skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a rich nation should do more to help it's poorest

I'm trying not to sound flip, but I challenge you to a thought experiment -- perhaps with real money, if you like.

Take some of your own money. Go find a poor person. Use your money to make them less poor. It's easy, really. If the nation can do it, surely you or I could do it as well, right?

The goal of this experiment is to take away lofty ideals and ask practical questions: just what are we supposed to do that is going to help? Just what really helps and does not hurt poor people?

So pick a strategy and pay for it. Let's agree to come back in three years and see how they are doing.

You'll find that there are only three cases: 1) the person is poor because they continue to make poor choices, perhaps due to addiction, mental capacity, or emotional issues, 2) the person is temporarily poor due to circumstances outside of their control and is quite able to get ahead in the world if given time and left alone, 3) the person is somehow trapped by circumstances outside of their control which will not go away: medical bills, bad spouse, etc.

#1 and #3 aren't going anywhere -- by definition they have chronic issues which money will not fix. No amount of mental therapy is going to make a drug addict into a banker: recidivism for drug addiction is around 95%. No amount of money is going to take the wife of a crack addict wife-beater and turn her family into Oprah's.

For #2, those guys are going to do well anyway. Sure, if you want to lend a helping hand to make yourself feel better, go for it. But don't kid yourself that you're the one making the difference. The difference comes from inside, not from outside.

I'm not saying don't help people. I'm saying that lofty, praiseworthy feel-good rhetoric does not fix a damn thing. Instead everybody just smiles and nods and agrees to spend money. If you or I have a hell of a time fixing one poor person, with direct one-on-one involvement, it is completely ludicrous to expect an impersonal government to do it for us. It's also a lazy man's morality -- I'd like to help people today, but I'd rather write a check (or even better, make the rich guy down the street write a huge check) and just go take care of it, okay?
What's with the down modding, if you don't like it respond.
Obligatory link to the best ever libraries-vs-frameworks post in the history of internets: http://term.ie/devdev/why_frameworks_suck .

Choice quote: I’d really like to give you this fork Jimmy, but you’re gonna need a knife and plate to use it.
This one's easy: frameworks adhere to the Greyhound principle (leave the driving to us) and the Hollywood principle (don't call us, we'll call you).
Bruce Schneier posted about one particular function that was banned - memcpy. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/microsoft_bans...
Depends on the car. If its assembled in Japan, there is nothing wrong with C. You can get a car with 150K miles and it'll run just fine for the next 50K miles. However, if it was assembled in USA/Canada, I'd be wary with it, and wouldn't get a car with more than 50K miles.

The assembly point is very important. As an example, with Hondas pretty much all non-Japan assembled vehicles have transmission problems.

Getting a new car makes no sense, unless you plan to lease.

Go look on Craigslist, there are a whole bunch of good deals on there.
I think the $5000 for supplies underplays the enormous investment required to build this home.

1500 hours @ 30/hrs manual labour per week (could you do more?) works out to 50 weeks ... one solid man year of construction

Next question: What is required for ongoing maintenance and repair?

By the way, as an alternative, if you devoted one full year's salary, could you buy a better home?
the pure number is always nice; has a BAM! factor. But what is important (at least to me) is time on site, interaction , bounce rates, returning visitors etc...

- I don't know if you can even get a synopsis of how good or bad a site is doing based on one number. However we know twitter is doing well. :)
World’s first battery fuelled by air, which could provide up to 10 times the energy
For me, I can get very well with anybody, specially strangers who I share nothing with. The people I have problem with are shy/timid/sensitive people. And sadly, they're almost always fellow software developers. As soon as we stop talking about hacking we have almost nothing in common.

If I could do it, I would force every fellow hacker to work for a month as a bouncer at a night club. Get yelled at, get cursed out, get pushed and shoved, get a thicker skin and some street sense.

You will notice that cocky business types[1] and jocks have something in common; they're infallible to themselves. However wrong they are, they speak with bone-headed authority. Now imagine if knowledgeable people were able to push their wisdom with such authority? Develop a fierce fighter, go-getter attitude and you will live a full richer life. Introspection is good when you're still developing your moral system or reflecting on, well, your beliefs. But once you have something you're convinced of, go out there and preach it.

--

[1] I don't want to generalize the "business types"; not all suits are alike. A good chunk of them are push-overs who speak with a script and you can easily run them over. Others are brown-noses yes-men; slimey, very slimey, and best kept away. The type I have in mind are your typical, successful lead salesmen. Yeah, those guys, snap them out of their sales pitch by disqualifying yourself as a potential buyer, then twist the discussion and try to "flip them" (i.e. get them to work for you, or talk to them as a peer and talk shop, etc.) those guys are very interesting.
Its a better target than say vegetables - but in all honesty I want less taxes over all.
That's a great article -- hadn't seen that before. I guess everything's already been ranted about...
Many languages have this kind of community IMO. After a certain size, it doesn't matter really how big the community is because there is enough to sustain help. After a certain point, it only helps in finding specialized sub-communities which need to be that minimum size too. I think almost any language that a person here would consider for some project or another has that community, and you'll really notice the difference w/ languages that don't. For example, SML is a language that is so tiny that you can really notice the lack of community (and free documentation...) compared to, lets say, python, or objective-c.
somehow I don't think he thinks about time vs money as we do. I would be proud of this house; then again I live in a barn in Yukon,OK ;)
I'm not tempted to say "fuck you" since I don't know you, but I will point out that people in a wide range of IQs are capable of lucrative trades and professions

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx
I was under the impression that this was more like ExtJS (i.e. the heavier end of the scale) rather than something like jQuery that pretty much just works on top of standard HTML markup.

I spent several months attempting to hack our applications to work within the ExtJS way, but found it pretty hostile to working with a traditional web application (e.g. POST/GET rather than AJAX everything). This bad experience led me to dismiss Cappuccino as being inappropriate for our needs, though it might be useful for writing apps from scratch. jQuery has proven far more amenable to a baby-steps conversion from a traditional CGI app to an AJAX application. There's also the accessibility and downgrade path question with all-JavaScript generated pages (like ExtJS, and, I thought, Cappuccino).

But perhaps I'm mistaken about Cappuccino.
I checked this out, and it reminded me of a pet peeve of mine with APIs.

I know this is hacker news and all, but it's annoying when a neat-looking new api is released like this and the documentation doesn't have any obvious cut-and-paste examples of Get calls to play around with. They offer up two examples, but the "examples" don't resemble anything that I can play with or take action with, I see two code snippets and not much in the way of explanation.

I find enough APIs like this that I have a text file with sample api calls for different services that I get out when I go to play around with them as I can't find cut-and-paste examples of their calls in their documentation.

If anyone can steer me to a URL I can try out (I have an api key), I'd be appreciative. It's just not clear to me, as a somewhat novice developer how to use this service without a blunt example.
New 'broadband' cloaking technology simple to manufacture
Google Suggest Adds Hyperlinks, Personalization And Yes, Ads
Bigtable (according to the paper), HBase and Hypertable all use bloom filters to improve performance of random reads. Here is some bloom filter test code in Hypertable to compare Jenkins' lookup3, Hsieh's SuperFastHash and Appleby's MurmurHash2: http://github.com/vicaya/hypertable/blob/4fce96592cab3fd6d0e...

MurmurHash2 is the winner in all cases I've tested.
When I look at the pictures of this house, I have something like the feeling you get when you start to drink a glass of water and suddenly realize you were really dehydrated.

I often feel it when I see handmade things. There's something missing in manufactured stuff. It's information poor.
yep, so?

Your implying stupid people aren't equal, they deserve to be poor? That smart people are superior? Perhaps stupid people should have to stay in special stupid areas, go to separate schools, drink at special stupid people only water fountains.

I believe stupid people need more not less of a break, more not less assistance, more not less of everything from society and government precisely cause they are stupid.
CPP can be used with Java, since it's completely independent of the "real" underlying language. There's also several native Java preprocessors available.
> except if ya got paternalism issues and would also slash developers' tires so they don't crash their car

Which exactly describes most 'Enterprise' software shops.

(Side note: you make a good point, but would have made it just as clearly without the cursing.)
CiteSeer is still good too.
Wattvision: Understanding your electricity meter with Wolfram Alpha
I'm judging by the dearth of comments here that these rules are considered excellent (hence the upvotes) but obvious (so no discussion). Which makes me wonder how valuable they are, especially to the kind of people invited to speak at TED...
Saying "I'm tempted to say x" = saying x.
Not taking this out on you. But, start a business then that teaches them this and find a way to make money doing, or get donors and do it as a none profit. I am not saying that you are saying have the government do it for them, but that is the vibe, I get with the vast majority of people in this thread.

The government is not the only people that can help the poor, and likely not the best to help the poor. Why is this? Because the government does things on tax payers dime, they don't have a 100% control of the money.

I am sorry, but even if this is the case in real life that the poor have it harder, which I do not doubt, it does not make the solution government intervention.
Wordgeist.com
socila bookmarks
Electronics was my first love. At school as a kid I said I wanted to be an electrician (I knew a few) - but I had good maths skills, so Elec Eng was recommended (so since I was 10 I knew what I wanted to study at least - was a nice feeling - never understood "not knowing what to do").

Went to university, about 2 years in I realised that I had seen and understood the state of the art in electronics, at least the core of it, and that all the interesting stuff was in VLSI/chips, and so on (all of which was basically done in software). I even started designing my hobby circuitry in Microcap and pspsice before I would build it, and then I realised I had almost completed the transition into software - when I realised I was "creating" things in software, it was liberating...
That's a valid point, but I don't see anywhere in the article that seems to be trying to make it.
If you're interested, do contact us at info@wattvision.com and we can get you on our private beta, which is currently free.
Mindandbodyscript.com
Health social bookmarks
Putting $1000 into a $1500 car still makes it much cheaper than any new car you can buy in the US.

As air pollution expert Glen Class used to say (while acknowledging its disproportionate effect one the poor), the most effective thing you can do improve auto emissions is to remove the oldest 10% of cars from the road as they contribute emissions equal to the newer 90%.

While I don't know who colludes with whom, new cars really are that much better emissions wise than older ones.
Cool. Let us know if you're interested in our private beta at info@wattvision.com
Ask HN: Do you workout? Review my startup
For any other fitness junkie nerds like myself, I've started excycle.com

Its an online sports nutrition store, which focuses on the community trying supplements, tracking the results, and creating an aggregated display of them.

This is important because supplements are not regulated through the FDA (unless people start to die). So it helps people see which supplements are the most effective.

I'd love any and all feedback!
If done right, it's the same as a normal toilet, but substitute the "flush" for scooping some sawdust down the hole. I've used quite a few, and if you do it right, you can't smell a thing.
http://www.excycle.com
Sorry, I should have mentioned: they are getting a couple of hours of training on how to interact based on type.

Do you think that kind of training makes the whole exercise productive?
One of my friends built a large community of affordable straw-bale housing in Afghanistan. The officials thought it was a joke, so came over and shot their machine guns into one of the buildings. The bullets didn't penetrate the walls, so they were impressed and gave them the thumbs up to go ahead.
The unfortunate answer is trial and error. If we agree that money does have an economy of scale but that its very difficult to measure, ignoring it because we can't measure it isn't much of a solution. The idea is that money has a decreasing marginal utility as well as a "money makes money" economy of scale. A subtle and well tuned progressive tax would keep the tax (although small) from overwhelming the poor who are right on the edge and also ask more from those who can afford it the most while still not overly dampening their incentives to achieve. Like Terry Pratchet so succinctly said "its the difference between using a feather and using a chicken".
Importing Mephisto comments into Disqus
Yeah, neither of us think the company is brazen enough to actually try to use this for hiring or promotion purposes. We're both more worried about the more subtle consequences.
Odd, it seems as though HN eats the apostrophe. This link should work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law
Good points. Regarding buying used from a dealer or private party, I think it also depends on if you are financing the purchase or paying cash.

BMW and Audi are both offering great deals .9% financing on certified preowned cars. Sure they cost a bit more, but you can make it up for it in financing costs and also get a warranty in many cases.
This article is looking at things from a static perspective. If biohackers ever get to the point of releasing killer plagues, something along these lines would happen:

(1) The earliest killer plague created and released by a biohacker kills thousands, but isn't even close to being fine-tuned enough to be an existential threat to civilization.

(2) The powers that be, and society, now that their attention has been focused, react to this threat by restructuring themselves slightly to better handle more virulent threats of this sort in the future.

(3) Go to (1), only with a somewhat more virulent outbreak. Then go to (2), only with a somewhat larger restructuring. By the time biohackers have gotten far enough up the learning curve to release truly effective plagues, society will have gotten far enough along the restructuring curve to handle them without being wiped out or even seriously set back.
For everyone interested in social skills, best resource I know
I believe there is, or at least was, also a rule about not bringing up politics.
No, because the 806 number includes compounding.
You should use a measure of chroma (CIELAB C*, the C from CIECAM's JCh, Munsell's "chroma", etc.), rather than HSB/HSV "saturation", as the latter is not really meaningful from a human visual perception standpoint. CIELAB isn't ideal for this, but it's easy to compute:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense3.png
It seems like their time would have been better spent forking and improving Greasemonkey, if they thought it wasn't user-friendly enough or whatever, instead of re-doing everything.

As I recall, there were significant problems with Greasemonkey's original approach of leaving privileged user scripts in the global namespace while untrusted scripts from the web execute, since it could wrap objects user scripts would later call, potentially turning any normal function call into a state-stealing XMLHttpReq. From a quick read of the jetpack site, it appears that user code does indeed remain accessible while untrusted code executes (since the jetpack.tabs object is noted to be "live"). I wonder how they deal with that problem of hostile-wrapped objects? [Edited for detail and clarity]
Google StreetView Tricycle
>"France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility [1]"

That report again! All I see is: some professor came up with his own definition of economic mobility (some unitless score, what the hell is it?) and now we are supposed to take these conclusions as a gospel.

UPDATE: Apparently I can't reply to the comment below, so I have to do it here. The comment only confirms what I wrote and does not answer the question: what is that score? How is it computed?
I'm a licensed broker and one of the companies I own is a real estate brokerage. I made a very long response to the original poster (si2) before I realized that he is wanting to rent a home, not BUY a home or rent a commercial space. The realization that he is a residential renter could change my answer a bit, depending on his circumstances and his local market. Unlike with buying a home, you CAN - potentially - save money by finding the rental yourself. If buying, I always recommend an agent - with several important caveats. I'll revisit this thread again later, when I have some more time and maybe some more information has been posted.

You give some great advice, brk, buy you should know that the average buyer's agent commission is 2.5%, not 1% or 'nothing." There are discounters that will give you around a 1% rebate on their commission in states where RE rebating is legal, usually subject to a minimum commission, but it is impossible to represent a buyer for 'nothing.' Most buyer's agents that will consider larger discounts are not really representing your interests, because they are either designated agents or (much worse) dual agents, who are just trying to eke out a bit more cash from the transaction that they might not otherwise receive. I can explain that in great detail when I have more time, if you're interested. In any case, you should know that people don't work for free, so you WILL pay for any services you use at some point in the transaction.

Unfortunately, most consumers are woefully uneducated about real estate transactions, including important details about the principle of agency and commissions. My entire business model for our RE brokerage is built around educating the customer enough so that they don't get screwed over by agents or lenders. I would recommend that a buyer obtain representation from an EXCLUSIVE buyer's agent and to attempt to negotiate a commission rebate IF it is legal in their state and IF they will actually use less of the agent's time by being a savvy, educated shopper. I suspect most HN readers are savvy, educated shoppers who can use the web to save time and trouble for themselves and their agents, so most should be able to get a commission discount/rebate. I wish real estate rebates were legal everywhere, but some states have allowed lobbyists to overpower common sense and consumer rights.
Whenever tax and "helping the poor" comes up, the argument always seems to degrade to higher taxes <-> bigger welfare checks.

Never underestimate the power of one well placed community center.

I know guys who have had the entire course of their lives altered by one mentor at one afterschool program. A lifetime of welfare checks could not have done so much.
Just remember that the realtor works for himself, not for you. His job is to maximize his commission, which is usually shared with the selling realtor.

We found that out when we bought our first house back in the 80's in Connecticut. A very nice older lady was our realtor, and she really didn't serve us well. (Lots of house issues swept under the rug, so to speak, until it was too late.)
the concept is interesting and has some potential. however, basing reviews on the numbers that you have posted is dubiously representative at best. there are a lot of reasons why an individual will see gains/losses in performance across the time period that a supplement will last.

i'd put more info on the root page about what the site is about and such.
I agree, and while I think part of it is the organic nature of the subject, I also think some of that feeling comes from that fantastic quality of the photography. It just looks like a fairytale.
Waldorf MD
If you decide to stop for a long period of time in Waldorf you will see that it is nice city.
However we know twitter is doing well.

Do we?
Things that you need to be concerned about in CA, MO, and other places that have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earth quakes: rafter ties and joist ties to keep the roof from flying off and to make the framing a continuous unit. The framing needs to be bolted to the foundation. You dont want the thing to collapse in a 6.5 earthquake. I've had 2 houses that each survived a different one. Compare that with other parts of the world where a 6.5 leaves rubble for miles around.

I would guess that bales of straw plus fireproof facing are more fire retardant than the wooden houses most of us live in.
I would agree that Page is probably being intellectually dishonest in his argument that H1N1 is a prime example of why Google should be allowed to retain data longer, but I don't think your comparison holds. At its core, what you're describing is taking away the privileges of very many people to potentially (dubiously, in my opinion--I do hate "think of the children" crusades) protect a few people. The debate surrounding Google and data retention is more about Google taking some risks with the privacy of the consumers who use it in order to take actions that will benefit it long-term--and which I strongly believe can and will benefit its consumers as well.

Sure, there's potential for abuse here, but that's true of all technology. I don't think we, as hackers, should let that hold society back when there are valuable things to gain from its advance.
My favorite thing about frameworks? Whenever I go to a shop that uses them, I could always write something without the framework that looks like I used the framework but does things they never thought possible.