skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with our legislature is three fold.
1) We have safe political districts.
The political districts are uncompetitive in the general elections.
The only worry they have in getting reelected is if they don't appeal to the core of their party and are opposed in the primary.
This leads to the most active, the most idea logical and the more fringe elements of the party deciding who our representatives will be.
The people being elected are unwilling to compromise and so cannot find practical solutions.
2) We have term limits.
The politicians do not have institutional memory and do not seek long term solutions to the problems.
They are looking to move up to a more powerful position or at least they want to return home with a greater network of connections.
So they spend every dime they can find and borrow as much as they can and are not there when the bills come due.
The lobbyists do have institutional memories and are seeking long term solutions to their problems, not what is in the best interest of the state.
3) Proposition 13
Prop 13 was a tax-cutting measure that took care of the problem of property taxes skyrocketing as home values skyrocketed.
This caused people to not be able to afford their homes any longer, not because they couldn't pay the mortgage, but because they couldn't pay the taxes .
But it hit local governments especially hard. Key budgeting authority devolved from cities and counties up to Sacramento, where they have to compete with the state government for money. You want your streets paved or more teachers for your third grade? Stand in line behind the health department, or the corrections department, or Caltrans.
And then the state borrows (takes?) the money it is supposed to send back to the cities and counties for it's own uses.
California is not ungovernable -- it's just been ungoverned.
Questioning the Hawthorne effect: Light work
The bullying in schools, the ostracism of anyone different, the teasing. This is not learned behaviour, it is the default state, to be overcome by education and socialisation

I think the problems you mention are largely caused by today's school environments, not cured by them.
didn't cmdrtaco go to gvsu?
Oh man, almost ungodly humid. But I agree, that was a fine piece of writing by Tom.
I forgot to mention one more item. It takes a 2/3 vote to pass the budget. 50% + 1 makes much more sense. At this point I'd take 60% as much better solution.
It doesn't matter at all where you went to college, or even if you went to college.

Sure, graduating from Harvard offers some short-term advantages, but if you're motivated you can take the lead.

Consider how much time in college is wasted studying minutia for a competitive exam that has no impact on learning.

Consider how much of college is often spent stressing about stupid deadlines that really don't matter or fawning over prestigious faculty who did something noteworthy 30 years ago and have coasted since.

My advice: Do something that really matters, and take the initiative to teach yourself as you go. You are (and should be) your own harshest critic. Make it your responsibility to find others to join you in your quest (if necessary). A college campus might be a good place for you to recruit.

But certainly don't hang your head!

note: most students at top phd programs didn't go to major name brand undergrad programs... they went to small (not well known) schools and accomplished meaningful research that would have been harder to accomplish in a cutthroat name brand atmosphere.
I think you're right. It might not be useful for your projects. Sorry.
Insurance Reviews
In today’s world, you’re at risk almost all the time. The risk may be to your life or any asset that could cause you financial losses. Even though you cannot get your life back once lost, you can definitely cover up the expenditures and losses incurred on your assets via insurance. For example, if your car gets vandalized or maybe you crash into someone and your car gets severely damaged, you’d incur expenses of thousands of dollars. However, you can easily cover this by using your car insurance.
"Scrap Your Boilerplate" in Haskell: http://www.cs.vu.nl/boilerplate/

You can do the same thing without macros. Granted, the compiler supports by generating code, so it is macro-esque.
Somebody wake me up when all of the anti-Arrington comments over...
Microsoft's Bing Refuses Search Term "Sex" In India
List of open source software used in the Palm Pre
as much as it sucks, take the jobs. the experiences you get now will more than make up for the pay differential if it means your career as a whole has a better trajectory as a result.
ブロガーのための「Firefox」アドオン--記事作成を効率化する15種:スペシャルレポート - CNET Japan
If it looks like a duck but wears a shirt that says "goose"...
Because we expect too much for what we pay in taxes, add to that we also elect some of the dumbest people into office.
I think Michael talks about Twitter because he genuinely loves the service.

What about all of the posts he did last year when the service kept going down? Do you think all of that negativity was paid for by Twitter too?
Yes, and I'm sure others will, too. For example, perhaps, after the barriers have been removed, a new school has popped up which has a better way of training doctors. They are allowed to teach in ways that were not allowed before. Doctors from this school go on to perform exceptionally well and have a proven track record. You hear about them from satisfied patients and ratings organizations (like Consumer Reports). Their medical procedures are insured by a company that also highly recommends them. You select one of them.

Or, perhaps you prefer some sort of alternative medicine. Using whatever criteria you choose, you are allowed to have a procedure done regardless of whether or not your doctor has a title. After all, the majority is wrong sometimes.
Interesting, but nslookup businessmodels.com returns NXDOMAIN. Also, please submit with the working link and put the comment in the home page of the wiki instead.
Zelphyr, make sure that you have showdead turned on in your HN profile, as there is a comment by JimmyL which may be helpful.
"We have the world's most productive agricultural region"

I doubt that California can beat hi-tech farms in Brazil and South Africa. The climate is good, but not that good.

"two of the world's top universities"

It's more like three: Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. The other UC schools are quite good too. For instance, UCLA is strong in math, while UCSB is strong in physics, etc.
>Not to mention the credentialism (a focus on credentials rather than actual ability)

Well, the idea is that credentials are a measure of actual ability. A company looking for new hires can't give everyone a month-long trial to see what their ability is firsthand, so credentials like GPA and degree serve as a heuristic. It's not a perfect system, and in some respects you could even call it broken...but until someone comes up with a better way for companies to work out who to interview, it's necessary. Personally, I think it would be better to fix the problems than to remove the system entirely.
Yes, Brits may put more focus on which university you go to, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

In the UK, getting into Oxbridge is nowhere near as difficult as getting into Harvard, Yale, Princeton. There are 24,000 undergraduate spots at Oxbridge for 60 million Brits, compared to 17,000 spots at HYP for 300 million Americans.

Also, the application criteria at Oxbridge is far simpler. It is based entirely on academic potential. British universities are uninterested in extracurricular activities and "well-roundedness". In the US, very smart students with perfect grades are rejected from Harvard because they weren't editor of the school newspaper, because they got a D in History in 9th grade, or because they couldn't write a good essay about "If you were going to sing a song in a talent show, what would you sing and why?" That doesn't happen in the UK. If you are smart, work hard in school and get good grades, you'll get into Oxbridge. The same can't be said for getting into HYP.

All of the British universities are public, so there doesn't exist the situation where students may choose to go to Berkeley instead of UPenn because they want to save money, or because they were offered a scholarship.

Which university you attend in the UK tends to be a better indicator of intelligence and academic success than where you study in the US.
This strikes me as a lofty-sounding statement that may not actually mean very much. I'd love to hear you elaborate and contradict me.

I think the US public school system is deeply flawed, but one of the few things I don't blame it for is the cruelty of children. Kids are just cruel.
Interesting, I find that almost every comment section here on HN contains at least one useful piece of criticism (when there's criticism at all).

The difference may be that good criticism in my eyes doesn't need to be a complete analysis. Earlier today I dismissed an article by saying it had "unsubstantiated claims" and was "sophomoric". That was it. No additional details or explanations given. I still consider that good critical feedback, because a sufficiently motivated person could improve the work based on it.

If somebody looks at my code and says: "that's too brittle", that's good criticism. If somebody points at something and says: "unpythonic", that is good feedback too.

Other people are not obligated to tell you what you need to do to improve. Even when their dissatisfaction takes the form of a rant, there's often a rational cause underneath. (The cause may be completely unrelated to the work he's criticizing, but humans are funny that way.)

The difference between a critical analysis and bitching is only intent. Bitching is an attempt to make yourself feel better by making somebody else feel worse about his accomplishments. Criticism is trying to tell others where to improve.

So the exact same one-liner (e.g. "that code sucks") can be nasty bitching from one person, and good feedback if it comes from a respected peer.
There are brands like Anyvite caring about customers
Your class warfare attitude doesn't seem justified. No one is holding people down, and no one is "allowing" these students to rise up. The story is that someone who wants to help people started a good school, and it's working. It's bizarre to try and cast this as a classist struggle.
Without taking a position, I will point out that in a pure direct democracy, it is possible for 49% of people to be enslaved.
Interesting that they cite California's long constitution as a problem, since Texas is in the exact opposite position as California (budget balanced), and yet has a longer constitution (second only to Alabama).
My sympathies to the author, that is one mixed up dude.

What kind of person (at 35 no less) still identifies so strongly with the school they attended as an 18 year old?

And to be wracked with guilt about it?

And to blame his schooling for his inability to speak to the plumber?

This is nothing short of neurotic.
"Because in the primaries they have run on extremist platforms against other Republicans, they have no incentive to be pragmatic or moderate, and tend simply to balk."

Yes, let's knee-jerk blame Republicans. Obviously cutting spending is out of the question, even though other states somehow manage.
This is very true. I'm at a top "name brand" school for CS, and, honestly, when I look at myself next to someone from a good but less-well-known university (say, UW) who has done really interesting research, I feel inferior in a way. I guess it has something to do with this guy really being a star in a pretty good department, versus myself being a pretty typical student in a very strong department.

What I'm trying to get at is that while being from MIT or Stanford makes a good first impression, personal achievements say a lot more about you than the hand you were dealt by the extremely noisy college admissions process (consider this: I am a CS grad student at Stanford, and I was rejected from UMD and UMass Amherst for grad school).
Well, some of you geniuses decided to not even use A/C, which was completely nuts. Once ours were acquired, things were rather comfortable... so long as you didn't leave the room with 2 units in the windows!
Exactly. I don't think I've ever attended a graduation at any level where the graduating class wasn't referred to as "the future" or the best and the brightest.

It tends to be at university when one meets honest-to-goodness exceptionally intelligent people that we first learn our own limitations.
Interesting. It was originally submitted by 'bokonist' accurately titled as "How tiny Portugual beat the Chinese Empire in the race to control the seas", but this got very few votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482484

I resubmitted it with this title, which is the original title of the article, hoping that it would be called to the attention of a few more readers. Empirically, this title seems to have worked better.

What title would you suggest?
Ah, for the days when nearly all internet discourse was as polite and interesting as Hacker News.
To see the equivalent of this initiative on steriods, take a look at Bihar's Super 30: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMSYGLbIUxc
And that (the Humpty Dumpty reading, wherein the meaning and intent of words is subordinated to the reader's desire) is an assumption of the sort one has to make in order to "prove" that it is fundamentally impossible for a statement to be self-contradictory. Such statements are always introduced in intellectual discourse as self-referential; that is, the words "this", "I" and "me" are identities of the statement by definition. There is no ambiguity of the sort that one might find in Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", where one may chose to infer "ceci" to refer to any of the depiction of the pipe, the painting as a whole, or just the written statement (none of which is a pipe as such).

Think of it this way:

If a stranger were to approach you on the street, say, "I am a liar," then walk away, you'd likely think that the fellow is a little depressed and perhaps a bit remorseful about a habit of lying whenever it suited him. If the same fellow, in the same circumstances, had instead said "I am lying to you right now" before wandering off, you're left with two choices -- seriously psychotic or smartass.

People are reluctant to think of systems such as language and mathematics as seriously psychotic, so a cottage industry has sprung up trying to prove that these systems are merely smartasses out to infect our internal source code repositories with Brainfuck or some other Turing tarpit. It doesn't matter how many times one invokes the demons of deconstructionism, these paradoxes are and will remain very real.
1200, 1208 Lcd Led Lights Problem
A title of nobility that has to be earned and is available to anyone with adequate grades? I don't think that analogy holds much water.
Yeah, I've seen a few people in their 30s or 40s doing CS degrees, and I always respect them for it. Don't let your age stop you if it's something you want to do.
And that percentage goes up to 99.9% for non-direct democracy and other forms of government.
You're not contradicting me, because I'm not saying schools are entirely responsible for the cruelty of children. However, the problems are exacerbated by the environment.
Again, it has to do with credentialism. I'm not making a typical class warfare argument.
I think California succeeds in spike of its political system, not because of it. The bay area has fantastic weather, a cultured urban center, plenty of nearby outdoor activities, and a climate of technological innovation that predates many of the problems with the political system. I have never personally visited L.A. but it is also reported to have excellent weather, and is clearly a center of the entertainment industry (this development once again occurring before their problems got really bad). I've lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle for most of my life, and have wanted to move to California, but have not done so precisely because of the high taxes and the dysfunctional politics, which make some sort of disaster seem almost inevitable. The question is not how it survives, but how much better it could be if the system worked properly given the number of advantages that the state enjoys.
there was a video on the news the other day that some kids with cell phones had recorded of this one kid beating the crap out of another kid and it was the kid getting beat up who was punished by the school.
Name brand colleges are a joke. It has taken the world a while to figure it out but it's finally happening.
Well, the idea is that credentials are a measure of actual ability.

Sure, that's the idea, but they're not. I'm not saying people should use any one system to evaluate people, but a variety of different ones instead. The one-size-fits-all approach is inherently broken and extremely expensive to boot.
The words may be the same, but the meaning is significantly different, and I have little interest in whatever sophistry you intend to pursue in order to support your crankish opinion that university degrees are unconstitutional.

Incidentally, "nominate to an order of persons" is probably the operative text there, and is something that you probably neglected to include in your earlier definition. I do not think that Alabama court of a century ago, or indeed the drafters of the Constitution, intended university degrees to count as a title of nobility. Especially since many of them founded universities themselves.
"California’s current constitution rivals India’s and Alabama’s for being the longest and most convoluted in the world"

It's the fact that it is both long AND convoluted that causes the problem. Convolution is the major problem. Length makes convolution much easier to pull off (How complex can you really make a 1-page constitution?), but it doesn't guarantee it.

That said, Texas's may be just as crazy, just in a crazy way that somehow works. That's unlikely though. It's pretty hard to make an extremely complex governing document that will stand the test of time and still function properly as Texas's apparently does.
Our "office" (read living room filled with computers) was actually sealed off with sheets in order to keep the cool air from the in-window AC confined to that room.

The real killer was the two mile hike to YC for weekly dinners and meetings. Unfortunately walking to the T, taking it a couple stops, then walking to YC was the same equivalent distance, so we ended up just hoofing it over there in the heat and humidity.
The Economist is traditional a fairly conservative organization, it's hard to call their critique of Republicans knee-jerk.
I'm embarrassed every time an article like this gets posted to Hacker News.

I don't think anyone here would take Ray Kurzweil's books seriously, but quite a few people would upvote an article by Dawkins or Chomsky, whose books have contributed to their respective fields in the same way that Kurzweil has to ours -- which is to say, not at all.

P.S. The last time someone submitted an article about the Sokal affair, I posted a short comment about the importance of postmodernism here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856
For what it's worth, I have a friend at Lockheed right now and they are paying for her master's at UPenn.
Whether or not that is the case, the initiative immediately cut property tax income by 57(?)% and made it much more difficult for the state to raise money by increasing taxes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you can't lower taxes without also decreasing spending.

As far as the problem being obvious to "everyone not in Sacramento," clearly you are wrong because here we are, and the voters of California played an active role in bringing us here.
The reason it works is because it requires a balanced budget. However, Texas' constitution is still rather confusing and can be frustrating for law-makers - it just doesn't suffer the budget problems.
I compliment colleagues and friends who have CS degrees, and deprecate myself about it out loud, but I secretly don't feel the least bit inferior. In fact, I kind of enjoy the drop-out hacker makes good story.
I disagree with you. They may be a noisy measure, but they are not meaningless. If I have ten technical positions, and for each one I interview someone from MIT and someone with a two-year degree from community college, I'm pretty sure that at least 9 of those 10 positions are better filled by a MIT grad.
Okay, that's a fair point. There are some very stupid policies concerning fights - I've seen my younger brother be penalized for defending himself as well. But it is silly to say that schools cause the fights in the first place, and/or that kids, left to their own devices, would be civil to one another.
I was just there. The people I talked to about this feel that (a) politicians have talked up the crisis to such a shrill level for so long that trust has almost completely been lost and (b) cost cutting is a desired outcome, although I don't think the people I talked to are clear on what that means to them in the day to day.
Well, I don't think a representative democracy like the US has could really result in enslavement of 99.9% of people.

In any case, I am no fascist (or anarchist). I don't know who first said this, but the only thing worse than democracy is every other alternative.
>To oversimplify, I see a large class of people being unnecessarily held down, with everyone cheering when a select few are permitted to rise back up.

That kind of sounds like a typical class warfare argument to me...
Oh and I thought that I was going to give microsoft a chance and try using bing instead of google... But yes I can confirm it, here (in malaysia) searching for sex returns "THE SEARCH SEX MAY RETURN SEXUALLY EXPLICIT CONTENT." (and all in caps as if they needed to shout it on top of that)

No way I'm going to use a search engine like this.
Okay, well we agree on that point. :)
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson
"made me want to vomit every time I had to use it"

100% agree...as a windows user, this is my only exposure to apple software, and I am constantly shouting out loud at the insanity of it.

The only other thing I know is you can't maximize windows on a mac without some sort of add-on or something. I don't think I want to know any more.
This is slightly tangential, I guess, but could someone explain this facet of Indian culture to me? I have heard that India can be very socially conservative, but, well, the Kama Sutra did come from there. Is there a sort of Victorian dichotomy of public conservatism and private debauchery? Is it a religious thing? Is the Kama Sutra the product of an older culture that no longer really exists? Are there strong generational divisions on this sort of issue?
"AIUI East Asian means Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese if you're really pushing it."

All except Japan were within the Mongol empire mere centuries ago. All have significant genetic influence from the hunting/gathering Mongol hordes. Don't underestimate the genetic influence that nomadic tribes of horseback rapists can have when they conquer a continent.
don't let them California folks tempt you; their "thug life" tats are henna. this shit is supposed to hurt.

/me goes back to struggling with CSS in IE, you fucking piece of crap!
Not to mention, I think a large part of google's advertising revenue has got to be a waste of money for the person paying, it just hasn't been figured out yet.
The Kama Sutra is so old there's a whole chapter on what to do with your tail.