skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha ... I am laughing now thinking of the 30 Rock episode when the guy played by Alec Baldwin thinks up the smallest microwave ever, and that was like a funny thing. And now its a reality, :) ( by the way the microwave showed in that episode was bigger than this one )
"down-mud"?
To be fair. It should be noted that US and UK elections have far larger variances than the elections in Iran. I suspect it is because incumbent politicians are allowed to engage in 're-districting'. I would need more data to make a definitive statement on the 'why'. In my view though, when Republicans carve out new districts in Mississippi and Louisiana, and when Democrats carve out new districts in Chicago, it is a form of election tampering. A very effective form of election tampering. Only the evidence of having tampered with the elections via re-districting shows up via Benford's law. Again, that part is just a theory. The explanation could be as simple as tamperers stuffing ballot boxes in the US as well.
Easiest way would be to check the user-agent string.

Or if you use desktop-only apps it will surely ring some bells.
I think his point is that if a hundred such political scientists used a hundred different methods of evaluating election results, one of them would be guaranteed to find evidence of fraud. the other 99 would not report there results, not having found anything exciting. im not convinced there ARE that many tests you could perform, but the general point is interesting...
I was another person looking for this feature: https://twitter.com/pswam/status/1661113057

I have been playing around with what Gabriel built, it's interesting, here are some of the queries I tried:

- @duckduckgo diff

- @duckduckgo diff -popular

- @duckduckgo diff -25

- @duckduckgo diff -popular -10
Effexor, lowest dose possible, cleared me up. I almost couldn't leave my house before.

Try exercise and better diet first though maybe.
or page up and down
I dunno, these problems aren't very puzzle-y, they look like job interview questions. I'd rather do top-coder questions or wu riddles.
Why do people drive gas-sucking SUVs today? Because CAFE regulations in the '70s killed the family station wagon, but exempted cars. People want big vehicles, and found a way around the regulations. And the work-around was worse than what we had initially.

In that case, the problem is that the CAFE regulations weren't broad enough-- not that someone tried to regulate the market. "Government meddling" is necessary, and desirable.
Remind HN: Tuesday is June 23rd and the Monday after that is June 29th.
Why would a search engine do this as part of the same brand/domain?

Can somebody tell me how this is related to the search engine?
The Myth of the Abrasive Genius
I agree and I've suggested elsewhere that there be an option to disable the damn karma score. When it can be seen on every page it's distracting and feels like it's turning the whole thing into a karma whoring game. I try to resist it and write whatever I want but still.

If there was an option to permanently disable display of my karma, I'd select that. I can get recent feedback from the "threads" page.
Yes.

+ Thunk is the past tense of think,

+ lunk is the past tense of link (I lunk to that page)

+ cluck is the past tense of click (I cluck that link)

... and "down-mud" is the past tense of "down-mod".
Mr. Freidman discounts a little too quickly the incredible changes and advances in technology in the past 60 years. If you consider per capita technology spending in the last 60 years, I suspect there might be a suprising correlation to health care spending.

In 1946, oxygen administration was considered "advanced". Penicillin and sulfa antibiotics were just begining regular use in World War II. Before that people died from infections like pneumonia very frequently. Diseases like polio, smallpox, measles, tetanus, mumps, were devastating and crippling diseases. We rarely see those any more. Advances in microbioligy and pharmacology have greatly reduced morbidity and mortality. It's harder than it used to be to die from an infectuous disease in a country with modern healthcare.

But, people in the US now have a cultural expectation that medicine can dramatically fix or cure a lot of diseases, like we did with microbial diseases. But, the diseases that we are left with tend to be chronic and a lot harder to cure: heart disease, diabetes, cancer. Low hanging fruit are easiest to pick.

15 years ago, when I started my nursing career the state of the art in emergency heart attack treatment was a $1000 single dose of a clot busting medication. 1 out of 20 people bled to death from that cure. So, $300,000 emergency heart catheterization and angioplasty was developed to limit the 5% mortality rate.

One of the big focuses in the US medicine is technological innovation and critical care, because that's what our insurance pays for. The focus in many other developed nations is primary care, prevention and cost effective treatments.

Also, other areas of technological innovation benefit from exponential decrease in costs because of Moore's law. Medical and biological technology have the inherit limitation of the human body. That's going to influence cost structures dramatically in comparison to other technologies.
Sadly the majority of motherboards out there can't handle more than 8GB of memory. Single 4GB chips around $80 now (fully buffered), so it should seem like normal motherboards with 4 slots should support 16GB normally.
Quick q: Have you heard of duckduckgo before this post?
This passage caught my eye:

"I eyeballed the Wyse terminal in the office behind her. "I thought you said you had Microsoft Word running on that?" I asked. "My handwriting's not very good ... mind if I use it?"

I'm just wondering, do you, fellow typists, suffer from a similar atrophy of handwriting skills? I was never any good to begin with, even when they used to drill us pretty hard about penmanship back in grade school. Let's just say things have only gone downhill from there.
[TED] Yann Arthus-Bertrand captures fragile Earth in wide-angle
Why not simulate a more interconnected architecture by just running really really fast?
I disagree with further complexity. Generally if people have a good counter to your argument, and if you seem to be someone worth arguing with, they'll pipe up with a dissenting view. And if you're really confused, a short reply saying "I'm genuinely curious as to why I'm being downmodded - anyone care to explain their decision?" will rarely attract spillover downmods. Unless the comment was really egregious ..

If we're brainstorming how to improve HN's commenting system, here's an idea: a limit to upvotes. I propose 32. Beyond that, upvotes only raise position on the page. Thoughts?
Well, lots of things in life are completely arbitrary. Just do what works for you.
iPhone is OS X (which means UNIX). So, it is possible to port almost everything for it. kismet, aircrack-ng, wireshark, etc.
Augmented Reality is Full of Zombies
The machinery used to make White Castle hamburgers is a proven and mature technology, but that doesn't mean it is beneficial to people's health.
The Firefox Kid: Blake Ross (2006)
Classic. Absolutely classic.
People drive gas-sucking SUVs because our government did the following:

1) built a massive interstate highway system that made it cheaper to live in the burbs where mass transit was not needed.

and

2) because our government wages oil wars that essentially subsidize the price of petroleum.
I doubt the beta comes with debug information (not your beta, theirs). I don't use Windows -- it should be easily checkable by someone who does.
see my comment on government subsidy of oil and burb living, which is a sister to yours.
Agreed. People who rave about government--provided healthcare seem to be mostly talking about routine care: colds, broken bones, pregnancy.

My aunt is an oncology nurse. She has told me that she sees a lot of patients from Canada seeking treatment in the US that they can't get in Canada under their healthcare system. Of course, it's only those who have money who can afford to do this, if you're not rich you're just out of luck.
There is certainly an epistemological flaw in predictive economics. On the one hand, economic history gives us plenty of data on the behavior of economic systems. Unfortunately, each new economic system is essentially novel. That's why I don't give much credence to economic predictions that are overly precise, and I am skeptical of lessons drawn from long-ago events applied to today's issues.

This is where I think Austrian Economics has diagnosed the problem correctly, although its solution (an escape into extreme deductive logic) doesn't appeal to me as a reliable method to discover truths about the world.
This is one of my arguments against a national health plan in the US. I can't think of a single thing in this country that has been made better by the government being in charge of it. Anyone who has had to deal with the IRS, the VA, or any number of other government agencies knows what that is like.
Why we need no DRM in Norway
As an experiment, compare the relative merits of statistical arbitrage, black-scholes, and the gaussian copula (of mortgage backed securities fame) to Newtonian and quantum mechanics, general relativity, the germ theory of disease, DNA research, and any number of seminal papers in computing from the time of Turing to now. It seems fairly obvious to me that financial engineering is not in the same league.
I'll be the sacrificial lamb and remind people that if we start posting this sort of article, there will be a whole lot more like it, from reason.com, Krugman, Thoma, Cowen, and so on and so forth. They may be interesting and stimulating, but because of their ability to stimulate heated debate, they will eventually crowd out other things unless they are controlled.

I mean specifically articles about politics/economics, things which people hold strong opinions about, and are of interest to pretty much everyone.
Same here. I just moved and don't have internet set up yet. It's been really useful, but I'm a little worried about my next bill :).
That might explain why people drive cars rather than taking mass transit, but it does not explain people's preference for larger cars like SUVs.
Because we get a lot more done that way than if we packed all those celebrations into one earth's rotation about it's own axis.
Sorry, edit to the above after the deadline.

I said "CAFE regulations in the '70s killed the family station wagon, but exempted cars"

What I meant was "CAFE regulations in the '70s killed the family station wagon, but exempted trucks"
For what it's worth, we've already got wikipedia which does math pretty well. Even though it doesn't have the fancy-sounding zoomable user interface (which imho suck w.r.t. usability), it does offer plain old, get this, hypertext, which allows you to perform further exploration.

As for your idea, I don't want to minimalize it [because well, with ideas, you never know for sure which ones are good and which ones are bad (w.r.t. how successful they are) until after they are deployed], but it seems to me it would be a lot of work, with an end-result that might be totally crap usability-wise, and of limited interest to a large part of the population. Plus it would (for the moment) require a computer to read it. And computers suck as devices to read books on.
Why are Support Vectors Machines called so?
Entrepreneurship Is Not Sexy
Ask HN: How did you get started with your first start-up?
Please feel free to share every detail and piece of advice comes with it.
This is the Slashdot way: each mod has a label (interesting, insightful, funny, overrated, underrated, troll etc.). A total score can be for example 5 Insightful, made up of 3 Insightful and 2 Interesting.

Slashdot's system is fairly complex, and pretty successful. But on HN the accent is on fewer members and overall quality, and less on a complex system. And it's working pretty well so far.
FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments
Microelectronics and the personal computer by Alan Kay
Are you using the latest FF 3.5 release candidate? I noticed this issue with previous versions, but it seems like the latest RC is much better.
Not so much atrophy, but underdevelopment.
A while back, someone came out with a prototype driver for a mouse that used, for lack of a better word, "stabilization" to compensate for a jittery hand. I want to say it was an IBM Alphaworks project, but I'm not sure. Think of image stabilization, but applied to mouse input rather than a camera image.

If a shaky hand is limiting his ability with the mouse, while a long-shot, it might be worth looking into this. (I'll google around a bit and see if I get lucky.)

----

EDIT:

The following apparently is only for Windows. Whether you might be able to adapt/adopt it in one way or another, I don't know.

SteadyMouse

http://www.oatsoft.org/Software/steadymouse/

The page mentions an IBM hardware adapter as both inspiration and as a possible alternative, albeit one that (as of 2006) is not yet available.

A comment to the page mentions this hardware adapter. Looks like it sits on the mouse's USB line and is fairly OS independent. I can understand the pricing based on the probable small size of sales and corresponding mode of manufacture. And for someone really needing it, it may be money very well spent. But it's not cheap. (On the other hand, some of use spend as much on ueber-keyboards.)

http://www.montrosesecam.com/index.html

Per the About page, it looks like this is the licensed offshoot/production of the IBM product:

In 2004 IBM secured a global licensing agreement with Montrose Secam Limited to manufacture and market the mouse adapter.
In twitter's search, the emoticons are not literal search terms but keywords that select for messages considered positive or negative more broadly. This might mean that :) translates to (cool OR awesome OR great ...) or it could be some fuzzier NLP thing. Who knows. Either way, it's a handy feature with a cute UI, totally un-understood by this writer. Considering the amount of merited curmudgeoning possible regarding twitter, this is pretty lame.
"A single payer would have a huge advantage in negotiating drug prices."

If that single payer is the US Government, expect the same US Government pattern. The system will be gamed to maximize cashflow from US tax dollars to crony corporations. That's the rationale behind Medicare today and that's the rationale behind downsizing the military and hiring back the soldiers we just downsized as mercenaries. That's the rationale behind corn ethanol subsidies.

So drug prices (to the government) go up, but drug prices (to the consumer) drop to some arbitrary low level. What do you think will happen then? People will use more prescription drugs. Now the cost to society is even higher, because the inflated subsidies (which in more honest terms might be called "kickbacks") by the government combined with the total lack of spending discipline on the part of the consumer result in an even higher increase to the tax burden and the federal deficit. Which must be dealt with in some way (taxation or inflation) that makes us all a bit poorer.

It is a fallacy to assume that individuals make perfectly rational economic decisions on behalf of themselves, but it's closer to the truth than supposing that governments make perfectly rational economic decisions on behalf of the people at large.
"It's immensely cool to be an entrepreneur now... 'when I was at university, the cool guys all pretended to be in a band, now they all pretend to be entrepreneurs'"

- The Economist, Special Report on Entrepreneurship, March 14, 2009 (http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13216025)
We could pack them into one rotation of the sun around the galactic center and get a lot more done, but then lots of lifes would be without a single celebration.
My verdict:
Cargo cult critics ("Somebody else criticizes, so I can do as well, in a cargo cult way, by treating what they do a prori mocking, and without real understanding of matters") of management practices.
I'm not sure if things are different in your country - business cultures vary from city to city. In Boston, it'd be harder but not impossible. In one of my old employers, we hired a guy in his early thirties who'd been a sysop in the military, serving a tour of duty in Iraq. He had no relevant work experience and his technical skills were weak, but he was taking programming courses at a local community college and seemed eager to learn and really excited about the job. Turned out to be a pretty good hire too, as he was eager to learn and excited about the job.

If you do this, the burden will be on you to show why you want to jump into programming at such a late age and why you haven't done so already. People don't change on a dime, so your interviewers will ask you about this. (In my last job hunt, I got questions about why I was looking for a position in Mountain View when I lived in Boston, and why I wanted to work for a big company when all my previous experience was with startups.) But if you have good reasons for this (where good != "I wanted to make more money" (outside of the financial industry) or "I really wasn't any good at my last job, so I'll try something new"), most people are quite willing to give you a fresh start.
"United States population is growing at almost the same rate as India. We also have a new immigrant population every year."

There's no "also" to it. Reproduction of those already inside the US is below replacement rates. Immigration is our only source of population growth.
Thanks for the info - but a shaky hand isn't the problem, so stabilisation won't help. It's partly a cognitive thing, and partly an alzheimer's-like problem (actually Binswager's). He's likely always to have a problem with a mouse, but I'll also have a look.

Thanks.

And thanks to everyone for the incredibly useful responses. Currently I'm looking at pico or nano.
Isn't this precisely the sort of thing criminals are made to use in some places to monitor parole compliance? (i.e. the kind of thing I would only use if my alternative were somehow worse).
I admit curiosity too. Sometimes it's obvious. One-liners dont fare too well, alas. Other times it's a poorly reasoned argument. That's usually apparent when someone below points out the errors of my ways. I think down modding because of a differing opinion is a bit rude. When I dont like someone's opinion, I upmod someone else.
+1 for Mousepad

http://www.xfce.org/projects/mousepad/
I've often thought about how games could be used as a sort of simulator for political ideas. This seems very interesting, especially in that context.
Ask HN: Missing needed skills for startup
This is partially a technical question and part business.

I have a business idea, which will require a non-trivial database. I have a CS degree but almost no db experience. I'm considering moving forward with the project with plans to hire an expert to redo the database later if the business gains traction.

I'm curious if anyone on HN has been in a similar situation and am curious how you handled it. Would you take several months to gain expertise before beginning rather than learn while doing with intentions to replace the code later? Are there utilities to do some of the heavy lifting for the database portion that are good enough for use in production? What would you do if you were in my place?
This is great game that builds on real objects like a map on a table and skittles but why not as an iPhone app?
This problem just seems really, really trivially easy to fix. Advertise elsewhere.
Planar (Nanotech) Assembly Scale
I'm not sure if this has been commented here before (it probably has), but these guys really deserves some credits.

NRK (aka The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) is a radio and television broadcasting company, owned by the government. There are no ads, instead every household with a television receiver has to pay a mandatory annual license fee.

They've started nrkbeta.no, a company blog where the tech guys posts about things inside NRK and other, generally tech news/thoughts. So when Dagbladet (news paper) launched a gorgeous new video player on db.no, NRKbeta blogged about it and agreed that it was something NRK could learn from.

They've served TV-series (where they have the full copyrights) through BitTorrent and is now running their own tracker. No DRM what so ever (see quote). They've asked developers on what they want from their API (still not finished though), and the users how nrk.no should look like.

In short: They're some fucking awesome guys, who really believes in the great openness of the internet!

(Oh, and we're just around 4-5 million people spread across ~385,000 km2. We could need some more…)
I think it's a clever trick to get more followers. It's a good idea, really.
I wrote a quick Ruby script awhile back which provides the same function (without having to follow @duckduckgo):

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/05/expand-your-twitter-netwo...
What are you talking about? You pulled this out of nowhere.

Boltzmann machines are undirected architectures, and have been around since the eighties, courtesy of Geoff Hinton and collaborators. Here is some new work on the topic: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/dbm.pdf

The more interconnected architectures are much slower to train and use for inference. Hence, we use restricted architectures to improve speed. (RBMs = restricted boltzmann machines, which are a component of any current NetFlix-prize top contender.)

AI does need faster number crunching. Matrix-multiplies are really slow. I can't train more than 10K neurons on desktop hardware. Faster hardware has driven a lot of AI innovation.
I'm in town for a conference which starts tomorrow. I was planning on seeing the talks that sound interesting, and then talking to the speakers, or other people who thought that same talk would be interesting.

I agree with you that I'm not here for the talks, but everyone still goes to them (at least the marine-ecologists at the conference with me), so I won't have anyone to meet while there's a talk going on, anyways. Go to the talks, and see who goes to the same sessions that you do!
They kept mentioning the Tegra by nVidia. It seems like this application would require a lot of power, the kind the iPhone can't produce (yet).
Clarification:

I'm left-handed, write somewhat crabbily at the best of times, and was suffering somewhat from mild RSI at the time. Half an hour isn't very long; I can type a lot faster than I can hand-write, so to make even a token stab at the task I needed a keyboard.

I'm just startled that nobody else ever asked the obvious question ...
Prototypying the next generation Hypergrid
I think h1 tags have to be closed.

Assuming they are much the same as the HTML 4 tags:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html
Because you're surrounded by people with emotions and feelings and one of those feelings is to be made feeling extra-extra-special and an anniversary day naturally slips into that.
Of course, it's not the actual downloaded text that takes up all that memory. It's not like programs take up gobs of memory because the programmers were being lazy and disdainful.

No, it's the internal representation of the markup, and the program state of all of the javascript programs a page might incorporate, that takes up a lot of memory.
the discussion one year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203683
I have a hazy recollection that classical education used to mean mathematics, Greek and latin. I take that combination to be pretty good prep for hacking haskell, clojure, erlang, F#, whatever.

Especially with some logic, stats/probability, applied math, linguistics, and intro classes to assembler and C thrown in.