skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because you've told it to by making your data look correct.

Python executes your data the same way you yourself parse it: by how it appears. Brace requiring languages execute your data using different rules than you use to parse it.

Redundancy of logic is universally known to be a poor engineering practice.
Coastal cities? S/he may be a boater!
I agree. I don't follow baseball, but I'd imagine there's just as much, if not more, story in the unmeasured events between the plays as there is to be told when they occur.

I do follow pro cycling, however. And even if riders' exact position and biometrics throughout a race were recorded, analyzed, and commented on by such a program, the resulting story could be accurate yet would likely be utterly boring compared to an experienced commentator's narrative of the facts combined with the less quantifiable atmosphere of the course, the conditions, and the crowds.
How about using a real SQL engine, then? http://www.sqlite.org/vtab.html among other possibilities.
When Django Fails? (A response)
'Yeah, that's the request I was referring to.'

Having an opinion thrust at you does not equate to soliciting said opinion.

It's your responsibility to clearly state the benefits of what you're advocating. You don't seem to be able to do that.
They are charging for access to their API? I'd love to hack something together, but not for $0.06c / request for the most basic plan.
Good thinking, I'll try to do it.
Takes 20 nascent entrepreneurs just to get a single employer firm started
Has he never seen a certain cartoon involving a tree and a swing?
The following is oversimplified but has a grain of truth to it: Poor people pay for access to their own money. Rich people are paid for accessing their own money.

Here's a practical example for you: a one month train pass from my home town to Nagoya costs about $200. A six month pass costs $1,000.

Given these facts, some people (through either lack of means or lack of savvy) will in a six month period buy six one-month passes, each time incurring a $1 ATM fee, for a total cost of $1,206. More savvy people will buy the six month pass on a credit card and pay it off before the grace period runs out, which costs about $990 ($1,000 less the $10 your bank will give you to say "Thanks for your business! Please charge more stuff!").

If you know you're going to be working in Nagoya for six months, buying the six month ticket is equivalent to buying six month CDs at an APR in excess of 40%. The actual rate offered on a Japanese CD is typically .5%. Somewhat surprisingly, there are many people at my day job who buy both one month tickets and own $5,000 or more in CDs.
How about the DC/MD area too?
I would love to see if this works.

"Feel free to enhance the discussion"
or
"Feel free to add value to this thread"

Any other ways to word it worth considering?
This is a great example of how the comments on HN are often more useful than the articles themselves. Thanks, everyone.
Mixed Race Americans Picture A 'Blended Nation'
Google/Picasa-Order of Magnitude shift in pricing.
Money and wealth are different.

Regarding your point (a):

Things can become more affordable by innovations in technology, production and distribution. Services may not become more affordable because service is provided by human being. And by definition, the above average service always costs more than average.

I don't think in the name of profit is the cause to the problem. Lacking of political power to punish corporation corruptions and being oblivious of public wellness are the root cause.
Why the hell is this reply, and its parent, being downvoted? They're both insightful opinions by users who have made really insightful contributions here for a while.
They're his words (paraphrased) not mine, and it is impossible Buffet is unaware of corporate tax. My guess is its more than rhetorical flourish too since he's not known for that.

Your making the argument that corporate taxes reduce his personal income, and therefore should count as his taxes. Ok. But if corporations did not have to pay taxes, they would pay their employees more, including secretaries. It's impossible to say for sure that a 35% corporate tax rate reduces secretary salaries by 35%, but it is something highly significant.

In a roundabout way the secretary is paying that corporate tax too. Its effect is not as directly measurable on her as it is on Buffet, and might not be 1 for 1, but it's undeniably there and equally applicable to her tax rate.

Also Social Security reduces her pay by 12.4% (half of which is paid by her employer but again would likely go to her if not). Since its capped at $100k income, it rounds to 0% of Buffet's yearly earnings.

*I should point out that I am aware I've grossly oversimplified the effect of the corporate tax on the secretary, I trust but you get the point.
The closest these empty suits get to reporting is when they state the scores.

This strikes me as standing up in the middle of the play and shouting "That so-called Romeo is really Steve! What is this twaddle about Juliet?! Steve isn't even interested in women!" I mean, I sort of get where you are coming from, but I think your understanding of the purpose of the exercise is so at odds to everyone else's that it makes it difficult to engage.

Sports are a form of performance entertainment, and the sports section of the newspaper is an extension of the performance.
Switching to a named user you know and starting a login shell isn't the same as presenting a list of possible users who have the privilege.

One possible hypothetical Unix equiv would be:

command
<failure message returns 'sudo -l' from everyone that does have access>
<user interface to PAM-type app to prompt for credentials and 'sudo -l <command>' as one of the above users>

This doesn't exist as far as I know.
New Amazon CloudFront Feature: Private Content
Not a perfect analysis, but still insightful. My issue with the analysis is that purchasing a CD is, to some degree, a mechanism to store your money - and hopefully get it back at the end of some period of time. Buying tickets one month at a time also gives you the flexibility of finding alternative transport or moving.
It's worth observing that your CD example may be rational given that CDs are more liquid than train tickets.

Train tickets are generally non-transferable so, absent a black market, they are not liquid at all. Buying a six month ticket is making a $1,000 investment in being in that situation for six months.

Maybe they'll lose the job in question, move, or need the $1,000 in cash for some emergency. Depending on how likely those possibilities are, the buyer is going to have a lesser or greater preference towards a more liquid place to put their money.
This is just so well done. The overview, the gallery, the animation, and play. It's remarkable. This must've been a labor of love.
NodeBox 2 beta - Python based Mac/Windows graphics app
Wolfram Alpha added to Bing
So if I want someone to make me a PB&J sandwich, do I now have to pay royalties to Microsoft AND smuckers?
if you know the coastal cities' latitudes, then some basic geography will help one match up inside cities, too.
How about the lottery? You give them $1 and get back as little as $0.25 in EV depending on what you play. And that's not even counting that you're taxed on winnings as normal income but unless you're a professional gambler (and if you are, shame on you for buying lottery tickets) you can't deduct losses in a losing year.
How in Cthulhu's name does this not mention that Warren Buffett's father was a Congressman, Howard Buffett of Nebraska (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Buffett)? Probably, I think, because it would sound bad. It sounds modest to say "I didn't get here entirely by my own efforts; I was lucky to have been born in the US, instead of Bangladesh." It doesn't sound modest to say "I didn't get here entirely by my own efforts; my father was a Congressman who had a strong personal friendship with Murray Rothbard, one of the most famous economists in history."
Sure, a large inheritance is undeserved. But when you get right down to it, everything you have and everything you are is undeserved. You can't choose your parents, you can't choose your DNA. You can't choose the country you're born in, the ideology you're raised with, the opportunities you'll have, the events in your life that shape your psyche, the friends and enemies that taught you who to be.

Even when you make decisions, take action, seize opportunities, the grit and courage and insight and endurance that enables you to do so originally came from somewhere else. Someone taught you that. Something made you that way.

I am the sum of the curses and blessings and happenstances of history. You cannot factor them out of my identity. There would be nothing left. Asking who I would be had I been born in Bangledesh is like asking what a square would be if it had been a circle. The question is wrong-headed. I would be someone else.

And asking whether the son of Sam Walton deserves wealth is like asking whether Audrey Hepburn deserves to be beautiful. It's the wrong question. Gifts--from parents or forefathers or strangers or the universe--are never a matter of deserving. They are not to be worked for or worked off. They are to be embraced with gratitude, and cherished with an earnest effort to make the most of them.

The idea that gifts should be received with guilt, that jealousy on the part of those who don't receive them justfies taxing or destroying them to make things a little more fair, is the attitude I find repugnant.

Perhaps Albert Einstein does not deserve to be so intellectually creative, but that does not mean half of his intellectual energies belong to the state. Perhaps you or I do not think the son of Sam Walton deserves wealth. It is irrelevant; it only matters that Sam thinks he does. What he does with the wealth is his responsibility, as what you do with your gifts is yours. The fact that these things are gifts does not in any way change the fact that they are ours.
How much would you be willing to pay? How about $3600.00? Would that be too much? Is it the per user cost of fi that is too much or just the overall cost? What if the $3600 included as many users/repos as you wanted (given your hd space) and 1 year of free upgrades.

How about $999.99 (same as Adobe Photoshop so it should only require middle management approval)? What if you got a box like the yellow google search box (it could be called that the "premium version")?

An unknown factor in all this is how many companies would be even interested in buying a github server in the first place. If it isn't that many the costs might be too low to sustain development. I am betting that for the GitHub guys it makes a ton of sense for them to sell the private small accounts on github (and only manage/fix 1 github version). and for the big guys sell them a big package.
Ask HN: Best way to guess gender based on persons name
Hey guys,

I need to write a script that will try to guess a persons gender based on given a given name.

What do you think the best way to do this is? I am thinking the best way is to look up the name in a large name/gender database (if there is one).

But it seems to be that some maths and syntax should also do the job...

What do you guys think?
Actually, if 1/x of the money is taxed away, there will only be a power law decay curve for the wealth and power of the family.

There might not be decay at all if you account for the exponential growth of investments.
One thing I've been doing is keeping an annoyance diary. Haven't come up with any great ideas yet though.
The problem with this approach is that each person has their own picture. On a very popular page, this has the tendency to make the page very slow as it loads another 100+ items on the page yet adding nothing to your experience.
Another thing I've been thinking about is how can we learn more about problems in other domains. For this idea day, my frustrations would probably be dev-related, but what about the problems people have in professions other than coding?
http://amp.ece.cmu.edu/people/Andy/projectpage_names.html

"Estimating Age, Gender, and Identity using First Name Priors"

Although the paper looks at this in the context of computer vision -- matching faces in an image with names in the caption -- it should provide some information (and references) on your problem.
I'm guessing github:fi is too expensive for your boss. How much would he be willing to pay? Is the per user/repo a factor?
Minimizing "Freak Out" Execution
Apple having a repository of approved apps is fine. Denying the ability to run other apps isn't.
> If we cut capital gains taxes to zero and added an equivalent amount to corporate profits (say, a 40% annual tax rate instead of 35%), the government would make an equivalent amount of money from the same economic activity, and Buffett's theoretical tax rate would go down. Similarly, if corporate income taxes were zero and his capital gains were taxed at 40%, he'd pay much more than his secretary, but the government would collect the same amount.

Neither of these are equivalent. The "only capital-gains tax" scenario creates incentives for foreign investors in US corporations. The "only corporate tax" scenario creates incentives for US investors in foreign corporations.

The current scenario seems to be a "get some tax revenue from whomever we can" strategy, but it might be worth tinkering with the ratios, especially to determine whether a more capital-gains-heavy, corporate-tax-light regime might increase overall tax revenue, by altering in the US's favor the flow of foreign capital, domestic capital, corporate relocations, and corporate expenditures.
That's actually what I meant. It's not supposed to be developer specific. I was thinking about problems you may experience as you get ready to head to work, hear others complain about on the train ride over, or from those eating in the booth next to you at lunch, etc etc etc.
Agreed. It rings even more hollow given the recent revelation about widespread scams in Facebook apps.

If his company was doing as good a job at protecting users as Apple had, I'd be more inclined to listen to him. The position he's taken is a purely self-interested one, asking for more developer freedom without even acknowledging the difficult challenge Apple faces, and without admitting that maybe his company could learn something from them.
Microsoft admits Mac was Windows 7 muse
Meru National Park | Game Park | Accommodation Hotels |Lodges| Safaris 
Meru National Park/ Meru Hotels & Accommodation, Meru Lodges, Meru Hire Car / Rental, Meru Game Park, Meru Safaris
The corporate tax rate is only paid on profits.

Profits and pay for workers are in competition. So raising the cost of profits actually increases the incentive to pay workers more. This is why many actual nonprofits are poorly managed; they are funneling profits to workers rather than to shareholders.
Someone clearly doesn't know how Bayesian inference works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Mechanical Turk job.

Perform a Google search of the name, bring up all the pics that return and get the Turker to identify if the photos are male or female.
I recently bought a HP Envy 15. The design is clearly lifted directly from Apple and feels just as solid but the specs are much better than the equally priced MacBook Pro.
Iphone jailbreak features
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In a way, that's sort of a wiser decision to make.

The cereal, once you eat it, is gone forever, but the toy will last until you lose it/get bored of it/your dog eats it. Since your parent was buying it, it was like getting a toy for free.
I think I spend all damn day whinging (mostly in my head) about problems that nobody else will fix for me. Anything and everything from the lack of software I want to the poor design of my headphones to the stupidity of traffic lights. 90% of everything is rubbish and nothing is perfect. Problems problems problems, they're endemic, and OK.

I think that if you cultivate this habit without also driving yourself to fix problems, it will just make you miserable and grouchy. Avoid if possible.
this sounds like a potential startup, unless anyone knows of a site like this
Is it online?
Maybe he used to work for a missile program? :)
I would agree absent for the unstated knowledge that everyone at my office is a Japanese salaryman and, as such, the most negative thing you can say about my job security is that I may lose my job if I die.
I should have considered that. If you either a) assume we're only talking about US citizens, or b) assume that this law would also force foreign investors to pay, the point still stands.
It's hard to give an answer without knowing more about your input data and what you intend to do with the output.

On general principle, "math plus syntax" seems like a highly error-prone approach, especially if you need to process anything that's not a standard English name, or if you have lots of users named Pat. E.g. diminutives of Russian masculine names often end in "a". I'm sure there's names which are masculine in some countries and feminine in others. Etc.
Tortoise: I'd like a bicycle helmet, please.

Achilles: Why do you want to wear a helmet?

Tortoise: So that I won't hurt my head if I bump it.

Achilles: You won't bump it.

Tortoise: Suppose I do.

Achilles: You won't bump your head.

Tortoise: But suppose, hypothetically, that I fall off my bike and bump my head. What would protect it from injury?

Achilles: Your head is not injured, because you didn't bump it.

Tortoise: But that's the very basis of my hypothesis!

Achilles: Yeah, I'm going to just ignore you said that, and tell you again that you won't bump your head.

Tortoise: How do you know?

Achilles: Because you made sure that it didn't come into contact with anything.

Tortoise: Good night, dear Achilles. May you encounter others like you.
Profits and pay for workers are in competition. So raising the cost of profits actually increases the incentive to pay workers more.

That is not how it works. When car companies start losing money, they don't give people raises; they fire them. When Goldman has a great quarter, they don't cut people's pay -- they give them bonuses.

Nonprofits are managed because they exist to spend money, not to spend it well.
I think the point is more then this. It brings up a question: can you really stop people from leaving wealth to their children in some way? How many loose ends will you need to chase down. Inheritance is intertwined with property & ownership.

Life insurance is one way around estate taxes. I'm sure there are others.
MarkCC has also written some wonderful poignant work on bullying and how it affected his life. One of the few blog posts that's really ever moved me.
Rails uses Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities extensively, and those capabilities are one of the reasons people choose Ruby, as well as the very thing that makes it possible for Rails to work the way that it does. This is, at least in part, why your code doesn't seem to be on the call stack. My question is, do other language environments do better at exception analysis when metaprogramming is used in this way?
Everything you say is correct, but I believe it misses the point. This isn't about what's deserved, it's proactive: it's about things that Buffet thinks are good actions to take for a better running society. It's split into two parts: build up some barriers to the establishment of an entrenched American aristocracy and try to increase the opportunities for those who weren't graced by as fortunate of a birth.
Finding doctors is a huge problem. When you move to a new city, you are given a list of 2000 PCPs and told to pick one (after calling around to see if they are accepting new patients). When you need to see a specialist, you are given a referral. People in the health care industry know that many of the specialists are untalented losers who push patients in and out as quickly as possible, and would never let someone close to them see them. The general public has little idea.
http://idea-ne.ws/
First, thanks to everyone for reading my worst nightmare and commenting on it. :)

+1 to RiderofGiraffes for that tip: From now on, I am reading the program online and in print. No surprises, please.

I only wish the BlogWorld organizers had responded to my direct e-mail explaining the situation and asking for ways to prevent it for other speakers in the future.

Wade Kwon
Birmingham Blogging Academy
Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are too many examples to list.

Though you are correct that many communities suffer when they restrict membership, that isn't an infallible rule.

Communities that have benefited from restricting membership include the Freemasons, Mensa, and the online community TheRoot42. Those are just a few we know about! Many closed communities are also at least somewhat secret. Barriers to community entry are sometimes beneficial (not that I'm advocating it for HN).

Entry difficulty is a significant contributor to group cohesiveness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness).
It'll drive you miserable and grouchy if you think of them as petty annoyances. Thinking of them as opportunities for improvement is more healthy.
How about slot machines that actually advertise "Pays out 95%"! as if it were a good thing.
I think the time value of money is just totally upside down, and the train pass pricing is a good example of it. Nagoya needs to change their pricing to reflect that, because they're leaving money on the table by charging so much less for a six-month pass vs. one month passes. Chances are the money they get paid up front can't be invested in a short-term asset with a return that justifies the discount.

Governments move slow, and leave money behind them.
Preview of The New York Times new viewing mode, great for mobile
I was a foodie from the moment I was born, so I never had to set down any rules. I just ate everything. It helped that both my parents were (still are) quite excellent cooks.

Perhaps it is the level of marketing today though. All of my little cousins and nieces/nephews (big family) are really picky eaters, some on a level that makes me wonder about the parents.

I know all of those kids watch excessive amounts of television, and I never watched television. My family didn't own a TV until I was 16.

Perhaps it is the TV marketing of certain foods? I have no idea.

It may also have been the types of food I was raised on. My parents were on a big health kick right after I was born, so most of my first solid food memories consist of tons of vegetables, fish, meat and occasional bread. We had dessert maybe once a week, and breakfast was never cereal. The closest thing I ever had to cereal was along the lines of oatmeal.
HP to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion
Bump (YC S09) Goes Cross-Platform With New Android App; Upgrades iPhone Version
The Future of the Human Body