skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't make sense to generalize in that way. It may be true for Spain but it is not true for most European nations.
Programming is like building an invisible engine from invisible parts with invisible hands.
They don't, (nor do they for Literature, of course), and often the Peace Prize is used as a political platform for the Nobel Committee. E.g. Al Gore.
Remember how much news Krispy Kreme got? They even had a big IPO. Then everyone remembered that donuts are horrible for you.

The clock is ticking cupcakes...
Remembering numbers is a form of mental exercise that we used to engage in regularly, and as exercise it was good for the brain, just like stretching.

You seem to have the implicit model where the less we burden the brain with mundane tasks, the better, as if we had a fixed daily capacity for thought, or that mundane tasks are somehow wasteful.

I'm not sure this is the case--neither that mundane applications of brainpower is burdensome, nor that capacity is fixed.

I suspect that someday, after more and more mundane mental tasks are replaced by more automation and better design, a market will emerge for mental fitness clubs to help thin the "fog" that will come to characterize our mental lives..
Guh, I was trying to point out you're probably the Sama and maybe get some info on the actual deal. Not get you down-voted. Your comment was perfectly acceptable considering your connection to Loopt.
Why the downvotes? He makes good points about the distribution of services becoming as centralized and commoditized as manufacturing. Not that this is bad, but it's certainly changing our lives substantially.
With XHR's same-domain policy, the JS had to come from you -- using eval introduces no exploits that weren't already present.
Doctors do this all the time, there is even a term for it called "supplier induced demand." In a normal setting you'll see that as the number of suppliers for a particular good or services in creases, demand should decrease as there are too many in the industry.

What doctors have done is they induce demand by changing the way they offer their services. For example spending more time with customers or offering better service. This is why in such areas as Beverley Hills where there are hundreds of plastic surgeons they still all charge you a premium price. They all offer the same service, but because they can induce demand by their name and skill and location they make more, all of them.

Also this is one of many factors why the health care in America cost so much. Doctors can pretty much make up their own pricing. The more specialist the more you can charge, so everyone suddenly claims they are specialist doctors so they can charge you $1000 for clipping your nails.
Great domain name. You been hanging on to that one for a while?
That is certainly true.

Veterans that I've known often have not developed their abilities at building a consensus, getting people to buy in, or pushing responsibility and decision making down to the people in the trenches.

You're right on the first two, completely off on the last one. Military leaders will view building a consensus and getting buy in as politics, and avoid it. They will most certainly delegate properly, especially if surrounded by proven performers. In fact, you can pretty much observe what they think of their colleagues by observing who they delegate to. If they don't delegate at all, odds are likely that they would also consider their staff lacking in skill if asked.

That being said, without being too draconian, I'm learning more and more that assessing the first two items as politics is accurate. Sometimes necessary, but not fun.

Employee/Company culture matching is tremendously important as you point out.
Expense is just an excuse to avoid commitment in most cases.

You think your parents started out with 2 cars, a nice house, and college funds all wrapped up and ready to go? I know mine didn't. In most cases, those people have worked hard for years to earn that kind of lifestyle. A lot of the coming generations are accustomed to it and expect it, without realizing all of the time and work their parents invested to earn that.

My parents moved into a small apartment when they got married. They worked to save up for a down payment on a home. They had bought one by the time I was born (4 years after their marriage), and they continued to save to provide all of the luxuries that my siblings and I enjoyed as we grew up.

But they didn't use it as an excuse to put off the family.

My wife and I shared an apartment with another couple when we first got married. It sucked, but we did what we had to do, and we were happier to be together than to put it off and stay at our parents' houses alone just because we couldn't afford a spacious living condition.

You don't have to spend 30k on a wedding. My wife and I got married for less than $200, and our rings were under $50.

You don't have to have your own house. Apartments work just as well, and have less general expense.

You don't have to send your kids to college. They can work to get there -- there are plenty of options for that, and they may not even have to go to college. I dropped out of high school and my last full-time job paid me a salary of $65,000; not bad for a 21-year-old, imo.

Plenty of people get by with their kids on $10-$15/hr or less. It's possible, you just can't be demanding and you can't nourish entitlement. Accept that you won't be able to buy that $300,000 house right away and move on with your life. Don't put off love for convenience; that trade will rob you blind.
This is exactly what I was thinking. 23-30 would be a much more appropriate percentage. Many students would even still call their parent's house "home" until they graduate and move on to "real" jobs.
The real question is: What problem are you trying to solve? i.e. what do you hope to achieve by explaining programming to non-programmers?

When people ask me about my scientific work, or my thesis, my goal is typically to make them feel validated and my work seem interesting, rather than going into excruciating detail and making them feel dumb and my work arcane. So I explain the topic at a high-level. I then say that I examine particular aspects of the topic, but that these aspects are only interesting if you understand the context and the other things people are working on. They usually are content with that, and rarely want a summary of the literature.
The FDA, on the whole, is quite reasonable and well-run. For treatments where there isn't an alternative and the disease is fatal, they do accelerate approvals and they allow more people to use the drug experimentally. For things like Rogaine they are very cautious and even then sometimes make fatal mistakes.
Texas begins paying wrongly convicted
At our tiny branch of a division of a subsidiary of a large fortune 500 corp, a degree is neither a hinderance nor a help for technical staff. At higher levels, management staff can't get promoted without a masters degree in a business field (usually an MBA, but I'm working on a masters in accounting as an alternative to an MBA). So this means that one needs the masters in business-ish degree by the time one is a manager with the actual worker bees being 3 levels beneath one. Years ago, when I worked at the large bankrupt car company, at the division I worked for, one needed a masters before getting promoted from first line manager (where the people that did the actual work were 1 level beneath oneself).

We don't get to see resumes until after HR has screened them for buzzword compliance. Prior to the absolute hiring freeze, we didn't see too many programmers with a degree at all.
This is pretty good! I like how you changed it up a bit, instead of just doing the original song.

Edit: OMG just heard the end. ridiculous.
Also "Performance Psychology" which as its origin in sports.
One of my favorite things about HN is how often I read a well-articulated and reasonable response to a nutjob rant, rather than a response in kind. Kudos and a vote up to you, sir.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754160
My wife and did the same thing last year; we're both in our thirties. We moved in with my mom in order to save money for a down-payment on a new house. We both worked our tails off, saved the needed cash in 4 months, and then moved out.

We're an easy-going bunch, but those were a challenging four months. I want to believe that our problems had cultural causes-- that we would have been less tense if we were a bunch of Italians who had grown up living with extended family. I'd like that.

If you can do it without incurring too much friction between family members, then I heartily recommend it. There's simply no other way to save so much money in so little time.
Got a dream but no cash? The Internet can help
Sometimes people ask me why programming is fun. I tell them programming is like building a sandcastle or writing a story, with the added pleasure that what you build reacts to your inputs. In fact some of the pleasure of writing in a natural language comes from striving for clarity and succintness, just as when you write code.

Some people don't understand how it's possible to stay in front of a screen all day. I tell them it's not like watching tv which gets boring because you are passive, it's active because you spend the day thinking.
A lower marriage age means people will have fewer relationships before marriage, which in my opinion, would lead to more unhappy marriages. Less data usually leads to less sound decisions, and I don't see why marriage would be an exception.
51) My Lawn

All of these kids on it are trampling the grass.
I was joking, but thanks for asking anyway.
4 years of publishing blogs, news, links, photos, videos....

It's not so far off from what PG preaches about releasing early and often.

If you put out 100 crummy stories, odds are one or two of them will get hot on Google and send you some traffic.

If you spend the day slaving away on some terrific story and post it and no one cares....well you just wasted the day AND you have no traffic to show for it.
Nice sentiment, but contradicted by reality.

Most women I know don't know how, or won't change a tire. Oh, and I'd rather let somebody else do it for me, if given the chance. (I'm a woman and I know how to change a tire.)
Interesting. What about OCaml? I assume they have some kind
of macro support. Assuming it is not as simple to work
with as Lisp, how does it compare to the "Haskell-style"
macros of Template Haskell?
McCartney, Elton John protest about plans to punish file sharers
Sorry for the long comment, I just don't want to come off like I'm sniping at you, or trying to start an OS war.

Actually, the long comment is much appreciated. It's a very interesting subject for me. I wasn't trying to say that I doubted you, just that I'm no expert. :)
In one way gray goo already exists. The world is literally covered in tiny nano machines eating and multiplying as fast as they can. And many of them are deadly to us. We call them bacteria and fungi.

"grey goo" beyond the natural goo, as often seen in fiction, multiplies and moves so fast as to violate basic laws of physics. For example there's only so much energy stored in stuff that could be eaten.
> Rails is clearly the framework with the most mindshare.

> Is this not the case?

Well...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750142
I think that was more of hard sell for space exploration then a warning against super viruses.
I'm not sure if you were trying to provide an example or a counter example -- the post you linked to is modded 3 points, but the parent is at 18 points, showing a great deal of respect for the achievements of Mr. Wallace.
OK, everybody who's More Feminist Than Thou, let's back the truck up.

There is a huge difference between...

1. Observing aggregate facts, or even trends, that say "Population Y doesn't do X much," and commenting on them.

2. Extrapolating from those aggregate facts/trends, and saying to an individual (as opposed to an aggregate population), "You can't / shouldn't / won't / won't be good at x."

There is a big, huge, fat, hairy difference between the two. And #1 is totally blameless, even innocent, and that's what's happening here.

You can be angry that the facts show that more men than women know how to / will change a tire. But you should keep that anger to yourself and certainly you shouldn't blame somebody who points it out. Unless they are saying "And this goes to show, women are useless with cars!" Which the above poster isn't.
Because it is really helpful for a young person to know that you are protected in case of serious illness, that if you want to have kids, they will be socially protected which means that they will be able to get good education, health care, educational trips and so on without you paying ridiculous premiums, fees and getting into huge debt.

It is also really nice to know that the government will take good care of your parents after their retirement. That they will be able to pay bills, travel, get medicare, etc.

When this basic stuff figured out, young people feel safe.

That said, there is another interesting problem here: when young people feel safe they may become too lazy. And when people get too lazy, society starts to stagnate which is, as far as I understand, a huge problem in some european countries. But that's a completely different thing to discuss.
Hah, just be careful, having to go back the other way is kinda painful. I keep a file for myself called pythonisms.php in it i define a few functions that let me continue to think in ways I've come to love in python. One example, the get function. It takes 3 arguments, and works like python's dict.get(). I seriously have no idea how I did php without it.
But we largely live in a consumer society where we are constantly bombarded with messages to 'buy! buy! buy!' Is it any wonder that lots of people fall for the messages? Especially when you have entire companies full of marketing people all trying to figure out a way to convince you that you need their clients' products.
My bad. I was talking about basically about Germany and Hungary.
The brain does have a fixed daily capacity, but it is far higher than what we use in average.
My prick with phone numbers is not that remembering them on itself is wasteful, but simply that people seem to change phone numbers so often (due to lost, broken, change of company, etc) that I stopped bothering to remember them.
Also, I play Sudoku and Dual N-Back in a daily basis to keep my mind sharp.
In the same way that you can't generalize 'US Of A' on anything either. East Coast vs West Coast vs Middle America can vary wildly on different topics.
Some of those things are interesting, but they're hardly very influential at this point.

Are there fewer local bank branches today as compared with 10 years ago? Maybe (though I'd like to see the data), but is it due to online banking or just industry consolidation?

Are there fewer realtors? Almost certainly, but it's also almost certainly all about the real estate bubble popping, and virtually nothing to do with Redfin.

Are local and community colleges being killed by straighterline.com? Ummm...no. Maybe someday, but not now. College attendance is actually probably up as compared with 10 years ago.

Prosper.com and other P2P lenders are interesting, but 99.9% of people have never heard of them and still rely on credit cards and banks for unsecured credit, so they're hardly killing anything.
"Your individual responses are not vehement; however, last time I looked you had > half the responses in this thread (needless to say all taking the same "side"), which suggests that for whatever reason this is an issue you have strong feelings about."

Just because the counter arguments were so poorly argued. Much of the counter arguments were in the vein of "that guy doesn't think the Internet really changed people's lives, he's obviously an idiot" "Yeah, you are so right, he's obviously an idiot," instead of explaining ways in which the Internet has made QUALITATIVE improvements to people's lives compared to 1959.

You finally get to the point of arguing that the wide availability of air travel might be a qualitative improvement over what we had in 1959, but after much nattering on about fuel efficiency and social change that still doesn't change the fact that the experience of driving an automobile in 2009 is largely similar to that of 1959. I might even agree with you on the airlines point. What I object to is all of the "this guy is obviously an idiot" without citing any obvious counter examples to his real points. In my experience, Hacker News is usually better than that, with people employing bad arguments getting called out even by people who happen to agree with the opinions. That is not aimed exclusively at you, just the general tone of responses I was reading here.
"But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all."

That's simply not true. For example the Google bot decides every seconds if it wants to crawl this website or another one. I don't think you are up to date - might want to read up on "autonomous robotics". Many of the algorithms are so in nature that humans can not predict their results.

I think if you talk to robot builders they will tell you that the robots do stuff they weren't told to do all the time.

As for motivation, I don't think it is as magical as you presume it to be. We are not motivated to do arbitrary things - nature has motivated us to do certain things (think, learn, reproduce). So if we motivate a computer to do certain things (like crawl web site), why should it not count?
> Should a female be automatically assumed unqualified to run a men's magazine

Well, history has at least shown that making that assumption would be dumb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Hefner
BizTravel: first public StackExchange beta site
BS.

* Changing a tire requires a lot more physical strength than either of those two things. And...

* Changing a tire has a much higher injury rate than calling for a tow truck.

It is not an arbitrary chore, it's messing with a giant machine that can kill you... directly toying with that machine's only mode of contact with the thing it has to touch to keep you safe... on the side of a place for other giant machines that are moving that can also kill you. And it's dirty.

There's nothing wrong with women who don't want to change a tire.
Platitudes: Everything You Already Know (But Don't Care About) Is Reprinted and Schilled Annoyingly on Your News Source.
Smoot - A MIT student as a measurement unit for Harvard Bridge
More information here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
> You think your parents started out with 2 cars, a nice house, and college funds all wrapped up and ready to go? I know mine didn't. In most cases, those people have worked hard for years to earn that kind of lifestyle. A lot of the coming generations are accustomed to it and expect it, without realizing all of the time and work their parents invested to earn that.

It doesn't help if the parents don't really do a good job of instilling in their kids what they have gone through in their life. If all they tell their kids about their life are a few choice bits here and there, then it's little wonder that their kids don't have a clue that their parents were sometimes in dire straits for cash or food before working their way up to where they are today.

> You don't have to spend 30k on a wedding. My wife and I got married for less than $200, and our rings were under $50.

My wife and I were able to do ~$5k for a wedding for ~50 people, which included a banquet at a nice Chinese restaurant (There was so much food that people were taking food home, they added an additional course to the meal at no charge, and let us bring our own alcohol even though we technically needed to get some expensive license to do so). And ~$3k of it was just for the banquet.

But I've known people that go overboard with weddings. One wedding we were invited to was in the Caribbean on a cruise. If we wanted to attend we would have had to purchase our own way on a 7-day cruise. (Apparently the service was going to be on some small island in the middle of the cruise) I can't imagine how much that must have cost. My wife also had a co-worker whose fiance broke up with him because they weren't going to be able to immediately move into a nice house/picket fence/etc when they were married because he ended up losing his job. People put too much relevance on money and possessions.
1997 was actually a pretty hot year for investment.
This isn't that new, and historically has proven to not be very effective in classifying broadly diverse areas of music.

If you want to classify different types of 'ballroom' music, as the article states, then you've already partially defined the music for the system.

But beat and tempo, not taking into account tone, range and a thousand other variables just isn't effective enough.

Genre classifications are only moderately useful for human understanding of music, but as music now lives on computers, don't we really need a model that the computers understand more than what the people understand?

Echo Nest is doing some very cool stuff in this area, as well as many others.
Cool. In any case, we fundamentally agree, both things are terribly broken. You can also add intellectual property laws, giving power back to the states, and a whole host of other things too...
Today's Commercial Users of Functional Programming Keynote: Real World Haskell
I get along great with my family, and love them very much. However I moved out when I was 16 and have lived on my own since. I have an independent nature and it's important to me to support myself and provide for myself as much as I'm able. If I had to, I could and would move home, but if there was an option to be supporting myself, I'd take it.
These are social problems with simple technical solutions. Making it default to going to voicemail, with only a whitelist of callers ringing through, is one possible solution. Having it respond with a message that suggests using email instead is probably the one I would use, since I hate phone calls from just about everybody, except family.
Their API has also done both simultaneously at various times, mogrifying tweets as they transition between queues/memcache.

SMS doesn't actually use bytes natively -- it's 160 7-bit characters packed into 140 bytes. As is their way, Twitter fucks this up: they use the 20 spare characters for the "username: " prefix, but limit usernames to 15 characters -- 3 are completely wasted! Why not allow usernames to be 18 characters?

They've historically fucked up plenty of other SMS encoding details like sending & escaped as &amp; and murdering unicode in weird ways -- always truncating the message at an arbitrary tier instead of validating/refusing it up front.
I can't provide specifics for the above claim, but SEOmoz's Search Engine Ranking Factor's survey found Recency (freshness) of Page Creation the 2nd most important factor outside of keywords. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking...

Also...SEOmoz just published an interesting experiment exploring the role of freshness. They attempted to game google (not recommended) by rewriting old links with new dates, etc. @ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-google-like-it-when-youre-fr...
Weird CNN News Test Story?
Looks like someone either made a mistake, or someone figured out how to post stories who isn't supposed to.

I just saw this on my Gmail.
Why Public Education Must Use Public Software
I have two questions, maybe somebody with expertise could answer them.

1. What is the breakthrough here? Delivery of medicine through feeder vessel? The idea of how to implement it (needle, robots, tube, etc)? Or just the actual design of the rig to do it?

2. In what situations can you target a tumor up through a blood vessel and not have the option of cutting it out? Is this a brain situation?