent of the tag clearer. The quote taken out of context in the article does make the tag sound like rather ridiculous though.

More from quirksmode.org:

I use it a lot in the great compatibility tables. These tables are very large and very tight, and I wish to avoid horizontal scrollbars, if possible. These scrollbars are mainly caused by the length of method or attribute names, for instance getElementsByTagName(). Therefore I do:

<div class="name">getElements<wbr>ByTagName()</div>

I give the browser the option of adding a line break. This won't be necessary on very large resolutions, when the table has plenty of space. On smaller resolutions, however, such strategically placed line breaks keep the table from growing larger than the window, and thus causing horizontal scrollbars.

I still won't be using it. :)
It sounds like you have only ever come across poor business people. It's pretty easy though, they are about as common as poor coders and designers.
Read Keynes.
I personally consider most of what Krugman writes to be utterly non-sensical. Unfortunately the policies of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations agree with Krugman's Keynesian view.

This article has been rebutted for the past 10 years by people a lot smarter than me. My favorite rebuttal is David Gordon's 1999 article on Mises.org:
http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=53

Other notable rebuttals:

* http://mises.org/story/105 - by Gene Epstein, the original author that Krugman references in Hangover Theory's first sentence

* http://mises.org/story/103

* http://mises.org/story/630
I just got a new car a few days ago... I filled out a finance form online, made a call the next morning. Did some negotiation after I got there

Where was "there"? Do you generally do some negotiation after you get "there" when you buy a book on Amazon.com?

drove off the lot with the new car

Why was it not delivered to your home or office, like Amazon.com purchases are?
Full disclosure: I was a judge. Trevor Blackwell (from yc/anybots) was too.
This analysis has two major problems. The first is that housing ads are not a good proxy for total population using Craigslist; different cities tend to have different "velocities of housing" (how many times people move per year). He should have divided housing ads by some other housing supply metric and multiplied by population.

The second is that Craigslist is not the only channel for prostitution. There are high-end channels such as those used by Eliot Spitzer which may be more common in affluent cities, any "brothel"-type establishments that exist, and of course women on the street hollering at cars (the ability to do this may be severely hampered in colder climates).
I don't know if this helps you or not; but I know 4 MSFT employees and 3 of them are pretty sure they are going to retire from there. All three I know from my days consulting. The fourth I met while he was at Microsoft, and he gets to work on interesting things; I just don't know him well enough to ask him if he plans on being there for awhile.

MSFT does have interesting projects going on as well. The R&D wing has its fingers in some pretty cool stuff like Surface and Photosynth.
Oh, that's really useful. I had my own mental approximation, but it was much mushier than this, and this is pretty darn accurate.

Much easier than multiplying by 5/9ths. Or 9/5ths. Whatver.
For those curious about mescaline (mentioned in the article) and how it supposedly removes mental filters to allow you to see the world "as it is", I recommend Aldus Huxley's Doors of Perception.

http://mescaline.com/huxley.htm
To address your #2, the fact that having a deep relationship is difficult is why such relationships are valuable and precious.
Note that this is a pretty old project really...

It is at least a second generation db project by the same author. It's a continuation of QDBM by the same author. I think QDBM has been around since the year 2000. Tokyo cabinet has been around since 2006.

At this stage it is getting quite a lot of testing, and has been around for years.

As someone bitten by lots of BDB bugs I think tokyo cabinet rates fairly highly in comparison.
Look, don't buy a computer based on what you think of the company. If you're serious about getting stuff done with your computer, get the best damn computer you can, regardless of company reputation, regardless of what other people think about it.

If you think that you can live with Ubuntu, with all its problems, then get Ubuntu - but get it because it's cheaper, because it's more tinkerable. Don't get it because of Apple's dickery. Of course Apple is a dick. They insist on having complete control over your user experience. As an Apple user, I will attest that I love it. Some people get a kick out of supermodding their computer. My cofounder loves Linux for that very reason. I like Apple because they do everything for me without thinking.

I think this case is over-the-top, but I don't necessarily disagree with Apple's reasoning. If I made a product that had a built-in application system designed to my specifications, I'm not sure if I wouldn't be pissed off at the people who wanted to get around that either. Jail time seems a bit over-the-top, but if it's in Apple's contract that by buying their product you agree not to mess with it, and I'm fairly certain that's been the deal since the iPhone came out, then you might not like that, but if you don't like it, you don't buy the thing with intent to break the law. You get a different phone, one that lets you modify and tinker with things. If you get caught, then you'd better have known that there was a chance of it happening from day one. It's risktaking: always has been, always will be.

People get into a bunch of arguments about evil and not-evil. It's not about evil. It's about intent. Apple's intent has always been to control every aspect of their product. They insist on controlling hardware - so you can't get OS X on another company's computer. They insist on controlling software - so you can't free up your iPhone. Some people disagree with that, but it's their prerogative as a company, and it's let Apple consistently create the best products in their respective markets with little debate. If that's evil, then I guess I'm evil, because I think they have the right and I wish more companies were that restrictive.

So think about that when you get your computer. Don't worry about all this bullshit arguing either way. Think about the computer itself.
theman: a microframework for running and monitoring scheduled workers
iReddit: The official Reddit iPhone app arrives
who is Jeff Atwood and who is he to decide what is and isn't an accomplishment?
That article was really well-rounded.

I think over the next decade we're in for a huge shortage of analysts and statisticians in almost all fields of life. Availability of data is ever increasing. The benefits from using it more effectively than competitors are immense. In almost all of the startup businesses in our portfolio (venture capital firm), we've now hired number-crunching guys who do nothing but metrics and we're seeing the results.
Do I smell a Hacker News-based dating site around the corner?*

*I really, really hope not.
> Considering the horrors of both...

The horrors of both?

The Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Germany, etc., are all horror-ible places to live?
tried zendesk? it's awesome.
Thanks, that answered my question on Krugman's perspective on Roosevelt's policies.

The current stimulus seems to be inline with Krugman's recommendation. I'm more on the "Austrian" side but it will be an interesting experiment to see if the Keynesian approach can be effective on such a wide scale.
As much as I think Jeff Atwood is a clueless writer, he's got a point. IMVU is childish (not to mention really, really ancient), and it provides essentially nothing. "Providing value" to me means "make something that other people can use to improve themselves" - IMVU isn't doing that. At best, it's entertainment, and low-brow entertainment at that.
I'm sure you took my meaning.

It doesn't sound like you're correct though. At least S & P suggested that the U.S. might lose it's AAA rating. (Note also the article is from 2006, while we were still in the boom.)

http://www.savings-bond-advisor.com/us-credit-rating-could-d...
"But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created."

"truly amazing" - a little bit of hyperbole perhaps?
Oh boy, I can't wait for the Golden Era of Entrepreneurship to arrive!!!
Every doctor I have been to in Austria has been superior to every doctor I have been to in the USA, with the exception of my ENT surgeon, who was a middle eastern immigrant to the US. (He was a top doctor in his field, taught at JHU, invented stuff, etc.)

The doctors in Austria take more time with you, they listen to you better, they come up with more novel solutions, and they seem to know more about other medical fields.

And here's why this is true:

a) free medical education. Yes, FREE. That means people who want to be doctors, can; the only requirement is that they can hold their own academically. That also means that when they complete their education, they are not saddled under $300k+ of debt, and thus are not having to hustle and scrimp for money.

b) a culture of service. Yes, really. Austria has a huge number of social workers -- nice ones, too -- and unlike in the US, there's a very solid mixture of men vs women. People can actually earn a decent living (thanks to socialism) helping other people.

c) a very different situation with insurance (everybody has it) and lawsuits (uncommon).

All of this combines to having a huge number of women doctors, and a huge number of doctors who are in it for passion and not for money, and doctors who are not afraid to just give you an atypical solution or who have to worry all the time whether the patient's insurance will pay for it.

And amazingly, it's cheaper than in the US sometimes, even if you pay out of pocket. I saw a top-rated dentist, got a 360 degree x-ray, he himself poked around in my mouth and proscribed an antibiotic -- and with the exchange rate, that whole thing cost me $180 US. Ha!

It's simply awesome.
Saying that Roosevelt tried to "stimulate the economy with government investment near the end" of the Depression is a little misleading.

So is Krugman's statement about Hayek arguing, "in the depths of the Depression", against credit expansion.

This makes it sound like we were in the middle of the depression -- without any government intervention yet -- and suddenly the State decides to expanding credit. This is far from the truth. By the middle of the depression, say 1936, the government had already been intervening and expanding credit for seven years. Though I'm sure Hayek and Mises spoke out against such intervention on day one, anyone with half a brain would speak out against a policy that hadn't been working for seven years.

Hoover, like Bush, implemented massive government interventions. Both Hoover and Bush somehow get labeled as Economic "do nothings", but check Hoover's record: after the crash in 1929 he implemented massive trade tariffs (Smoot-Hawely), signed a "Home Loan" act to encourage more houses and protect against foreclosure (sound familiar?), raised income tax, raised corporate taxes, signed the "Emergency Relief and Construction Act" to fund massive infrastructure projects (like the Hoover Dam), etc...

Then, after Hoover's interventions, FDR came along and continued intervening with even larger, New Deal, programs.

Krugman's point of view does seem to be that FDR's New Deal started too late, but he, and other Keynesians, never explain why Hoover's 3+ years of interventions just made things worse. I'm with the Austrians on this one - If the State stayed out of the economy, these depressions and down-turns would fix themselves MUCH quicker.
Astronauts test sex in space - but did the earth move?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleeking
How Google Decides to Pull the Plug
The AAA credit rating is in terms of US dollars.

Sometimes. Sometimes not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation_fallacy
1. Illegal in common use refers to a felony or at least an infraction. Breaking terms of a contract is none of that, therefore "but if it's in Apple's contract that by buying their product you agree not to mess with it ... you don't buy the thing with intent to break the law" is an incorrect frame to describe what happes. The correct frame if "violating the terms of a contract".

2. Breaking the terms of contract does not always lead to problems and is not always wrong - some contracts are unenforcable because they contradict a law, and some are plain morally wrong. Just because something is written down and signed by a person does not make it the law and the truth.

3. Just because someone is pissed does not mean other people lose their rights.
Handy quick directory changes for bash
I live in Atlanta and we have tons of Southern Baptists, yet we score pretty highly on the list. I'd actually argue that religious pressure may push more people towards this type of activity. eg. Ted Haggard
Exactly. People will work harder to do something that improves the world as well as making money. If we were just trying to make money, we probably wouldn't have started YC, for example. We hope to make money, but that alone wouldn't have provided sufficient activation energy.
Similar to what happened to the creator of the Nike swoosh: a logo or "brand" going from obscurity to icon status with not much realized ROI on the designer's side.

Carolyn received $35 dollars for designing the Nike logo in 1971.

http://www.vainnotion.com/blog/2006/04/that-apple-logo-creat...

Edit: info about the designer of the Nike "Swoosh" logo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Davidson
$1.99? No thanks.
Do We Need a New Internet?
What does this post mean?
Has Apple explicitly asked to make jailbreaking an iPhone a criminal offense?
Also, it assumes that usage of each category on craigslist increases at the same rate. Since housing and erotic services have strict separations between them on the site, it seems as if the network effects would be relatively (but definitely not completely) isolated to individual categories. Secondly, network effects increase the utility of the site logistically, so the ratios between different categories at a given point in time aren't meaningfully comparable.
the player that is not a star but helps his team wins championships is James Posey. Every team needs a guy that does the dirt work and nobody is more effective at doing that right now than Posey. Coming off of the bench he played a huge part in both Miami Heat and Celtics championships. He plays great defense and is also an offensive threat from the outside.
Yeah, I also felt that the poster was just bragging on and on like a boring talk at a bar counter... oh wait, it's my post!

Now I remember. It was within a long discussion with a guy who kept complaining nobody had respected his accomplishment and wanted to hire him. I wanted to tell him that he had to have feedback loop to align his and others' interest. (And to be honest, I was already irritated to the guy at this point.) That was the context.

I don't deny that there are important problems worth to tackle even nobody seems to care about them. But if you do so, you won't complain about nobody caring, will you?
Ok, to the first point, how do you determine the population of a city on craigslist? For example metro Atlanta has around 5 million people I think, while the actual city is ~600k. And some locations split out, such as LA and Orange County. I think the number of posts is both a good determination of population and usage rates. I'll agree though that it's not perfect, but I'm not sure there's an easy way to determine a "housing metric" for a craigslist city. It's hard to know the size of the surrounding area that uses the service.

As to the second point, the channels may differ, but a city that's affluent and embraces technology should see an proportionate increase on both categories, housing and erotic services. And LA has a great climate for "hollering at cars", while Boston should probably have the higher rate due to weather.

I'm certainly not going to argue that this analysis is anywhere near perfect, but I think you'd agree that Boston at 4% and LA at 24% is probably not just a matter of people moving more frequently.
They've got an ad supported free version coming as well. The current version will not display ads.
As I said: I won't argue that Apple's move is pretty extreme. I'm not going to get mad at Apple for it, because I understand their reasoning, but I won't support them on it, either.

Either way, I wouldn't avoid their products because of that reasoning alone.
Yes, autojump is frequency based. That is not what I was responding to.
It's difficult everywhere for different reasons. If you're in a city, the 'quality' folks aren't generally using it and you'll waste a lot of time, money and silly dates to get anywhere. Especially now. Six years ago, you could make great friends in Boston on craigslist, for instance. Now? Enjoy that healthy dose of spam.

Out west, where it's not as populated or where it's long distances to find new folks, you can successfully find weird people or who have diverse (so there, considered strange) interests, but you're simply going to still waste a lot of time.
This is absolutely true, however I did preface it with "The best I could come up with was the Housing category"

I'm completely open to a better metric. But as I said in the reply above, it's not easy to determine just how many people in an area use craigslist.

That being said, I'm not sure the two categories have such a hard seperation between the users. People on craigslist who use it for finding prostitutes probably also use it to find housing and vice versa.
very cool...what does it do exactly?
Even better: http://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/tree/master
The twitter exchange reads like a giant Tech Crunch comment. IMVU is making over $1 million per month [1].

While I wouldn't ever use IMVU, hundreds of thousands of other people do. How many people have created something where they can say that (even if Jeff can with Stackoverflow)? Though I am surprised that they're not profitable.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2008/06/24/fresh-look-at-imvu-mini-mmo-wit...