skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not really looking for it, I'm trying to create a bailout. Just looking usually doesn't work.

How could this be a truly _worthwhile_ cause? I'm not a starving child. I'm healthy, I have a great job, a great family, great friends. This is suppose to be 0) fun 1) eventually become entertaining 2) encourage other bailout seekers to do something about their bailout seeking.

Cheers,
Andrei
So many new entrants. Good sign.
Manufactured stuff is "information poor"? What does that mean?
The Balsamiq story is really quite addictive. I want to buy the application, despite having no solid need for it and a yearly income below his daily income.
I'd be interested in a watt vision beta if you have any.
The Beginning and the End- the Great I AM
I voted you up because I am thoroughly confused now and it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Classifieds Click at Mizzou's Journalism iPhone Competition
Tengwar, Tolkien's Elvish writing system, had a sort of table of letters instead of an alphabet. If you knew the glyph at the top of each column and the permutation for each row, you could figure out all the characters. It was pretty cool.
I mean in the information theoretic sense. A 3d representation of it would compress well.
Are US students really that bad?
I've seen many time Unarchiver saying a archive was corrupted or was unable to decrypt with the right password.
Now I use unrar in command line. (imported from macport) . Much better!
It tells you that if that's your hypothesis. If you think rich people are smarter, it tells you that not only do they make more money, but they're more responsible about saving it, too. So even though Mr. $80K has to buy a nice car and a couple suits, and Mr. $40K doesn't, Mr. $80K still spends less on liquor and lotto tickets.
I would disagree. I use frameworks because (a) they save me loads of time and (b) I already know how all that garbage works anyway. I know how HTTP cookies work; I have no desire to implement sessions myself because they're a waste of time and, frankly, proper cookie handling is a pain in the ass.

That being said, I know programmers who don't know SQL outside of an ORM, and if it hasn't bitten them in the ass yet, I am very confident that some day it will. I'm a hacker in that I will occasionally write my own http client or something like that, just to learn a new language or networking engine. I'm a professional hacker in that I'd just as soon use one already created by a competent person (or persons) and use my time to write something more interesting.

The mantra of "good coders code, great steal/reuse" has, for my entire career, more or less proven to be true.
C and C++ are not the same language.
Even in the web-development world, that might be too general of a description.

I think either type of hacker would be happy with using a framework if it wasn't closely related to what they need to do. For example, my latest app has a ton of Javascript code, but still needed some functionality on the server. I used Django to get that part done with quickly. For the actual Javascript, I used jQuery as a library, not an application framework.

As a side note, I feel Django does a pretty good job in being transparent. Once I've got it set up, it's transparent where in the view what loads and calls what, even if it is the loading/calling of templates and models. On the other hand, I never did get very far into Rails.
Wolfram Alpha, Semantic Web, and back to the pre AI winter future
Are you sure that he didn't do it on purpose? Along with his "eleventh rule" and the fact that you're repeating something stated in the HN guidelines, it seems on-the-nose enough to be absurd. I laughed when I read it.
I'm beginning to see Raganwald's point about reductio ad absurdum.
Bah. Why monolithic frameworks suck. If the framework is implemented as a bunch of nicely integrated yet modular libraries that you can use standalone, you can use the fork without the knife and plate.
Numbers (numerals) were not distinct from letters in the West for a long time. China didn't have "letters," and did have Chinese characters that serve as numerals (with place value notation probably coming later there than in India, although some Chinese scholars like to claim priority for that over India). By the time the West had numerals, it had had a well established alphabetical order for more than a millennium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
Yes, there is no doubt whatever that the alphabetical order of Roman script comes from Greek, which in turn gets its alphabetical order from Near East Semitic alphabets.
>The good news is, you don't have to be part of the problem. There is hardly any reason to use the "popular" languages. They don't have better platform support, they don't have better libraries, and they don't have better tools. So don't worry about them, they are for other people :)

This is why I'm not interested in Clojure, regardless of how nice a lisp it may be. Java libraries are poorly-designed, the prospect of wrestling with them again brings back memories of frustration. And you can bet that no one will ever write better ones, because the community will discourage people from "duplicating functionality."
re: the link to the youtube video of a Google talk about TODO lists ...

On the one hand, people's "TO DO" lists may seem trivial, but some of the key lasting archaeological artifacts have been lists of cattle and grain being brought to market.

Also, since the talk was given at Google, it is not really the TODO list of any one person that is up for consideration, but rather the collective of ALL TODO lists around the world and what information they contain and what they might reveal about the people who make them.

I am not saying the author who gave the presentation (and wrote the book) has it all figured out, but looking carefully at something simple on a massive scale is, in fact, what many startups connected to ycombinators are all about.

Rather than "people doing amazingly trivial stuff", we might say YC startups are "people doing amazing stuff with trivial things".
Given that this was his first comment I doubt it.
Thanks for the save! I hate to see my karma erode.
You're lucky. I live in Appalachia without a car. If I don't want to pay $11 for cab fare, I have to walk 5 and a half miles over a MOUNTAIN to get to work.
New York City gyms can cost that much, sadly.
I never said the "poor are irresponsible", and there's no reason to get hot over things people don't say. What I said was: Excepting serious disadvantages (like being disabled) responsibility is the #1 factor in whether you're poor or not. If you think that your genius-level IQ made you non-poor, then you're short-selling yourself, which is a psychological folly. Picture your same life, with yourself have twice the IQ but 10x the laziness. Now what's your bank statement look like?

There's also a #2 factor and a #3 factor and a #4 factor, etc, and some of those reflect the hideous face of dame fortune. But attributing guilt to ANYONE, the winner or the loser, on chance, is a stupid mistake. So-and-so was born with a low IQ. Not my fault. In fact, as a eugenics supporter, I did my best to prevent it. (<-- joke)
I just got back from the EPRI/NIST "Smart Grid" workshop in DC, and can report that every meter installed by every power company within the next couple years will support this capability, and the rollout costs are going to be borne by the taxpayer. There is a metric crapton of cash getting plowed into this very specific initiative (AMI meters, most of which can link to "home area networks" via ZigBee, all managing an ANSI standard table definition).

For reasons that I hope are somewhat obvious, Matasano has had some limited involvement with actual on-the-ground projects here. The products are there, the PO's are getting cut, meters are getting retrofitted or replaced by the tens of thousands.

I think it's hard to say whether this is good news or bad news for the current crop of "smart grid" startups. You worry maybe that this is going to be a walled garden for the utility companies, but then a lot of these meters speak open standards, and there are jurisdictions (like, all of Texas) that mandate that customers own their power data. I also heard more than one utility talking about products that were going to bypass the utility/vendor AMI networks and just do a lot of this stuff over the Internet.

One of the more interesting (or at least complex) ideas that I saw getting tossed around was Demand Response / Load Shedding startups; the idea that a startup could contract with a utility to sign customers up for a program that would trigger different power profiles (like, "turn off your air conditioner") when the utility needed it, and in return get a break on their bill.
Astrails:  PostgreSQL and Subversion support for astrails-safe s3 backup
For me its worth it even just for their "Financial Advantage Program" -- specifically the insurance plans:

http://ieeeinsurance.com

We don't have access to all the plan types here in Canada, and I can't speak for price comparisons between the IEEE plans and those of other providers in other regions; but in Canada the premium on e.g. a group term life T-100 blows away anything else I've seen...
How to get 150,000 people to read your blog post in 1 week
It certainly does not include compounding; the 806 figure is derived from the stated weekly cost of $100 -- $15.5 -- times 52 weeks, a simple sum.

A calculation of the annual rate based on 15.5% compounded weekly would be much, much worse.

The effective annual rate is somewhat worse than 806%, because if you rolled over your $100 principal loan each week, paying just the $15.5 fees, then paid back the principal at the end of the year, you've paid $806 in interest, yes. And if that full interest payment had been made only at the end of the year, your annual rate would have been 806%. But you paid a lot of that early, so your effective rate was higher.
"But C++ often hits a sweet-spot between languages where high-level abstractions are available with the raw power of C when you need it." He then goes on to say he uses Ruby and not Python. Is Ruby missing nice C integration? Python is oft-touted as the sweet spot here, although I have to confess I haven't done a whole lot of Python/C or Python/C++ integration.
This aligns well with the concept of economic mobility: Team of Brookings Institution researchers publish study - http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_American_Dre...

From the PDF: the U.S.A. has fallen behind other western nations, such as Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden in maintaining the concept of economic or upward mobility...

And this is the main reason, as I recall, why the U.S. was always portrayed as more desirable than European nations (and it was true in the 50s; part of my German family immigrated to the U.S. in the 50s). If you take that concept away - why would you want to live in the U.S. anymore:

- none of U.S. cities rank in the top
100 most livable places (Mercer Cities Ranking)

- high schools and many public schools rank low in comparison to other western nations

- education is much more expensive

- there is no organized trade school education, like in
Germany, Britain etc.

- salaries for the lower third are less

- health care (don't get me started)

- hardly any social safety net

- crime, largest per capita prison population in the world

- infrastructure - roads, bridges, buildings etc. (don't get
me started; it's almost third world country level)

- average lasting quality of housing (drywall, cheap wood framing, bad carpentry on windows and doors etc.)

- manufacturing quality and capability: look at American made cars or power tools (I always prefer foreign made)

- half of the government budget goes towards the military

- lack of public transportation (Standard Oil bought up the urban train networks in the 1940's and had them decommissioned: street cars, urban transit etc.)

- no functioning Euro-style city cores, urban sprawl, stuffed highways with commuters

- and the most important fact of all: the byzantine law system of the U.S. and the huge costs of lawyers and law suits (this affects many areas); lawyers can cost over $ 500/ hour and if you can't afford one you are out of luck; further, judges are not high-end lawyers trained as judges (like in Germany etc.) but can be any random divorce lawyer that got appointed regionally, as I understand

Final verdict: the U.S. has been badly managed in the last 30 years, and the poor carry the burden.

The final evidence is given in the study of Cliometrics and measuring average body height of nations (an indicator for health/ prosperity): it used to be (up until the 1950s) that U.S. Citizens were taller than Europeans; this trend has been reversed in the last 30 years - now the Euros are taller (especially the Dutch)
Thanks for clarifying this; as someone who didn't take the usual CS in university route this often confused me.

I've added C to my list of languages to learn after Python, mostly from recommendation on HN and I want to get into machine learning.
I don't know. Even Komolgorov's "Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning" is pretty easy to read.

My theory is that instead of teaching the abstract definition and proofs for group like general college math professors, V.I. Arnold might start lectures from some games/problems in daily life that we can apply group theory on to kids. (Of course those kids maybe gifted in math already) then from the special concrete case as basis, he then showed students the abstract stuffs behind it.
what does this have to do with "cloud"? because it's simply hosted on amazon? does that really mean anything different? does it affect your users at all? do they even know what it means?

just sick of the overuse of the term.
Interesting. I thought the color scheme was very important because you only get 30 seconds or so to convince a first-time user to stay for the 31st second.
It's not about knowing the core differences, it's that the actual practice of writing a lot of C makes one familiar with its advantages. It's difficult to appreciate the value of C's small size if you are only coding in C++. Without doing a lot of coding in straight C, it'll be a lot harder to understand and recognize the various tricks and techniques other C programmers use to make the most of the small language.

I'm not saying there are no good reasons to learn C++. Just don't think that you'll really appreciate C until you've actually used it all by itself (with maybe a few C++isms here and there like //comments).
Most languages with C integration can be integrated into C++ quite reasonably, if not optimally.
I just like Ruby more. You can connect both Python and Ruby to C APIs, and I've done so in the past from Ruby.

C++ integration is usually moderately more annoying since once you start moving beyond ordinal types cross-language communication becomes hairier. C ends up being the lingua franca between programming environments a lot of the time.
But the loans are cyclical.
You take out a $300 and have to pay $345 next week. Next week, since you are troubled financially, cannot make the payment, so you take a $345 loan and have to pay $400 next week.

Continue until they cut you off and sic a collection agency on you.
Repeating the same words often doesn't do much for SEO anymore. At least not on Google.

It's all about high quality links these days.
You completely missed the point of the article, which was that I can add these features to the language without waiting on the language designer. Microsoft added three key technologies to C# 3, one of which was syntactic sugar for the other two. That's irrelevant to my point.
Well, some languages have so much apparent power that it's easy to be seduced into thinking you hardly need libraries, since you can just build it yourself right quick. Common Lisp, for example.
Economics of Sick Days
It's anecdotal and just one point on the graph, but it is absolutely on topic and a valid response to your post.

You ask what I would personally do to make one person stop being poor? Well, it worked for me, so I would give that person the opportunity and the means to do so in the form of money for higher education. You can't personally teach the masses one on one.

I do agree with some of your points, but it seems that you are asserting that money isn't the answer. I disagree. If college were free then money wouldn't be the answer.
I'm not sure that article is a fair discussion. To me, the framework wouldn't do as your quote says.

My framework would ask me how many people I want for dinner, what mood I'd like, and what should be on the menu. Then it would surround my table with exactly the right number of chairs, lay out appropriate crockery and cutlery for the courses, and switch on suitable lighting and music.

It would also give me a facility to override its choice of lighting and music to specific settings if I wanted to, and a way to tell it one of my guests is left-handed and another is a vegetarian so their places at the table can be adjusted accordingly.

Of course, my framework would suck at laying out food for a finger buffet for 50 at my big party, but then if that's what I wanted, I doubt I would have started with that framework anyway. And I'd still have to decide on the music and lighting.
You ask an odd question, paraphrased: "Why can't he be some of the things he is, while not being others?" Part of the reason he's done it is because he has these views. You can't ask him to separate them out. And I can understand it, because I share some of his views. If anything, it's admirable that he's walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

Some people do enjoy living 'off the grid' (so to speak) and aren't as radical as this guy. They just less likely to set up web sites about what they've done, as they've no motivation to promote their message (if they even have one).
Yahoo Placemaker: Extract Location Data from Any Text
Why don't you use Intersquash.com?
Cappuccino is a completely client side framework. It requires nothing on the server. It is written in JavaScript and Objective-J (a small set of extensions to JavaScript). It uses no python.
The search for a nearby second Earth
Open Database Alliance: New Direction for mySQL
Notes from the first session at Founder Institute
"Bland"

[on applying lossy compression to pg's comments (parent and child of your comment)]
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Let's not mumble-mumble "choices" -- that makes it sound like you could be doomed forever if, in a fit of adolescent stupidity, you went out with friends instead of studying for a geometry test.

Here are the durable wreck-your-life decisions you can make at age 14:

1) Dropping out of high school, at age 14.

2) Getting thrown in jail for crimes you committed, at age 14.

3) Getting pregnant, at age 14.

They don't seem all that hard to avoid now, do they? And they don't look all that hidden now, do they? Its not like rich people get together and say "Psssst, pssst: having a baby at age 14 will wreck your life. Pass it on but don't tell the poor people!"
Interesting. The design is somewhat similar to how SpiderOak works. They were both created at about the same time, it seems.
Bikes are good for non-poor people too. Walking is not the only option if you are car-less.
Funny, in the same exact situation. Building a deployment app and deciding on a billing system. Was thinking about just writing a custom one or maybe writing something for Ubercart since it's drupal-based.
I know where you're coming from; I love writing cynical "buzzword alarm" comments. This time you got unlucky and criticized a legitimate project; I wouldn't worry too much about it.
It's worth pointing out that IQ's advantage is a diminishing return. I imagine that the advantage is in how many people you're smarter than, rather that in how smart you ultimately are.
Mozilla Labs Jetpack
The installed base of smart meters is going to dwarf Wattvision deployments, but you can probably safely bet that a YC startup will kick the ass of the consultants the utilities bring in to build "portals" and reporting.
Of course not. Does Hacker News really have to ask itself if Symantec has secretly solved the halting problem?
It is unfair at the least to compare this to jQuery. This library attempts to bridge the gap between jQuery and Django for AJAX calls by being in between.

If you mean you are better sticking with raw Django views and jQuery AJAX calls, that could be true.

I was planning on writing a few helper functions for this myself as a lot of my AJAX work is getting repetitive and could be refactored, so I will at least read through before passing judgement.
A Visual Guide to the Federal Reserve
I can imagine many many clients following a particular user on twitter, awaiting commands. Perhaps "zombies"?
The problem with relying on economists is that they tend to rely on things such as GDP, housing starts, and price of gold, all of which focus on the past. These also happen to be items that can be easily combined into a mathematical equation. What economists struggle with is the ability to see, or take into consideration, the average American’s thoughts, fears, education, and progress, or things that can’t be counted.

Depends on the school of economists. Austrian economics is all about that kind of stuff; the Law and Economics school (surely the most entertaining -- you do realize that selling children ought to be legal, right?) also does; the heterodox lefty types tend to talk about that kind of thing when discussing why cash incentives don't always work and how income inequality kills.

So maybe jgervin should listen to some other economists.
I think my objection to your generalizations about Americans was fully justified. The US is an extremely diverse country, and trying to paint Americans as materialistic or less-holy-than-thou is really, well, stupid.

"Nations" are composed of diverse individuals and groups, but they also have their unique, combined national identity[1]. I am not making sweeping generalizations about "Americans", I am taking their self-identification and their actions at face value and looking to see whether those words and actions are inline with the profession of "In God We Trust."

Everything, from the declaration of independence, to the conquest of the South/Western Mexican states, to becoming a sea-faring world power, to occupation of Philippines to the industrial revolution, mass immigration and everything. All the "American Dream" mythology, upward mobility, white-picket-fence and two-car-garage house, competition, excellence in sports, variously named "Generations" (an age-demographic category that has no other peer in the world) .. this is not exactly a defeatist nation that believes in predestination. No where in the this massive running engine that we call American daily life does God figure in; just look at the morning rush, when Americans go through the ritual of drive-through breakfast and traffic jams. That's an all too human pursuit of life, driven by selfish interests. And there is nothing wrong with it.

But it mocks one's intelligence to see these very people tack random trite quotes and slogans from their religious past onto their current everyday life. It would be honest of them to fucking come clean, or sit together in a massive group-therapy session to reflect on the disparity between their words and their actions. And I say that as a person who prefers their actions, over their phony appeal to scripted/printed moral aphorisms. Cut the judeo-christian faux-altruistic crap already.

--

[1] ignore for now existence of consensus on national-unity by all the alleged members/citizens.
The Longest Story Ever Told