skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are no "bad" parts of Bratislava. There are massive "bad" parts of the Bay Area. There are even larger "bad" parts of Rio. The more bifurcated the wealth, the more you have the gated communities and the unwashed masses.

About the flat tax, that is definitely interesting. I think most tax systems are horribly broken. Buffet recently complained that he paid less in taxes than his housecleaner. I think he's a great man for saying that, and it's truly atrocious. Something has to be done.
Some kind of debt slavery calculation? :)
this is probably only useful to someone doing math stuff, anyone else its more or less completely useless

Some of the other examples posted as comments here look useful in disciplines outside math. I just put in a hairy system of two equations in two unknowns[1] made up randomly by my students, so that none of the coefficients or constants were preselected for easy computation. Alpha calculated the exact rational number solution set for x and y right away. Alas, the export results to .PDF link wasn't working just now, but that would be a cool feature for teaching my math class.

[1] 7672x+1357y=3, 63/8659x+1862y=5672

x = -9514160366/17670859355, y = 53828777381/17670859355
You have said that some sites like xkcd have a permanent downweight. Is it only a domain by domain thing? If it can be story by story then you or the editors can just flag stories as lightweight to tweak the front page at will, or push a second type of flag to the community at the expense of some extra complexity.
Unusual Gourmet Gifts
Anniesuniquegifts.com sells gourmet gifts, organic and gluten free gifts, organic coffee, gluten free food, organic food, corporate gifts, baby gifts, gift for men, gifts for women, gourmet food, chocolate, wine gifts, tea, gifts for all holidays.world.
Nice :P You can have wolfram and I'll take ACC titles and we'll call it even :o)
This is the SECOND TIME a prominent site has been killed by dicks when there was no backup.

What is the problem here?
I wouldn't underestimate the intelligence of computer scientists working at Google.
Really, if you manage to formulate that query, think about the answers, and type them in, you are most likely not that drunk.

Edit: Still, interesting.
Do other frameworks have this problem, and to the same degree as rails?
Been reading Abtruse Goose? http://abstrusegoose.com/149

That's the first thing he though of too, apparently.
It is now... http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html
This is difficult for a number of reasons. As I mentioned in a previous post, the big reason is that sizes are not standardized. A size 32 waisted pant can be a true size 32, or really a size 38. Also, people's sizes fluctuate, usually increasing.

The 2nd part of your question, simply defining what style of clothing to wear is even more difficult and probably impossible to automate. However, there are professionals you can hire which will solve the problem for you. It's not cheap, but if you're single and make a good programming salary it may be a better investment than the latest digital camera or gaming system.
It gave me a load capacity error with a quote from 2001:A Space Odyssey, then directed me to a live webcast of the control center:

http://www.wolfram.com/broadcast/wolframalpha/
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=can+entropy+be+reversed...
Assuming zero interest :-)
The reply was made because there are indeed plenty of rich people who made fortunes outside of software, Sam Walton is a great example.
Only cause finance wasn't listed.
I live in an area very close to there (still in the DC metro) which has houses which go for 400K and up, and yet I pay just over $1200 in rent. Renting and buying are often out of sync with each other, for whatever reason (in east Alabama a few years ago, it was the other way around; you could easily buy for less than rent).
After playing with WA for a while it seems to me that it is not so much a better search engine as it is a better encyclopedia. Many search results read like condensed Wikipedia articles.
Nothing says "nice to have you on board" as "here's your vesting schedule and you've got a one year cliff", but it's still a good idea to do.

I think a lot of the problems with prenups is a chicken and egg sort of thing. If they were a standard part of the process they'd be less offensive.
It's not necessarily stupid. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is being hit from everybody that follows tech news, and so it's taking a huge load of hits. The delayed loading doesn't come from the images: look at the page as it loads and you'll see that the longest delays are coming not from the process of loading the image but from performing all the necessary calculations in the background. That's the slow part.

"Infuriatingly" is a bit of a harsh descriptor, don't you think? There are a few things that make text better than images online, and loading time is rarely one of the factors. The first issue is indexing - but Wolfram Alpha's results are so specific to the question asked that there's not much being lost if they're worrying only about providing a useful service and not one that Google hits on. The second issue is interactivity - but they provide easily copied text, so they're taking care of that one. (That may help indexing as well.)

Meanwhile, providing information as images means no time fiddling with style on their part, and it means I can very easily transfer their generated image for use online or in files and have it look nice.

'Designery'? Do you mean, 'Styling that accurately and attractively shows the relationship between various pieces of text and their various importances'?
Wolfram Alpha: Why didn't you plan for a lot of traffic?
Is anyone else having a horrible time using the site? I can understand it probably has a lot of traffic right now, but come on! you think they would plan for that. Nothing worse than a hyped up site that you can't even use. I'm turned off already.
What do you mean by 'the issues of precision and recall' ?
You can definitely use your own. Try Janrain's offering, or just use django auth.
I can remember when it was even harder to download the first version of Netscape (which wasn't even called Netscape that long ago, if I remember correctly), so I'm used to the first day or two of business being overwhelming on new servers. But the results seem pretty good, once you get through, so I don't think that this is an epic fail quite like Cuil, but rather a new venture with growing pains.
Now if we could tell it to consider interest then I would be impressed.
look what happened to netscape...
I bet Google Squared won't be slow when it goes live.
The crime problem needs to be solved first, or employers will simply never return to the burned out areas. As one super market in Detroit says ( http://www.detroitblog.org/?paged=2 ):

A day in the life of Tom Boy Super Market consists partly of stopping people from robbing the place blind. “There’s so many days when I don’t do nothing,” Jitu says. “My main job is to run the office and I don’t have to be here, but I have to come anyway. You don’t want to have, like, one person here, and then half the store is gone. We have to have so many people. They don’t have to do nothing, but they have to be here.”
I own the hardware of my iPod touch. I have the right to jailbreak it, and in doing so forsake Apple's promise to help me when things to wrong.

Of course I have control. I just don't have control if I use both Apple's hardware and their software as Apple originally designed it. That's perfectly within Apple's jurisdiction as a company.

I understand why you might think that their stance is ridiculous, but think of it like this: Apple's design strategy is to make products that are foolproof. That means blocking something like a background application that might ruin my experience, even if that means taking away some of my control. It limits what I can do, but within those limits I'm relatively safer. When I download an application, there's no threat of it running in the background without my knowing and sapping my battery.

Is it incredible that I put up with my iPod? I know full well that I have control of who to purchase from. If I didn't want a closed system, I could go somewhere else. Nobody forced me to use Apple products. Their monopoly is not forced upon users; we accept it voluntarily. As a result, I get a music player/video player/miniature computer that does many things very effortlessly. When I buy an application, all I need to know is that it appears as a little button I can click to run it. When I want to add music to my iPod, all I do is make sure it's in iTunes, and then my player syncs. It's simple, and it means that I don't waste any of my time whatsoever with my iPod. It does everything I want and nothing I don't want.

I don't see why people find it hard to accept that some people want freedom at the cost of effortlessness, and others want effortlessness at the cost of freedom. It's not incredible or ridiculous. It's simply different philosophy.
Random observation: the Wolfram|Alpha Twitter account follows the Hacker News Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Wolfram_Alpha/friends
Mathematical queries aren't the most impressive results because those have already been around in things like mathematic/maple/matlab for years. Symbolic integration is cool, but typing in ISS, and getting the current position of the international space station is cooler.
Perhaps not skip - but it's an abstract and complex image whose only connection to the Internet is with the old concept of the "worldwide web" - emphasis more on world than web.

Compare that to Internet Explorer or Opera, who at least provide a memorable initial. Or Safari, whose symbol of a compass indicates travel in a more direct manner than Firefox's logo. (Chrome's logo is similarly strange - comes across as a Pokeball to me.)
I was able to copy-and-paste from the result I got (as related in another reply in this thread), so I have no complaints about the format of the answers. If the answers hid the textual part of the answer so much that it couldn't be copied-and-pasted (as I frequently find in addresses on websites of businesses), I would be annoyed, but I can deal with Alpha as it now is.
Data can be interesting and smart without being useful.
Define "free". Google gave their search away for free until they added advertising. Youtube serves ads as well, and obviously it's their hope that they can make ends meet.
Who says that happiness is the goal in life?

Happiness is an occasional side-effect of living a good life, but it'll come and go.
If the article is saying something stupid, why submit it here? Better to ignore it than post it and get no feedback beyond us calling Time stupid. That's not a valuable use of time.
Thoughts from a startup on getting accepted into new incubator from TheFunded
One imagines:

Precision = correct results / total results (E.g., what fraction of results are correct.)

Recall = total results / total queries. (E.g., what fraction of queries are answered.)
If you've got the money, The Deck and Fusion both boast very high conversion rates - provided your product is within their niches' interests.
This startup http://scribetribe.us got accepted last night. Anyone else have any thoughts on TheFunded's Founder Institute compared to the other incubators and accelerators out there?
Isn't the folk story that they only made @replies into a link when all people started marking replies in such a way?

Considering they've just recently started turning #hashtags into links, I would not at all be surprised if @replies were birthed in a similar manner.
It definitely still has a long way to go. For example, it cannot understand area Pittsburgh / area Kanazawa or population density Pittsburgh / population density Kanazawa which seems less complex than the above queries. Alpha is, however, aware of the populations of each city.
It's a marketing technique. You follow an account with high number of followers and some of the will find you, like you just did, and maybe follow you.
"If a member of subgroup Y is the first human on Mars, why should we have to wait for an X-er to step on Mars before we can tell X-ers they can do it, too?"

If everyone who has landed on Mars, the Moon, or any other extraterrestrial body is a member of subgroup Y, and so is the vast majority of people who have done anything like it, then maybe the point does need to be made that someone outside of subgroup Y can do it, too.
Founders always paint an extremely optimistic picture. You need to look at the facts, and decide for yourself. If you believe in their idea as much as they do (which generally won't be true), you're good to go.
I'm not so sure the blame falls entirely on the news sites. As I've watched a seemingly unnatural amount of attention fall upon an unreleased product over the past few weeks I've come to the conclusion that we're being led around by Wolfram's PR firm. If that's the case and they were using 'google-killer' to pick up buzz, I think Wolfram deserves to fall on its face.

(That's not to say it's not an interesting product).
Out of curiosity, where did you get the idea that it was intended to be a search engine?
Is Sequoia China in Trouble?
Buried in the middle of the copy is the dirty little secret:

"This needs to be done the night before."

I've been doing this part for years and it has really made a difference. It only takes 15 to 30 minutes, but I review hard copy every night just before lights out. I always know the first thing I'll be working on the next day.

I don't go to OP's extreme by doing the first thing before anything else. But maybe I should. I could easily get this first hour of work in before anything else. I may give this a try next week to see how much difference it makes overall. Stay tuned...
1) solve a problem burning enough for early adopters that they'll be willing to invest time to figure out how to use the poorly designed product

2) try to offer users just 1 action per page

3) watch logs and talk to customers to see what is/isn't being done as desired. adjust size/color to get results.

4) invest in UI pro when ready to move beyond early adopters to a mainstream audience. design does matter.
I feel exactly the opposite. I want to think about it while I'm sleeping. The more I review the closer to bedtime, the easier it is to work on the next day.
I dream of an automated fact-checker. Of course, to do it right you need Turing Test-passing AI. But if you start small, with the capability to parse a few statements of a few forms, that would still be useful.

I saw an argument on HN recently where people made these statements:

1. The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically.

2. There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK.

3. Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US.

No-one provided sources; people asked for them later. Suppose HN ran an automated fact-checker over every sentence ever posted, searching for statements of the form:
"[country] is (much|a lot)? more [quality] than [country]" - or a more sophisticated regex that captures more applicable cases.

And then, for the sentences that it understands, it checks the claim. Maybe it highlights incorrect statements in red, or just adds footnotes. This might make online debates more rigorous. Not only would a few statements be fact-checked, but the knowledge that a fact-checking program will look at your comment might incentivize people to be more careful with facts.

Newspapers and other media would find automated fact-checkers useful too.

Taking a longer view (like decades), with good speech-to-text technology, it could fact-check TV broadcasts in real-time. This should improve the debate quality not just of obscure internet forums, but also nationally-broadcast TV. Then, maybe, we'd see an improvement in the accuracy of all political debate, which should improve democracy.
you're comparing the resource, infrastructure and experience of Google, THE internet company, with those of a shrink-wrap software vendor?
while remaining dead simple to use, heroku is also becoming an increasingly sophisticated platform, capable of handling a wide variety of app requirements. eg - background workers and memcached support are available in beta. since i started using heroku for tripeedo.com, the traditional server hosts are looking a lot like dinosaurs.
It sounds like you're disagreeing with me, but that's exactly my point. Are you going to wait for an X-er to do it before you make that point, or will you make the point even if it's only been Y-ers so far?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+much+wood+would+a+w...
The opposite of Human Engineering
Wedding Dresses
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Bridal Gowns Plus Size
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Japan and China have become world leaders in manufacturing sector by IMPORTING American products (for eg a Ford car) to their countries and EXPORTING back the same to USA by incrementally remodeling,renaming and re-engineering it.
And they were exporting these products back to America at a reduced price.
Can you allow us to edit our old posts?

If not, can you delete my account?
With all due respect, if she's not working, _why the hell not_? She has custody of her children. That doesn't mean the man in the marriage should be stuck paying her total living expenses.
I believe 'we' (20-somethings) should be required to sign pre-nups by the state to receive a marriage license. Or a standard one should be provided upon marriage. It's silly to sign a legal contract with another individual (however in love the two are) without any concern over financial obligation. That's stupid, not selfish/"expecting the worse."

People change by health, hormones, situations, and children. That is a fact.
Code generation is nearly always the Wrong Thing. Using the right abstractions is the Right Thing. The problem is it leads to a bunch of duplicated code... and they you have to change something.

The one exception might be scaffolding code, which isn't really intended to be kept.
> I'm glad my wife has promised that ...

I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but those promises fly out the window as soon as times get tough.

No matter what you think she thinks of you, when the kids come and times get tough, she will look at you and weigh having you around vs. having automatic custody of the kids + child support + alimony.
My phone, TV, internet is roughly $170 per month for just me alone. Nothing super special: Digital cable+Internet ~ 120, cell phone ~ 50.
Netscape wasn't just some "shrink-wrap software vendor." They were "the internet company" of their day. They didn't just make a browser; they made a lot of their money on the server side.

Obviously Google does have the benefit of a decade and a half of additional experience and technology and so on, and they can definitely scale better than anyone past or present. But let's not mangle our history too badly.
will do! :) expect an email from me very soon and you if you know someone who can be our acquiring bank - please get in touch - we can move very quickly if that facility can be made available ASAP :)
The basic problem in Rio is that the lower classes reproduce at a far greater rate than the middle class. Every year, the Favelas grow larger and larger, and the habitable areas shrink ever smaller. What kind of policy would you recommend to fix this? Is it the responsibility of the middle and upper classes to support the fertility of the lower classes?

As for Buffet, who do you think will spend $50 billion in a more socially productive way: United States Government or the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation?
I've been playing with this for a while, and Hans Rosling's TED Talk keeps popping into my mind (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKbO6O3O3M). It seems like the potential of this isn't from the search, but the much easier access to data. Once we start to see some fully developed applications using the API, then we'll begin to see a much better picture of W|A's true potential.
Keep the spam off of here please, it won't work like it does on reddit/digg, trust me.

Just trying to save us both some grief.
I am guessing that colloquially they would like the search engine to be called just alpha which probably will work. "Did you alpha for that data?"
The best book to follow up SICP is Essentials of Programming Languages, by Friedman, Wand, and Haynes. It uses Scheme to show how the fundamentals of programming languages are built, and both in its form and its content, it seems a direct continuation from SICP. After you've done with it, you'll have a much better understanding of Scheme, functional programming, programming languages, and programming in general.
Let there be a covenant among us that we will ruthlessly down-mod anyone that comes in here and plays the 'YC is better' broken record.

Hadn't heard of this, very happy to see more incubators :)
Oh, that's going to happen :)

YC has at least one awesome team I know in it this round.
> if my husband made me sign a pre-nup before the
> wedding, it will pretty well signal the end of
> the relationship.

You don't seem to understand. The legal system in the USA is currently configured to crush fathers. A pre-nup is not a way to say, "hey, I want to be able to leave you and the kids and not pay a dime!", it's a way to limit the soul-crushing damage the legal system will do to Dad when Mom decides he's not making enough money and wants a divorce, and the kids, and the house, and child support, and alimony.
I'd actually like to see pre-nups made into law. If you don't make one yourself, you get a pre-nup that says what already happens now when you divorce - but you have to sign it and acknowledge - "yes, I want to be raped in the ass if he/she leaves me". That might remove some of the emotion and distill a bit of clarity.
I'm not sure "incubator" is the best word to describe TheFunded Founder Institute. Founders aren't even expected to work full-time.

Instead of providing funding, founders actually have to pay $450, which makes having "TheFunded" in the title pretty ironic.
hmm, I filled out this form and it says I have a BAC of .06% Then it said time to .08% = 1hr

How does it know I'm going to keep drinking? Probably because it's only 9pm...
Awesome news :) I'm thrilled you got in - you and @medimum deserve it! ;)
Here's the final sequence (and boss) of Ultima III. I don't care what you say, it's the scariest ending ever:

http://unclegropey.com/exodus.gif

...and yes, you had to be 8 years old in the 1980s to understand.
> My blood pressure went way up when I found out how brutally he is being raped by the alimony system

Agree. I was really impressed that he managed not to express any bitterness towards his ex-wife in the article. That says a lot about his character.
Congrats, Jed! Glad to hear it... Can't wait to hear how things go.
I tried P vs. NP, NP-complete, NP-completeness, and NP complete. IIRC, It only realized that the last one was in the field of computational complexity.