skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

This reeks of extreme arrogance. A type very common in academia. The presumption that the masses are ignorant, while you, anointed and blessed, are simply brilliant.

No.

If you get off your high-horse and actually talk to them, you'll find that they are just as brilliant as you, in their own ways.

Our problems don't stem from the majority wallowing in ignorance. They are not ignorant. Our problems stem from divergent interests. What is in the interest of one, is not in the interest of his neighbor. The path to a healthier nation is in finding creative ways in resolving those conflicts of interest.
In my town, there are famous pizza places which people absolutely love and then others who think it's an overrated, pretentious mess

Let me guess, you live in Phoenix?
can you create a Jira ticket for #2 if that is happening it should be easy to fix. jira.mongodb.org
Show HN: CmdShots for FireFox
I think you completely misunderstand the audience for Rachet.

It's a HTML/JS/CSS prototyping tool, so if you're building a web application for iPhone it makes it so much easier to get a basic prototype together and start hallway testing. Interface builder is _not_ the tool for doing this.

Additionally, just because you're not 'creating stuff like this in graphics' doesn't mean that you'll never create a proper interface for the application, it just means you can get a __prototype__ together quickly. Spending time creating a well designed interface takes away from what a prototype should be.
I was playing around with jQuery Mobile the other night to create a simple iPhone compatible web form.

I found the WYSIWYG builder Codiqa on their web site was really handy. It was literally 5 mins of building, download, and then tweak the HTML file and I was done.

Perhaps that is the next step for Ratchet? A drag and drop WYSIWYG editor.
I really like the Dolphin browser on Android, partly because it lets you switch between mobile and "desktop" modes (lies in the agent string). I don't find I have to use desktop mode that often, but its really handy when its there.
"One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters."

We have a dysfunctional political system that provides voters with leaders who are compromised. Who then pander, rabble-rouse, and pick narrow issues to speak loudly about to raise money. Who then lose our trust and respect, corrupting the institution. Voters are not too "dysfunctional" or ill-informed to make reasonable decisions. Approval of the US Congress was at %10 in August, the lowest in 38 years. The electorate isn't smiling through the failures of government.

The People are not the problem. I think Tyson would have answered different after a few hours with Lessig. Blaming governement's failures on a ill-informed electorate is second-rate at best.
Are you suggesting that different languages and tooling would make different players on the team 'A' players? Sorry, but I find this to be an extremely dubious claim.

It depends how far apart they are.

Having written the code is a huge advantage. Getting to write code is a major advantage (if most of your time is spent reading code, your odds of transferring to a new-dev role on the same team are low). Picking tools that one knows well is also an advantage, but probably less of one, because there are far crappier corporate codebases than in-use open source tools (in general).

If the people are very far apart in ability, then those kinds of changes won't permute the ranking... on the other hand, if there's that much spread among programmers of equal rank, then you have an unusual team and a recipe for chaos.
The Long Now Foundation hosted a talk by Benjamin Barber called “If Mayors Ruled the World”. Barber discusses the major influence that mayors and city governments have to make positive change to global problems, sidestepping political gridlock at the national or international level.

Notes and audio (and non-free video) are available here:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02012/jun/05/if-mayors-ruled-wor...
That's an understandable point of view, save for the waste of time part, but it's not the use case they're targeting (I think). Ratchet I feel is primarily for folks who don't use Interface Builder, who aren't engineers, and who just want to test stuff out really quickly and efficiently (with HTML and CSS). Great for designers like myself who aren't as tech saavy but know the ins and outs of simple code like HTML and CSS.

As is the case with just about every other application, project, framework, and sexual intercourse: there are many ways to do the same thing and not all of them work for everyone.
>But you are definitely getting beyond it being a pure functional issue.

How so? Creating a compatible piece of software is functionally impossible without using the same API, because that's what the API is. You can't do it. The fact that compatibility has a lot of advantages doesn't change the nature of that functional necessity.

>Copyright in general is not a matter of inherent evil but a balance of rights.

Of course, but that's the point. You weigh the evil against the good. If someone creates a thing and is a good steward of it then they have a first to market advantage over competitors in addition to the implementation copyright, so as long as they're being good stewards and only collecting their creation costs plus a fair profit, they'll have the market all to themselves because prospective competitors will see that they can't profitably do any better as against the need to spend the resources to create another implementation. Only when a copyright holder is allowing the market to decay or imposing unreasonable restrictions or pricing on users will there be a sufficient incentive for others to enter the market, and why in that case does it make any sense to give the copyright holder the power to prohibit such competition?

>I also agree that forks are not always a bad thing but they could be permitted by the copyright holders (if API's are copyright).

The problem is that in almost all cases the copyright holder wouldn't allow it -- a full reimplementation fork is only necessary when the existing maintainer is doing such a sour job of it that you think you can justify the enormous reduplication of effort necessary to compete with them, and in that case why would they sanction a competitor?
SourceTree is really cool but IME it's best for beginners to start with the command line. I've taught git to quite a few people now and see a correlation between early command line usage and understanding what is going on.

Once you're at the level of git add -p you can probably start thinking about using a GUI if that's your cup of tea.
Blogger fills in where Big Media fails: List of people killed by Hurricane Sandy
This old comment from rayiner felt very relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4658565
Everybody has a prejudice or two without adequate basis in reality. Most people don't realize that they have prejudices. Of those who do, most don't bother to do test them further than inspecting a few cases of confirmation bias.

It's not the ignorance or the intelligence of the American populace that upsets me. It's the inability to imagine that they might be wrong.
Back in the 1900's and even before that electric cars were invented by several people. In 1916 some inventor called 'Woods' created the frist hybrid car.
One reason for the decline of the electric car market was that the infrastructure eventually could not facilitate them. Read; hosting providers didn't support them.
Another reason was they were slightly more expensive, especially when Herny Ford came along. Read; shared hosting is cheap.
Another reason I have heard told is that electric cars had less parts that you could tinker with. It was more interesting to have a fuel car because you could use other car's parts and combine them, you could spend your weekend working on them. Electric cars just worked, or people didn't have the technical know-how to toy around with them. Read; non-techies don't know how to setup a Rails app.
Assuming 'Ghost' is the new best thing, making the underlying technologie easy for non-techies is NOT the way to make it happen. The whole goal seems to be to make the UI easy and useful.
You make the point that non-techies need to be able to set it up. You make the wrong assumption that they would need to touch code/servers to do this.
How to Stay Relevant
I'm tired of Gabriel Weinber telling me how bad Google is and therefor why I should use DDG instead.

Perhaps avoid his blog next time, since he's clearly passionate about it and likely to do similar articles.
I'd vote for him, if only to increase basic research stock and funding. I'm not sure his social and foreign policies would be apt, however, given his academic veneer he takes to the written-about issue.
Often I feel like it would be better if sites couldn't even tell the difference at all between my phone and tablet and a normal browser... Some mobile sites are great, but only a very small minority. Most times I get redirected to a mobile site, I switch to the desktop version and find it's a far better browsing experience and they shouldn't have bothered in the first place...

An example of this is almost any blog with the WPTouch plugin... Most regular Wordpress theme gives you a better reading experience going to the desktop site and double tapping the main column to make it fill the screen!
According to the link in dmgrow's comment, it's

Score = (P-1) / (T+2)^G

where P is the number of votes, T is the time in hours since submission, and G is a power that controls the steepness/rate of decline in ranking, so popularity is decreases exponentially over time.

I'm sure that YC-affiliated posts have a different ranking algorithm, considering you can't vote on them.

Some other cool algorithms are:

del.icio.us / delicious.com 's: ranked by upvotes in the last hour. I like the elegance of this solution a lot :)

reddit's "best" feature: compares the rates at which comments are upvoted to generate the probability that a comment is a good one, which is how posts with fewer votes can be ranked better than posts with more votes. It works well, in my opinion.
A Perspective on Progress
Yes, I was thinking of that exact quote. Read this zenpencils version recently:

http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...
In the same way that Foundation links spontaneously appear on Bootstrap threads, ThemeForest links spontaneously appear on WrapBootstrap threads. ;)

For more, take a look: https://wrapbootstrap.com/tag/admin
Front-end Web Developer
Seeking a talented front-end developer that loves bringing great designs to life with standards compliant HTML and CSS.
-Ability to work in a team environment, from making pixel perfect sites that meet the design requirements to integrating code with the back-end development team
-Must write clean, semantic markup
-Deep understanding of CSS inheritance and how to use it to your advantage
-A good ideology for managing maintainable, scalable and cross-browser code across large sites
-Familiar with source control principles and comfortable with SVN
-In-depth knowledge of IE quirks and how to address them
-Experience working with jQuery, advanced JavaScript skills a big bonus
-Utilize CSS3 while maintaining fallback for browsers that don’t support it
We are located in Oakland, CA.
I dont want to give away too much but moderately sized metro areas are paying 70k for first time developers.
This is not necessarily helpful, but consider eliminating "wait" as a thing you can do. If it is true you cannot leave the country due to financial constrains and you do not wish to do it as a result, then stop waiting to leave.

Now your focus can be re-targeted to doing -- so long as it's not doing waiting. It sounds like you have freelancing aspirations. Perhaps something worth doing is building a solid social network with a referral program. A bonafide consultancy. You may still want to go to another country, but you aren't waiting to do it -- you are starting a consultancy.

There may come a day when you see the financial success you set out for. You'll note you want to leave the country, so you will book a ticket for next week and set up an apartment. You'll just do it.

Semantically, you still waited. Mentally, you took action -- so there was no negative fallout usually associated with waiting. Always commit fully to your present task, do not let the delusion of waiting creep in and breed complacency.

It's what I am trying, at least... human nature does have a lot of exploits.
I think this is a case for continuing the current course. By that, I mean that these obvious missing issues of Apple would be fixed in the next revision if a large plurality of websites did not display well. I doubt the websites themselves would be affected in the long term, however. Of course, I base this behavior analysis on a sample of one (my apologies to the staticians out there).
> It doesn't take long to do a GOOGLE SEARCH

And waste time wading through a bunch of patent nonsense put up by scammers in the often-vain hope that there is something, just one real item of legitimate information, lost in all the dross.

You say 'closed-minded', I say 'wary of wasting time on yet another example of the alt-med scammer runaround'.
> The path to a healthier nation is in finding creative ways in resolving those conflicts of interest.

That's the entire purpose of government and has been since the dawn of time. Even authoritarianism is a "creative way [to] resolve those conflicts of interest".
It really doesn't matter which 3rd party you vote for, so vote for whichever one you abhor less or like more.

The main thing is that you're entering a vote that isn't being counted in the Dem or Rep column.

If you don't vote then it doesn't count against the Dems or Reps at all.

Vote whichever 3rd party is easiest on your conscience, and you'll be voting against both parties that can't responsibly work together at the moment.
> Some mobile sites are great, but only a very small minority.

Indeed! Wikipedia is a thorn in my side when browsing with an iPod.
This article is great.
Not a huge deal, but it can become problematic when you're using something like git bisect.
Looks great, guys.

Slightly off-topic... the name "Ratchet" seems to be getting pretty crowded. In addition to this, there's also:

- Ratchet the websockets library for PHP: http://socketo.me/

- http://ratchet.io - error tracking (my startup)

- Ratchet the consulting company (acquired earlier this year), which owned ratchet.com
Personal Website Tweaks: Google Cal Scheduling and Public Dropbox
Although the title talks about detecting the iPad Mini, the article makes it clear that the real dilemma is that there is no way to know the physical size of pixels as presented on the screen and size things accordingly. That's especially important on touch devices where you want to size controls to make them finger friendly.
Air heats as it compresses. If you cool it, you lose pressure and thus energy. So you would have to keep it hot. It's problematic because it's less dense then and because you'd have to insulate it.

Water stores much much more heat per volume and you don't have to handle the pressure if you keep the heat modest.

This way your air pressure vessel can be smaller and probably uninsulated.
Nice work. :-) This list is getting pretty comprehensive.
As someone else replied, probably next to nothing.

Now get schools hooked up with some open source software that runs on Android and THEN try to get the local decision makers to buy that tablet over an iPad; which makes them look cool and hip; and then I will be impressed.
Elite sequel announced
Just a few days after the launch of Kickstarter UK, Frontier has announced a project called Elite: Dangerous. Kickstarter at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous - BBC news article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20165344
Wanted: German security developers for new, homegrown spyware
A long-term temporary setback. Even if a) it magically works and does everything, and b) most people get them, you're still looking a span of years before you can count on Glasses users being a significant fraction of your audience.
Things are locked down on iOS but not (yet) on Mac OS X. My gut feeling is that this trend will continue.

For example, APIs are already being leveraged. You can only use iCloud if your Mac app is distributed through the App Store.

In the near future, Apple could switch Gatekeeper's default setting to Mac App Store only, raising another barrier to independent vendors.

Moving to a new processor would provide Apple a great opportunity to round up the laggards and force them into the App Store.
How is this better than pencil and paper. You don't have to see the button depress to know what the button does, right?
Interviews with Interrogators
Based on my reading you're conflating ignorance with an apathy toward evidence and information based decision making.

I agree with the author that most people lack the ability or desire (I'm not sure which) to _seek_ an objective reality even if it's unlikely a truly objective reality exists. I think this is what he characterizes as "scientifically literate". And while you can argue up and down that data can be used to mislead people just as easily as rhetoric, I'd prefer the latter to the former because at least then there's something tangible to discuss (methods for data collection, data presentation, etc).
I meant PHP.

I don't want to spark some sort of war on what language beats up your language. So I wont. Besides I don't think something 'being everywhere' makes it good. By that standard lots of things in this world are good.

PHP is exactly what you say it is with regards to being similar to a workhorse. It is a tool for programmers who like to work very hard to achieve something that a harvester could do a lot quicker and more efficiently.

Alex Munroe explains what I meant better than anyone I have seen. It is a great read. Also if you like PHP.
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

He does not bash PHP, he explains why he thinks it is the wrong tool for the job. Interestingly, he also uses the tool analogy. We are all so predictable :).
The crux of the issue is whether or not Motorola was discriminating against apple. If everyone else that licenses Motorola's patents pays 2.5% why should apple pay less? What gives them that right to special treatment?
Facebook released an update just today that integrates the features from the separate FB Camera app into the main FB app
I wish you the best success with the new features. We're excited to build up our local area.
Is there some obstacle that stops him from running?
There are some alternate browsers for iOS that allow you to send a desktop user agent. Sleipnir, Atomic, probably others.
"cure to a lot of ailments ... criminally underfunded ... potential immortality".

I mean as a mechanism, "focused ultrasound" pretty much says it all. But how successful is it in trials? I think I took a quick look at some links (or googled) based on another one of your comments, but not being in the medical field, or currently needing any repairs that involve tissue ablation, I didn't spend too long investigating the state of the art.

FWIW, I didn't downvote you. I just want to encourage you to sound less crackpottish. Focus on peer-reviewed evidence for specific applications, don't allude to some miracle cure-all.
You aren't alone. There is actually a version of Markdown for writing Screenplays. When writers adopt Markdown then I am not sure who Markdown is not for.
500 reasons to vote against Mitt Romney and for Barack Obama
Nice. I definitely like the way it has been presented as a demo; well done.
Some experiment. Dropbox and Google Drive are two of the buggiest, slowest, highest CPU using pieces of software I've used in a long time.

As for startups Dropbox has all this money and has done almost nothing with it. The product is almost identical to version 1.0. Yet you have companies like Evernote truly innovating with far less money. See Evernote 5:

http://evernote.com/evernote/whats_new/mac/

Google needs to stop being so evil (privacy and anti-competitive practices) before they will be the best kind of big company again.
Interestingly, one of the creators of Ratchet is @fat, who is a co-creator of twitter bootstrap, so he would know a thing or two about adoption of new frameworks.
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss [video]
We have politicians who think all geologists are lying about the age of the earth and actually believe in a sort of divine manifest destiny.

There comes a point where merely learning to resolve our differences is (although necessary) not sufficient. Some things (such as, for example, Democracy imho) require a baseline education and scientific literacy.

You put crap into a democracy, you are going to get crap out. The process works pretty well for executing the will of the people, but it really does next to nothing as far as data sanitation goes; it simply was not designed to do that.

(On the other hand, the constitution itself was designed to be a crap-filter of sorts. Instead of just putting every single issue to a vote, the constitutions makes some things unusually hard to push through. The first amendment is basically a filter to prevent the "will of the people" from being executing if it violates certain principles (of course a strong enough "will of the people" can remove these filters).)
I used to come up with, never implement, and completely forget about good ideas. So I decided to make a rainy day ideas list. Somehow I've managed to populate a text file with at least twenty ideas that I find at least somewhat valuable, so those ideas are what I try to write to life whenever I have some downtime, and it's been really rewarding to build some of them. My advice? Go out and make your ideas.txt (or bucketlist.txt) file today!
Show HN: GitBattle – Battle two Github accounts
He has said before that he doesn't actually want the job. If he ran, I don't know if I would vote for him or not, but I certainly think he is best applied elsewhere.
Just prior to their acquisition by Google, Motorola was planning on suing other Android manufacturers to collect patent royalties [1][2]. Some of the commentary I've read speculated that the Motorola purchase was done partly to avoid civil war among the Android licensees.

Interestingly enough, Sanjay Jha left the company right after the merger was finalized (with a healthy golden parachute to boot!).

[1] http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay-jha-o...
[2] http://www.phonearena.com/news/Motorola-wants-a-piece-of-tha...
They should have become a yelp competitor in 2009, back when people still used Foursquare.
Quantifying Sandy: 75% Drop in Church and Gym Visits
Sorting is easy, you just choose _id as the sort field.

Selecting is also reasonably easy, the first 4 bytes of the id are the timestamp (seconds since the epoch). You just create a hex string in that format -- 4 bytes of timestamp and then 8 bytes of zeroes and then create an object ID (using the classes provided by your driver) and do:

coll.find({_id:{$gte:<id>}})

or whatever is the equivalent in your language of choice.
I feel GUIs can be great learning tools to become better with the CLI. I've personally learned a lot of tricks and commands using a GUI Git client.