skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FYI:
I don't know what alternative delivery services exist (the nice thing about living way out in the country is that they'll leave anything at the door if you're not home!), but when I lived in an apt in town, I had an account with the local Mailboxes Etc. (now UPS store) and I just had my packages shipped there and could pick them up at my convenience.
Invading black holes explain gamma-ray bursts
Once a year for quite a while now the National Opinion Research Council has asked Americans whether, on the whole, the are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy. Since the early 1950s the percentage of people who counted themselves "very happy" has steadily dropped.

From the book "Deep Economy" http://jamestravels.com/2008/01/deep-economy-growth-and-decl...

I've noticed the looks on faces in old photos too. Yes, today, we all smile, but they are forced smiles. "Say cheese!" They didn't do that in the early days of photography. Photos were expensive and were a serious endeavor.

I think a lot of the smiles in photos are fake. We smile for the camera whether we are happy or not.

Yes, life was hard, but I feel happy when I'm working hard and being productive and I feel life is worth it. I think today, we are filling our lives with material goods and sacrificing a lot of the earth and resources and invading other countries and killing people to take their oil and things like that take a toll on people.

Even more, we pop pills to alleviate our depression. The unfortunate side effect of these pills is that they also limit the upside of happiness. They flat line us at a normal mood. Not a happy mood -- a not depressed mood.

Add to this the migration out of families and into more individual lives. We are isolating ourselves from the group. We are gregarious animals by nature, but living independently in little square boxes all alone violates our natural drives to be with others. We need more community. A push to materialism comes at the expense of community.
My one annoyance with Amazon: I live in Australia, yet Amazon item pages still say, even when I'm logged in, that I've qualified for "FREE Super Saving Shiping!" A quick check of Amazon's help pages will tell you that international customers aren't eligible for free shipping of any kind. All of my shipping addresses are in Australia, but Amazon doesn't do any checking of that before saying that I've qualified.

Also, there's no Amazon Prime for international customers, which is a total shame. I understand that it's not cost-effective to give free international shipping for $75 a year, but I'd happily pay double, maybe even triple for it. The shipping costs are what kill me on Amazon -- it's the only thing that stops me from buying everything (literally, everything) from Amazon.
Try using "for in" to iterate through the returned canvas's properties. You'll get all the methods of the canvas. So far this sort of stuff works (OSX Leopard): gl.clearColor(0,0,0,0);
gl.clear(gl.COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
The key thing I got from this article: in French, a buffer overflow is called un dépassement de tampon. I plan to use this expression during my next code review.
Seminal Work Or Sloppy Thinking?
Decreasing populations are a bad thing if your social insurance program is a Ponzi scheme.

Most are.
It attempts [...] to fix one issue that certain investors have.

That seems disingenuous. This isn't about a few rich people's personal convenience. It's about lowering an absurd impediment to the creation of innovation and wealth.

The investors you mention must be really dumb to waste their time on foreign founders, let alone immigration reform, if they could just go and find better startups some other way. They say their bottleneck is the supply of good startups to invest in. Are they lying or incompetent?
New Wheel of Time book prologue leaked to BitTorrent
Yes, its seems that the simple visual freedom of expression in combination with the young fun loving community is attracting lots of users within this age range who are looking for a new outlet to uniquely express themselves with their peers. DailyBooth is definitely on a roll right now and has great potential to be the next Twitter.
All are, even the traditional family is a "Ponzi Scheme" in that new investors (babies) pass money up to old investors (the elderly). Unlike most Ponzi schemes, however, the old investors are seeking modest gains, and for a very limited time.

The problem is when the pyramid goes upside down (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). In that case, policy doesn't enter into the equation. You're effed no matter what.
That's an exceedingly ignorant statement.
Learn to speak Indian since it appears that most sophisticated programmers are from India. :) By the way, i am not from India.
1. No not any. Many cross-compilers do not if the binary formats and pecularities of arithmetic operations maps well between host system and target system - why waste time? Example = x86 and x64, two different platforms, with same binary representation. About performance - not sure if it is negligible - optimisation takes a lot of time in moder compilers.
3. You have not seen ml code I am sure. ML has type inference, you are not bothered about types too much. And it has pattern matching, very good when traversing trees.
Neither scheme nor pyruby has this.
ML also a language with completely formalized semantics, in combination with strong type it allows you to prove that you compiler is correct by means of formal provers.
I'm confused -- is labour cost a big part of rocket fuel costs?

Actually I'd like to know much more about rocket economics. How much of the cost is in fuel vs engines vs support staff etc? If we started cranking out Delta rockets at mass production rates could we get the price down to, say, a million bucks a pop?
This might actually be a viable analogy if the hills were "fuzzy" - i.e. changed in height and location over time. Because careers are like that - often the highest hills get worn down, or moved to other countries.
Pair programming seems to be good, if you have everything defined. But in reality, you research, experiment, hack things around. You work on hunches and quickly implement them, then gradually improve them, compare the solutions and find the best. Pair programming would be pointless; rather annoying in this case.
I guess it would be best if you could just download the app. But, since it’s a directory (bundle), that’s not practical.

Zip, however, seems to become a sort of standard wrapper for those kinds of bundles. iWork’09 files are just zipped bundles so that you can easily send them via email and nothing breaks if you do.
At some point the state agencies has to clamp down on people not paying taxes (known as a use tax) on their Amazon purchases. I know a lot of my friends purchase from Amazon because they save 8.5% in tax. It's significant when you make a purchase like a Macbook. That's a huge competitive advantage that Amazon currently has over other online retailers (at least for California).

Edit: Correction IRS => State agencies (thanks shrughes)
I've done quite a lot with the ML family, just not OCaml specifically. Type inference helps, but being able to use an Sexp-style representation a-la lisp is a huge, huge benefit in compilation. You cannot do this in any of the ML family.

Pattern matching is a great feature, and it's available in all of the languages I mentioned. It's a built-in in Boo, there are many libraries for it in Scheme, and I have my own Sexp pattern matching libraries for Python and Ruby. It may have come from the ML world, but it's by no means exclusive to it.

As for proving correctness, depending on the language to provide this is simply not realistic in compilers. You've got a much better shot at correctness by making your compiler easier to work on, IMO.
If what you are saying is true and the language you write the compiler in needs to mirror the type properties of the target then there would be no cross compilers or new architectures or new languages because you would be stuck with the type semantics of your original platform. It doesn't make common sense let alone technical correctness.
When you make optimization you need to do intermediate calclulation _exactly_ the same way the target machine does.
Even if the number is ascii or unicode string, you need to do the computations strictly same way s target machine does, otherwise you'd break assumptions of the programmer, and lead to unreproducible code.
One of the things I find really effective, and almost never see, is pairing up product managers directly with programmers. Instead of product types going off and holding endless meetings finally resulting in a product spec carved in stone, there's a nice interactive process of product development.
TGI Friday's Takes to TV to Buy 1,000,000 Facebook Fans - and it's good
How the artists get screwed
it already is. it's the biggest and cheapest place on the web.

shipping is getting faster and better as well. i was going to order an OEM hard-drive and in the reviews someone complained about the poor packaging. someone else replied and said to take a picture and submit to amazon. one day later another reviewer said that their packaging was fine. trusting amazon, i placed my order (free shipping). i just got my hard-drive today (2 days later), and packaging was on par with the retail version.

[edit] link: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2Q6A3WHMIDISG/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt...
I don't know what kind of family you live in, but in mine the flow of money has passed in the opposite direction for generations.
"Silicone Valley"? Isn't that the place with wall to wall topless clubs?
Pirate Bay Buyer Faces Bankruptcy
This is the healthcare of the future.

The basic care that you receive will come from a physician assistant/nurse practitioner. This dramatically cuts down on cost while mantaining an adequate level of care. Physicians are going to continue to become more and more specialized. Which leads to physicians only providing specialized/unique treatments.
Interesting that it's been dropping since the 50s. The article posted a few days ago arguing that innovation since 1959 has been much less significant to peoples lives than the innovation from 1909 to 1959 comes to mind. Ending many infectious diseases, an affordable, stable food supply, wide spread home ownership, telecommunications and automobiles seem unambiguously positive, or at least would have in 1959.

But when you start getting traffic jams and long commutes, high fructose corn syrup as the main ingredient in the food on supermarket shelves, the constant temptation to stare at one screen or another rather than interact with the world around you, the interruptions enabled by ubiquitous communications, the lack of exercise due to going from bed to car to cubicle to car to couch to bed again, the benefits from advances in technology seem more ambiguous.

I know this makes me sound like a Luddite, but I just think those of us who like technology and gadgets for their own sake should step back once and a while and consider whether more technology is always better or if there are also potential downsides.
I don't know which statement you mean, and it's a bit unnerving to be defending HN's gold medalist of curmudgeonry twice in one day, but I was going to comment on this anyway:

90 percent of programming is more "typing" than programming because the work is straightforward.

This may be exaggerated, but it has more than a grain of truth. If you take it to mean 90% of programming as actually practiced, as opposed to 90% intrinsically, it's not even that much of an exaggeration.

Working on harder problems in higher-level languages than I used to, I felt less productive for a very long time. In some ways I still do. I eventually figured out that this was because I was spending much more time thinking and much less time typing. Typing feels like good-old-fashioned-work in a way that thinking doesn't. That's why people feel satisfied after cranking out thousands of lines of code, when in reality they may well have made an unmaintainable mess (and thus destroyed value rather than created it).
Of course it is true. And of course it does not make common sense - common sense usually made by brain/mind.
If you cannot mirror properties of target machine - you cannot optimize code for that target - period. Any computatiuon made in compiler will be potentially different from the same, nonoptimized computation made in target. The more computations have been optimized in the compiler the bigger probabilty you'll get wildly different code.

However, if you do not have the target datatype you dealing with during compilation, you are destined to simulate them.

Example: ((unsigned char) 2) + ((unsigned char)255) = 1

That is in C. In ruby you'll have to manually check for overflow, and do it for each operation. You can invent classes all kind of things, but why? Use a language with types, and the check will be done for you by you Core Duo.
I have heard from a few investors that immigration issues caused problems. When I query about what percent of founders this applies to, I hear numbers like 10% or 20%. What numbers are you hearing?

Unfortunately your challenge is flawed of finding investors that have experienced health care as more of a problems than immigration. The health care argument is that people won't consider quitting their day job because of this problem so they never reach the point of showing up on an investor's radar. I know far more well qualified U.S. citizens that would love to start their own business than there is money to fund them. Health care is generally the number one reason cited for them not leaving BigCo.

The founder's visa argument is there are not enough founders to invest in in the U.S. Some people, myself included, are simply trying to point out that not only may there be far more than immigration reform could provide, but that legislation is currently in progress that might alleviate a big part of the reason they are not "on the market".

I am commonly "self-employed", at least from the perspective of Health Care insurers. I have insurance, but mostly to appease my wife. Do you know the stats on cancellation for an "individual" policy if you actually do get a serious illness? Its well over 50%. I know my insurance is most probably useless, as I said, I pay for it to appease my better half who is more risk averse. Most founder-wanna-bes do not have enough money socked away to spend as I do.

I agree that immigration process is insane and unfair to the immigrant. One big problem I have with this proposal is it is highly self-serving to investor desires and doesn't put leverage on the more important issue of simply treating all legal skilled immigrants more appropriately.
I disagree.

I think the bigger question is whether Apple's specific regulation of its app store is anticompetitive, thus legally actionable.

IMHO ;)
Amazon's severely restricted here in Canada compared to the US, and is pitiful compared to what I'm used to in the UK, so I receive the same problem as I'm frequently on the US site.

I don't fare well as I used amazon for nearly everything while in the UK, but now in Canada I'm stuck with CrapBuy and Shit-Mart who sell everything at hiked prices.
As the tree rots, the bacteria, fungus, etc release a lot of CO2 and methane. Enzymes obviate combustion.
"Are they lying or incompetent?"

If this ever gets in front a Senate committee, hopefully they will have to disclose hard numbers so we can find out. I don't see why they don't go ahead and publish their data right now if they want encourage more support.
The World Without Us
It seems like drop-boxes, like the ones used to return library books, could be built into the rooms in new apartment buildings. That would probably solve the delivery problem except when shipping really big packages (e.g. televisions).
Okay, I've been wondering about this for a while: what processor would you possibly want to run a compiler on that has floating-point arithmetic incompatible with IEEE 754? Are we still making cross-compilers that run on a VAX?

(Not that this would stop the GNU people. Have you seen the code from bison? They actually emit code for their own reimplementation of memcpy() on some platforms. They are fanatical about compatibility. Or they were last time I checked. Which was sometime during the 90s.)
We did exactly this for the two-month sprint for the initial code for Dawdle. I moved into the contracting firm's office, and we did this stuff all day long. It was great; they got a sense for what was "nice to have" and non-negotiable and I traded stuff that wasn't as important (a functioning search; we ended up using SWISH-E, shudder) for stuff that was (user account management). Both sides learned a lot, and I now know that most programmers aren't as good as the people who did that code.

To this day, two years later, our search still sucks, but the basis of that user account management has meant that we haven't had to touch that code in almost two years.
There's no language called "Indian". They speak Hindi and English in India.
Inspired by this, I've started writing a compiler for a subset of Matlab. I'm sick of Matlab being an interpreted language year after year, and while I don't hope to change that, I can at least do a proof-of-concept to lend weight to my derision.

I've got the lexer and parser done, thanks to Parsec, and some basic C code generation as a sanity check. Now for the runtime LLVM code generation, to make it feel like an interpreter! Thanks, HN!
The IRS is a federal agency, so it would be state tax agencies that try to clamp down on use taxes.
Reducing Your Risk of Developing Type II Diabetes
nah, not a problem, if you only have 4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child, you simply have to put more pressure on the 1 child to get into Harvard. Problem solved ;)
This is one of the few comments in the thread that makes sense to me.

I haven't asked anyone about percentages, but one thing we can say is that whatever the percentage is of foreign-founded startups trying to relocate to the US, that would be roughly the number who are having trouble doing so.

As I pointed out in another comment, the best investors say that their bottleneck is finding good startups to invest in. Objections that reduce to the idea that these people don't know their own business (or are lying) don't hold much water with me. It also seems obviously true that a demographically small number of new startups (a few thousand) would provide huge economic leverage. (Sure, their investors would get richer, but the whole country would get richer. This isn't a financial shell game, it's about creating value by making things.) So the question reduces to the design problem of figuring out a good way to identify authentic startups and minimize gaming of the system. That isn't prima facie insoluble, so all these arguments that it can't be done, at the very beginning of the discussion, just seem disingenuous to me.

What you say about health care from your own experience is very clear, and I certainly hope that that situation gets replaced by a more rational and sustainable one.

Edit: by the way, there's a problem with this:

Unfortunately your challenge is flawed of finding investors that have experienced health care as more of a problems than immigration

That's not my challenge. My challenge was "Find me someone who's made 20 or more angel investments who agrees that the visa issue is less significant to new startups than health care" (emphasis added), in other words, a leading investor who has gone through the same thought process as you guys and arrived at your conclusion that the HC impediment is more important than the visa one. If the argument is a good one, it ought to be possible to find someone who knows early-stage startup investment inside-out and agrees with it. This is a significant point because one thing we know about the business of startup investment is that it doesn't work the way most people think it does. By the way, I'm quite willing to change my mind about this, but not as long as I see all the most credible people lined up on one side of the issue.
But calling them heroes is a bit of a stretch.

And why is that? Football players earn the title of "hero". (at least at ASU they do).

Why should intellectual accomplishments be any less note-worthy than physical ones?
Outsourcing as a startup
I recently read the 4-hour work week and came away a mix of excited, entertained, and annoyed at Ferriss' douchyness. The one thing it did open my eyes to, though, was outsourcing work to India. You can get Indian outsourcing firms to do everything from making appointments to writing grants (god forbid!) to writing code, all for unthinkably cheap rates by US standards. What I'm curious about is if there's a place for this kind of outsourcing in a software startup. It seems like there must be a number of simple, repetitive tasks you could offload, from profiling your users to gathering info on similar businesses.
Does anybody do this? Has anybody tried this?
Does OO Calc have the same tab-return behavior as Excel yet? Last time I tried it, doing data entry was a real PITA.

In Excel, if you're entering data, you press 'tab' to move to the next column, and when you're done with that row, you press Return and it kicks you down and back into the leftmost column. Very handy, since it saves you a mouse movement or many left-arrow presses to get back to the start column. At least the last version of OO Calc I played with didn't mimic this behavior properly---pressing Return just dropped to the next row in the same column, even after entering several columns of data.

Excel may not be the greatest program in the world (let's be honest, it's a bloated monster), but it does a few things right.
"In order to delicately preempt any political trolling, this article is about medical care, and that is an entirely separate issue from insurance."

I hate political trolling as much as the next guy but I disagree with your point. If health care is absolutely free to everyone than why choose a clinic with nurse practitioners over a hospital with doctors? The questions surrounding the health care debate are ones of efficiency and cost and these types of clinics are very relevant in that debate (though I could see both sides using this to support their point)
In Germany (where Amazon uses DHL), DHL has "PackStations" scattered around the country where you can go to pick up your package if they miss you at home delivery. I think in most cases they're within half a mile of the home they tried to deliver to.

So when Amazon misses me, I just walk over with the DSL slip that says a package is there and scan the barcode on it and grab my package.
"They speak Hindi and English in India."

We do and with Hindi and/or English you can get by almost everywhere.

In practice, the language spoken changes every 200 miles you travel (and India is a big country). Most educated Indians speak 3 or more languages.

From Wikipedia,

"According to the most recent census of 2001, 29 languages have more than a million native speakers, 60 have more than 100,000 and 122 have more than 10,000 native speakers.

The government of India has given 22 "languages of the 8th Schedule" the status of official language."
That's mainly true because we (now-a-days) treat anyone under 24 as an invalid, needing constant subsidization. In reality, the only people who need welfare are: actual cripples, young children, and the elderly.

Cutting off the gravy train to young adults would have zero systematic effect.
What I'm wondering is how much these clinics use technology and how much better they could be if they used it more.

I wonder if having a small number of doctors available to these nurses could improve treatment by allowing more patients to get a doctors opinion (somewhat in the same way e-mail and IM tech support allows each technician to server more people than phone support). Could they treat even more conditions that way?

It seems a setup like this with some technology checks and balances (to make sure the right questions get asked) could make health care a lot more efficient.