skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heck, I don't think many adults should have the right to vote. Democracy is irrational enough as a decision-making mechanism as is.

There is tension between a hypothesized universal "right" of voting and the use of voting as a real-world method of choosing people to govern a country in a wise manner.

You see this tension when, for example, the ACLU advocates for restoring voting rights to violent felons. Personally I think violent felons have showed remarkably below-average decision making capabilities and I don't see why they should have a voice in running the country. However the ACLU seems to think that removing their voting rights is an affront to human dignity.

For many, democracy has become religion. It is no longer presented as a wise way to run a country. It is simply the unquestionable, universal, and only morally correct method of running a country. That's a dangerously inflexible stasis point for our thoughts to settle in, but that's where we are.

I prefer to avoid discussions that focus on the moral dimensions of voting. I would rather discuss how different government schemes are likely to effect society's well-being. I find these discussions to be much less predictable and more interesting.

Now, a voting test might be a good idea, and I would love to see it applied to adults too. Who knows, it might even elevate the level of political debate in this country to the point where candidates actually discuss substantive policy ideas. Of course, it would only last until an election cycle where women or a minority racial group had a lower than average pass rate, then it would be deemed "evil" and scrapped.

A disclaimer: I got halfway through and stopped when I ran into the giant pile of steaming kneejerk partisan assumptions (Oh look. A "George Bush is evil" quip. How original. Did it take a physicist to come up with that?). I'm bored and disgusted by this level of thinking, and I was somewhat surprised to see it from someone who argued so intelligently up to that point. So, if there is anything interesting after that segment, I missed it.
Generally speaking, that's true. The standard practise in Erlang is to treat processes like you'd treat memory allocation in other languages - don't be wasteful, but don't spend too much time worrying about it until it becomes a problem. Processes are cheap.

If you've got a task that seems overly complicated, maybe you're trying to do two things at once; simplify it by splitting it into two processes. (Of course then you have to manage the interaction of the two processes, but each is simpler than your original process, so often this is a net win.)

If your processes are truly doing things in parallel, not just spending their lives waiting for each other, then you will get speedups with more processes - minus some overhead for process spawning communications, but this depends on how parallelisable your problem is. Close-to-linear speedups are not unheard of, especially if you have lots of mostly-independent problems to process.
AdultSpace Gets A $1.3 Million Boost For Its Adult Social Network
It would be neat to automate this by using the SSD as a file level cache.
If you're working on something that can't be launched immediately, then what you build during YC is a proof of concept. You just have to be able to make something good enough to convince the next round of investors to back you. That's the threshold.

The details of your plan worry me though. How much money do companies make from Unixes now?
Make time for the things in life that aren't work: family, friends, exercise, church, hobbies, etc. When I overwork I am generally given cause to regret it. (The others are more important to QOL, personally, but that exercise point is very important to stress. 45 minutes of exercise buys you an hour extra of productive labor, easily. I wish I could make that trade all day long, and I hate the actual act of exercise.)

Concentrate on small, achievable tasks. Do them regularly.

If it isn't worth $100 an hour it should be automated, outsourced, or eliminated. (You can move that number up as your time becomes worth more. I've always considered it a solid baseline.)

You can combine the techniques. I used to spend an incredible amount of time on content creation for my website. Conception, writing, HTMLification, etc would take me literally hours per page. I decided to eliminate (my involvement) by outsourcing the conception/writing and automating the heck out of the workflow.

This entailed moving my site from static HTML with a lot of handwritten content into a Rails-based pseudo-CMS with a lot of handwritten but machine-polished content. Downside: it is a lot more cookie cutter than it used to be. Upside: 2~4 hours of my time per unit of goodness is now 10 minutes of my time plus $100 per 30 units of goodness.
Too bad the stimulus money injection is wired to the companies' bank accounts. Imagine a $10 billion bail out delivered in cash to the door of AIG's headquarters, for instance. Imagine 18-wheelers carrying truckloads of $100 bills. That would be impressive indeed :-)
Portable Code: How To Check If A Machine Is 32 Bit Or 64 Bit
Writing portable code is very important but it is one of the aspects that most people neglect until it is too late to realize its importance. Till few years ago, most people writing code for personal computers were not worried about the data sizes on their machines. They didn’t even think whether the machines, on which their code would be running, would be 32 bit or 64 bit.
This is pretty amazing. I would love it if there was a way to view various types of food and merchants by region. I'm from the Raleigh, North Carolina area where we have many awesome local farmers markets. However, i'm at college in the midwest and would love to be able to get some of these items online. I have no doubt that this will take off, but when it does and all the various merchants from nc sign up, being able to find them quickly and easily will be a great addition.
Agreed, that's a great way to handle the case
I thought of this as a solution to the interminable curveballs life has been throwing me of late. Interesting.
Science and the Obama Administration
Great app, emphasizes what's most important in mobile search: speed.
Discovery Channel is the unsung hero here. Mike Rowe is a fantastic host and narrator, but it is the Discovery Channel which has given him and others the platform to do what so many else have struggled to: get young people interested in science and technology. Sure, a lot of it is overly high-level or pseudo-science or simply mindless explosions... but they sure have done one hell of a job making a lot of traditionally uninteresting things, interesting.
Charles Stross: The 21st Century FAQ
It's also a problem when people keep voting for expenditures by majority rule and deciding that a different minority group should pay. That doesn't seem right.
Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Bible MP3 For iPod
A list of the best places to find a Bible mp3 for iPod.
Think the article should have been titled

"Core Competencies of Coders"

I expected something that would include, at the very least,
Algorithms and Data Structures.

Software Construction is not the sole realm of the Hacker.

coder!=hacker

Coding is not the sole realm of Software Construction.

It is too bad that so many people totally mix concepts up like that, playing fast and loose with synonyms in that manner is like wearing a sign saying "I am an ignorant two bit tech person in a hurry"

Say, what about Cray, when he toggled an entire OS (that he designed) into a machine (that he designed) through the front panel switches, in Octal? AND IT WORKED.

Crappy programmer, can't type x number of wpm.

ROFLMAO

EDIT (now that I paused for breath)

Worse programmer even, for not USING A KEYBOARD

ROFLMAO
I'd hope so. Every time you get on a plane you're trusting the answers returned by Mathematica :-)
I think this would be more meaningful if it was preceded by a visualization of what 300 million people looked like.
If you don't want to participate in this discussion, find another one, Gordon.
An intentional Freudian slip. Clever girl.
But thats what the national printing presses are for!!! Get with the program man (and hope the international banks do not get there first).
I think that another key is being accountable to somebody else, if only informally. I'm all for self-motivation -- and I've accomplished plenty that way -- but I find it far easier to work when I know that somebody else cares about whether or not I complete the project. Maybe a business partner, maybe a coach of some sort.
I completely disagree with all four points. A hacker can only use TextMate, vim, or emacs? You kidding me? And who writes code at more than 60 wpm -- writing code is a thinking sport, not a race to the finish.

Diving into a large codebase can be important for certain hackers, but honestly this sounds like a skill moreso needed for corporate programmers ...
Well, I meant someone competent that you would ideally be on friendly terms with.
Not really sure how useful this is... even if it was practical to adapt datatypes at runtime, it would still be extremely painful. Surely just using portable types is vastly easier and straightforward.

(or am I missing something?)
http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~dbl/cfdsdisk/cfdsdisk/Space%20view...
She's female, talks dirty/sexual and has a book: http://www.amazon.com/Brazen-Careerist-New-Rules-Success/dp/... (That covers the famous part)

That being said - i think large parts of her advice are worth considering at least.. not sure about them being iron-clad rules - but some of her work is worth a read.
What about obligations to external parties, though? Family, VCs, employees, whatever -- one may not have enough leeway to fail on the first few shots. What was your situation?
If you're making over $380k, then you're in the top 1% of households in the US by income.

If you're making over $150k, then you're in the top 5% of households in the US by income.

If you're making over 100k, then you're in the top 10% of households in the US by income.

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2006prel.pd...

There are some lines. I'd draw it at "top 5% by income."
I really couldn't tell if that ad hominem was a satire of ad hominem or not...
Apple bringing out touchsreen netbook?
yeah, I have been biking past the "tent city" of Sacramento for a year now. This isn't something new, although it may be bigger now.
I think you missed the rely upon part.

Also, I think the main point of what you quoted is that the additional level of abstraction does more harm that it does good when it comes to hacking, not everyday 9-5 in the office type programming.

As I mentioned a bit earlier in this thread, people are confusing programmer and hacker. The two terms are not synonymous.
Probably MATLAB instead of Mathematica. Control Systems, Communication Systems, Structural Engineering, Engines, Vibration Analysis,... all within MATLAB's domain, right? Am I missing something?
The lack of a roof over your head isn't the cause of homelessness, it is the symptom. Addressing it in a more permanent manner would probably require you to compromise on a lot more of your libertarianism than just offering more social assistance.

For example, a huge percentage of the homeless are mentally ill. If we institutionalized them, which is a nice euphemism for "confined them against their will", they would no longer be homeless. Are you willing to do that?

Another major portion prefer camps to shelters or traditional housing arrangements because they just fundamentally do not want to accede to societal norms like "You should work for a living and pay rent", and necessary prerequisites like "In order to maintain that job, you will probably find it necessary to come in to work almost every day, and be sober for the duration".

Empirically, a significant portion of the homeless population will trade comfort for autonomy. Living in a shelter means a loss of autonomy, and some people prefer a largely-unsupervised tent or, in a pinch, the streets. NYC used to have significant excess shelter space and tried to force it on a homeless encampment by Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The church and homeless advocates sued to protect the homeless' right to live outside of shelters.

So, again -- are you OK with agents of the state having to physically restrain people to get them into shelters? Because that is what will be required to alleviate this symptom.
I think the world needs contrarians like this, but that the world also needs to know not to take them entirely seriously.
I have a mockup of a feature that might improve voting on articles:

http://mld.dreamhosters.com/hn.png

Basically, new links open up in an frame, with a slim Hacker News bar at the top. The idea would be that as you're reading an article/finished reading an article, you'll be more likely to vote if the button is right there, rather than if you have to go back to HN and search for the post.
They're too slow, $5 says it takes over a week.
Economics According to Google
IF you are going along the lines of the article, then shouldn't it be 100 bytes on each piece of paper ?!
Ask HN: What's the best way to break up charges for recurring billing?
I recently had a conversation about the best way to do recurring billing. We identified a few pros and cons for a variety of approaches. I am interested on the HN take. (NOTE: This is technology agnostic, and more of a conceptual discussion)

1) Prorated First Month, all recurring clients are billed on the first.
+ Cash flow at the beginning of the month
+ Cash flow lines up with bills.
+ Easy to do maintenance on recurring billing system (only runs once a month)
+ Reasonably easy for users to understand
- small partial month transactions for people who order late in the month.

2) Prorated 1st month with 2nd month prepay
+ (all of the above)
+ Even more cash flow early on, as every client is always one month ahead on payments
- some clients might not want to prepay for 2 months at once
- bill might be different then what the expect to pay, i.e. signup now for $15 costs them $29 (if they order on the 2nd of the month)

3) Everyone is on a 31 day cycle
+ everyone charged a flat $15 for every charge.
- Billing period slowly shifts around, not the same day every month
- cash flow spread out throughout the month
- harder to do maintenance, as billing must run every day

Other ideas:
4) Only Annual
+ large amount of cash on hand
- might scare away new users

5) Instead of prorating first month, call it a trial period, that starts 'now' and ends whenever your billing cycle begins.
- confusing to end users
- lost revenue due to trial

What is 'your' take? (your.. the collective HN)
I did something silly like this too a year back, sent a tweet to Evan Williams asking for a job and he replied too with "Great, Do you code" kind of tweet.

http://twitter.com/azharcs/status/781605391
Interesting point, especially since trains (or at least train stations) have been targets in Spain.
Any theories on why? I'm working on a PHP code base where some of the classes are 2500 or so lines and I find it quite puzzling.
So a "security" program is really the ultimate virus, one the user is not only aware of but completely submits to.
An Idea For Discussions on My Blog
45 percent of world's wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO
> IF PIFTS.EXE WAS HERE, THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

Gotta be 4chan messing with Norton.
1) Standard practice. Good for accounting purposes.

2) Unnecessarily complicated for end-user. Also messes with accounting because you don't want to record revenue earned for the second month in the first month.

3) Accounting nightmare! But nonetheless, common practice throughout the web industry.

4) Should be an option for end-users. Common practice, but again ensure you're deferring unearned revenue.

5) Eh, just sounds kind of cheesey. Why should a user who finds your site one day before the first of the month only be treated to a 1 day trial? Trials are good for the end-user, but use it in conjunction with #1.

These options should not be used exclusively, i.e. I would favor using 1 and 4.

Sorry for the accounting comments. I'm taking an accounting course right now and couldn't help but throw my comments in there. It's still important though.
Isn't there any sort of social welfare if you're unemployed in the US? I'm in Australia, and if you're unemployed here you get an allowance from the government, it's not much but enough to keep you able to share the rent with a couple of people and so on, so no one has to live in tents or die from exposure in the year 2009.

There are a small percentage that abuse the system, but not many and most view it as an acceptable price to pay for a social security net. To receive it you have to do so many hours of community service after a number of weeks, which minimises abuse of the system. But then we also have free medical if you need it to. If you're really on the skids the government will provide housing even. I believe this is the same in the UK and some other european countries, the UK is where we got it from.

The total laissez-faire system has it's up and down sides, which really aren't necessary in the 21st Century imho.
Yes, using portable data types is much easier. But I thought about this when we had to make our code work with some legacy code (which we couldn't change) and the outputs were in non-portable data types.
Price of world's wealth decreased by 45 percent: YC Partner
What would happen if Chuck Norris Tweeted?
Here's as good a place as any in this thread to say this: a lot of the comments here are beneath HN. They're unprofessional, they add no value to the discussion, they do not help us sell more widgets to people, and they're needlessly mocking of real, actual people.
Kutiman mixes YouTube
This would be much more awesome is Woz was grooving while riding around on his segway.
I am more curious as to how the hacker even start on cracking the algorithm.

Do you suppose the hacker spent alot of $$$ on the real gift cards in the first place then go from there?
I know this link is a little off-topic for HN, but what this guy has done is nothing short of amazing. This has totally blown my mind. Pure genius. I urge you to check out all of the tracks, though #1 and the #8 are my faves.
Privacy and Free Speech : It's Good for Business
Wordpress KickStart
Wordpress is one of the most popular, if the the most popular, blogging platform out there. However, just starting out on your first blog can be a challenge to know where to begin. Finding a theme, the right plugins and so forth. In steps Wordpress KickStart, a collection of 16 open source plugins and 4 themes to help you hit the ground running.
It might be handy just to figure out the most common foods people avoid - vegan, vegetarian, wheat gluten, nuts, I'm sure there's others - and have a labeling system.
Seo prices to make advertising affordable
I found a site that gives seo prices for your projects.
Not really, most of it was really destroyed - debts not repaid, foreclosures, etc.
Except of course they don't. All tax goes into a pool that the government (as the representatives of the people, the majority if you will) decides what to do with it.

I think a better question is why shouldn't 'the rich' be paying a bigger portion of tax? You mention, 'minority group', but if you change that to 'the rich' (for a good definition of the word), the answer becomes imo that the rich can afford to pay more tax if they stop spending so much money. Many more people can live very with surprisingly less than what 'rich' people have. The answer should be to suck it up and deal with it.
If you look around Silicon Valley, you see a lot of companies that have a culture similar to HP in its heydays, when the "HP Way" was still going strong. HP was one of the early companies to succeed in the Valley. I suspect other early companies in the Valley also had strong cultural influences on startups in the Valley. We know, for instance, that many startups emerge from individuals that worked for established companies, and what better way to transmit a culture than through individuals leaving one company and starting another.
One of the comments on the article offers an opposing view:

Justin Feb 13, 2009 3:13 PM GMT

DO NOT listen to this guy! This article is nothing but the "opinion" of an uninformed CPA. His opinions are supported by NO credible data. Here are credible stats that completely refute Mr. Marks article: -73% of consumers use search engines to find local businesses from which to buy (WebVisible/Nielsen NetRatings, 2008) -Search engines are the first source to which consumers turn to find local businesses (31%), ahead of even print yellow pages (30%). (TMP Directional Marketing/comScore, 2008) -Over 77% of people said they were more likely to make a purchase from an unfamiliar business with a quality Web site than a poor Web site from a known business (WebVisible/Nielsen NetRatings, 2008) Mr. Marks, next time you are asked to write an article about anything related to marketing, please do your research and support your opinions with credible statistics.
If you read the article, the author suggests a fairly marginal increase in tax for those with already much more than those in the middle-class. I wouldn't call this being 'punitive'.
I wouldn't define 'rich' by income alone, because 150k ain't rich in the Bay Area.
I live a few blocks from Seattle's tent city. I've been keeping and eye on it since the downturn and I don't believe its grown.
I'll be honest, I can get the marketing side of the green argument. But, it seems to be crazy how much emphasis there is on "greening".

I can see an argument where there is a real value proposition, for example, solar panels in Arizona, Southern California, or Colorado, places with above average sunlight. Water optimization in LA (not in Oregon).

But, when you have people in Virginia i.e. (http://tjspi.110mb.com/press20082404.php) trying to put solar panels on top of a school, in a region that is incredibly hazy during the summer (the time where electrical energy could do the most good by balancing peak load). It just seems to me that eventually the money for these sort of unsustainable --- well intentioned investments in green technology will go away.

I.e. it appears there is a lot of hype, and a lot less real substantial progress. Obama's new green jobs, are only really beneficial to the economy if they actual reduce our dependence on foreign oil (we are the larges consumer of oil in the world) at the same rate that china increases it's need for oil, so that the price of oil stays high even if the US isn't buying it. And in terms of beneficial to the environment --- we all live on the same planet --- and that's a worldwide problem to solve.
So we should just stop trying? That's not very entrepreunial.
It was certainly the first thing that came to mind for me. After seeing the URL, I was pretty disappointed not to find a magical nonthreatening pansexual spokesthing on the actual page.
That's really not a lot of paper. We should have no problem printing that out.
The state of in-flight Internet
I agree that violent felons have shown below-average decision making capability, but as much as I don't necessarily want them having a voice in running the country, whether there are costs to not letting them do so seems to be at least an open question. There is a significant negative correlation between voting and recidivism (http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...), though it's easy to see how the causation could run mostly in the opposite direction.
Why do people like Kendall so much? Out of all the "squares" and neighborhoods in Boston, it sucks the most IMO. It's essentially the industrial park next to MIT.

If people are so inclined to be in the "tech scene", live in any other neighborhood, Porter/Davis/Central/Beacon Hill/Brookline/JP and take the T to Kendall if you have to.
You should re-read that link: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm:1/di:1/do:1/ddo:0