skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Portland has this almost unhealthy obsession with getting itself "On The Map".

- If we just build this convention center, that'll put us Portland The Map.

- If we can build a successful light rail system, that will put Portland On The Map.

- If we could only attract a major league baseball team, that would put Portland On The Map.

There's a Map out there somewhere, and Portland really wants to be on it. Pick any thing that any big city has, and Portland will want one too, because that will be the thing that finally pushes it over the edge to where it is respected as a "real city."

This article sounds like more of the same. There are Startup Hubs to be had, and P-town needs one. Because that'll put it on the map.

Don't get me wrong. I lived in Portland for almost 10 years, and it's a great place. But it's got like 1/10 the population of Seattle, and I think that gives it a bit of a complex. I wish it would chill out and settle into its role of a comfortable small city where you can live and work downtown.

That's all you need to be, Portland. Stop trying to grow up too fast.
By the way, for military economist types - could someone explain to me exactly why the Iraq war costs so much? I mean, what specifically costs?

You've got increased wartime pay to soldiers, and pay to defense contractors. Energy costs and munitions. Construction and military engineering...

...and then what? It's a counter-insurgency, it's not like the military is unloading cruise missiles or nuking cities or getting aircraft shot down. What costs so much? Once the conventional warfare ended, the military construction/engineering/bases were built, and all the troops and gear were in place, wouldn't the costs be not-so-highly elevated over keeping a standing army and regular training? Just ammunition, increased wartime pay, and defense contractors no?

I guess it's kind of an ugly supply chain in hostile territory in the desert, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey are nominally allied, so it shouldn't be too hard to buy/ship food and ammunition through there. There's lots of cheap oil and refineries nearby. Where's all the money going?
Prevention does not save money.

Or rather, it saves money for the individual who has something worthy of being prevented. For that person, it's much easier to find something and/or prevent it early rather than wait until it gets serious. This is why prevention seems like such a common sense thing.

For society at large, however, testing and servicing all of the other people -- the people who never will get the thing you're trying to prevent -- ends up spending more than the treating person who got it later.

It's one of those things that sounds good when you say it, but the statistics don't back it up.
Yes if it was bi-directional. I'd want to receive texts by having the service hit an API on receipt.
When proving a new theorem the first prove is usually ugly. Only later they get ever more nicer and simpler. Since the fame of mathematicians rests mostly on new stuff they discover, there's a saying that `mathematicians get famous on the ugly proofs.'
OK, a 20-something with less life experience may benefit more from the event than a 40-something, and be more likely to actually do a startup (having generally fewer commitments etc.), but hopefully they won't use age to rule people out if they have a technical background and genuine desire to do a startup even later in life.
Thought you should know, we added the ability to see Google keyword performance throughout every stage of the funnel. This happens automatically with no extra work.

This is generally for those of you who want to see how certain keywords (e.g. Adwords) effect the overall conversion rate and effect your bottom line.

Thanks for the kind post!
Bloggers up in arms over Italian journalistic accountability law
Awesome Suhail. I think I should point out that you would have to do extra work if you were using my Rails Mixpanel integration, since it never loads your Javascript and thus you are never given access to browserland things like the referrer string.

But that is a good automatic feature to most of your customers, who use the JS integration rather than a server-side API library.
A/Bingo: OSS Ruby on Rails A/B Testing.  No Javascript.  Two lines of code.
I use Amazon.

Find a dozen books on a given topic, read the descriptions, reviews and ratings. Pick the one that fits your tastes, and read it. All.

Reading a textbook always helps. With experience, you'll get "luckier" at picking the right book.
To be more explicit (and avoiding further downvoting) multitouch systems are a new hardware platform to be programmed at various levels: driver/tracking library, development framework, end user interface (web, flash, python, processing, ruby, pure data, etc.)
How Projects Really Work (version 1.5)
A quick aside: A/Bingo exists primarily because of HN, whose articles and discussion drove me onward to finishing it. Thanks!

If you have questions, I've got answers, at least for the next hour or so. (Tonight is date night. I'm dedicated to my work, but I'm not that dedicated.)
Copyright myths explained
It's a fallacy to say that people are either illegal downloaders or not. There's a large segment of the population that won't download media illegally if they feel that they're being well served by the marketplace. If on the other hand, the industry conspires to limit consumer options out of greed and stupidity, that same segment of the population will feel that it has a right to seek redress, and won't feel bad about illegal downloads.
Well, if the price gets to $40, he would have roughly 40,000 users. That's roughly $800,000 in gross revenue. (20,000 * $40.)

Assuming the operating costs are low, this site could bring in a life changing amount of money for one person.

Edit: It's interesting to think about whether he'd make more money with the price going up logarithmically.
I like this bit at the end:

"About the data: The June and July results represent the first results published that were collected with a new Nielsen MegaView Search methodology. Because of these changes, this data - and all related search figures from Nielsen - cannot be trended with results that were collected by the company before June 2009."

Nice of them to collect using the old methodology in parallel so that we can compare the results over a couple of months to see how much of this is sampling noise.

1.3% sounds like a lot, (and it is if you are 5% :) ), but at 66% it is a minor blip.

Other such services show yahoo holding steady, google slowly rising and bing slowly dropping (since the launch peak).
Thanks for this great article and thanks for sharing the code! Methinks I'll be installing it sometime in the next week.

Quick questions about your A/B testing...

* What kind of user volumes are you looking to do A/B testing on? How does that relate to how long each of your tests runs/will run?

* Are you running several A/B tests in parallel?

* Do you make each user an A or B, or do you keep the A/B testing page-based? I'm assuming the former, since otherwise the same user might see both sides of the test, which is not desirable.
third that :), And I'd like to add 'using Django'. It's been a long time since I did anything in Python and I'm sort of re-learning it right now to build something in Django. Django is one way to get 'into' python, it is not the easiest way but you will have a new foundation to build stuff off by the end of your weekend.
Not true. Portland State has a decent Engineering/CS school that's growing like a weed. It's just going to take a little while for it to build a bigger rep.
Want to write a paper involving maths and comp sci. any ideas?
I want to write a paper involving maths and comp sci , and the only field that i could see involving both is cryptography which already seems overcrowded . So can anyone suggest any other field which i can do research on write a paper?
I'm not a military economist type, but I'll take a stab at this.

Apart from the costs you cite, which are certainly significant, there's the cost of replacing equipment, much of which dies quite quickly in the desert.

There's also the cost of oil (which the US buys, and doesn't just steal out of Iraq's oil wells, as far as I know). Believe it or not, the US military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. Here's an interesting article about it:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199

From the figures in that article, I'd estimate that the US military uses about $10 billion a year in oil, at today's prices.

Contractors are a huge expense. From what I've read, there are as many contractors in Iraq as there are US military personnel, each getting paid much, much more than a soldier.

According to the following article, the US spent about $100 billion on contractors between 2003 and 2008:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7557995.stm

Then there's all the money that's simply "lost". For example:

"How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

There are no doubt many other expenses, such as the new $600 million "embassy" in Iraq (which is going to cost $1.2 billion a year to operate).

For more details see the Congressional Budget Office's report on the "Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan"

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/86xx/doc8690/10-24-CostOfWar_Test...

and "The Three Trillion Dollar War":

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/...

Unfortunately, as outrageous as the money wasted on the war is, the human cost has been much worse, and it may not be fully paid for generations to come.
What are the regulatory obstacles for a Kiva for tech start-ups? I'm guessing they're SEC relics from pre-internet scams or have to do with being publicly traded.
Ask HN: Is Drupal a good choice for apllication that wants to reli on AJAX?
I am developing an application which is going to help students locate a course around the world. It will contains stuff such as Given a country we will present the list of universities there, when he selects a university we will show him the course available there<p>And many such combinations.<p>I was wondering if drupal will be a good choice in such case mainly because of other things its provides such as ad banner management, theming support and user access management.<p>IF I go with drupal i will be investing significant amount of time in learning it, I dont want that time to be wasted. I should prove to be an investment.
Note: I did not A/B test the experiment covered in the Mixpanel article. I did just release an A/B testing framework (A/Bingo) today. You can find it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764508

1) I run tests until I get statistically significant results. How long that takes is outside the scope of this comment, except to say that if you're testing something with a high conversion rate and testing two very different alternatives you can get significant results in ~250 users or so. This lets me do very rapid iterating. Changes in my core interaction can be A/B tested in under a week, which works well for me (I do most development on weekends).

2) I run lots of tests in parallel. For why that is not as bad an idea as you might think it is, see the A/Bingo FAQ.

3) That is a core design consideration for A/Bingo. I obsessively track users to make sure they always get the same alternative. A/Bingo is the only Rails A/B testing framework that does this, to my knowledge.
Well I suppose most have been hoping, not for a complex of dirty caves under the general Gizeh plateau, but for a big room under the Sphinx. At least I have been. Then again, research in the summer of '9 and publication immediately on September? Sounds fishy, but is a bit logical, coming from the author of the Cygnus Mystery (knock-off theory based on the general ideas of Hancock & Bauval, themselves a bit stretching it).

Symbolist Egyptology still has a long way to go, and a lot of cuckoos to leave behind I guess. Even so, Hawass' attitude has become truely totalitarian, and reminds one of the late 19th century US Patent Office, or Royal Academy of Sciences: We know everything, whatcha gonna say to us?

PS: The Rostau isn't directed downwards.
iPhone 3.0 supports remote wipe. Also you should always put a passcode on your mobile devices. Even though there's only 50 msgs on the device, you can always download more using the Mail App. Also, think about all the phone numbers, etc. on there.
Yeah, you can reply, forward, compose, etc. Most Exchange servers support IMAP: http://www.remail.com/faq.html#exchange_support
don't bother wasting your time there, someone should make a digest of it. Here are the few things that were in there that you might find useful if you can't do them yet and that you could learn in a weekend when your leg isn't functioning the way it should: (remotely related to hacking)

- Learn to Pick a Lock.

- soldering (though any hacker worth his/her salt can do this already)

- read braille

- juggling

- sign language

--

I'd like to add my own here: basic electronics
It's clear in their podcasts that Joel has been around the block a few more times, and sometimes needs to fill in the larger perspective that Jeff lacks.

Tell me about it...
A weekend is enough to get you started, to get your appetite whetted. From there, yes, multiple readings to fully digest it (which I certainly don't feel I have fully done yet)
Just out of curiosity, pg, why are you holding the event at Berkley this year?
Building an Apple-1 replica from scratch
Phil Schiller Is A Man On A Mission: To Save The App Store
Well, you'd figure that a belief that people hold so vehemently would have some evidence behind it. I really haven't seen any. But I guess it's accepted to hold a belief without evidence if it conforms to group norms. Snide comment or not, this group of unusually smart people is not so different from other groups that are held in low esteem by it. It's funny how that happens.

It's interesting, and telling, that several hundred smart people have viewed this comment, but not one of them has decided to offer a link to any sort of evidence.
You are demonstrating the same 'them and us' attitude that is present in the original article. You show your mistake by lumping together 'organic/all-natural/no-additives/USDA-approved/recycled-packaging' as if they were all a single proposition pushed by some united group of science haters. If you can't evaluate each proposition on it's merits then you are failing prey to dogma yourself.

> the burden of proof that a BigMac would be healthier if it were made from "all natural" ingredients.

Why should the burden of proof fall one way or the other on this proposition? This is the classic technique of those who see themselves as guardians of scientific orthodoxy.

> which gives more evidence for vegetarianism being related to good health than the "organic" lobby could ever dream of for "organic food"

That doesn't mean that knowing the value of organic food also wouldn't be useful.
There were people who joined Pinboard who told me they never would have considered using the site had it been free.

The fact that there was an actual funding model (however offbeat) helped convince them that the site was a serious effort.
hndir.com built in codeigniter - will let you build some stuff on top of it if interested. the project really has potential, I'm just too tied up with graffitiGeo.com atm
It helps to read the article and verbiage on the website.
For one thing, this method has apparently raised money roughly comparable to what one would get from Y Combinator at no cost in equity - i.e. enough to bootstrap the development of the subscription features.
I take after Mobutu, myself: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko)

"In 1972, Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."), Mobutu Sese Seko for short."

No, but seriously, I use "Principal." It conveys my central role in the company from a financial perspective without having the dangers of sounding pompous, pretentious or immodest to the ears of people who think "President" or "CEO" is a bit lofty for a 1-3 man show.
The practical effect of the money + cheap location is that it gives me a few months of development time that I can pour back into the site. It's more of a bootstrapping technique than a straight-up scam.
The length of the list is a function of two variables, the first the length the bug has been in production, the second the number of versions you have released in to the wild.

What you're seeing here is a fairly rare occurrence in the linux world, a bug that has been in the code for a long long time. Frequent releases are pretty common in open source projects.
Have own/individual health insurance, but only for catastrophic situations - it has a $5000 deductible. There may be one or two deductible-exempt office visits with a small copayment covered every year, but aside from that, basically any routine medical expenses I might reasonably have that do not constitute an emergency or a grave illness are my own.
Look at the capacity of the venue... that is most likely the number.
It might encourage, but I don't think its absence materially discourages.
not even close to ballpark numbers, sorry... :)
My articles seem to do best when I submit them early on Monday morning. People get to work and don't want to do anything useful, so they read my blog instead.
There are webmail providers other than Gmail? I didn't realize...
all design is redesign.
flowingdata.com FTW. They even have their own data visualization twitter app. Great stuff.
You need to understand C to understand how Ruby works via observation. Observation and reverse-engineering visually is more important than you think. Understanding programs and being at one with them is the true path to enlightenment, not poking several different languages down your throat.

They should however understand theory and implementation separately. Implementation should be the most common form.

People forget that you need a job when you leave university.
hi Rajesh,

I've got about 1500 drupal sites running right now on a free hosting site.

Not sure if that qualifies me to make this statement:

stay the hell away from drupal.

Drupal is a great concept executed poorly. There is no upgrade path between major versions and the 'modular' approach is taken to such an extreme that you'll depend on some cranky maintainer somewhere (who more often than not can't be bothered to fix all the known bugs in his/her module even if you send them a patch) for basic functionality.

read this if you have the time:

http://drupal.org/node/327225

From version to version modules are not supported or changed so much that you end up rewriting your stuff completely. Databases do not port from one major release to another. There is no strong policy of maintaining backwards compatibility.

This is a major reason why plenty of sites are still running on older versions of drupal. Not that they wouldn't like to make the switch to the newer version, they simply can't.

My personal website still runs on drupal but at the first opportunity it will switch away from that.

good luck.
Me neither. Sounds like words for the sake of words.
Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say.

It doesn't "seem" like you really mean "interesting", but there's nothing controversial here. From the most recent survey of American religious identification:

"Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as 'Born Again' or 'Evangelical'" (emphasis added)

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Repo... (pdf)

There's also the fact that evangelicals just came off an unprecedented 8-year run of political power, surely the apex of their influence in US history to date. So they've been rising in at least two senses.

On the other point, I don't know about the influence of the internet, but it's pretty clear that until some time in the late 90s, or perhaps with the advent of GWB, evangelicals were almost exclusively treated as an unseemly species of white trash by the media and mainstream US culture. It isn't far-fetched to say that expressions of that faith were suppressed. In fact, it used to bother me that they were treated with such knee-jerk contempt. (It now bothers me less, after observing what they did with their newfound influence.)
Seriously. Cancel the Iraq war and everyone could get free cocaine!
I think the point that the previous posters were making is that pure REST should not rely on out-of-band information. The client should not have to guess or create URLs from knowledge they may have to look up in some other place. A pure REST API should be discoverable and subsequently navigable without having to rely on any other information not contained inside the request.

In practice this can increase the amount of requests required to get at the information you want, and also the size of each request, as it must then include information about the actions that can be taken on the resource. It could be argued that this constraint is more for the benefit of systems or programs that need to interact with the API without knowing anything but the initial URL, and not necessarily a programmer who can work these things out. owever, if a REST API uses this constraint, and application developers follow it, deep changes can be made to the URL structure of the API without breaking the applications that use it.
I had found many critiques of drupal's u are probably the first one who has used drupal and to give a negative comment.

With whatever initial forays I had in drupal, I agree with you on all the points. I dont see how drupal saves my time. But then I strongly need a CMS instead of writing everything from scratch.

Drupal seems to be a strong contender in that case.
The problem with a university education is that it is becoming less relevant. A formal education doesn't necessarily teach people to deliver software, which is critical for the captialist society we live in to operate.

A monoculture is seen to be negative due to this insane emphasis on diversity recently. Diversity generally hinders resource pooling which is what allows monumental things to be created.

For the record, I am a pure autodidact with no formal qualifications.
Microsoft: Whistling in the Dark
I think we should be able to buy our way in with HN karma ;)
In the absence of solid evidence, metaphorical reasoning is a valid technique to use to explore the possibilities.

> Why not claim that USDA approved organic food is the "white rice" of our times?

Why not indeed. It could be true. How does one work out the a priori likelihood of this being true to know whether it is worth looking into further? Metaphors might be one valid method. I can see an argument that some pesticides actually enhance human health. An analogue here would be the decline in iodine levels in milk when farmers stopped using iodophors.

http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/184_06_200306/letters_20...

I'm not saying I think the proposition is likely to be true but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand and I wouldn't assume you are being unscientific for proposing it without proof.
Err malloc, free, pthreads are all abstractions and are not black box generally. You can look in them and find out what the hell is going on if you need to.

C is great at networking (sockets), concurrency (pthreads), security (brain) and readability (brain). If you know what you are doing. The same is true with any language. You can write shitty C# and JavaScript.