skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the scale is off, but I think the comparison to the GOP changing tactics, rather than revamping their platform is spot-on. I was hopeful that a true conservative, Ron Paul-style movement would take root at the core of the party, but they seem to be going in the opposite direction. They're becoming more polarized and exclusionary, focusing on undermining Obama, rather than building a true vision for the future.
10 Uses of RFID Tags
How do you expect to pay back debt then?

If you're looking for ways to support talented people with pie-in-the-sky ideas, that's what the Macarthur Fellowships are for. Those are outright grants, so the people in question can concentrate on what they love and not have to worry about paying back a high-interest loan.
The essay tries to draw analogy between our current economic crisis and the state of Weimar Republic (Germany) after WWI. It's pure crap. The Weimar Republic was in far worse shape.
The economy was in worse shape because it had lost a war. Agriculture was destroyed. The had to pay reparations. They had a minority government. The only parallel was that the leftovers from the old government wanted the new government to fail. Maybe Rush Limbaugh is a fascist, but he isn't going to turn into another Hitler and the Republicans aren't going to turn into Nazis.

We may be facing a huge task, but this is utter crap.
One thing that surprised me was that so many of these uses are tagging living beings, rather than inanimate objects.
"...the total interest generated by the fund will be 5% per year. "
"...the fund interest could exceed 10% per year."

I can buy MO right now at a dividend yield of 7+% and have equity in the company. Assuming zero change in the dividend payout or stock price over the next 5 years - which I don't think is any more unlikely than your assumed 85% required success rate, the 5%-10%/year (with no equity) from your assumptions doesn't seem quite so attractive.
Its rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a company that collects patents and funds inventions.

It does a lot more of the first than the second. I wish they'd just leave it alone as the results will probably be a non-practical, gee-wiz laser gizmo that makes no sense to deploy anywhere and a raft of vague patents that freeze innovation in the field preventing the inventions that might actually help.
I'd be interested to know what your assumption is of net income this person would have to receive in order to be able to pay off the majority of the loan in 1 year.
I am the same - I often don't know where to find something on it. I just never think to even look at clicking on big glossy images.
This doesn't matter much, but Saginaw is North/Northwest of Detroit.

As someone who grew up in (outside of, but that's the style of Detroit -- no one lives _in_ Detroit) Detroit and takes enormous pride in that fact, it's been funny to see the massive amount of press recently about the fall of the city. I think the rest of the country is just sitting nervously, thinking "what if that happens to our city?!"

The funny thing is, when I was growing up we NEVER went to downtown Detroit. There were basically only two reasons to go there: (1) to watch the Red Wings or Tigers (the Lions didn't even play there until recently, and the Pistons still don't), and (2) to go to the Auto Show. We would just spend all our time in the beautiful suburbs. However, now, when I go back home to visit, it's amazing, we spend ALL our time downtown and talk about how much better it is and how much we love it. Quite the opposite of how the press talks.

If you want some perspective on how Detroiters feel about all this, I highly suggest reading Mitch Albom's article, The Courage of Detroit (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/01/0...). It's long, but try to get through it all.
Well, he said he was using Visual Studio. Everything is hard in Visual Studio.

In emacs, I could see two files next to each other with C-x 3. Or, I could see the same file in two columns by typing M-x follow-mode after C-x 3. (In fact, I use a 1920x1200 display for most of my coding, and I end up with 3 emacs windows next to each other. Very efficient. Wide-screen is great for coding.)
"What happens if we extend life to, say, 150 and what we get is this long, 100-year decline into complete cognitive paralysis?"

Struldbrugs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struldbrug
The Republicans are total bone-heads, without a clue, but they aren't becoming Nazis. Whether they can dump Limbaugh, Palin, Gingrich, and other nut cases remains to be seen. It's entirely possible that the "loyal opposition" comes out of the left.
Same impression here.

The huge header graphics are a joke, I'm at a 1920x1600 screen but still get the vertical scrollbar at my normal browser-size.

I also find all offered layouts annoyingly cluttered and uncomfortable to read. The artsy colors and low contrast may work for a webdesign studio portfolio - but I'll prefer the current mozilla.org over each of them any day.
The only point I disagreed with was the weight vs. heat one. I travel a lot (think hitching across Africa, not flying to NYC on business), and the laptop accounts for most of the weight in my pack. I very rarely use it on my lap for any extended length of time, but there are times where I carry it on my back for hours. 4 extra pounds would be a dealbreaker.
For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

Yep, everything about being sure we have an unbiased sample, which is not likely for a question like this.

What does your calculation say about the grouping of the data into categories?
Yes, $120k/year is a reasonable sum for a 10 year senior developer, and not just in the Silicon Valley.

Check out http://www.glassdoor.com/ for overview of how much money people make in different companies and locations.

It depends on what you do, of course - designing web sites for hire probably does not pay very well. Enterprise software OTOH pays very well.

Bottom line is that your time is very valuable, but you need to find a place where it can be put to productive use.
Here's what a legitimate parrot expert has to say about it:

http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com/2009/02/buyer-beware-parrot-...
But it's all jommetry.
Thanks for the directional edit. Fixed. The suburbs of Saginaw, at least those where our relatives live, are very nice. You'd never know how bad some of the inner city areas are.
Do you think...you could post that somewhere? It would be neat to see (also, your target demographic?)

Thanks!
Usability gurus often advice not to try to make everybody happy. You are probably very far from Apple's niche market.

DJB's cr.yp.to is the most minimal possible site, which has it's merits. But navigating the site is highly impractical. No search, no breadcrumbs, no menu. The text uses 100% width of the page making it hard to read, specially in wide monitors. Black on white is hard on the eyes for long text.

To be fair, the site keeps the same layout and hierarchy all across.
How many of you start-up founders would like to hire a narcissist convinced he can do no wrong?

"Narcissists make terrible relationship partners, parents and employees. It's not a positive characteristic. We are in danger of encouraging this," she said.

"And we are kidding ourselves if we think that we aren't going to undermine learning if we restrict criticism.

"Parents no longer want to hear if their children have done anything wrong. This is the downside of the self-esteem agenda.

"I'm not saying it's of no value--but you get unintentional consequences."
Yeah, the same separation between small assets available quickly and big assets available slowly is how Amazon recommends you separate data between SimpleDB and S3.

I'm quite fascinated by all the ways we'll be able to persist data.
Remember, in America you can be sued by anyone for any reason at any time. Judgment can be rendered against you in an almost random fashion and all of you assets can be seized. If I were a medical doctor in the US, I would absolutely have hidden assets.
I'd like to see this implemented. I'm imagining a feeling of seasickness developing as I scroll down and the text snakes up,left,up,left .etc.
Finally nice to hear from someone else that does that. I still code to the ol' 80-col limits (with minor exceptions as needed) so I can stack two or three emacs next to each other. I use real separate frames, so I get two tiers of navigation control, ALT-TAB from my window manager to switch frmaes, and ye olde C-x o within a frame.

But everyone looks at me like I'm a kook when I show this off in person.

While I like lots of vertical space as much as the next person, I find that in practice there is a diminishing return in how useful one large monolithic window can be, and being able to split it (in the same file or not) is way more useful. It is striking to me how often I will have four files open simultaneously and be using all of them in quick succession.
I respect that as I come from a text-mostly low-level hacking background. But don't you notice the mouse cursor changes when it hovers over the pictures? Also the shadows and backgrounds of click-able pictures resemble buttons (smooth round edges.) Apple is famous for working very hard on perfecting the user experience.
Just outta curiosity... How did u put those vote up buttons in your post? :D
There's a ghost town in the middle of Silicon Valley too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge,_California
Are there any books on the subject of writing good marketing letters that you could recommend? If not, is there a specific name for the technique that I could Google?
Here's the rough outline: http://s5.tinypic.com/2db9vyw.jpg
X-axis is number of contributions. Y-Axis is percentage of people that have contributed at least X+1 times for the given X.

So we can segment that out with various tests to see how it affects the engagement curve. For example, how does the curve shift when a user gets a personalized message? or a generic e-mail? Or does contribution type A, etc etc.
I want an OMAP-based laptop that can run off batteries for 24+ hours on a single charge, that runs Linux, emacs and Django on a decent, 800+ line screen.

The way it is, the article is a series of complaints of a Visual Studio user who, appearently, can't rearange the windows in its own environment. Not everyone uses Visual Studio and most of those who use should be able to set up their environment comfortably.

I am fine with a widescreen laptop: I just use the rest of the screen for things other than source-code. For me, any landscape screen is less than perfect. I would much rather use a portrait monitor, but a laptop with a portrait display is less than practical.

I never used a square screen... Anyone willing to sell an NCD-16 1024x1024 X terminal?
If trees are made us using Leaf, Node, and Empty, tree "leaks" names, which is a disaster because lots of things have leaves, nodes, and empty. That's what the explanation seems to say.

It's unclear if calambrac's comment is meant to say that trees are actually made using something like tree.Leaf(int) or (more likely) tree() by itself and type disambiguation.

One reason why I've never looked seriously at Haskell is that all of the examples that I've seen are basically puns and there's no indication as to how one might build larger programs. I'm sure that there's some way to do so, but I assume that the advocates present the language in its best light.
I have a question. Are you making the loan to the corporation or to the individual?

If you are making the loan to the corporation, then it'd a fine business. You are basically limiting your upside, as opposed to an equity investment, but you will be able to calculate your revenue stream more easily. If the loan is to the corporation, then the founders won't be liable for the money, and you're just another investment vehicle.

If you are making these loans to the founders, then you're just another credit card company. I doubt there will be anyone good competing for your loans. The good people will get the equity, and only a dope would take a $100,000 loan at 20%, for anything. Maybe you can sucker some college kids like the credit card companies do.
I just remapped F1 to do the same thing as Esc in my .vimrc.
The fact remains if IQ is tapering off in the late 20's, the a child born to the parents in their 30's may not have as high an IQ as the parents. Personally my parents were in their mid-20's when I crawled out of the evolutionary slime, and in a sense I agree with you on the maturity and economic front - both factors were issues - and I think there has been growth there since, and my younger siblings had it better as far as maturity went, but honestly I wouldn't have it any other way, at least I know I got the best evolutionary shot I could get, lol! :-)
Wow... I saw this movie a few weeks ago when a friend interviewed Nina Paley and she gave him a copy of the DVD. She was lamenting the fact that she couldn't get funding to buy rights to use the great 20s music in the film. What a pleasant surprise to see this turn up on HN!

Incidentally, I saw this the day after watching Coraline in 3D, and I liked Sita MUCH better. The animation, graphics, "multithreaded" storyline, and music are captivating. Less can be more (speaking to the complexity of graphics, etc).

I recommend it heartily!
Unmarried (and presumably celibate) priests isn't universal, even in the "older" churches.

For example, at least one Eastern Orthodox church allows married priests. (IIRC, they have to get married before they get ordained.)

Rabbis are almost required to be married.
In Palo Alto, there's an interesting abandoned Sun Microsystems building (http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/sun_microsystems.htm). It might be gone now or fixed up, those pictures are a few years old.
www.customink.com ?
Interesting graph -- any idea why that second peak is followed by such a large drop?

(though i guess if you could answer that correctly, maybe you could make it go away)
I was born in the Detroit suburb of Garden City over 50 years ago and had lots of relatives in the area. Many of my Polish relations lived in Hamtramck. My father and uncle worked for Ford. In the 50s and 60s, we saw a lot of downtown, but things were on the decline even then. We moved out in 1966.

I came back to Detroit in 1979 as a manufacturing engineer for a company making components for the M-1 tank. Chrysler was the prime contractor, but right about that time, Iaccoca went hat-in-hand for his famous bailout. There were people selling Dallas papers in the median of Woodward Ave. Even then, I spent some time Downtown. The RenCen, Bricktown. But I lived out in Birmingham.

I tear up when I see the desolation that Detroit has become.
I don't know of any books that you could buy from Amazon; I learned 'on the job'. It kinda hurts me to do this, but check out 'the course' from http://www.marketingtips.com.
Being chipped so the club can automatically charge your drinks? God no. Being chipped so the police can track you after your are kidnapped? I dont think I want to live there. Chipping sponges so the surgeons can retrieve them? That makes sense.
26 + 29 + 41 = 96

Wow!
I'm not a neuroscientist. But I'm an avid reader of neuroscience blogs (not the shiny ones, the ones by and for scientists) and papers. The Torygraph isn't exactly qualitity media but I doubt they misinterpreted the paper that bad.

The problem with current research is it's requiring too much previous knowledge to grasp even the abstract. And it's getting more granular and harder to sell with mainstream headlines. I actually prefer it this way.

There is a large amount of neuroscience research from the last decade that didn't make it to mainstream media. Specially things that could offend people or cults.

Mainstream media is obsolete because of this. A small blog post with proper explanations as popups or links to references (even Wikipedia) delivers more efficiently.
If forwards compatibility is not accounted for, you could almost consider C, C++, Java and C# as the same language. There was a natural progression of syntax and features with very little that happened disruptively in the syntaxes in moving from one to the next (biggest jump, amusingly, was the one that was forwards compatible -- from C to C++).
For what it's worth, chipmakers been saying that flash drives will catch up with hard drives in price for about 17 years now. I first read an article about solid state drives catching up with rotating drives in 1992.

Right now a terabyte hard drive costs $81, and a terabyte of SSD costs $2684, I'm not going to hold my breath.
I wonder when the day will come that public torrent trackers start earning more than old media publishers?
Related: have an informational site that is monetised by AdSense. It's not that attractive, but was doing OK. One day, I upgraded the design to make it look more slick, and the CTR dropped to half of what it was. Left it for a week just in case it was a single-day anomaly, but it wasn't. Switched back to the ugly bland design and CTR jumped back to where it had been.
You don't have to; C++ can work just fine with object files using C name mangling, so it's no problem to mix C and C++ in the same project even if the source files are compiled with different compilers.
Just a small suggestion. Try to find a magazine which will agree to publish your story. If it's long you could split it and publish in chapters. When I was a kid I remember many stories for children were published that way and I liked them. There's something special when one have to wait for a month. As a side note: I hope there are still some published magazines.

I have a question, though. What do you mean by 'public domain'? Is it http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or something else? I think you should read more about Public Domain and posible difficulties http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/
Google uses C++ for compute-bound stuff.

Google's problems are big enough that constants matter.
For what it's worth, this is Hacker News. We're polite here and try to avoid snark whenever possible. We tend to offer explanations when we refute something rather than resorting to name calling. Observe:

http://img.expatsoftware.com/blog/vs_split.gif

That's a screenshot of Visual Studio with files lined up in columns. It's actually a really good development environment. You should give it a try one day.
As a product of the overabundant self-esteem training myself, I can verify that my narcissistic tendencies (coupled with my deep-rooted insecurities) has significantly (negatively) affected my relationships (of all types).
I don't think so, I'd have to check my server stats but I think that most of them have high speed internet access.

And I never did any research or anything to get into my niche. I found myself helping my friends to set up simple websites and I realized that other people might want the same help. I'm not a writer, so instead I just wrote software for the same group. It worked out for me.
It's been a fascinating experience developing our first app for salesforce.com AppExchange. Dan's post sums it up really well. Now to see how bSelling performs now that it's out there in the real world.
I'm a pakistani working abroad and I'll have to admit that seenreport has definitely kept me and my friends up to dated with the current rally in pakistan. Its a great idea and the best part is that you guys have implemented it with perfection.
see http://linkeddata.org/guides-and-tutorials

Basic principles are simple: use URIs to describe things and provide useful information about these things when requested:

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
No frickin' kidding.
Boxee iPhone remote app available on the App Store
I'd say this is bad advice. I disagree rather strongly with the idea that you should habitually lie to keep people from taking offense.

In general, I think I've been well-served by telling more truth than most people want to hear.
Ask HN: Looking for a web designer
I'm looking for a web designer to redesign our home page and overall CSS/HTML design. I'll take raw CSS/HTML, but bonus points if you can edit our Django templates directly. You would just be responsible for mock-ups and CSS/HTML implementation. I have a designer I work with for illustrations (logo, icons, etc.), and I do the javascript myself.

My website is http://www.trailbehind.com

1. Is any talented designer on HN looking for a paying gig?

2. Can anyone recommend a good designer?

3. If you don't have a personal contact, are there any resources you can point me at for finding a designer? I've looked at http://www.99designs.com, but I'd prefer a standard contract on an hourly or project basis to a design contest.
What a shame to see so many good buildings left to decay. Are there policies in US to let people use empty buildings? In Argentina, after the 2001 crisis, many factories and other buildings were taken by former employees. Several of those ventures were highly successful. But there was always the danger of the owner to show up and seize everything disregarding the new occupiers. IMHO there should be some legal cover to define a fair solution to this situation. But it is very stupid if society lets such an opportunity escape because of taking private property law too strictly.

Better a bunch of knowledgeable workers as entrepreneurs than a crack and prostitution den.
Just do "View Source" on its slides:
http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/
I don't like any of them actually. The most important part of the site, Mozilla's products, are listed below the fold.
Also anecdotal, but...

As I started getting into heavy research on recommender systems for our startup after being somewhat lax in my research reading for a few years I stumbled into some papers that were really hard for me to push through. I kept thinking, "I must be slipping, I know this stuff wasn't as hard for me in college."

Then at some point I needed to look up a couple things in some of my textbooks (I saved them all) and as soon as I picked them up I thought ... wait? That was the hard stuff? This is all so ... trivial. Since the progression from textbooks to academic papers had mostly come at some remove, I'd not noticed that I was gradually reading much harder material, to the point that the stuff that I found hard in computer science in college now seems all rather easy.

Now, I'm 28 at this point, but already I've noticed that I'm not as fast as I once was, but I've got more momentum. When I throw myself at a problem it's with the goal of crushing it rather than dancing around it. This seems to be what's awesome about smart folks that are in middle to older ages. There's like this blunt force of knowledge that can be thrown at hard problems. Great systems programmers in their 50s are awesome to work with.

Note, also, that the article also mentions that knowledge based abilities increase up until you're 60.
I think this is the best example I have ever seen of "Black people have to die so that white people can feel comfortable".

Seriously. Look at what you're saying. Too dangerous to protect African children from wasting death, but perfectly safe to prevent casual nuisance at your next barbecue? (Psst: what is the size of the average American backyard relative to the average African dwelling?)
haha. i was wondering how narcissism and eye balls related.
age 22 is peak. After 25 is downhill - though I feel ok.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4995...
same here. fortunately, it can be un-trained. or rather, better habits can be trained. there is no end, just little steps along the way.
Since when were vertical scrollbars bad?
> Less can be more (speaking to the complexity of graphics, etc).

It's true, in fact this is one of the core values that Matt Groening (creator of the Simpsons/Futurama) holds as he's written about before.

It's especially true of 2D (cel) animation.