skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I vaguely recall that LA was served by train when it was first built -- I mean, internally for local commuting purposes. My understanding is that LA was built so spread out because it is in the desert and it wasn't economically feasible to develop it without doing huge swaths at a time because of the cost of infrastructure required to pipe in water from elsewhere.

I went to UC-Riverside in the LA basin for 8 weeks. I took the bus down from the SF Bay area and lived without a car the first four weeks. I brought my car the second four weeks. Local bus service was surprisingly good. The area I lived for 8 weeks was surprisingly pedestrian-friendly (except for the small detail that I was threatening to go into anaphylactic shock every time I left the building thanks to the smog). The city in the SF Bay area where I lived for five years or so also had better local bus service and was more pedestrian friendly than many places I have lived. My recollection is that SF Bay is one of the few places in the US where population densities are similar to parts of Europe. If I recall correctly, it also has one of the more heavily used Amtrak lines.

I think a lot of folks who are used to driving simply lack the skills and mindset to cope effectively without a car. So they routinely go back to their default and think the solution is either bring your own car or rent one. That isn't necessarily the case.
Learn.GitHub: A Compilation of the Best Git Resources
Regardless of the steps between now and "going public", I think you owe it to them to warn them, with proper opportunity for response, that you're planning to publicize it. They're dropping the ball by not responding to your initial e-mail, but to just go public with it seems premature.
How about regular expressions? It would be interesting to try out some catastrophic backtracking expressions, see if the tweet goes through.
5 Startups Launch At Capital Factory’s Demo Day In Austin
Who exactly would I pitch to? Someone I would be working with, or the company I would be contracting for?
Neuromorphic Electronic Systems (1990) [pdf]
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum.
I smell the blood of an eval call,
Be it abstract, or be it concrete,
I’ll grind their strings to mix my syntax.
The Secret Art of War
This is a classic example of the phenomenon that people have trouble understanding very large or very small numbers. Why would one percent of registered youtube users pay $10 per month for analytics?

The average registered youtube user is a random person that just watches the occasional video and had to get registered because on of the videos he wanted to see was adults only. The average registered youtuber does not give a flying f#$% about analytics of the random video he watches.

So would one percent pay for a monthly fee? Doubtful. I think the author thought they would simply because one percent is a very small number.

But it might be a good idea nevertheless. It is good idea from the business perspective as it is not likely to prevent people from using youtube in general. A person will usually first upload a video and then worry about who is watching it. So the fact that youtube charges for analytics is unlikely to prevent anyone from uploading videos.

So good idea, but it is very unlikely to bring in the enormous amount of money the author imagines.
I'm being pedantic, yes, but it's 13 to 19 inclusive. Not 10 to 19.
ER, how about retweets, which they're trying to track and make semantically important. Seems more logical to me.
Nice. Any chance for an API?
A comment later on seems to suggest there is a PDF version.
Anything you want me to try out? I'll post the result here.
You beat to it. I've had the site on my favorites list for months, it's got more information than the article, but it wasn't anywhere near convincing enough to get me to actually spend any money. Maybe I'll go through it again and see.
Might be an interesting strategy - write bad reviews of the products you are interest in, and see where the rejection of your trolling is the fiercest. Might be the most passionate users there :-)
Is there a name for the class of bug that is rarely an issue in regular use but indicates that something really wonky is going on internally?

If not, there really should be.
Xcode shortcuts: 4 favorites and a cheat sheet
That's what eventful.com is. They spider other event sites (including the likes of meetup.com), allow category and location monitoring and provide a cleanish gui. They even offer a developer API if you want to build something on top of it.

What eventful don't have is a good search or good marketing. But neither of those are insurmountable problems, and I'm sure they'll tackle them in time. Or just get bought by google who can deal with both of them.

However one problem is that many events are not listed on any event directory, but just on individual websites, those are much harder to spider and deal with.
typo -- should be $1.2 B
Check out this model: http://bit.ly/Lw6Id
Good point - I think of this as the difference between a pupil (absorbs instruction) and a scholar (seeks knowledge).
Okay, you win. I'll leave HN as well.

I'm just a guy with a deep and abiding fascination with economics and public policy. One so deep I recently picked up a graduate degree on the subject. One so deep that my current startup is based entirely on my desire to help individuals better understand the financial possibilities that lie before them.

But you've read a blog and some things on reddit, so clearly you understand it better than me.

I'm sick of arguing with people like you... people who base their economic beliefs not on solid econometric analysis, but rather on mostly inaccurate blog posts... and yet you still mistake yourself for an expert.

You win. I'm out of here too. I'm deleting my posts that are available for deletion, because the combined arrogance and ignorance of your response here makes clear that I was foolish for thinking that this could be a venue for informed discussion. I won't waste another second of my life "debating" well established knowledge with an idiot like you.
I suppose those are only supposed to be readable to friends?
A couple of urls, in case you find this field interesting:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
Sorry, I gotta disagree with you. Learning Japanese using an antiquated romaji system (si vs shi, etc.) and not learning any kana or kanji won't get you very far. What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

I saw Eleanor Jorden (writer of JSL) talk at Cornell, and a kid in the audience asked, "I opened a book and saw a bunch of squiggly lines!" To throw out a language's native written system is folly.

We used the Genki bookset in school, and it worked pretty well.
Have you tried Anki? (it's open source, see GiraffeNecktie comment). I've just downloaded it. There are also some decks shared by people (mostly for natural languages) that you can download from the app itself.
Facebook pwns TechCrunch
This remind me of a drawing book called "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". It teaches people how to draw realistically using techniques like contour drawing among other stuff.

However, middle school art teachers seem stuck in their little art project. I am not sure about high school, but it doesn't look like they teach the skills.
<3 multiprocessing, <3 you.
The link that goes to dropbox.
Read Dale Carnegie on effective public speaking: http://www.amazon.com/Quick-Easy-Way-Effective-Speaking/dp/0...

Also, agree with the others that there is no substitute for actually doing it.

One thing you might try is videoing yourself giving a speech. Then watch the video and see what you like, what you don't like, what is effective, etc.
Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software
This is a language issue then, here in NL when you are '10' you are officially a 'tiener', even if you are a young one.

It used to be 13 to 20 here, but that was a long time ago.

Apologies, I just took the dutch word 'tiener' to mean 'teenager' in English. My bad.

So that raises the median age by a year and a half.
Remember, only the dumb ones get caught. Fake reviews put up by clever PR firms would not be discovered so easily.

This also shows that Amazon doesn't even do the most basic of automated checks for fakes.
One more thing -- get comfortable with pauses. When you stop speaking and are trying to think of what your next sentence is going to be it may seem like a very long time, but in reality it is usually just a few seconds.
You can set the privacy of notes: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Firefox-20090911-181428....
This always seems to come up whenever Japanese is mentioned. Just to balance this, RTK is not for everyone, personally I am having more luck with repeating kanji while seeing them in context in written material.
I think you might be on to something there...
Too Many Incubators
The mysterious equilibrium of zombies
Of course, do what works for you. It's different for everybody It's just that those of us who like RTK really like it, and we want to talk about it and tell everybody we know. It's a Kathy Sierra kind of thing.
I think you're not using the author's definition of "stupid" (an aggregate behavioral mode) but instead the more commonly understood meaning (lacking in intelligence or knowledge). I really don't want to be misquoted with an article of this nature, so I'm going to replace some terms in my response: "stupid" is now "destructive" and "intelligent" is now "generous."

The author's boldest thesis is that there are no common "destructive" characteristics outside of aggregate behavior. Only by looking at the net effect of an individual in question can you truly determine if their behavior is, to some degree, destructive. Or helpless. Or "bandit." Or generous. By the author's reasoning, "destructive" people cannot help but hurt others and to some extent themselves, regardless of all other factors except influence.

Mr. Cipolla's definition is firm, but adaptable enough to allow for all sorts of situations. What other social model is going to tell you up front that some Nobel laureates behave in destructive ways? That's not supposed to be allowed by the common metrics and understandings of the characteristic/success correlation model.

How many articles have you run across is the last, oh I don't know... year or so that can't seem to penetrate the "mystery" of why the best, brightest, most highly paid group of individuals in the world can't manage the very financial system that keeps them in business and the rest of us employed. Or why members of congress, with assured lives, cannot agree to measures which would enhance the well-being of themselves and their constituents. Or why unhappy, desperate people actively protest measures that would ease their suffering.

In each case you can point to specific reasons for these types of situations (incentives, irrationality, ignorance), but you haven't really said why these types of situations exist and continue to exist despite all of our other advancements. The author simply says that a group of people will experience decline as the balance of power shifts to the "destructive" members of that group, whoever they may be. The effects of this (in the author's mind) are clearly seen throughout history as a regular feature of humans, much as the male/female birth ratio has been unwavering.

What's fascinating about this essay is that it has to be the purest form of "don't judge a book by its cover" that I've ever read. It also agrees quite nicely (unless I'm mistaken) with the spirit of the Nash Equilibrium, which says that the best thing that you can do is take into account the other players' (members of society) potential actions and plan for the best outcome for yourself and all other players. According to Mr. Cipolla's model, the best thing you can do is elevate the generous (those who will help all) and mitigate the destructive (those who will hurt all), not just for yourself or in spite of them but for all of us.

I'm having a hard time disagreeing with that sentiment.
Speaking as a gen X member, gen Y is now what, just getting out of college at best? While we're in our 30s to 40s. This comparison is silly.
Check out the 1110 reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gallon, 128 fl oz:
http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/product-r...
The first page of stuff is all superficial and pointless. My favorite is the one that suggests leaving the "http" off URLs when typing them into the address bar, so that you enter ://example.com instead of http://example.com. I'd really like to know what idiot there didn't realize you don't need the :// either.

. . . and I just realized that for some reason HN eats a double-quote at the end of a URL, so I edited this to eliminate most of the double-quotes I used in the comment. I don't want a delimiter mismatch, after all.
> It teaches people how to draw realistically using techniques like contour drawing among other stuff.

A great book. One of the exercises is to copy a picture turned 180 degrees, so that you're drawing exactly what you're seeing without the interference of your mind's prior knowledge of the subject.
DoJ decides that Microsoft-Yahoo deal deserves more scrutiny
"Annoying Habits of College Professors" (circa 1935 to 1937)
I gave up on Amazon reviews years ago when I noticed that almost everything had 10 5-star reviews the first couple of days. Mom, dad, brothers, sisters, aunt, uncle, secretary, mailman, bartender, yea - that oughta do it.
Crappy inflammatory article broken up over 4 pages.
I think you may be right. I played around with that a bit and plenty of the notes that I can read are from people whose profiles are locked down pretty tight.
Annie Liebovitz Renegotiates Predatory Loan, Keeps Photos, House
I agree. Just think of all the mundane "25 things about me" notes we may now be forced to read.
Group buying might be the wrong model.

What if, instead of focusing on products (which might have been mercata's downfall?), we focus on pooling money for the local community? It's a fundraiser service, except the service will also take care of several loose ends.

(1) people bid real money to get something done in their local community (fix potholes, install solar panels, bring music bands into their local bar, whatever).

(2) the service builds web tools to help the community discuss options and reach a consensus about a solution

(3) people can opt out at any time until the proposed solution (reached via community vote) gets implemented (by contracting out or whatever). This gives the users the power of choice.

($) the service primarily makes money when fundraising communities can reach a consensus. There are also infinite possibilities for making deals with meat world service providers (construction contractors etc) at a large scale. Also, the money that users pledge will actually be deducted from their accounts and held, accruing interest, until the user opts out or a solution is reached.
Why He Will Not Read Your Fucking Script
I thought being searchable would provide some hilarious or insightful notes. But frankly, no matter what I search for, it's only mentioned in someones 25 things about me/my friends quiz.
Us 13ers are firmly in control now! Watch out boomers and boomer babies!
http://www.amazon.com/Generations-History-Americas-Future-15...

"Far more than other generations, 13ers feel that the real world is gearing up to punish them down the road… Elders find it hard to suppress feelings of disappointment over how they are turning out—dismissing them as a 'lost', 'ruined', even 'wasted' generation…"

"Thirteeners find these criticisms overblown. They look upon themselves as pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves to understand the game of life as it really get played. And whatever they are, 13ers insist, they have to be.…"

"Thirteeners, not Boomers, were America's true 'children of the 1960s,' and especially, the 1970s. An awakening era that seemed euphoric to young adults was, to them, a nightmare of self-immersed parents, disintegrating homes, schools with conflicting missions, confused leaders, a culture shifting from G to R ratings, new public-health dangers, and a 'Me Decade' economy that tipped toward the organized old and away from the voiceless young."

What a fun book!
I regret posting my social security number, home address, and the names of my most cherished loved ones in notes. I may never recover.
Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony
A fake user review on the Internet? Say it ain't so. Surprised this made the WSJ.
It's Leibovitz.
Webapps are not the only thing to program. Heck, they aren't even the only subject of a startup
CEO of Failed Lehman Bros. Looks Back
Am I missing a joke here?

You posted this exact same comment (but linked to this page) in the page you link to.

Which one do you prefer?
Home insurance leads
sign up for a free account and start receiving high quality homeowner's insurance leads today!
If I know the name of an event I'm looking for, I just Google it. They have a "spider."
I used to work for Upcoming.org. Yes I know about the location bug and way more besides. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do about it any more.

You're missing the bigger picture. Forget about tight calendar integration and blah blah, that's a nice to have, and reasonably easy compared to the bigger problems.

Event sites suck because they never have most of the events you want to go to. And without some fundamentally new way of learning about events, they never will.

Events sites are trying to do something a lot harder than the typical Web 2.0 startup. They are trying to build an accurate and complete picture of the real world, with a constantly shifting time horizon of about a few weeks, out of relatively apathetic users and very flaky and fragmented and non-technologized players (promoters, fans, etc.).

Contrast that with say, a photo hosting site. The assets at a photo hosting site are all-digital, last for years and constantly accrue new visitors. If you uploaded a photo to Flickr in 2005, it's still making money for them today, one way or another. It's also still garnering the user comments and page views, giving them some love at the same time. You have no expectation that Flickr should have all the photos you want to know about, just that there be enough good ones.

Your idea of autodiscovery via microformat already exists (hCalendar) but good luck getting others to use it. There are several startups which tried natural language parsing to grok events from the web but none came close to succeeding. The best method might be to reuse calendar entries, and Google's made some efforts in this direction.

Anyway, all the above problems seem to confine event startups to, at best, becoming authoritative for certain local scenes. None have ever taken off and just become authoritative even for an entire city, or a music category across cities. The only ones who are winning are just pouring money into the problem, sucking up event data from a variety of commercial sources. So far there's no real community solution to this problem.
You're almost certainly going to need to personally guarantee the loan until your business is sufficiently established to be it's own guarantor.

Just because you fill out a a bit of paperwork for incorporation does not mean you'll be able to secure large loans without personal liability (until, obviously, much later stages).
:)

I bet the crowd size wouldn't have mattered. Last two times I gave a talk to any sizable crowd the lights were such that it was sort of hard to really see past a few rows.

Now, had the crowd gotten unruly, yeah, big mobs are worse than small mobs and you find out soon enough :)
I agree also. Guy Kawasaki calls this the "Chinese Soda Myth" - If we can get 0.X% of the population to buy our soda then we'll make $XX million.

As a VC, he blames hearing this too often from startups as one of the reasons he has developed tinnitus :)
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire (fantasy review)
Wow, that's way harsh. This wasn't a he said / she said piece of gossip. This was a feature that they saw on Facebook.com, that they reported. They are a tech news site and all.

Lighten up.
Groovy read of an interesting way of viewing software development.
That's kind of the point of the post.
"No caffeine"

Caffeine calms some people down. Lack of it can throw people off, make them edgy.

Better to just not change your usual habits unless you really know how you'll respond.

Practicing really makes a difference. I've tried, though, to be sure I know the points I want to make more so than the specific words, and when rehearsing try to see if some phrasing work better than others (and try to keep) them.
Apparently these include private notes as well. I don't use facebook so I can't tell for sure.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9jn8i/facebook_...
Actually, it's Hanlon's Razor:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Severity 4/Minor issue? It does seem like it deserves a more appropriate name...
There's at least one maker of language courses (Pimsleur) which use the pacing effect. Unfortunately they're audio only, which at least for me isn't nearly as effective as a combination of audio and writing.
The best books I've read regarding learning japaenese are 'Making Sense of Japanese Grammar'. I recommend it a lot. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-Grammar-Paper/dp...

If it weren't for that book I would have never understood why there are so many exceptions with verbs regarding the whole intransitive and transitive thing.
Microsoft's Ballmer threatens iPhone with violence
The point of the :// thing is more for links and less for typing in an address bar. Some forums only allow so many characters in the signature and (say it is exampleforums.com), if you type in a url (say example.com) with out http, it will go to exampleforums.com/example.com. Thus a problem. If you type <a href=://example.com>Example</a> it saves characters and wont go to the wrong address.
Wow.

You complain about me being "arrogant" and "ignorant" and then you make entirely false statements about my own background (a subject of which you know absolutely nothing). You then complain about the quality of this forum, and then are the first person in two years of commenting on Hacker News that has ever attacked me ad hominem. I suspect that you are reasonable person that is just especially frustrated by the generally low quality of internet commentary about economics ( I too no longer visit reddit, but that doesn't mean the people there are wrong about everything). But if that kind of language is common with you, I do hope that you leave Hacker News.

I have had also had a long and deep fascination with economics and public policy. I've read dozens of books on finance and economics, from the original classics to more modern research. I've read hundreds of articles, I used to browse through social science libraries and download NBER papers for fun. I've had long and productive discussions with academic economists, people who work in finance and people who have worked in central banking. I don't claim to be omniscient about economics. But I have formed judgments, I state them plainly, and I welcome debate and hearing new arguments. I do not disagree with Keynesians or other mainstream folks because I am ignorant of their arguments. I disagree because I have evaluated them very carefully, read everything I could on the subject, and found their theories unconvincing.

I would be happy to debate or back up either of the two claims I made ( "The CPI is not a good measure of inflation" and "The mainstream economists led the economy off a cliff"). If you want to read comments where I elaborate more, you can read a few I made elsewhere: http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=15334 or http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=12274 I would actually really like to debate them with a worthy opponent. I too find good economic debate very hard to find on the web.
I can never bring myself to trust Amazon reviews. I'm a big Consumer Search fan, tho.

http://www.consumersearch.com/