skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you know your flight has a certain probability of being late, are you going to risk arriving late at the airport and missing the plane if and when FlightCaster gets it wrong?

Another inherent problem is related to the fact that
until the airline admits that the flight is going to be late (and sometimes even after that point) they still require you to check in on-time or risk losing your seat and pay extra for rescheduling. Then, what good is the information?

As customers of the airline industry we have been trained to adjust our behavior and expectations regarding timing without being able to influence the industry. The service will NOT and cannnot change it.

Given the factors involved, it is unlikely that the model used is able to explain substantial amount of the variance. Hence, the ability to predict low probabilities.

Sorry, I will not invest a penny in a company like this.
I assume you're talking about this story: http://www.naturalnews.com/021290.html

If so I'd have to dispute it. I do think the U.S. imprisons too many people for drug charges but I also think China and Russia have a lot of people imprisoned "off the books". Also keep in mind the statistics don't tell the whole story. We all know Russia doles out a lot of punishment via hit squad and China, who won't release their capital punishment numbers, admits to executing more people than any other country on earth (though not per capita thanks to Iran)

If China has fewer people in prison because the execute far more people than your argument isn't really a valid one
I could spin it as "Catching Real Sex Offenders Act" where I would refocus the list towards the "scary types"

This is actually how Minnesota's sentencing laws work. Long before the federal sentencing reform, Minnesota calculated for each convicted criminal a

criminal history score

and

severity score

and used a grid to determine sentence length based on how much a convict was a consistent, dangerous offender. Over time, the grid was adjusted as to specific crimes as criminals learned which offenses were least likely to lengthen their sentences. Minnesota spends less per taxpayer on imprisoning convicts than most states, and yet spends MORE per prisoner on programs that tend to reduce recidivism. Minnesota simply doesn't imprison people for long terms for minor offenses, but uses community-based sanctions to deter and correct those people.
I think politico is the true herald of the digital journalism future. They are hard journalists, they are small and efficient like a startup, and they are profitable. They are also very narrowly focused.

The problem with the majority of currently falling news organizations is the fat profit margins they've been enjoying. And there's no helping them.

Let me put it this way, after the railroads no amount of cleverness and inventiveness was going to save the pony express.
"Too many lists and then everything is saturated, no I don't propose that. I propose common sense when a sentence is being dealt."

That's the whole point of the article. Common sense wen't out the window because there's an arms race among politicians; everybody wants to look tougher than the others on sex crimes, and nobody dares criticize the system because "the attack ads write themselves".

So we have tons of people who had consensual sex or urinated in public that can't live within "1000 yards of a school, park, library, bus stop, playground, etc" and can't find jobs. Not to mention that they become the victims of harassment and vigilantism.
The problem is that adding TCO to a mature and widely-used language introduces a massive compatibility problem!

If Python supported TCO, more recursive Python code would probably be written

And not be able to run on Python implementations without TCO!

Code that takes advantage of TCO is utterly dependent on it. It is absolutely not an 'implementation detail', or really an 'optimization' -- its presence is a major part of the semantics of any language implementation that does it.
Maybe some sort of per-worker hidden metric formula based on...

Perhaps I didn't state my case well enough. Let me try this...

The correlation between activity and achievement is not only irrelevant, it could be worse; it could be negative.

If you have lots of commits, why? Didn't you code it right in the first place?

If you're doing lots of testing, why? Didn't you write it well enough in the first place?

Why are you emailing and going to meetings so much? Aren't you able to conduct analysis more efficiently?

There questions are all, obviously, ridiculous. Activity is an indicator of nothing. So why collect it? The number of flies landing of flowers in Peru is just as good an indicator of your achievement as the number of commits, emails, etc.

This is a idea that must be resisted so that maybe, just maybe, managers might learn how to manage and forget the gimmicks.
I suppose it's no surprise that people too lazy to use a search engine would also avoid putting in the effort to click through to the results, when it's so, so much easy just to reach for the downmod arrow. Sigh...

This from the ACLU article:

"In 1998, people convicted of drug offenses constituted almost one-fourth of state prison inmates and over half of the inmates in federal prison. While African Americans reportedly make up 13% of the nation's drug users, they are almost 60% of those in state prisons for drug felonies. "

And this the VERY OPENING of the Atlantic article:

"Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers"
I don't understand what you mean by this. If the truth is that the current sex offender laws make kids less safe and you can prove that to people I'd think the truth matters a great deal. People empower "Spin" too much in their heads. The reality is it's reasonably ineffective against someone who can clearly and coherently state the truth.
It's the concluding paragraph of "Revenge of the Nerds"
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

I completely failed to recognize its significance when I first read that essay. Thanks for bring it to my attention.

"This practice is not only common, but institutionalized. For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble."
What Google Engineers Are Building in Seattle
The natural tendency of government is to extend power and when the power extension efforts suddenly narrow their focus to a certain realm it indicates a trend. Given the resources and coordination needed to fuel a trend in development of a state's security apparatus there is likely a perceived threat behind it.

Cold War efforts, for example, were in anticipation of possible conflict with an external enemy. In this case, as the Pentagon's recent request for authorization to deploy 400,000 troops within the US indicates (http://tr.im/xn5T), the perceived threat is domestic. This begs the question why they are anticipating a domestic threat.
So now your sister in law is suspicious of her neighbor and likely uncomfortable about her living situation. Her kids will likely lose freedom and probably be restricted to more inside play time. Running background checks on everyone you come in contact with doesn't make you safer, it just makes you more paranoid.
To support the problem identified earlier: "75% of all significant delays (those over an hour) are first posted by the airlines within 30 minutes of departure." Yet, in most cases you have to check in at least an hour before departure.
So, this statics actually works against your service.
Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem
> but that's the judge's fault

Not necessarily. In some states, you are mandated to be added to the registry for certain crimes.

If you really believe that the sex offender list is too large, then what are you doing to rectify this? Are you calling/writing your local/state legislature? If not then you are willingly ostracizing a group of people based on a premise that you know is faulty (that everyone, or even most people on the sex offender list are dangerous) because you "don't have the time" to be bothered to help those people out. One of the evils that abounds in our society is the indifference of 'good men.'
Building a new startup hub
Its also a weird combination from a core business perspective. Why does an ad network need/want a small business organization tool?
I can understand the saying "money can't buy happiness", but when you're broke and behind on bills, that lack of money sure does create unhappiness.

I've talked to a very well off person about this, and they said that not having to think paycheck to paycheck certainly does alleviate a lot of stress that most Americans deal with.
I'm not so sure about that.

The 'long tail' in search is - for google at least - everything beyond page 100 (or position 1,000 , which ever way you want to slice it). Those pages might just as well not exist for those keywords. But because there is plenty of other content nobody notices.

The situation with the 'long tail' for pagesets where there are less than 1,000 'results' can be handled the exact same way it is being done today (here the long tail probably refers to rarity of search keywords / combinations).

For really small sets (1 full page of results or less) the ranking is pretty much irrelevant.
We need to get people to stop believing that 'tv == realism.' Watching "Law & Order" doesn't make you a legal expert. Watching "The Sopranos" doesn't mean that you know all about the mob. There are people that believe this though. Statements like, "the revolution will not be televised" are a reflection of this tendency in our society.
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

-Maslow
Nice explanation. Note that I did wrap my print arg in parens, however. When I heard they were changing it to a function in 3 I made this a habit.
I can see your point, and can't say I disagree with you, what worries me is that we'll swing too far back in the opposite direction the same way we went into a panic and went overboard with the law.

I can see where I misunderstood the point being presented though.
It was a good article 3 weeks ago when it was featured on other sites. I dislike reading (slightly) old stuff in Hacker News.
What about the dramatically increased weight of electric bicycles due to the battery? Over short ranges, the fact that humans need to exercise anyway should also become important; I would think twice about a 20-mile daily commute, but I commuted 4 miles each way along the Stevens Creek Trail during the summer I spent at Google and it was a blast. (Despite the increased physical activity, I think Google was net bad for my health because I wasn't able to resist the oh-so-delicious array of desserts.)
Ask HN: How many req per second can a single mongrel server handle of RoR app.
I have a RoR app running a simple hello world program running on a single instance of Mongrel as app container and apache as web server.<p>Its a dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM<p>Can I expect it to handle 150 req. per second?
The truth is that living wills are not death panels, but after some powerful people started the lie it caught on and now half the country believe it. The same thing would happen with something as easy to spin as sex offenders.
The number of children that are sexually abused/kidnapped/murdered by complete strangers PALES in comparison to the number of children that are abused/kidnapped/murdered by family members/close friends/teachers/etc.

Yet people go all ga-ga about guy in the beat-up car trolling through residential neighborhoods to entice kids into his car with promises of candy. This image is largely a modern-day boogie-man. It does happen, and it is a tragedy. But there are MORE children that are raped by a parent/sibling/babysitter than there are by complete strangers.
Please help vote. Rating some of the apps at the bottom of the list and solo apps will be extra helpful! Thanks.
The irony? No doubleplus operator ("++").
Let me clarify..

How would you know how to value votes for different queries? Certain pages are more relevant to certain queries more so than others, and likewise for votes. Your approach doesn't have a way of accounting for this. And implementing something that does is a very, very hard problem.
I don't know if someone else care, but I find it annoying that the "blocks" proprietary extension to C/C++ is conflicting with C++/CLI syntax for managed pointers.
It's $30 credit towards your rackspace hosted exchange service (which is $12.50/mo. per user) - obviously their costs are much less than $12.50. In reality it is just a discount code - it's like google giving out a free adwords credit.

On another note: I am actually considering going with Rackspace to host my main email address (personal/freelance stuff). Currently using Google Apps, but if the Snow Leopard exchange integration is as good as Apple says - then I will definitely be wanting push everything. I would use MobileMe, but there's no option to use your own domain.
Spend some time with a language that not only supports them but actually encourages their use, and you will see for yourself.

This isn't an example and does nothing to convince me that it's actually useful. Your suggested application just hints at difficult debugging when a Car object can be a stealth Truck. Maybe it isn't actually difficult, but why is this actually better than subclassing?

TCO allows programs to, in certain circumstances, reuse existing stack frames for possibly many function invocations. For example, if a function is written to be tail recursive, a VM with TCO could reuse the same stack frame for each recursive function invocation until the terminating condition is reached, at which point the last return value is caught and the frame is popped off the stack. (TCO isn't strictly limited to making tail recursion more efficient, but that is its most often cited benefit.)

Sounds like a loop.
Visualizing sensor data and statistics with augmented reality
One big problem/wrinkle with the "Politico is the future" thesis is that Politico makes all it's money by selling classified ads in a weekly print newspaper it distributes across Washington D.C. according to Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200...

From what I recall of the piece: The guy funding Politico originally wanted to publish a weekly Capitol Hill insider paper. The well-known editors and journalists who left the WaPo to start Politico convinced him that going hard on the web, breaking news every hour etc was the way of the future.

Yet, the original, "boring" idea, to offer a weekly Capitol Hill paper, is where they make all their money. The web site is in some ways just a marketing tool for their print product.

So when people tell me "doing a Politico" is how to make news on the web, I'm skeptical. That approach is a great way to build a brand, but you still need a way to convert that brand into $$$. That's where we need innovation.
Backyards are a great thing, no she doesn't spend her life living in fear, and neither do I, you take the information and make some adjustments to account for it. You don't have to let fear rule you to still be careful. You still should exercise responsibility when raising children though and not put them possibly in harms way, only slight adjustments are needed and they still interact with their neighbor just fine.
Also, here's a link to a demo video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxr8oaRUq6k
Four Things Open Source Projects Should Know About Dealing with the Press
I wonder if paying for someone's lunch might, in some cases, might make them feel less friendly towards you. For example, if they feel as if they owe you something and are not in a position to return the favor. They may start avoiding you in that case.
Lmgtfy is kind of snarky, which is why I suspect you're getting downmodded.

Anyways, what exactly are you inferring from this? That those who commit drug felonies are not violent offenders? Even if that were true, your "citations" still don't support the assertion of the gp that "Most people are in prison for pot-smoking and non-violent offenses".
> I'm from Germany

That changes matters considerably.

have a look here:

http://de.dir.yahoo.com/Firmen/Finanzdienste/Business_to_Bus...
Scope creep on relevant topics + widening and increasing userbase = digg/reddit clone.
How to beat Amazon's Kindle.
That's true, you would not have the 'text in the link' to guide you.

But you might be able to get around some of that by allowing users to tag the urls.

I realize it's a hard problem, I assume that the OP does not expect to walk out of here with a bullet proof business plan for a new search engine. There are bound to be issues with almost any suggestion that you could make here.

But it might give some useful hint or starting point.
So most of the ideas mentioned here don't really consider the costs involved with making a search engine. New technologies/concepts/ideas are great and all, but unless you're building a very niche/vertical search engine, you're going to require several million dollars in servers to build a search engine.

Any strategy on building a search engine needs to address the costs. (Raising VC money is not an answer.)
Search is a function of 2 problems:

1. Mainstream Search
- This is the search for information that a lot of people want to know. Britney Spears, How good is the new transformer's movie, 1 + 1 = ?, etc. I think I would just go through slowly and optimize each page to show results from the various information portals on the web, then make competing websites bid for positions. ie. list game reviews from gamespot, ign, etc. with rotten tomatoe's algorithm.

2. Long Tail Search
- This is random information throughout the web. I don't think there is a better way to aggregate this data than what traditional search engines are doing. Perhaps look into more advanced spam filtering algorithms, but that's a tweak, not a feature revolution.
- Probably just use something like Yahoo Boss to get started
http://www.english-for-students.com/Take-A-Different-Tact.ht...
Here here, how did this get to the top of HackerNews? Maybe the whole California kidnapper put this back in peoples minds.
I don't think sex offenders are being punished too much, it's just America's definition of sex offender that goes too far.
The last few days I've been unable to do anything other than consume media. Last night I finally managed to commit some changes on my project but now, as you can see, I'm on HN again. Maybe I should go cold turkey on all seeking activities for a while. Good article.
Good point about the mandated law, I forgot about that/didn't realize it, so I retract the statement about the judge's fault.

I honestly have never looked in detail at the sex offenders list or the law surrounding it, I can say that when my brother told me about his neighbor I made the comment that I didn't feel we should judge him solely on that since it's easy to get convicted and put on that list wrongly, but that a little caution is in order to err on the side of safety.

And you're right, complaining about it on HN instead of writing the state officials is definitely not the productive way to handle it, but this is also the first time I've had to really THINK about the law in detail. I can see why the law would need to be adjusted to actually better protect people instead of blacklisting whenever remotely possible.
Remember, spin can go both ways, even if it seems one party is better at it than the other, and I think that might be what the OP is trying to get across.

Call it the "Serious Sex Crimes Act."

Spin it as:

"America's worst sex offenders are putting our wives and daughters, our mothers and sisters, in increased danger because of a new political plan to force our police to spread their resources too thinly to put these criminals behind bars. Our choice is clear: put our families in danger, or return to a time when we prioritized our law enforcement to protect what is most valuable to all of us."

Done well, it would be difficult to fight -- any protest would be a direct attack on our families.
Obviously it's fun to run a server at home, sometimes. The question is whether or not there's something more fun. Or "better" for any definition of goodness you prefer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

I, for one, remain fully satisfied with the time I spent installing Gentoo Linux.
Assertion:
"Most people are in prison for pot-smoking and non-violent offenses".

"Most - non-violent offenses".

Quotation:
the majority of them nonviolent offenders

majority - nonviolent offenders

I don't know how else to spell it out.
The thing is, what if you want to run something Hostgator doesn't offer. I didn't see Arc, or PLT Scheme, or even Java. From your own home server you can run whatever you want.
This is neither news, nor current affairs.

It is a political trend that has been going on for many years, and is unlikely to change any time soon. What's even less likely is that the discussion here will produce any new insights or solutions.

Sure, the story itself or some of the arguments in the comments might be news to SOMEONE, but I'm not convinced that's a good enough justification. This is precisely the kind of conversation - emotional, low barrier of entry, "common sense" outrage, the same points being endlessly echoed - that makes Reddit what it is.
I'm siding with Mark on this, quite frankly the author did exactly what he meant to do. Cut through the crap and found out this wasn't the right job for him.

Except this line (and maybe the one after it) we're unnecessary. (Sell your self don't crap on others already doing the job)

"Frankly, if there’s a pr person above the pr specialist, I’m probably qualified for that job, too."
Judging from how often software breaks, not very.
Is PHP staging a comeback?
The "human compiler" bit never made sense to me. When I start to write something for the second time, I stop and make it a function (or a class, interface, library, or whatever's appropriate). "Don't repeat yourself" is good advice in any programming universe.