skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You misunderstand me. I was not, in that comment, stating that women and children should be protected (or not) from the same things.

I was pointing out, simply, that (whether right or wrong), being "protected" from politics is in fact protection from oneself.

Now, you may feel that children should be protected from themselves, whereas women should not. That is a perfectly consistent position. The grandparent seemed to be unclear that that is what you were advocating, and that is the confusion I was clearing up.
He doesn't stash or throw rocks in the off season at the zoo. Says something about zoos, or at least the "look at the monkey" idiots who visit them, doesn't it?
For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requests it.

Typical Apple - simple, clever solution to a seemingly complex problem.
> Absolutely false. Nobody in the US has "no access to healthcare at all."

Absolutely false, you're confusing health care with emergency care. Plenty of people go without health care.
App monetization: Gambit launches, funnel metrics, ... (Andrew_Chen)
Designing a document database: Scale
You are ignoring Pat's point, which is that many of the homeless choose to be homeless. So you must answer the question: should we force homeless people into shelters?
Someone should slip him a slingshot (catapult).

But seriously, arming him with a Super Soaker will be awesome. He will get stress relief, children will enjoy it and zoo will get more money.
A quick look at Metacat (AI project out of Douglas Hofstadter's research group)
So they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!
Hrmm. He forgot about ActiveMerchant.

http://www.activemerchant.org/
When is Apple going to stop embedding Quicktime movies and move to streaming Flash like the rest of the world has?
One computer I owned did make them fun, although it still didn't lighten the blow of having to reboot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
IPod Shuffle gets smaller. Perhaps pointlessly so, but there you go.
ChubbyBrain: User-Generated Startup Reviews
Only indirectly. If a business can profit more from investing than it can from sitting the money in the bank, then it will regardless of the taxes. Higher taxes will lower consumption and raise costs, but they won't deter investment by themselves, otherwise nobody would start businesses in Sweden or Belgium.
Btw, there is now Mathematic Home Edition for only $300, with the same capabilities of the normal one, with one limitation - it can't be used in commercial setting.
django-cart and django-paypal ?
Besides the problems mentioned in the other comments, there are many homeless people who aren't really fit for any job, due to severe mental illness or drug abuse issues.
ActiveMerchant, Rails SAAS kit, etc.

The hard part isn't doing credit card payment. It won't take you fifteen minutes to integrate, e.g., single purchases of Paypal content into a typical Rails app. Trust me.

The hard part is you just introduced requirements for users, authentication, logging, administration, bookkeeping, accounting, and reporting into your app. And those requirements are, necessarily, different for everybody.

Its the same reason Rails doesn't have a One Way To Do It user signup & administration feature: everyone's needs are different and the overhead added by standardization is greater than the engineering effort saved by it.

(Sidenote: if you don't need subscriptions www.e-junkie.com and don't look back. $5 a month, saves a lot of boring report & email integration when you're starting. It took me about ten minutes to set up "People click this button to pay me, e-junkie mails them a license key." when I started. I didn't add anything to their solution for about 2 years. These days they call a script on my server so I can do stat tracking to my own satisfaction, but the core loop hasn't changed much at all.)
As they say, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The article graphs the maximum tax bracket with the total tax revenue, with no account for the number of people in this bracket or the contribution of all other brackets in the system. Its understandable, since doing the right thing would require a lot of data and would look a bit like calculus (revenue being the area under the product of two curves), and would sadly be too difficult for many readers.

But we don't have that data, so let me hypothesize a situation where this analysis isn't the whole truth. Article states that we take the same revenue whether the rich are taxed at 90% or 30%. Lets say that the left of the graph has 1 person making $1,000,000 in the 90% bracket, and 1000 other people making $50,000 in a 25% bracket. Total tax revenue is $13.4M.

Now at the right of the graph, we have a dip where the top bracket is at 35%, so in the same situation, our revenue should have dropped to $12.8M but was instead stable! Money on trees! Except there is a simple alternative explanation, which is that the bottom tax bracket went from 25% to 26%. Unfortunately, data on this is not supplied by the article.

It should be easy to see that raising taxes will raise tax revenue (not accounting for accounting tricks employed generally by the rich). Plotting a small component against an unqualified whole data set is plain poor research, and the WSJ should be ashamed.
C=Hacking (C64 Hackers' Magazine)
Iterative and Incremental
Good points - this is obviously a hard problem that hasn't been solved. Basically there are two opposites that both need to be fulfilled to solve the problem: It has to be both easy and secure.
Squirrels that hide seeds and nuts aren't planning for when they will be hungry in the future? In the chimp's case it's more obvious that this is planning rather than instinctual, but it would be nice if the article described what the experimenters consider the distinction.
That ape should be locked up. Oh, wait...
Gambit, a payment engine for social games
Pretty soon, half of all voters won't be paying a dime to fund the spending programs they vote for. That sounds dangerous.

In Singapore, which has a large number of social programs, many programs have a copay to counter the "buffet mentality" that comes from handing out lots of free goods. Consumption is subsidized, but it is not free. I'd like to see us take a similar approach.
Redis has a different use case then tokyo does. I think tokyo is beter for long term persistent data storage. But redis is much better as a state/data structure server.

Redis is faster then tokyo by quite a bit but is not immediately durable as in the writes to disk happen in the background at certain trigger points so it is possible to lose a little bit of data if the server crashes.

But the power of redis comes in its data types. Having LISTS and SETS as well as string values for keys means you can do O(1) push/pop/shift/unshift as well as indexing/slicing into lists. And with the SET data type you can do set intersection in the server. This allows for very cool thigs like storing a set of tags for each key and then querying for the intersection of the set of tags of multiple keys to find out the common set of tags.

I'm using this in nanite(an agent based messaging system) for the persistent storage of agent state and routing info. Using the SET data types makes this faster then keeping the state in memory in my ruby processes since can do the SEt intersection routing inside opf redis rather then iterating and comparing in ruby:

http://gist.github.com/77314

You can also use redis LISTS as a queue to distribute work between multiple processes. Since pushing and popping are atomic you can use it as a shared tuple space. Also you can use a LIST as a circular log buffer by pushing to the end of a list and then doing an LTRIM to trim the list to the max size:

redis.list_push_tail('logs', 'some log line..')
redis.list_trim('logs', 0, 99)

That will keep your circular log buffer at a max of 100 items.

With tokyo you can store lists if you use lua on the server, but to push or pop from a list you have to pull the entire list down, alter it and then push it back up to the server. There is no atomic push/pop of just a single item because tokyo canot store real lists as values so you have to do marhaling of your list to/from a string.
This is a great post. I am starting a company with a good friend of mine, and it's amazing how much time it takes to make sure we're both going down the same path, not just code-wise, but also in terms of marketing, pricing, hell, even the logo has required a lot of back-and-forth.

The one thing that I can add to this, is that make sure you go into business with somebody you can both win and lose an argument with. Plans change, markets change, and most importantly, people working together need to compromise. I'm lucky, in that my co-founder is a really reasonable guy -- hopefully he'd say the same about me.

To borrow a concept from PG: Make sure neither partner looks at the business as part of their identity.

Having done decently-sized projects (that never made money) on my own, I can definitely testify that the two-man-route is much, much harder.
Ask HN:  What good is a 'non-binding' letter of intent?
I feel like this is something that only moves us entrepreneurs sideways oppose to forward. Am I wrong? Should this be exciting news to hear from an investor or is this one of those 'kissing your sister moments'?
I think what the study shows is that listening to music goes beyond the encoding technique, like everything, it has the quality of contemporaneity; listening to music is made up of the music and the listening process, which includes the medium, vinyl, cassettes, cd, mp3 etc. We all have our way of remembering music, be it on 8 track, cassettes, or ipod. The current twenty somethings will reminisce about the old days, how their iPods sounded and how they would split their ear buds with their sweetheart of the day, just like the first guy and his Camero and sunsets with Susie :)

Its the same as photography, film, like cassettes, vinyl etc is no better than digital, its just different. The medium is an important part of any art form, possibly with the exception of literature. For the visual and music arts I have seen this phenomenon often but I am not sure if it applies much to books. The medium is largely the same I suppose - we've moved on from writing on pigskin, but for the past few hundred years and book today is much the same as a book from anytime, only the content has changed. The arts move, and are moved by technology at different paces. Possibly the Kindle will change things, but it hasn't had enough time to know yet.
I was going to say that my opinion had shifted - except that ErrantX's reply seems reasonable. A $500 prize with relatively little publicity seems unreasonable for an operation that putatively takes a specialized SEM and a week of clustered computer time. A $50,000 prize (possibly paid for by insurance) would be more to the point, if they're really confident; and if the recoverers need a standard OS or other recognizable standard files in order to decode the mechanical operation of the HD, why not make that part of the challenge too?
Teens Rate Their College Chances Online
An Office Safety PSA - The Daily WTF
Won't this be too slow to be useful for anything except a proof of concept?
Note: This was originally a little more harsh.

I don't think I am selfish and ignorant for worrying about the incentive effects involved when a majority of the voting public do not pay anything for the programs they vote for.

Of course, I am pretty poor right now myself (Grad school), so your suggestion that my taxes should be doubled doesn't really do a lot.
Twilio turns phone calls into HTTP requests
Plenty fast enough for IM.
Could you provide, please, the link of that story about CDs?
How the Knight News Challenge boosted program awareness 110%
It's the way the main browsers are going. Firefox is still wrestling with it, as I understand it, because it adds more overhead for memory which is obviously something they were already fighting with.
You're correct, the iPod earphones (all of them) aren't suited well for working out. Weight lifting? Yeah, you can get away with them there, as long as you don't mind the low-quality sound. Any in-ear type will stay put better, however.

Running or cycling? Not a chance. iPod headphones will fall out of your ears within the first 100 feet. I've never seen anyone running with iPod headphones; just walkers or commuters on the subway.

Exercise headphones are "disposable" too. I'll go through a pair every 4-6 months because the speakers eventually get clogged up with junk from sweat and eventually get muffled out. Speaker wire connections get frayed too since they're moving around a lot.

Sony MDR-J11G headphones work well for me running and cycling. They're $10-15 each depending if you buy them on eBay or in a store.

Apple wants $29 for replacement headphones. Even if they were designed for sports as well as the MDR-J11G's, they'd still be a rip off at that price.
Used tube amps can work very nicely.
The corrected charts and the author at that link say that it's inconclusive. Which is pretty safe to say.

Perot charts are interesting, more detailed and transparent. They cover areas you are worried about specifically the breakdown of different types of tax. If they are misleading they are transparent (enough) so that at least the user can figure it out. They cover a number of spending and tax issues:

http://perotcharts.com/category/charts/taxation-charts/

http://perotcharts.com/category/charts/
OMG, Apple will burn in hell over latest iPod Shuffle
Last.FM joins Google's rights row
Etech session liveblogging: Mr Hacker Goes to Washington
Why work when the printing press steals your labor?
Zappos and Magnify Join Forces to Combine Retail With Web 2.0 Video
Google knows where you surfed last summer
you're talking about a monopoly situation. I'm talking about a startup that competes for low wage/low skill time and then contracts this work out. It really isn't much different from the prison work programs, except the homless can leave anytime.
Living the Technomadic Life
This is a great idea!!!

Now for another idea that someone may want to run with: a similar concept for local farms that don't ship -- pickup only.

The idea came to me because I live on a small hobby farm and I produce eggs (thinking of getting a few pigs for meat & goats for milk...). Much more than my family needs, but not worth the effort of marketing and selling them, so I just give away the excess; nobody refuses farm-fresh eggs! There's another farm not far from here that sells bison (buffalo) meat, but you must preorder months in advance. His sales are from a big sign out on the road.

What I'm proposing is a site where small farms that want to sell their wares but simply don't have the time to do consumer sales & marketing could list what we have available, customers in the city (we're about 40 minutes outside Minneapolis/St Paul and not far from many suburbs) could prepay online and then pickup what they need when it's ready and the site can take a cut of the proceeds, or better yet, advertise local restaurants, cookbooks, etc to make a profit. Then the "little guys" like me can make a few extra bucks, the consumers get local, fresh meat & produce, and everybody ends up ahead. I'm not very interested in webapps, so I'm not likely to pursue the idea, but I think it's viable.
Yes it's tough and takes a lot of work to stay in sync, but it's also very healthy. I share the same experience.
Sergio is very pleased
“I’m very happy. This is what I’ve always dreamt of since I was a child. Suddenly the right circumstances were there.” said Sergio Busquets after signing the contract. “My agent and the team representatives worked very hard over the last few months and finally we came to an end. I’m delighted that I’ll be able to play for FC Barcelona.”
This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.
I agree with you on that point david. Not sure whether to describe it as "being redundant" or "being consistent" though.
Just commented on the post, but I know there are tons of smart hackers here who are prolly also interested. I've been working on this with a friend and will have the beta version ready for developers sometime in April. Email me at gmail or dm @kortina to get on the beta list. Our goal is to make credit card payments so easy your little sister can swipe credit cards at a lemonade stand.
> world's smartest country

South Korea?
In other words, make sure you aren't both a couple of passive-aggressive powderpuffs that will steam roll each other into oblivion.
This is a great hack, although it requires a lot of work. I have it installed on my server and my Mac, and surfing/e-mailing works fine.

I have been toying with the idea of having the client part ported to my iPhone, so I can use paywall wifi directly from a mobile device. This would require porting the Perl client code over to C.
At an individual level it is hard to gauge the effect of lowered taxes on productivity and employment. This is why we have to step back and look at the aggregated data across all businesses. For the theory to work, there must be at some point businesses who are on the edge of whether to hire or not. High volume low margin businesses I would think have the most direct relationship between taxes and employment.

There's another aspect to hiring that we should consider. If you receive a tax break, you can pass the savings on to customers in lower prices or bring more customers in through advertising. You are right, just because you have the money doesn't mean go hire more people. Smart business owners know that hiring people should only be done when the value they could bring the business outweighs the cost. The point is that lower taxes can let you expand or market to more customers, and as business grows, you will employ more people to keep up with demand.
Which YC Alum?
and why would homeless people volunteer for this if it was the case?
what's worse?

being on the street with no prospects

or

being on the street but having the option to work for basic amenities if you choose?

i think a lot of these criticisms are being unrealistic about how horrible being homeless is. Especially in cities where it SNOWS. Homeless people freeze to death every winter. Hell, if i was freezing to death I would rob someone just to get thrown in prison. At least prisoners have food and shelter.
Not really. As a django user I've found many apps to help in this that are extremely easy to integrate, and for what I could not find I built my own.

I built a django-simple-cart for our works websites, and then integrated it with a modified django-paypal within a single day. There are other django cart solutions, but even with mine I can plug it into any of our django sites and within a matter of minutes that site has a working payment solution.
> The biggest problem we faced was that my partner had just gotten into a relationship which requires almost as much time as a new venture.

This is when you start giving people ultimatums. Sounds dramatic, but it isn't. It's what's required to run a successful business - having a girlfriend isn't business, it's charity.
chris smoak, shoutfit.com and another developer tools thingy.
Google's strength is ads that you (likely) want to see, instead of flashing banners, stealing your attention. Ads are presently targeted by your google search, and by your gmail content.

Note that google already tracks your searches: http://www.google.com/history/
The article's right, you have to watch the video to see what this is really like. Impressive.
I should also clarify that my figures are slight underestimates of the actual figures: I can only "see" Mechanical Turk through the eyes of an average worker. So I cannot see if a requester asks multiple people to complete the same HIT and, sometimes, I cannot observe the details for HITs for which I have not passed the qualification test. I still think that the numbers will be at the same order of magnitude.

I am not sure if that's a valid assumption. Almost every HIT I've written has been at least 2x (and typically 3+x) for redundancy. It is cheaper/faster to code for consensus than verify results. I have seen several HITs for which the task is likely massively redundant.
The banks are insolvent. Mortgages and auto loans and credit cards are all going bust. There is nothing panic driven about the depressed value of those assets. Studies they've done on CDOs show that they are worth even less than what the pessimists projected (30 cents on the dollar for super senior tranches and 5 cents for mezzanine).

If this were a matter of illiquidity, the massive liquidity the Fed has injected into the system in the last six months would have ended the crisis.

here's more: http://hedgedbet.blogspot.com/2009/03/friedman-toxic-assets-...
Việc làm, bán hàng mỹ phẩm Oriflame Thụy Điển , viec lam them
Expensify’s Free Expense Report System Takes The Hassle Out of Reimbursements
Where is the Eurisko source code, Dr. Lenat?

Did it ever even exist?
Absolutely! There has been a big resurgence in this.

I've got a http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/ tube/valve amplifier. I rip my CD's to FLAC, stream via a squeezebox, into a monitor-grade DAC-1 (i.e. neutral sound) into the amp. So it's bit-perfect digital, which is then given character by the amplifier.

Mcintosh were once the king of tube amplifiers. They moved away to solid state back in the late 70's / early 80's. Then, as part of an anniversary, they decided to revamp some old tube designs. To their surprise, they liked the sound, do they bought some of the designs back.

I remember reading they were stunned at the quality of the actual tubes - obviously back then they were using tubes that were made using 30+ year old manufacturing techniques. In the meantime, the Soviets had actually put a lot of work and research into tubes (as they were late to the silicon game)... Anyway - Upshot is that you can get tubes nowadays that are extremely high quality and reliable - perhaps moreso than in their peak.

I've also noticed there are a lot of tube iPod docks now as well: http://www.google.com/search?q=tube+ipod+dock&ie=utf-8&#... .. They are reasonably cheap - As for the quality, I can't imagine, but they are around.

Edit: The place that tubes (KT88's and the like) are also still found is in guitar amplifiers - for the same soft clipping reasons mentioned above.
> This "bugger your neighbor" attitude that prevails in this country is removing every freedom that we teach our children make this country great.

This "defend the wealthy" attitude that prevailed in this country for the last 30 years has nearly ruined this country and served only to further increase the economic inequality between the rich and the poor.

If you think that what makes this country great is that the rich are allowed to walk all over the poor then fuck you. Now give me your wallet you greedy bastard, you can skip the steak so someone else can get some health care.
Is Apple about to shuffle the headphone industry again?
This is true, and I think the article mentions that explicitly and implicitly. However, that's not the point it's trying to make. The point it's trying to make can be summarized in one sentence:

When starting companies with fellow egotists, do not be passive-aggressive, and do not choose passive-aggressive partners.