skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A perfect point:

Django is about you making a web framework that makes your/other's life easier. Also doing good stuff, being in control, getting recognition, and what better resume than "I am the lead developer on the Django project"?

In the corporate world its more about making money, not getting fired, people thinking up better ways to make money with what you already have, using your talent to make money, in fact the only reason to create anything in the corporate world is either to better make money or to save money on something that currently costs more money than building + using would cost.

Granted there are exceptions, like 37signals, but they got maaaaaaaaajor recognition for ruby on rails, and that is in itself making them money, or getting them tallent (which helps them make money).
This is a conversation dominated by science majors.

I'm an art major. As in studio. Classic humanity major.

If I said "You should worry about what Adorno thinks about cultural production when you make a web object, since it means potnetially you end up with a more passive than active population: When you build an object on the web, how do you plan on activating the population, because of his critique?"

Most people here would go huh? by the sound of this conversation. In Practice, what humanities students say, especially when they sit down with engineers, is important. It is a pity that there is no practical humanities anymore. It is really useful to learn to think critically in that way about the world.
Is government fiber really good for your health?
Good point. And to add to that, to the best of my knowledge all Windows and OSX users are forced to use 32 bit browsers in order to have a working flash anyways, so if you limit yourself to 32 bit browsers you will have no issues and you will be getting the same thing as the Windows and OSX people.
My favourite part of the article:

"Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE."
down-voted for swearing witch all caps.
Software that doesn't improve over time is generally forgotten and replaced by software that does. Given that, the software we are using at an arbitrary point in time is likely to be in the latter category.
Nice Idea... How are you getting bargain data? Is it a trade secret? :)
Have you given Freshbooks a try?

http://freshbooks.com
and the r.

for the love of Mike, down-modder, look at the text in a mirror.
Why Artificial Intelligence may never exist
It would be useful to say how long you have maintained the same weight after stopping the diet.
They gave IOUs for refunds, then paid them fairly quickly. I filed mine electronically on April 10th or so, and received my refund within a few weeks--it's not like they just didn't pay. I don't disagree on the whole, though.
Do you mean the US or Norway?

Also, I'll note this article is from 2005, so I'm not sure how much these figures have changes since then.
You actually get used to not eating. I had to get used to it. What triggers peoples hunger is different for different people, some people get hungry when they need more food, some people get hungry when they CAN fit more food into their stomach.

You need to force yourself to become the first type, from the second type. It can be done.

I work in IT, this is my theory, I am not a nutritionist.
I'll bow to nobody in my disdain for the AR platform as a battle rifle. Direct gas impingement blows; it is broken by design. I don't care that it eliminates a moving part, the right answer is gas-piston (like the AK) or even better, op-rod. This is the answer to those who claim that it is a perfectly fine rifle as long as it's properly cleaned: (1) sometimes life happens and you have to use a rifle that's in a state other than perfectly clean; and (2) even if it starts out as immaculate, use it long enough, eg in a situation in which the metal bits of the rifle are literally glowing white hot (as described in the NYT article) and you'll find yourself with a filthy rifle you just don't have the time to properly clean. Also, the gas tube can break, rendering the rifle almost entirely useless since the soft metal and lame plastic makes it a relatively poor club or lever.

Granted, the notion of the upper receiver being just another part makes it a nearly infinitely flexible system that supports a plethora of caliber options. This is it's main saving grace as a civilian rifle that is realistically not going to be subjected to the rigors of battle. There are lots of easily-swappable parts available and just about anyone can snap together some pieces that will still shoot quite tight. Of course, the military is standardized on the stock rifle and has stupidly chosen the 5.56mm poodleshooter round which is obviously heavier but has much worse terminal characteristics than the 7.62x51 NATO round. No wonder special forces and other units that can opt out of the rifle do so. Yes, it's partly done because they can but mostly because they really, really need to.

The AK-47 has much, much worse accuracy but has to be considered a better battle rifle because it is good enough in that department and is much sturdier and physically holds up better than the AR platform. The AK line harkens back to a time when battle rifles were battle rifles: the Garand, the Mauser, the Nagant, and Enfield (bolties all except the Garand) were real rifles and shot real ammo. John Moses Browning would be half-impressed and half-horrified at Stoner's creation.

Since this is HN, I'll make an analogy to a poorly designed and written web server. When you're not stressing it, it doesn't matter that you're doing something in O(n^2) when you should be doing it in O(1). But when push comes to shove, no amount of external patches (more bandwidth, more CPU) can disguise the fact that the software sucks.

Oh, and the SKS was designed by Simonov, not Kalashnikov.
The statistics are misleading and muddy:

- Comparing adjusted disposable income between Scandinavia and the US is highly misleading. The disposable income in Scandinavia doesn't need to cover any healthcare, education and other public services. I wonder how much, if any, the difference is once you adjust for that.

- The argument mistakes distribution of wealth with average output per capita. Portugal is in the bottom of the list in the GDP per capita comparison between US states and EU countries. In Portugal there is a somewhat high wage disparity which means that those with high wages can afford to pay those with low wages to get cheap pizza (the example given). The same disparity exists in the US and pizza is cheap too, even though the US GDP per capita is at the other extreme of the comparison. Scandinavian countries have low wage disparity so things are more expensive by comparison. It has nothing to do with the output of the economy.

Basically it is trying to draw conclusions about the strength of the economies based on statistics that don't properly control for very relevant factors. The only good argument is the 2.2% vs 3% GDP growth rates. Considering the article is from 2005, recent events may throw some doubt into that picture. The latest estimates on Wikipedia were 2.6% in Norway and 1.1% in the US.
Skype will be open sourced ?
Skype (the famous Voice-Over-IP communication program) will be released under an open source license.
It's a testament to the differences between perception and reality. The NHS in the UK regularly gets poor ratings, in fact they're regularly flat out abysmal on national satisfaction scales, yet all out-patient questionnaire's regularly return with satisfaction rates >90%.

People perceive the NHS as this behemoth incapable of performing, but the reality is that it performs amazingly well and provides one of the best health care in the world.

Perceptions of America suffer a similar thing, it's always direly low in many countries. A very recent poll in Canada showed that they like Obama, and that a vast majority like Americans as individuals. Yet respondents states that Canadians dislike America on a whole more since Obama took office than before, and that Canadians feel less safe visiting the US than before.

Even I have recognized the cognitive dissonance of liking many Americans, liking the Presidency, I even like a vast amount of Americas culture, yet there's something ingrained in me that dislikes 'America'. Perhaps it's just the politics.
This part was:

Closed-source software gets worse with each release
(Microsoft, Adobe, …). Open-source software gets better
(OOo, Ubuntu, …). Discuss.
Norway in this case. I'm not sure what America's delusion would be.
I've been living here too long to tell.

In any event, I think America's dirty laundry has been thoroughly scrutinized at this point.

Every time I return to Europe most people are all too happy to remind me what precisely is wrong with America (income disparity, minority incarceration rates, healthcare, etc etc).
You forgot the M-14, which is a much-improved (far more accurate, faster to reload, higher capacity per reload), variant on the M-1 Garand.

Having shot all three (I own a National Match M-1, a NM M1A (the civilian (non-auto) variant of the M-14) and "more than one" AR-15), I can tell you that I vastly prefer the M1A.

The only time I ever had the M-1 'jam' was when it suffered a round of .308 through it during a match, resulting in an 'X', but also a failure to extract. I signaled a malfunction, the armorer came over, checked with me (3X) that the round had gone downrange, then placed the butt of the rifle against the ground, and stomped on the operating handle with his boot. The rifle extracted the (now fire-formed straight (no neck) .308 brass, and chambered a new round.

I was allowed to finish my string.

I've never had the M1A jam, but it probably only has 10,000 rounds through it (and yes, it was new when my father (who used to shoot classified as 'Distinguished') purchased it in the early 60s.)

The AR15s, (Colts, all) are, by any comparison, toys.

These days I shoot a Model 70 Winchester in .308 (it and the Garand were both my grandfather's.)

Since this is HN:

the M-14/M1A is like Lisp, elegant, but accessible only to a few.

the M1 Garand is like 'C', everybody's ancestors used one, but few know how to use it.

The M-16/AR15 is like Perl, cheap, but prone to failure.

The AK-47 is like PHP. Even the retards can make one work.
Correct, the machine I was using had a debug version of Flash.
The possibility also exists that possibility, reality and other existence-based terms as we use them are not applicable to the start and end of universes.
Finally a teenager humble enough to address the ad nauseam idea that teenagers can be entrepreneurs to. The media (most esp. major media outlets) have been exploiting this topic ever since they finally acknowledged the internet as a valid 'media contender.'

A teenager with an entrepreneurial spirit is rare as is and perhaps even paradoxical in the most stereotypical case, but a teenager disciplined and willful enough to build a business (web-site/service) attractive enough to sell and humble enough to remind us they still have a lot to learn is probably one in a million.

I don't mean to swing on this kid's nuts, I'm merely trying to make the point that a majority of early-blooming entrepreneurs wearing fancy acronyms/job-titles assume they know too much too soon and have a hard time adapting their business and their ego when X takes a turn for the worse.
I always thought Freshbooks is for freelancers who want to bill their clients. Will definitely see if it serves my purpose. Thanks
I agree that continuously pointing out those gets tiring fast (even though they are true). But then the US response tends to be "but on average we make more money". It's great that the US produces more (and can borrow more) and can buy more stuff, but that in itself does not guarantee quality of living. Diminishing returns on happiness of having more money kick in too soon for that to be a full argument.
Have you thought about getting a steady evening job instead?

I've found working as a gas attendant in the suburbs during the evenings to be low stress and often giving me time to read.
The same argument could be made for cows. They're not as smart as dolphins, but they're smart enough to feel pain, have emotions, and have social relationships.
+1

Tax filings start in a couple months, the deadline is just about 5 months away. At best this is just a very temporary stopgap. If they can't cut the budget now and can't float a bond issue now what makes them think they'll be able to do so then?

"Forced, interest-free loan" is Orwellian. It's theft. Setting aside any moral considerations surrounding taxes, these words are the semantic equivalent of CA saying "We're taking your money now, like it or not, and hopefully we'll repay it in a few months." It's not a tax, it's not a fee, it's stealing and it's easy because of the whole notion of withholding. To stand against it would require that both employer and employee perform simultaneous disobedience that is sure to bring the wrath of the IRS.

If we really want to see rage against taxation we'd eliminate withholding and all taxes would be rolled into a single lump sum that the taxed would have to pay the week before election day.
EMC & Cisco would be creating a joint venture to sell infrastructure to support
Authorize.net has Automated Recurring Billing, and BrainTree has some pretty good offerings too.
Looks great, but I don't have an iphone. Thx.
Very nice find. I didn't see an option to repeat the loop (might be there)
That strongly depends on which open source community you are dealing with. For instance I know people running Perl applications that I developed a decade ago without any changes on current versions of Perl. On the other hand I've heard that migrating Drupal applications to a newer version can be fun.

However there is similar variation within closed source. For example the AS 400 remained binary compatible for 20 years across multiple CPUs and even a migration from 48-bit CPUs to 64-bit CPUs. (And your applications still run today on IBM hardware, but they've changed the name.) However if you developed an complex application in VB 5 a decade ago, have fun porting it to any language supported by Microsoft today!

So backwards compatibility is orthogonal to the question of open vs closed source software.
Wow, at first I thought this might be something out of the NYT archives. These sorts of discussions were being had when it was first introduced in Vietnam, as mentioned by the author. It's stunning that this type of concern is still present in something that's been in use for more than 40 years.

Very interesting post.
I was considering http://www.zuora.com in the past at the recommendation of a friend. I didn't end up springing for a recurring billing solution though, so I don't have any experience with them. Their product looked impressive though.
PPC 
A Sydney Australia PPC Advertising Agency, that handles Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Pay Per Click Advertising.
The Timbro study that makes up the bulk of the author's argument can be found at http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665646.pdf. Most of the numbers are based on the US economy circa 1995-2000.

Bonus points for equating the economic prosperity of Spain with the alcoholic content of their drinks.
Scary man pages
The New Science of Temptation
The Economist's Big Mac compares purchasing power pretty well - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
I love the "Always add DB Indexes" slide.

It's amazing how many projects I run across that completely lack proper indexing. Many lack any indexes at all. It's almost like db:migrate should warn you if you've run a migration that lacked any indexes.

Rails makes it so easy to forget about the database (yes, I'm talking about you database constraints in the actual database), that users often forget that it can be a pretty important piece of their application (especially when it gets popular).
I don't understand how one of the largest states, which can supposedly benefit best from economies of scale, with one of the highest tax rates, can have such serious liquidity problems.
I'm wondering whose bread is getting buttered here? What new weapons platforms are competing for Army dollars, and which one solves the reliability "problem"? Seems like this is the sort of article that comes out of a press junket to a wide-open rifle range with lots of new toys for a reporter to play with.
Exactly. Watermelon cost like 50 cents in China, doesn't mean people are wealthier there.

Although for some reason the iPhone costs several hundred dollars more... But I'm sure they'll come to their senses soon and lower it.
What you dislike are probably all the bad things that come out of America. The bad things tend to stick in the mind and define things.

Probably doesn't help that America's so big and diverse; there's a lot there to hate.
WAAAAY more entertaining w/ actual sock puppets.
This just sounds like an employer with a gambling problem, he's taking cuts off his workers paychecks and claiming they'll get paid out. Well one question; what happens when he hits rock bottom and loses the business?
Failure to extract is remedied by the chrome plated chamber in the A2 and later variants (i.e. everything but the early vietnam war variants). I have seen it once on the range (not my rifle, nor the Marine I was coaching), but I've never seen it necessary to use a cleaning rod to extra -- pulling on the charging handle while banging the butt on the deck solved the problem.

The modern M4 probably would have been the perfect rifle for Vietnam. The rifle and ammunition are light, which is important when you don't have a truck near by. Urban combat where quick lethality is important wasn't as common. The chromed chamber eliminates the rust problem.

A lot of those factors have changed, but I still read most of these stories as "the grass is always greener".

How many soldiers have died due to an M16 not killing the enemy fast enough? How many soldiers would die from being less familiar with the weapon during the transition period? Would the weapon chosen as a replacement actually be the best for the job, or would the choice be based on which defense contractor is in a state with a senator on the panel who will be ignoring the military's recommendation?

The "it's not a real rifle, it doesn't shoot big enough ammunition, it can't be used as an effective club" arguments sound a lot like traditional RDBMS fans saying that key value stores are useless because they can't guarantee foreign key constraints, or, maybe more appropriately, it's like someone rejecting an effective approximation algorithm because it has an exponential worst case runtime. Life, even war, is not a James Bond movie. Of course special forces uses different equipment -- they have a different mission. If you optimize for the usual case, you may be de-optimizing for the usual case.
Dirty vendor tricks
foxycart.com - has a nice api and works with subscription payments via authorize.net

also try cariboucms.com if you're looking for a full cms with member management subscription capabilities(great product)
Windows 7 Replaces Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) with a Boot Cycle Of Death (BCOD)
As ridiculous as the whole idea is, it's almost as absurd to imagine this being some terrible hardship. The article makes it sound like it'll be a big deal to a lot of people but it's, what, maybe $30/month for someone with a pretty comfortable income? If that's a serious concern, then it's not just the state government with a budgeting problem...

Then again, maybe the purpose is just to get Californians upset to distract them from noticing that noone's actually solving the problem.
I need my middle click. It's essential for the open link in new tab functionality.
> would you rather take a business class seat on a jet or charter a 50 year old plane

You have relatively smaller seats and have to share with other passengers if you take the jet, whereas you can take the whole crappy 50 year old plane to yourself -- it's dedicated!

Well. I'll still take the former, but apparently some people prefer the later.
Check out http://cheddargetter.com

Incredibly simple API with libraries for most languages. But it does require an Authorize.net merchant account to tie into.
The impression I've gotten from the PhDs in my dept. is that the title is something they expect and appreciate as a nod to their years of work, but, by the same token, anyone you might compare with them based on merit probably is also a Dr making it useless to brag.

Anyone can technically become a CEO for $89. It only has meaning when attached the success of companies.
Paypal Web Payments Pro gets my vote, they do a great job with it
Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby Dating
Does this advert appeal to you? “Loaded, older man, potentially married, seeks attractive female companion half his age. Will pay for her expenses – if you know what I mean.”
If so, maybe you should join SugarDaddyMate.com. It’s a dating website with a brutally honest clientele who look for no-strings “arrangements”.
The site calls them “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies”. Babies join for free. Daddies pay $29.95 a month (As of Sept.1st have a promo for new sugar daddies 6 months free full access upgrade) sugar babies are always free.
Daddies and babies debate whether what they’re engaging in is prostitution. Thirty per cent of arrangements involve an “allowance” of about $2,000 a month. But most daddies simply provide gifts or travel.
There are 300,000 members, and babies are said to outnumber daddies ten to one. One sugar daddy described it as “the best fishing hole I ever fished in.
I highly recommend http://spreedly.com. Has a great API and recurring billing is built-in so you don't need to pay extra for it on PayPal or Authorize.
Ask HN: Intuitive formulation of trigonometry?
Hi again HN,

In keeping with my theme of math questions, I ask you, is there an intuitive formulation/explanation of the rules of trigonometry?

I understand the basics (def of sin/cos, sin^2+cos^2=1, etc.) in terms of the unit circle, but as soon as you get to things like double angle, half angle, the other identities, estimating the functions, and so on, you've lost me totally, because the proofs I've seen of those are just random things based on triangles and then you just memorize the formula and are done with it. Unfortunately, I hate memorizing things without being able to at least grasp the derivation from first principles. Any references?
The problem is that economies of scale generally apply in large Democratic states. Economies of scale are by their nature commercial. The only item that seems scales in CA is subterfuge.
This confirms my brother's stories. He has a penchant for dating Scandinavian women--thusfar he's dated women from Denmark and Norway and has visited them and their families.

Denmark was, of course, expensive by US standards. But upon returning from Norway, he remarked on the absurdly high cost of living. He made lasagna for his Norwegian girlfriend's family and it ended up costing around $60 US--just for the ingredients and a soft drink. Eating out at a burger-type joint ran nearly $100. It's not affordable unless you're absurdly wealthy.
We're using Zuora, but I can't say much about it as accounts and billing isn't my area. As I understand it, it's well suited to people who expect to be doing complicated things, and also people who want to ensure that they keep up a professional appearance by not sending someone off-site to enter their billing info.
You can either:

CMD+Left Click
Right Click + "Open Link in new Tab"
I was thinking the same thing.

Interestingly, it amuses me that government incompetence is preventing people from being killed.
Looks great. Thanks for the pointer.
If the M1 Garand is C, the M14 has to be C++: similar in many respects but with better (ammo) encapsulation. Heh.