skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the government is actually performing a useful service here.

We all know that people have a hard time identifying and reasoning about high-cost, low-probability risks. The government, because it's aggregating numbers over practically all the hospitals in the country, can identify these oddball cases -- these cases are hard for individuals to discern.

So, they found one -- a service in itself. But, what to do? I don't want to have to keep track of all these oddball risks (un-obvious, and with no significant upside). So, as in the case of various bassinet, bicycle, handrail, and staircase design errors, they are made off limits.

Easier for everyone. Next problem.
It just sounds too fantastical and comes off as puzzling and suspicious.

For myself, paradise includes a good cup of coffee, an issue of the New Yorker, and some good music.
Yeah, AED's are a massive help.
Masks banned in Canadian riots
It's almost certainly google's enemies having finally got through to the FTC. Google's made a lot of enemies, the telcos, microsoft, apple, big oil, big media. The population should wake up realize there's only a few good guys out there, google and maybe amazon, everyone else is evil and an effort needs to be made to stop the evil guys from destroying the good guys.
I think it's more targeted towards Consultants/FreeLancers that don't need to be in a certain geography.
I love that the age for starting such endeavors is getting lower and lower. If more and more people are exposed to the possibility of creating their own solutions (and fostering their own interests) from a younger and younger age, it will become the kind of culture that will change the world.
Healthier men, one moustache at a time
Hmm, did I understand correctly that you think that in Russia cybercrime is more mature than IT business?
How much did our defense spending decrease? I know that we must have saved a ton of money when Clinton cut the Army nearly in half and when we decommissioned so many of our battleships. I've heard it said that we still spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, but I'm not sure what the numbers looked like before the cutbacks.

Edit: I did a little research and I was astonished to find out that welfare programs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. I didn't think that something like welfare would make up a significant percentage of the budget. It's over 10% of the federal budget if you include all of the programs that fall under "welfare."

Looking at the statistics, the amount of money spent on welfare didn't significantly increase or decrease during or after Bill Clinton was in office (until our current financial crisis.) I know that he was trying to find smarter ways to spend the money, such as by getting people back to work with education and employment assistance, but how could the reform have added to the surplus if the amount of spending wasn't reduced?

After looking at this site a bit longer, it looks like every category of spending increased each year he was in office. Even though spending increased, there were some areas where he slowed down the rate of increase, which is admirable. But if we increased spending in every area before, during and after his presidency, yet we produced a surplus during his presidency, doesn't that mean the surplus was created by the thriving economy, which was in turn thriving because of the internet boom? I'm not asking to be argumentative, I just don't understand how we can say that our reduced need for defense spending combined with welfare reform caused a surplus when we didn't reduce our spending in either category from 1993-2001.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1994USbt_13bs5...

Edit2: Since I asked a couple of questions. Wouldn't it be more productive to answer them instead of downvoting me? I wouldn't have asked them if I didn't genuinely want someone to explain things to me from their perspective. Why let someone continue to be wrong when given the opportunity to correct it?
>"The truth is, Google is a big corporation run purely for profit"

As expected.

>"Google's dominant position helps only them and no one else."

Google helped me about 10 times already today. Their technology works.

>"In fact it harms the little players ( small e-commerce websites ) by taking the traffic away from them and selling it to the big brands"

As opposed to newspaper ads, or billboards, or TV commercials? The best accounts are the big businesses. That's the way advertising works, and Google is a an advertising company.
Between 5-15 kids every year die from asphyxiation on balloons. The number in 2009 was 11. In the same year, more than 500 kids were treated in the emergency room for ingesting small rare earth magnets; according to the APA, "almost every one" of those cases required endoscopic surgery --- and, while I'm sure that's actually alarmist, it seems safe to assume that balloons incurred less surgical cost than tiny magnets.

Balloons require warning labels, and some balloon applications that previously used latex balloons now use mylar for safety reasons. Balloon casualties are as a result declining. Despite increased safety labeling, reported harm from tiny magnets was steadily increasing.

When the CPSC banned lawn darts, the companies that manufactured that toy also had to lay off staff.
I admit my way is narrow minded, but it is also the currently admitted way of looking at success - attaining wealth to maximize intertemporal consumption.

Money is indeed just a way to carry out one's dream, but without this way, dreams will in fact remain dreams.

Personally, I would disregard cranky statistics or ranking such as the highly subjective Happiness Index where the US get the last place, which does not match the data since many people want to immigrate to the US (and not so much want to flee that Berlin-wall style fences had to be erected to protect Mexico from the hordes of US emigrants)

I'm sorry if this is offensive, but there are plenty of statistics, yet I like it better when statistics match the actual facts like decision made by humans beings who want to immigrate to another country.

[IIRC, there are other indexes which gives points by default, like based on longitude of the country (for the climate), etc. I guess Canada won't win on them :-)]
I get a lot of links to Quartz from another (financial) website I frequent.

I've never been able to get a page to load in Chrome, so I've never read a single article from the site.
Really appreciate this article - very thoughtful. Re: the "Increase the pipeline" section, I agree this is a great place to start. But while "the reasoning behind such skewed ambitions begins at home," I think it's also more of a media problem. We can name rap artists and basketball players because for the media, sports & entertainment are king. Thankfully, we can point our kids to Barack Obama - my daughter already knows "Pesident Obama" she's not even two yet, and our kids will aspire towards a broader set of ambitions. But we could also use a little help from the media highlighting achievers in other realms.
I don't think there has to be an answer to this question, but any plans to differentiate yourself from Cocoa Controls?
Why would it? The message was planted by a malicious group, that wouldn't affect people's faith in the legitimate authors.
"In Timisoara, a Transylvanian Silicon Valley about 100 miles from Bucharest" <- LOL, the writer must have used the new Apple maps to measure that!
I was developing a (java|coffee)script-only full text search engine (not just some simple regex match, but something memory efficient with succinct data structures) to have an answer for search, but than it occurred to me that I rarely, and in general never, use search on someone else's blog.
Maybe it's just a result of us being in the Midwest, but most of the snacks displayed here aren't all that cheap to me. I can get things cheaper if I go to Woodman's (local grocery store) or Costco.
Thanks, these will be very helpful.
I am not sure where you got those numbers from, but "more than 500 kids treated in the emergency room for ingesting small rare earth magnets" is just not accurate.

I need to do some digging, but the last time I saw the statistics, balloons were responsible for exponentially higher numbers of hospital visits and deaths than magnets. Buckyballs have never resulted in a death, whereas balloons cause numerous deaths every year.

Do you think that balloons should be outlawed as well?

Edit: This is where I am getting my stats from:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eliyahu-federman/banning-bucky...

> CPSC indicates that approximately 22 children were injured from Buckyball magnets since their release in 2009. Not a single fatality was reported.
Indeed, and I should have been more careful with my affirmations.

But at least I now have learn something interesting - it has been disproved that only increasing education length had any effect of growth.
I don't think of it in terms of redundancy, but of introduced entities. That is, if two theories have equal explanatory power, but one theory requires ten new concepts, but the other one requires one new concept, prefer the latter. This interpretation is, I think, the spirit of what he intended: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor#Ockham
That video was a lot of fun!

Definitely if your commute is also your hobby, that's awesome.
Optimal is perhaps a more useful term.

I'm more optimistic than you about how soon we might see major advances.

The emerging field of epigenetics seems very promising.
The Theory of Gravity is a Hoax
TIL lawn darts are banned in the United States. You poor safety-paranoid, helicopter-parenting sods...
I'm in the middle of a huge responsive site redesign and I'll just say that responsive is a lot of extra work up front, but having your site work beautifully across platforms, devices, browsers is cool. The really painful part is when you have many different layouts and per-page layouts. It's one thing to make a blog design responsive, or twitter responsive when it's basically the same layout. It's totally different to have tens of different landing pages each with their own responsive styles. Very few if any sites are doing that yet, so there aren't a ton of great examples or established patterns.
Come on, being unclear is not the same as moving the goalposts. Unless you think gnosis is lying about what they meant.
Here's a list of things you're already not allowed to buy as a consumer:

1. Things painted with lead-based paint
2. Dangerous bacteria
3. Heavily radioactive materials
4. Chips of wood carved and painted to look like hazelnuts
5. Laetril, a completely ineffective pharmaceutical sold as a miracle cure for cancer.

If being unable to buy buckyballs is the cost of having a government agency preventing fraudulent or outright harmful products like the above out of my unwitting hands, or the hands of people who would cause a lot of damage around them, then I'm okay with that. I don't expect the government to be perfect, so I don't consider a failure to be perfect to be a fatal flaw.
While it's good that building technology is becoming so much more accessible at a young age, you can see the ramifications and consequences of funding this early when the entrepreneur in question says that he doesn't really know how to build this into a company and, more importantly, he has other ideas that he will probably much rather pursue.
I think you mean trillion instead of billion for the NYC metro area GDP. We really need words that sound more different for the two concepts, because they're way too easy to confuse despite how different they are.

Good comparison between the SE Asia situation and New York. I think it paints an accurate picture of what's going on. My beef with the parent is this line, "Singapore is what it is because of their strategic placing in the wold today." Personally, I think a more accurate way to put that would be "because of their strategic place in the world and merit." Singaporeans had something to do with Singapore becoming a regional hub (the second time, at least) and they should get credit for it.

I definitely don't think education alone explains Singapore's wealth. Just because I disagreed with one of the parent's points doesn't mean I disagree with everything he said.
This is nice collection of ios projects. This is good starting point of a newbie.
2.25% is slightly less that Samsung wants for it's FRAND patents and is a whole lot less than the 6% Apple wanted for it's patents.

Apple and MS seemed to want the mobile radio patent owners to give away their technologies for free but are unwilling to license their own patents on reasonable terms
The best way to run MS Office on a Mac? I use VMware and just run Office within Windows. What's funny is that this is actually faster than launching Office for the Mac while showing me what a Windows user is seeing. By the way I'm doing this on an iMac so I'm not using anything too exotic in terms of hardware.
Stop being lazy by being constantly "busy"
The idea isn't particularly unique and it wasn't particularly well executed when the first version was built but with the investment he was able to hire some talented people and from what I've seen the application (as is available now) is excellent, however it seems that he is now primarily their advertising vehicle. He's being used to market the app and it's certainly working, it's getting them huge amounts of press compared to the other companies in the same space.

Stephen Fry is in the advertisement video for Summly, he tweeted it to his ~5 million followers: https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/264066858225905664

The Summly team: http://summly.com/about.html

edit: oh apparently Stephen Fry is an investor, that explains the "free" video.

edit edit: I wonder how he feels about his age being such a huge part of the stories now, back in August 2011 he said this:

So he kept it under wraps. "It was a conscious decision
to not disclose my age to Apple and the media," he says,
because he wanted "Trimit to be judged on its own merit,
and not the story of its creator being 15."

From: http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-trimi...
That's desperately clever. Really.
I've got a sibling that probably makes about 1.5x as much as I do, but in order to get to that higher paying job, she spends a cumulative 3 hours per day in a high traffic commute. I do not fathom how people live that way. By the time she gets home, most of her day is gone. So it's food, an hour of TV or internet, and then bed so you can do it all over the next day.

Nightmarish.
Education policy is interesting. What drove me to HN was that it had a better community that slashdot - but what drives me now is the quality of the content and the discussion, especially for economic ideas which challenge the theories I'm learning.

That's quite interesting - education efficiency (or effectiveness as you say) seem to matter a lot.

The Pritchett study reported by yummyfajitas (which is someone I highly regard, for his post are generally spot on and instructive) adds to this that increasing education duration has been disproven to have an efficiency on growth (which complements the Romer/Lucas models of growth I'm learning)

You further that by disproving the relation between spending and school system results.

The conclusion seems to be that while money and time might not be important, the educational content is more important, and country even with few resources or teachers could focus their effort on the right content to maximize their results.

Very interesting indeed.
Wow - when will this guy stop? This isn't new. Every few months, Jeff Katz goes on a Google rant. And it's getting old.

From 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190337400457658...
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mono...

Having worked in-house for several large online retailers as well as a handful of independent clients on the side, the comparison shopping engine industry was my obsession for several years. CSEs can make you money, but it doesn't take long to figure out all CSEs do is play a game of "sell traffic to retailers for cheaper than they can buy it themselves." After 12 months of CSEs, it was obvious that being a "CSE expert" wasn't a good career path for me.

Arguably, Nextag's four competitors are Google Shopping, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com. Google Shopping was free to list your products for the longest time (until earlier this year), which provided for a much better user experience. Between 2008 and 2010, Google Shopping's marketshare kept eating away at these other CSEs. It was clear their product was better on all fronts.

I think it should also be noted that in 2005, Shopzilla was acquired by Scripps for $525M. Scripps sold Shopzilla to a private equity company for $165M last year. Pricegrabber was bought in 2005 as well - $485M price tag. They just got dumped for ~$80M.

Most CSEs were founded in the 90s; you could argue that their models haven't changed since. It's not working anymore. Take it with a grain of salt, but peek at Google trends and Nextag's Alexa site info:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nextag.com
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nextag

Nextag's services are becoming obsolete. I find it concerning that their response is to "double its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months". I guarantee you they're seeing the same kind of traffic patterns in Bing as well.

Nextag is just a whole bunch of click arbitrage silliness. Don't drink the kool-aid.
An understanding of numbers and statistics is obviously not required for membership.
29 would be more valid in a leap year - so calendar days is far from simple and unambiguous.
As HN favorite duckduckgo shows, sometimes the best result a search engine can provide is in fact another search engine. But not always, and not forever.
I hope I didn't come off as pessimistic in the general case with regard to medical advances! We see important medical advances every year. I was referring to the notion of being able to verify "perfect health".
>But this is exactly what I'm taling about; I'm hoping for a time when medical science has progressed to a point where these issues are very well understood, and seemingly random cardiac arrests like this can be preempted and prevented. I believe it's possible.

This is simply a discussion of semantics, and I feel kind of silly for arguing it in the first place. You're absolutely correct that most of the 'random' sudden cardiac deaths that occur are in fact related to a previously unknown preexisting condition. Wolff-Parkinson-White, congenital long Q-T, and a variety of cardiomyopathies (most of them congenital as well) can easily predispose someone to dropping dead.
At first glance, it looks like all of the content on this site has been scraped off the site I run, Cocoa Controls (http://www.cocoacontrols.com). I really hope I'm wrong about this.

See, for example, this pull to refresh control: http://iosmix.com/content/pull-refresh-tableview-ios

And here it is on Cocoa Controls: http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/pull-to-...

You'll notice that the screenshot is from a Heroku app I built a couple years ago that lists my Heroku websites. I also wrote the text that appears on this page.

Here's an excerpt from the site's database (as seen through a Heroku console):

irb(main):005:0> c = Control.find(1)
irb(main):006:0> c.description
=> "As pioneered in Twitter for iPhone (née Tweetie 2), pull the table view down to expose a refresh control. Keep pulling and release, and the TableView will reload."
irb(main):007:0> c.created_at
=> Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:39:20 UTC +00:00

Here's another example:

On Github (https://github.com/shu223/Stats), it's description reads: "In-app monitering memory usage in iOS Apps."

iosmix, http://iosmix.com/content/stats-ios, reads: "In-app monitoring of system conditions for iOS apps. Displays: The variation of memory usage [kB]; The total memory usage [kB]; The variation of CPU time [msec]; The number of UIView subclasses."

Cocoa Controls, http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/stats, reads: "In-app monitoring of system conditions for iOS apps. Displays: The variation of memory usage [kB]; The total memory usage [kB]; The variation of CPU time [msec]; The number of UIView subclasses."

This is because on October 7, I edited the description.

From: no-one@cocoacontrols.com
Subject: Control Updated
Date: October 7, 2012 12:19:14 PM PDT
To: info@cocoacontrols.com

Howdy - The control Stats (1265) was just changed by Aaron Brethorst.

Here are the changes:

description: In-app monitering memory usage in iOS Apps. => In-app monitoring of system conditions for iOS apps. Displays: The variation of memory usage [kB]; The total memory usage [kB]; The variation of CPU time [msec]; The number of UIView subclasses.
Could you develop on how to mesure the information entropy in an absolute way?
Indian is not a race :-)
A friend and I did about 30k in profit at age 15 in '02-'03, and it would have been way higher if we weren't having issues with merchant accounts. I doubt it would have gone into the millions, but easily 100k-200k.

Finding a market and executing on an opportunity isn't that difficult of a thing to do - the trick is finding one within your grasp. This was virtual goods, so it required almost no upfront capital and very little development and maintenance costs. It's no massively-scalable startup, but when your goal is just to create a profitable lifestyle business, it isn't actually that complicated.
So I just discovered this while I was doing some research for a paper I'm writing on gravity. Anyone know why duckduckgo shows this rather than an excerpt from the article it links to for the first link?
Any more information to this story? Do you know how they did it?
having other ideas doesn't disqualify him from being a successful entrepreneur. successful companies were built by a team, not a single person. as long as the kid is able to gather bright people around he will sell this eventually to facebook for $1b. it looks like some smart and much older folks agreed on that. otherwise they wouldn't have invested.
1700 emergency room treatments for ingestion of small magnets occurred from 2009 through 2011 according to the CPSC, which gets its information directly from hospitals. Similarly, my numbers for balloon ingestion also came directly from CPSC.

Your data comes from The Huffington Post attempting to recap a CBS News report. Mine comes directly from the CPSC Proposed Rule, which includes methodological information. What's happening, it appears is that CBS is reporting a single sample set number, and not an epidemiological conclusion. Which is another reason I'm happy that CPSC does this work and not, say, HuffPo.
I'm not familiar with the Pirsigs, but I certainly do not consider the attitude in question to be lawyerlike. While lawyers do occasionally face philosophical conundrums, they also tend to have the desired answer known to them. This is considerably easier than to, say, set a prior for the domain of a model parameter, where your preferences are in a vague war between convenience and justice. The internal debate arises when working from first principles and finding too few.
IPad Mini obsoletes the iPad
"Staggeringly ignorant"

Did you really need to phrase the criticism this way? It seems unnecessarily confrontational, and serves only to detract from the rest of your (well-considered) points.

Why not "The author appears to be unaware of the realities of Android updates."?

I read HN comments because there tends to be a far higher level of civility than (for example) reddit technology threads. It is a simple thing to foster a better atmosphere, but it makes all the difference in the calibre of the discussion.
You are not special.
Iconic font composer with upload SVG feature
Yeah, to be honest I'm not even sure what App.net is supposed to be after reading the article. Is this like a paid Twitter?