skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it's a stereotype and it definitely doesn't apply to everyone but I've never seen so much confusion as on american roads. I'm from Italy and we're routinely made fun of for the mess that is our traffic, the reality though is that in Italy it is way more predictable and correct, blinkers are always used for example, than in SF where I've lived for the past 5 years. Italy has very few miles of bicycle lanes and yet most people don't use an helmet.

As I ride around town on a bike, there are all sorts of people that either just don't look when crossing, or look at the sky when moving sideways on a lane, or simply cross lanes reserved for bikes with the idea that pedestrians always have precedence.

Many cyclists are also guilty of the same types of sins by stopping in the middle of the street without so much as moving on the side or they are simply not capable of riding a bike in a city or they just perform U turns without looking at oncoming traffic. A friend of mine unfortunately died on a bike here in SF, was it because she wasn't wearing an helmet? Nope, it was because she turned left without looking and a food truck ran over her. She was the first and only fatality for bike accident last year.

When I passed my Driving License test here in SF the examiner told me that it's usually the americans that gave her the most troubles while europeans tended to always pass at the first try.

So maybe it's a stereotype but it seems to me that the american government went out of their way to try to protect pedestrians and defend cyclists with the result that they now walk around without their brain sparing the necessary few cycles to keep themselves safe on the street.

EDIT:
A funny thing that I've seen happening only here are cars that go through half of a cross-road and when they see you coming they just stop in the middle occupying the whole lane and forcing you to try to stop in a short space. If they went through instead of stopping there would have been no issues. This happens to me so often that I can't help laughing at it every time I see it.
"American" is not a race. If anything it's the opposite.
I have a feeling that these apps are going to be a primary constituent of FB's MySpace moment that I think is going to come eventually.
If you actually read O'Neill's research (from his book or Heppenheimer's CIS), you'll find that the material for the orbital structures is mined from the moon, and directed to orbit via a magnet linear induction motor "mass launcher" to L4 and L5 libration points at which the space colonies are constructed. Little matter other than colonists and biological source specimens are lifted from Earth. Primary industry was seen as the construction of orbital solar power stations (in geosynchronous orbit), beaming energy to Earth in the form of microwaves.

The goal isn't deep space exploration, but orbital habitation structures.
Also: "LSA was patented in 1988 (US Patent 4,839,853) by Scott Deerwester, Susan Dumais, George Furnas, Richard Harshman, Thomas Landauer, Karen Lochbaum and Lynn Streeter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
I don't my email is orionblastar@gmail.com I don't think I hide it anymore. Only problem I get are from trolls not spammers. Gmail filters out spammers very well.
> Not much activity though.

Sole Flounder
You must be signed in and a member of this group to view and participate in it.

Nothing says "I don't want any activity here" quite like a polite "fuck off".
It is only "risky" if you do what the author of the article did and leave no room for error. I have used airBnB several times in foreign countries and always had a fine time (albeit with a few minor glitches). Although the same is true even for hotel arrangements, with airBnB it is even more important to plan ahead, confirm things, and stay flexible.
Traumatic brain injury is real, completely life debilitating and can happen at very slow speeds. Many parts of your brain are protected only by soft tissue. Brains do not grow back like a broken arm/leg. Imagine permanently losing 100 IQ points by not paying attention for the wrong five seconds. Cyclists are extremely vulnerable on streets shared by cars. Think slow moving ~<180lb two wheeled bean bags vs. 1500+lb high speed steel boxes. It's pretty irresponsible and absurd for the NYT to print articles like this. I suppose we shouldn't use seatbelts or car bumpers either based on mean effects? Helmet safety is totally cheap (basic, OK helmets are $20-30) and easy to use. Although I would certainly like to make everyone "healthy" and build a cycling utopia, the fitness argument this article makes is completely absurd. Obese, unhealthy people casually cycling for ten or fifteen minutes across a city are unlikely to receive any significantly health benefit (reach aerobic thresholds) and are the the most likely to experience falls and collisions since they are inexperienced.
Ask Guilt to borrow the internet.
Dude, these are great, ignore the haters. People understand slider toggles and, for top level, high value on/off values or mobile versions of a UI these will be fine.

Just keep polishing them and getting them cross browser. I'll be forking the project and using them.
Enlighten me, niete! With a comment history on here that shows you speaking up only when gender politics are being discussed, I'm confident you have a well thought out perspective to share that I may not have considered.
Actually, lunar mining was the O'Neill model as I understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_mining
> Folks in the US need to start demanding bike lanes from their elected officials.

North American bike lanes, as they're currently implemented, in general, are easily criticized because they don't actually buy a safer ride for cyclists. They buy the illusion of a safer ride[1].

Some of the problems:

* Bicycles going straight through an intersection are encouraged to overtake cars
that are turning right on their right side. The motor vehicle can turn into the
path of the overtaking cyclist.
* Bicycles going straight through an intersection are encouraged to stay close to
the curb, where they can be hidden from the view of drivers turning left into
their path by cars that are traveling in the same direction and slightly
ahead of them. The left-turning car then turns behind the car travelling in
the same direction as the cyclist and into the cyclist.
* Bicycle lanes widen the travel lane, encouraging drivers to travel
at higher speeds.

There are bike lanes that actually encourage safer riding habits, but they're far less common, so the overall statistics don't show decreased accident rates when bike lanes are added.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_lane#Crash_types.2C_junct...
Yes, but California is also very sue happy. Better safe than sorry is sometimes a necessary and relevant strategy.
I agree. I asked about this a while ago on Super User:

http://superuser.com/questions/235937/does-e-mail-address-ob...

The top answer links to a study done a few years ago that showed that revealing your email in plain text did result in increased spam, but I don't think the study went into how effectively that spam was handled by modern spam filters.

In my own person experience, I've had my email address on my HN profile, Twitter page, personal website, Stack Exchange profiles, etc for years without any problem. I do get the occasional rare piece of spam but I think that it's more than offset by providing a no-nonsense way for people to contact me.
As a keen cyclist (I'm building http://www.cyclinganalytics.com/), I wish we didn't have mandatory helmet laws, but there are a lot of points on both sides of the argument worth pondering.

* Making helmets mandatory makes cycling look dangerous. What other things do you wear a helmet while doing? Between this, ruining peoples' hair, not looking as chic, and the inconvenience of it, helmets discourage people from cycling.

* Although it is possible to get seriously injured on a bicycle, the research that I've seen suggests that the health benefits of cycling outweigh the risk of injury considerably (even when not wearing helmets), so, from a public health point of view, it makes sense to encourage cycling, and even cycling without wearing a helmet.

* Therefore, it seems that helmets directly save lives (in crashes, although, for my own anecdotal evidence, they haven't helped me in any of the crashes I've had), but they cost lives indirectly by discouraging people from cycling in the first place. This makes it harder to sell.

* Laws are not about making things as safe as humanly possible. It would save more lives to have people in cars wearing helmets, but we don't do that (yes, I know more people travel by car). For that matter, it's legal to drive cars that would be considered death-traps by modern safety standards. Even if helmet laws did save lives, that doesn't automatically mean they should become laws.

* The drivers in different countries have different attitudes towards cyclists. In Australia (and probably America), we have a strong driving culture, and a very "us vs. them" view of the whole thing. Earlier this year, Shane Warne (one of the most famous Australian sportsmen of the last decade) had an altercation with a cyclist on a busy Melbourne road which led him to comment on Twitter about how cyclists should pay registration and show license plates. Views like that are very common amongst the general public, and often stem from the view that "bikes are okay for a gentle Sunday ride with the family to the park, but they shouldn't be used as serious transportation devices". Compare that with the attitude of the average driver in many European countries (from what I've heard), and you might be able to make a case that we aren't ready for scrapping mandatory helmet laws, because cycling really is more dangerous.
I think most finance jobs are somewhat better than what he described-- it sounds like he's taken some crappy jobs-- but I don't doubt what he is saying. Code quality issues in finance are well-known and seem to be systemic. Hours are widely variable; there are 9-to-6 IT jobs and there are others that involve more stereotypical (read: awful) finance hours.

I think finance is a great place to work (yes, even as a full-time programmer) if you have a strategic reason for being there (VCs like financial experience, there are some interesting machine learning problems) but I would say that, in general, you're best off if you know you have the social and political skills to get the best work and, if you don't, finance is not likely to treat you well.
I can't decide which part of that site is more hideous. The actively hostile user interface or the buzzword-laden "content".
That's a very interesting point. Thanks for the article.
You sign up for what is called a "High Risk" merchant account.

Porn sites, bail bonds, check cashing locations, dating sites, weight loss centers, and dozens of other types of businesses use this category of services which has a very high tolerance of chargebacks.

The sad part is if you get enough chargebacks you can actually bake in a higher transaction cost and not have to pay per-chargeback fees like other normal merchants do.
1. Modern e-mail providers do filter out most spam, but it doesn't hurt to help lighten their load.

2. My pet theory is that the people making money out of spam are not the spammers, it is the people selling lists of email addresses. Hey, I just cut their total of email addresses by a vanishingly small fraction.

3. I lived through 1997. It wasn't pretty. Old habits die hard.

4. I consider my obfuscation to be the signature of a hacker. :-P

P.S. Your email is not visible in your information (the email entry in your account registration is not publicly visible, you have to put it in your "about" box to make it visible).
Cite for that statement please?
Tell HN: Startup school 2012 invites are out
If you applied, check this link.
http://news.ycombinator.com/susrsvp
Copyright Act explicitly states disruptive innovation should be blocked
Face what?
I had toggles like this on my site and found that a checkbox was a lot less confusing. It is just too hard to tell if state is successfully saved and if clicking things turns it on or off.

The behavior I ended up implementing is... when the box is clicked, it is immediately hidden and replaced with a loading animation while the ajax request is hitting the server saving state. When that finishes, it shows a icon-thumbs-up for a second and then the checkbox again (either checked or unchecked).
Well, either radio buttons or a single checkbox, because the point of these sliders is that you can only make a single selection: on or off, not both.
I realistically believe in this solution but also this is where our current market model would stop stare at the solution... and turn around (the price is hardly going down), imagine being the guy trying to sell the property for some company, would the company acknowledge this solution or wait it out to sell at next buyer, in summary this is where it stags probably being the right solution.
Oblique Strategies (1975): Change nothing and continue consistently
You can be sure this wasn't his idea.
Good things about Nigeria
> His answer is essentially that there's no great time to force a change like this

Maybe there's no "great" time, but there are certainly poor times to do it, and it looks very much like they chose one.

jsz0's guess seems much more plausible: they took the decision a while ago because they thought they'd be in better shape by now, but they misjudged badly.

Had they realized the state things would be in, they would have lost little by continuing to use Google maps for another year—and doing so, they could still easily achieve their long-term goals while avoiding a great deal of egg on their face (and the associated hit to their reputation as "the company that does things right").
Most Reported Genetic Associations With Intelligence Are Likely False Positives
There really are no cons. As long as it's an accredited investor and your docs are well written (focus on length of time to repay and amount of discount) Just know the moment you take even $1 from outside investors your clock starts ticking and you must deliver. At http://geekli.st our first investors were on a capped note. If you get offered uncapped... take it.
I had to break it to you, but a lot of these cons apply to 99% of all software jobs, especially promotions being based on perceptions rather than skill or talent, stressful support, and bad luck if you're hired into the wrong team.

Programming is awesome, but 99% of the software industry is a toilet. Finance at least pays for your suffering in cash you can spend rather than lottery tickets.
So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting.

Yeah, when you think about it, this whole "we only hire the top 0.5%" condescension really amounts to a basic statistical reasoning fallacy.

To construct an alternate hypothesis: the "real" threshold for ranked competence[1] at "elite" companies might, just might, be more like "the top 5%". But we can safely assume that 95% of the available talent pool in this category will be employed (and not actively seeking), compared with say 70% in the bottom, or "sub-elite" category, at any given time.[2]

So for example in a "town" of 1000 putative developers, with skill levels ranging from god-like to "good enough" to mediocre to utterly bogus and self-deluding, let's say 50 (or 5%) of these are truly "elite", and 950 are "non-elite".

Further, of the elite category, 47.5 will be employed (and not actively looking), and only 2.5 will be in the job market -- versus, out of the 950 non-elite developers, we might have 665 (or 70%) employed, versus 285 (or 30%) on the market and actively looking.

Given this over-simplified (but arguably "less wrong") hypothesis, and assuming that a given opening draws applicants whose fitness ranking is evenly distributed across the pool of in-the-market candidates, it's easy to see that for any given opening, we'll have a ratio of 2.5:285 for elite:non-elite developers -- or a paltry 0.869%(!) of the candidate pool (2.5/287.5) will appear to be from the "elite" category.

That is, for every 1 "elite" resume in your inbox, you'll be seeing 114 "non-elite" resumes. And since tech geeks are, by and large, an insecure, envious lot, they like to brag and fudge a bit -- so that 114 easily becomes 199 in their minds (or the 1 a 0.6, whichever).

Which gives you the infamous "we only hire the top 0.5%" urban legend right there. Even though they're all really just angling over the... top 5% (ranked over the general pool of putative developers).

And since hot-shots like Joel Spolsky, not to mention nearly all of the investment bank / hedge fund types, and well, probably half or more of everyone in the monthly "Who's hiring?" thread just keeps repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it... well, shucks, it must be true.

[1] As such a thing as generic competence exists can be objectively measured, etc, etc, but that's a separate issue.

[2] Which corresponds -- conservatively, for the purposes of this argument -- to another widely espoused, but never quantitatively substantiated belief out in startupland: that "all" of the good developers are "always" employed and "almost never" on the job market longer than 2 days.
There seems to be a lot of HTML leaking through. We'll see if there is any way to sanitize it further...
*A web app like iOS5 Maps
Oops, now my real name is out on the internet. Good thing it didn't ask for my SSN, I probably would have typed it in as well without reading anything.
If you need the money yes, unless the note has some crazy terms.

On the pro side, you've got dry powder and runway from the $50k to keep doing what you're doing. Also you've gotten a vote from at least one investor with real money that you're doing something useful. An uncapped convertable note keeps you out of a lot of messy things like valuation etc.

On the con side, you now have an investor and you're going to need to talk with them and listen when they say things. You run the risk of having a crazy idiot to deal with.
This is not always true. If you're a quant or a trader, you can live in Jersey and send your kids to good public schools and no one gives a shit if you're good at what you do. If you're doing the soft-side bullshit, you have to live in Manhattan and send your kids to fancy prep schools and keep up with the Joneses (management) who have more money than you do, and you often get through the wringer with almost no savings.
Why not .net ?
check your spam folder with gmail, they started to have false positives for me (they used to be really good)
If you take advantage of someone's ignorance to sell them snake oil, they may think (for a while) that the exchange was mutually beneficial, but you're still evil.
It might help if you imagine yourself as the startup and them as your target market. What are their needs? Where's the pain? You suggest lead generation but maybe they have enough leads and the bottleneck lies somewhere else.

Don't be afraid to be honest and ask them directly, although not in a vague "how can I help" way. The more you research about their needs, the more confident you can be that you really are a good fit for them. If you produce some tangible results, hopefully they'll feel the same way.

I'm no expert but in my experience
employers value what a candidate has done more than what they say they can do.
> If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status to another non-immigrant status, find another employer (subject to application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
Interesting.

I've never gotten spam before (actually never, not once), until I put my email address-- obfuscated-- into HN. Now I get one every week or so (the horror!).

I guess the reason we obfuscate is the general horror that once your email address is in a list there is no way of getting it out, so it's better to be safe than sorry.
Typical. Only posted on the 27th though, so my ideas are catching up the present.
Opera 12.01 does the same.
According to this[1] Bloomberg article, failure rate is roughly 60%. Failure rate is defined as changing ownership within three years of founding.

Pretty low failure rate, compared to a startup.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-restauran...
You nailed it. The work quality you get if you're in the R&D world you discussed is quite high. It's like being a data scientist at a startup, but with more money and an environment that is less political.

You have to convince people you're more than "just a programmer" to get good work. A quant, a crack low-latency guy, a data scientist, possibly an "architect". By age 30, if you're not some X (as in: "X Who Programs") along with being a good programmer, you start losing.

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/
Well, in Brazil you can buy real brown sugar (raw sugar). I don't known the crap they sell elsewhere under this name. You can even buy it in blocks here (google "rapadura").

The problem isn't in the calories, which is equivalent per gram with refined sugar, but the fact refined lacks many nutrients. The article you mention is full of crap and doesn't link to any studies, but I can tell you raw sugar has ~5mg per 100g of Iron alone. Refined sugar has absolutely zero. In a 2000kcal diety, you're consuming 50g of sugar daily. You're getting along 1/4 of daily Iron intake if raw sugar is used, for free. I'm not even going to mention Magnesium, which 70% of the world's population is deficient on. I wouldn't say the benefits are negligible.

About Xylitol... what's the point in using an artificial sweetener that lacks any nutrients just because is has lower calories? Just cut caloric crap from the diet. The only benefit is for diabetics.
Selling Products and Services Directly to Developers
Here's a fairly extensive list of wifi-enabled workplaces in NY:
http://www.quora.com/Wi-Fi-1/What-are-the-best-wifi-enabled-...
I never have hidden my email address, and I've never used a spam filter. I used to get a lot of spam, maybe 50 messages or so a day. Back when I got that many, I was sort of motivated to set up a spam filter... but I still never got around to it. These days, still unfiltered, I only get 2-5 a day, and I think (for me at least) setting up a spam filter is a waste of time. I guess all the cracking down on open relays and filtering SMTP etc. has done the trick?
I am a physician, and was surprised by the NY Times article. Here is a review of older literature you might find helpful:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=10796827
Thank you for the suggestions. I wonder how possible it is to find a position at either firms if you aren't explicitly in the finance industry. I have no idea how to apply there and would be interested in talking to somebody about what goes on there.
redesign and update the <table> layout :)
Makes you wonder if the court would have upheld the police GPS tracking if the guy had just been parked on the street instead of his driveway the night they bugged his car.
Great, I'm glad I could help!

You raise a good point about discrete math, let me add the following to my list above:

* MIT's 6.042 ("Mathematics for Computer Science") Lecture Notes start at first principles and go on to cover relevant discrete math topics motivated by common types of computer science problems.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...