skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was living in Taiwan in the 1980s, most things I paid for were less expensive than most of the same things would have been in the United States (from the point of view of exchange rates between the two countries' currencies). Particularly notable was how inexpensive Adidas brand walking shoes were. Another peculiarity of the local economy was how little cost was added to the price of food by eating out. Yes, restaurant food was more expensive than food prepared at home, but not by nearly the same factor as restaurant food is in the United States.

But note that these comparisons are by nominal prices, at official exchange rates. Wages were also much lower in Taiwan in those days. I had a high-wage occupation (teaching English as a foreign language), so I was living large in the local economy, but even so I wasn't saving up much money for my return to the United States.

Most immigrants to the United States, from an enormous variety of countries, find that they can work fewer hours per week to buy the things they most desire than they could in the countries they left. That's why the direction of immigration flows between the United States and almost all other countries results in the United States having a net gain of population by immigration. When people compare their opportunities in the States with their opportunities in the country where they grew up, they mostly think that the United States offers a quite good trade-off. And that's not even to get into issues such as less corrupt government officials or less polluted air and water.

The more hands through which that money passes between the producer and the consumer, the more money is lost to waste.

The best research in economics results in a contrary conclusion. More trade and exchange means more efficiency all around.
Why did the "BrainTeaser" iPhone puzzle become so popular?
Any plans to support tags? Would be nice to have folder plus tags for organizing info.
Wow, just reading that brought back a lot of painful memories. I used to hone my skill at carefully tearing seeds out of seed-pods while leaving the pods intact, out of sheer boredom.
For shorter getaways, bike riding is great. I went out for 5 hours yesterday, and rode around the 'Colli Berici', enjoying myself thoroughly (Italy in the spring is that gorgeous). It's a nice way to get away from other people for a bit, too, without having to actually go deep into the woods, although you can do that too with a mountain bike.
There have been very accurate satellite measurements of rainforest deforestation since the 70s. We know how many acres are being destroyed each year from across the world. Because historical measures are so good, we are able to know if the rates of deforestation are increasing or decreasing. If countries are able to decrease their rates of deforestation from the historical baseline then they get carbon credits under certain cap-and-trade models. They are then able to sell these credits at auction.

Because preserving an acre of rainforest is far less expensive than reducing CO2 in more traditional ways, we can reduce the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for less money than it would otherwise cost.
Sure, I'd have that happen all the time if I tried to explain things orally very much. In fact, I'd suggest that for a lot of people, that is normal conversation now, especially in the workplace, but increasingly outside of it, too. If you want to explain something detailed or complex, you use an email, wiki page, or bug tracking system comment.

I admit to being annoyed when I'm trying to have a deep conversation with someone and their devices keep interrupting, though, and it can seem rude if there's anything more than small talk involved. I've been chalking this up to being over 30, though, and suppressing my irritation. :)
By my reckoning, six of the ten have major flaws that make them completely unacceptable for use as a programming font. Courier, Profont, Consolas, and Incosolata all have insufficient distinctions between 'l' (lowercase L) and '1' (one). Droid Sans Mono has an 'O' (uppercase O) that can pass for '0' (zero). Perhaps by virtue of the font size, Proggy has a lowercase L that can pass for a vertical bar at a glimpse. If you look closely, Proggy's lowercase L looks like a one -- this is less of an issue because it is visually distinct from Proggy's one glyph, but I still don't like it.
It seems to me that he is leaving out a discussion of slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles. Slow-twitch muscles are used in maintaining posture and light activity and burn primarily fat. Fast-twitch muscles are used for strength and burn primarily glucose. Hard exercise like he suggests would use mostly glucose. Walking slowly while working 8 hrs a day (treadmill desk) would presumably use more fat. It would be interesting to see if that is actually the case (within a 95% confidence interval, of course ;) )
Small steps leading to a small step for a man ...
Series of articles on the BBC tech pages ... links in the comment below.
I'm addicted to tech too, and I'm planning to going to Germany by bike (1400km) in a few weeks, I think the bowl of real life will be good.
And I'm seriously thinking in abandoning the development too. Actually I'm unemployed and I already refused interesting offers in development, the next step is finding another career, away from office and computer.
It's extremely simple to use. I could go right in and play with the demo document. I also don't have this need immediately, but your site will stick in my mind in case I need it later...
Me, too. :( Or carefully arranging things that didn't need arrangement.
The 'flight of the Spider' : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7939365.stm

Rendezvous around the Moon : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8056443.stm

There are more to come, but I'll let others add them if they find this interesting.
Facebook Launches OpenID Support - Users Can Now Login With Gmail Accounts
Yes, you need to explain why things are designed the way they are.

There are whole disciplines around it called "Human Computer Interaction" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-computer_interaction and "Information Design" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Design
Well, lesbianmonad, that's an interesting take I guess, but it's even more obscure than the story itself. I can't figure out whether you actually intended to refer to Charles Darwin or whether you were just smoking too much weed to remember the name of the main character.
Without any real backing, this would be discrimination, however.
yeah and as a previous comment said, he has thrown a lot of functionality out of the window. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614952
> Many sportsmen and soldiers are obese to significantly obese

That may be so when measured by BMI. That's a really crappy metric, since it holds muscle mass against you. That is, really developed count against you. And since muscle is much denser, it's as if they've got lots of fat.

IMHO, we'd be better tracking body fat %. Of course, even that's less-than-perfect. Subcutaneous fat may be unsightly, but it's not dangerous to health. It's the fat around your organs that's bad for you.
First off, that's a pretty k-rad design. Did you do it in-house or an outside firm?

I have a few questions/thoughts:

- What happens if the contents of a page change? Do the notes go away or do you try and follow the content as it moves around?

- Have you thought about public sharing of these notes? I don't know if it's in your business plan, but it could be a fun thing to be able to mark up pages on the web and see others' notes while browsing. Could get noisy and be a UI issue, but it sounds neat :)

- I might change the "Click to try demo" button to be a little bit more clear what's going to happen when you click it. It's a great demo that shows off your product perfectly, but I was thinking I would be sent off to some other page and might have to go into some registration process. Two ways to handle this: Show the bar dimmed out and a button that says "Activate demo" or something to that effect. Or have the links say something to the effect of "Try the demo live on this page" so we understand it's just something quick. Again, it's really effective, so you should remove any apprehension about clicking that link.
Wpost Opinion on Bailing Out Newspapers
Comments like this are why I cannot wait to be able to mod down. Back on topic...

I found this article interesting even though I've never needed to use encryption explicitly in .NET. I did study crypto in Java, but only briefly whilst in college and we barely touched on ECB. I probably would have made the same mistake and never been the wiser.

Thanks Jeff!

[Edit: Wow, first 0 karma comment in a long time. Must have hit a nerve. My original, and continuing stance on Atwood: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510526]
Optimizing a word game - 80-100X performance improvement
That's the problem with "Free": you might end up being the one who pays for it.
Ask HN: the best way to protect IP for a startup?
What is the best way for a startup to protect its intellectual property at an early stage of development? What level of paranoia regarding communications and legal safeguards such as NDA's is appropriate? How thoroughly must one ensure that no code is developed in a third-party environment in which IP rights are ceded?
IPhone Accessory Development
I am working on a new accessory for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It is an Ethernet adapter that plugs into the dock connector, along with software that allows you to do network analysis from your phone.

This is a bit of a departure for me from pure software, so I'm still learning as I go. If this is of interest to you, I've set up a short survey on surveymonkey to collect information about features, pricing, etc. I would really appreciate any feedback. http://bit.ly/1radd
He perscribed me 1.5mg lorazepam, but I've yet to observe any physiological evidence that they didn't give me a sugar pill by mistake. Just got a new perscription for 50mg trazodone. We'll see if that fares any better.
Twitter to launch business tools by year-end
I love mint and would much, much rather pay a monthly fee for it than have them sell information about me, even anonymized information.
This is why Hemingway is so popular amongst the rabble, while hardly any of them touch Joyce or Proust.
Apparently, when you have money all the sudden lots of people want to meet with you.

No one wants to meet with me, no one. But I'm sure if I scrounged up a couple hundred million bucks I'd have to write an article like this.
I just canceled my account. I am afraid that even though they anonymize the data, personal details may still be present. When AOL accidentally released their "anonymized" search data, the same thing happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal
You're right, I don't know if this is enough (do you get hooks upon loading each resource, etc) but they are definitely working to implement this properly.
Interesting read. I work with Ruby on Rails myself but I'm not that knowledgeable about scaling it.

It seems to me they didn't really know what setup they were running if they are wondering what a 'mongrel' is.

I hope they weren't trying to serve the site on only a couple of mongrels.

My first thoughts,

Benchmark a bit, use a tool like fiveruns to find out what's really happening. I wonder what the real bottleneck is.

Of course they shouldn't use a shared database server, but I'm wondering if they are they using caching? What I'm reading about that site I think they could cache the hell out of it.
I've only used the builtin Rails cache methods but a tool like memcached should help out on all the database requests.
That is because the railsways make tons of money with that. It is the largest ecommerce site in India by value and possibly volume. Plus, the entire reservation system was online for a long time. So they definitely have some experience is running massive systems
It comes down to tact, an I don't think there are any "rules" to applying it. It requires a unique and appropriate response to the current environment, and having been in that age group once myself, I can say it's not, generalizations aside, an uncommon deficiency.

...anyway I'm sure all of us here are stellar examples of tactfulness...
We regularly hear about the successful de-anonymization of anonymized data (netflix, etc), so this doesn't fill me with confidence about using Mint. Other than posting a bond (which a startup probably won't have the money to do), is there a way to robustly signal that this kind of thing won't be done by your startup?
Several people have requested tags and other related improvements to the notes organizer. These requests are of high priority in the next few iterations. Thanks for the suggestion!
It's this premium that skews US labor and trade, though. A computer programmer in Poland can use Zlotys for everyday living and work USD contracts. A computer programmer in the US pretty much has to use USD for everyday living -- even though they don't need the extra global liquidity the dollar offers.
Sounds curious. How do you plan to take 100 or 1000Mbits of data and stuff that down a serial pipe and then analyze in software?
Protein sequencing gone awry: 1 sample, 27 labs, 20 results
It was 2. The exact bug that exposed the data wasn't really the point, since he assumes that everyone will eventually make some similarly awful mistake; the point was that you should design things in such a way that when you discover your boneheaded mistake(s), the damage is less than it could be. I agree, though, that his habit of using particularly boneheaded mistakes as examples dilutes his main point, since a significant part of his intended audience will think, "Wow, I'd never make a mistake like that, so I don't have to pay attention to mitigating my mistakes like he does."
A paid service would end up selling their data eventually too. Its too valuable stream of revenue to ignore.
If government spending was the solution, the word recession wouldn't exist.
I live in a house without having debt. I could also pay cash for a car.

People should have the choice to borrow money from other people, and the people lending it should be able to make enough money to make up for the risk of the people they lend it to not paying it back. I don't think society needs to change, though.
Shout out to Tracy Wemett and Alex King for the great marketing. Alex has been with WebNotes since September of last year and has helped with the refining our our messaging. Our previous tag line was "Annotate, Organize, Share" and was so generic, it failed to differentiate us within the annotation space. Alex King lead the PR push six months ago for our private launch. Tracy Wemett heads our current public launch.
The difference is that a paid service can survive without selling something. With a free service that isn't offered by a charity, they need to generate revenue at some point. You just have to figure out what they're going to sell.

My guess is that Mint won't really do this. But it's an important risk; I'd feel way better about them having my data if someone out there was paying $5/month to use Mint.
Even a temporary sabbatical from technology? I don't think that's a luxury at all. If we wanted to, most of us could schedule our lives so that we got a month (or more) away every so often - away from work, from home, from technology, or whatever.
Thankfully there are numerous parties out there that will handle the scaling issues for you (heroku.com, engineyard.com) so you can concentrate on what's important, the app itself.
I agree with most of what is said, but I think the word "dysfunctional" is incorrect and implies the wrong characterization of these situations. Show me the entrepreneurs who came out of childhood situations where fighting, alcohol and drug abuse are the norm? I would agree that many entrepreneurs come out of childhood situations where their family struggled through chaotic situations (characterized by uncertain future, time spent living on the margin, etc.), but that the key element is that the family can remain functional and successful in these conditions, thus being closer to the exact opposite of what is normally categorized as "dysfunctional". I can point to the many cases of first generation immigrants who go on to be successful entrepreneurs. Their parents, as immigrants, faced exactly this sort of chaotic situation and had to find a way to remain functional.
IMO, that's a distinction without a difference. Viral is viral, whether there is agency involved or not. It's about people communicating and behavior spreading through a social network.

The downside of forcing virality is reflected in additional metrics like retention rates and engagement.
Because you're going to be making more money if 2M people are using it, all else being equal.
If you read the article, you'd know that he's an investor.
I'm forced to use it because it's the only text editor that comes pre-installed on Linux. I'd love to find something else. How does one go about "grabbing" these things? Are they usable in an SSH session?
I am a big fan of Envy Type R.
"Bad programmer writes bad code"

This is hardly a new idea. The fact that a bad programmer used Ruby on Rails, or Django, or PHP, or C++ to write bad code and implement it on a shoddy system is no reflection on anything. This is essentially a story of someone who took good advice for a hosting environment, and someone who took bad advice for a hosting environment.

Learn your tool, don't buy into the hype. Make sure you are aware of the reason behind everything that you do (because they I read it on a blog is not a reason). Don't be a bad programmer.
I believe that I heard him referring to himself as a "tooth fairy agnostic" was in this video, toward the end:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_milita...

He is also quite clear in The God Delusion that by any rigorous definition, he an agnostic and not an atheist. So I don't get why people keep arguing as if he's making a factual statement about the (lack of) existence of a god. He talks about (a) how it can't be proven, but (b) it seems highly unlikely that there is a god.
Yawn. Yet another misinformed "Ruby/Rails can't scale" article.

Seems to me the main problem is that his "MIT trained" friend had no experience building a scalable web service. He would've botched it up in PHP, Python, Java, whatever. There's nothing about his main mistakes- running your database on a shared server, naive (ab)use of SQL- that is unique to Rails.

And this bit: "pull entire tables into Ruby, the most beautiful computer language ever designed, and filter down to the desired rows using Ruby and its “ActiveRecord” facility" is completely incorrect and makes it obvious Philip Greenspun knows less than nothing about what he's ranting about.
Really more slides from an presentation on the language rather than a tutorial.
"Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement. "

Reading this, the term "spoiled sport" comes to mind...
Your site is too crowded. Give me one thing to look at on your main page. Right now, you have 'webnotes pro', 'sign up now', the play button, and your 'faster/more effective' drawing my attention, in that order. Read this:

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/good-call-to-action-buttons/

Remove the red from wnp. You want the first noticeable thing to be the first step, and the first step should probably be 'find out what this does' - so make the 'faster and more effective web research' text stand out more. You have way too many tabs - give me little next and prev buttons to scroll features. I like playing with those, I hate tabs - I get the impression that I'll have to load a new page, so I avoid them. Preload the images on the other tabs. Your support tab/button doesn't actually link to support, it links to info. Your video seems to focus on many individual features, rather than on the problem that you're solving for me. Why do I want to save these notes? Why do I want to compile a report? (Clicking the blackness outside the modal video should return me to the page - I don't want to click that little black x)

Summary: very crowded main page, lacks obvious next-steps at all stages of interaction, presents individual features rather than a solution to my problems. Looks pretty good otherwise.
"Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of singleminded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests. They say that the age of opportunity has passed. Nonsense! Seven out of ten of the wealthiest men on this planet started life without a shilling--and there are plenty more such strivers on the way up. Such people are not stopped by high taxation nor even by socialism; they simply adapt themselves to new rules and presently they change the rules. But no premiere ballerina ever works harder, nor more narrowly, than a man who acquires riches."

-A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
If the application is performing idiotic operations such as "[querying] MySQL 1500 times with 1500 separate queries (instead of one query returning 1500 rows).", merely moving to a better provider or using more powerful servers won't help. A modern web-based application is very complex -- the programmer has to understand how the database and application communicate, how HTTP works, how to cache data, etc.
The article is partly about how hosting service like that sucked.
We do something like this -- we call it "partial currying" .. if you think of a partial (in Rails) as a function of a number of parameters, you can render and cache the intermediate rendering of a subset of those parameters (curry them.) Subsequent calls can then specify the values for the rest.

The mechanism we use for this is to do some ruby metaprogramming to kludge in some placeholder values for the uncurried values, and then gsub them in in the subsequent passes. (So, the first pass is the only pass that runs the HAML/ERB file, the rest are gsub's) This works for us, since things after the first pass are not changing layout, etc, and need to be high performance. The first pass is a heavyweight rendering at a coarse granularity (and cached), subsequent curries are lightweight gsubs at fine grain.
There are a couple things we are looking at, but it basically boils down to filtering/buffering as much in the hardware adapter before shifting it to the phone on demand. Realistically, the product won't be able to do full line-speed Gbit dumps for extended periods of time, but for simple network scanning/troubleshooting, hopefully it will be adequate.
Obama’s Favorite Mutual Fund
If the government runs out of room to borrow, it will most likely favor inflation over deflation.

Just how high the risk for deflation is, is up for debate. But we'll probably see brisk inflation which will act as a wealth transfer from savers to borrowers. The Aristocrats!
Shouldn't the lesson to take away from this rather be that it's important to not be stupid? Clearly, the "MIT trained" programmer don't know what what he's doing, at all.

I'd expect similarly disastrous results had he used the same 100% ignorant approach to any other language or platform.
Thanks for the link, but how does one go about downloading and installing Nano? My only access to an EC2 Linux machine is via the command line, so there's no visiting the website, downloading and unzipping it. Am I really expected to visit that site from a windows box, view source on the download page, paste the url into an ssh session and do a wget just to get a copy of the source code? And then compile it before I can use it? Just so that I can edit text???

This is a fundamental thing I've never understood about Linux, and probably the reason I find it so painful. I can only assume there is something I'm missing. Any help would be much appreciated.
Extra ordinary Magazine Printing
I also love your design. Would love to know who you used.