skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correlating long bill length with corruption is a fallacy. None of the lawmakers read the whole bill in its technical legal form because it would be an exercise in futility - for virtually any bill, good or bad. It's the nature of our legal system (or any modern, complex legal system) that amending the law (especially in large cases like health care where there is a great deal of law already on the books and about few dozen loosely-related issues are being addressed in one go) that the resulting legal language is going to be confusing except to lawyers reading it very closely. For example, a great deal of the legislation refers to minor changes to existing laws, and hence would require reading those laws as well to read the bill comprehensively.

It's sort of like complaining that a program can't be good because the developers never bothered to fully read the binary produced by the compiler.

Which is not to say that all legislators don't understand the bill. This is what staffers are for - carefully drafting and reviewing legislation and imparting the meaning of it to their bosses.

Incidentally, there is at least one draft of the bill in plain-English form, the Senate Finance Committee bill. The Finance Committee, by tradition, drafts all legislation in legible English, with all members presumably reading the full draft, before handing it off to staffers to translate into legalese.

You could argue that all Congressional committees should follow a similar practice, although it's worth noting that in this case the process didn't do much to improve the bill - the Finance Committee version is generally regarded as the least-effective and industry-friendly version of the bill Congress has considered. You can, in fact, "do the math" on this by looking at the projected coverage rates under each plan.

The claim that this is the most corrupt congress in some time, while subjective, seems counterintuitive. This Congress is likely to pass finance reform within the next few months, despite that sector making massive contributions to both parties. Additionally, while insurance and pharma have had undue influence over the health care debate, their power is significantly less so than it was during the Medicare Part D legislation passed only a few years ago, in which they successfully got Congress to restrict the government from negotiating on drug prices. While I have many complaints about the honesty, integrity, and effectiveness of the current Congress, I would rank them as significantly better (less bad) than every Bush Congress.
There is a website called http://www.jingobid.com/ which has much more attractive prices than Swoopoo. I've won a camera for $15 with them.
She was the female Batman! secretly helping people at night ...
This seems like a good example of what's wrong with intellectual property laws.
Not sure if its a good idea to replace human waiters (other than for the show effect).
When 'donatos' tried to open in germany I went there and was very uncomfortable to order by phone and sit alone at a table the whole time. I think they closed by now.
Solution for the Lightbox vs Featured Content Gallery conflict in Wordpress
I had a big issue on getting Featured Content Gallery wp plugin (slide show) in to work after installing Lightbox on my wordpress blog . Finally i found a best fix for this after spending some time on the google.
Is hell exothermic or endothermic. (Priceless real story)
Beat box first moble of DELL: Mini 3
make buttons bigger and use more shiny colors. Better yet: get a designer.
How You Can Make $20 Billion
How to Ignore the Yes-Man in Your Head (Avoiding Confirmation Bias)
And I couldn't resist clicking on that link :)
"Magnanti... has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300 an hour prostitute working through a London escort agency."

The sad thing is, an IT contractor could easily expect to earn £300 an hour, especially in London.
Awesome. Forth is a great language!
I'd say it's still useful to know what confident, outgoing and friendly body language looks like, so you can recognize it in others and yourself. For one thing, it might help you deduce what kinds of actions make people more confident, outgoing and friendly, so you can try doing those things yourself. For another, knowing whether somebody else is confident or not can be important in deciding how to relate to them (you don't want to overwhelm an unconfident person).

It's definitely more of a sensory ('input') skill than an active ('output') skill though.
dont bother would be my advice

1. i clicked and failed to find any release. only a video and a mailing list.

2. only a beta will be released and you will have to pay 20$ to get it. To pay to debug their code? the offer is not that compelling.

let hope those are just glitch during the launch
You can't get the money out of politics before you get the politics out of money. http://change-congress.org/
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Ask HN: Is it necessary to be a child prodigy?
To day I visited a so-called seminar (which was more like a sales pitch) of a company. The company provides different online courses. There is an option of doing business with a referral system in it. And as such things turn out, the company now focused completely on the business part. As much as I find it foolish that people are paying money to become a member so they can make members and get money and the other members are also there just to make more members which completely leaves out education part, I noticed something strange there. People have actually made money through this (exploiting the foolishness) and all of them were not above 21 or 22. And that too so much that they could buy two or more cars.That made me wonder how dull a life I am living. I mean I am 18 but there is no chance that I would have that kind of money in 4-5 years if I keep working the same way as I do (which is concentrating on my college). I dont know whats the future of these people but there present is sure glamorous.

Now I do not compare things which are not comparable. But this is just sticking in my head. I mean if I look around myself there are dozens of child prodigies around, so much so sometimes I wonder if a person can be successful after the age of 25 or 28. This sometimes scares me.

So I as HN, as most of you are people here made there own self,usually from scratch. You made startups, you built your own personality, your own fame. You may not have that much money to start with but surely you got there in time. Is it necessary to be a child prodigy to enjoy the money you earn on your own self or if you want to be your own boss?

Disclaimer: This post may feel majorly mismanaged, with ideas and words all over the place, but this is because my mind is still whirling with thoughts.
I'm currently building a flash game, that is primarily aimed at Facebook users. I plan to start it off as a FB canvas app, in order to establish trust with users, and after I have reached a critical momentum, I plan to switch over to FBConnect.
Interesting, I admit to have repeated what I've heard so many times without checking it.
hey Rick,

Don't become a part of any pyramid schemes!

Regarding the rest of your post:

In my opinion it is absolutely not necessary to be a child prodigy at all, what is necessary is a certain drive and some self discipline.

If you work only marginally harder than your peers it is quite amazing how that pays off over the years.

And of course you can be successful after 25, I know a guy that is now in his sixties that only started his first company when he was 54. He makes more money than all the youngsters that I know combined.

The lucky few that manage to be ahead of the game by the time they're 25 are solidly outnumbered by the number of people that are well of by the time they're 40 or 50.

But everybody loves a good story, that's why the media will focus on the 20 somethings.

50 year old guy makes a million is not as good a story as 18 year old guy makes a million.
Not my specialty, but I came across this comment on reported traffic figures a couple of days ago:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/12/comscore-linkedin-twitt...

It struck me as interesting; perhaps it's related to what you're looking at.

About the overreporting: have you considered Google-caching ? I often just look at a cached page, which nicely highlights the words I searched for. Seems to me the page HTML is served from the Google cache, but images, ads, etc. come from the original sources.
I agree. I haven't been much of a fan of Cappucino since seeing a review at a Google JS meetup several months ago. I have just never been sure what the point of a language written on top of javascript is. The whole point of really knowing not only the core language but also the inconsistencies between IE and the rest of the browsers is that I want to build web apps that perform fast and robustly. Abstracting that away into yet another layer that runs moderately slowly on the 70% of common browsers just means that it runs that much more slowly. To be fair, I give all the credit in the world to the 280 North guys, but charging $15 for access to a beta program for an environment and language that really has no broad adoption is just not worth it.
http://freeculturenews.com/2009/01/27/jammie-thomas-receives...
Did Microsoft just sneakily patent an open-source tool?
Maybe they'll find a way to automate her out of the restaurant next.
In the UK it's legal to work below 16, but you can only be employed legally for a limited amount of hours. Self-employment doesn't have those restrictions, and you don't pay taxes either (until you turn 16).
I understand the media point of view but sometimes I get really scared. There are not much opportunities where I live and such pyramid schemes are actually very lucrative. They also gave a blown up figure of Rs 24,00,000 in one year which was presented by a person, from a college which works closely with my own, who had done it in his second year. I was almost compelled to join
FreeBSD 8.0-RC3 released
These referral schemes basically consist of selling junk to your friends. If doing that is what you consider prodigal and worth aiming for, I don't know what advice to give you.

College: you typically go to college only once. You have the rest of your life to earn money and buy lots of cars. While I don't consider college a strict necessity anymore, I think it can be fun and worthwhile (and it probably costs more than buying two cars btw). Which would you rather have, 4 good, unforgettable years at college or two cars?

Younger and younger successful people: sure, it is scary. But they will grow up, too, and on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. Meaning it is the product or service that counts, not your age. So if you find a spin to make money later on, where is the problem?

As a side note, I would not believe everything people tell you at such sales seminars.

Edit: they don't mention the "sell stuff to your friends" part until you sign up.
Pyramid schemes are illegal in many countries for a good reason, sooner or later the bottom will drop out and then it invariably turns out they are a net loss to a majority of the participants.

And those near the top are lucky if they escape jail time.

The atmosphere at those meetings is set up to make you euphoric, there are plants all over the audience. Don't get caught up in it and avoid them like the plague they are is all the advice I can give you on this.
An experienced, well-connected IT contractor, yeah no doubt. Someone fresh out of school, new to London ? No way.

And sad thing ? Nice little judgement you have going there.
No, but the effects of not having immaterial property laws should give some kind of indication on how it changes business strategies.
Engadget Mobile's logo is still the same color, so I don't think T-Mobile sued and won. They simply mailed a nastygram, which anyone can do for any (or no) reason.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=942698
Remember that because Objective-J is a superset of Javascript you can still write native JS code in an app. This is the beauty of Cappuccino: it provides the benefits of a framework (consistency, robustness etc) with the flexibility to pretty much still do whatever you want.

The 280 North guys are the first to admit that CP isn't for every web app, but it serves a specific need exceptionally well. And, personally, I think its' application and adoption will only broaden.

I can't wait to part with my $20! They have to monetise somehow, and if this helps the next year of development - hell, make it $40!
"I agree. I haven't been much of a fan of the NeXTstep class library since seeing a review in [a prominent publication of the period] several months ago. I have just never been sure what the point of a language written on top of C is...

"To be fair, I give all the credit in the world to the NeXT guys, but charging $3500 for a microcomputer without a vast application library and that really has no broad adoption is just not worth it."

That said, here's how I see things.

(1) 280 North took a broken environment and tried to apply a not-entirely-broken substrate atop it. Is it going to be slow? Sure, but consider also that Javascript is inherently slow to begin with.

(Slow begets slower, blah blah, I don't want to hear it. I don't care.)

(2) It's a start, and when it comes to 280 North's business practices, I'd be willing to bet that there might very well be a standalone compiler for Objective-J at some point if enough people ask for it.

... if I don't beat them to it first. It's getting close to the point where I'm considering just hacking something together in OCaml to scratch my own itch in this vein.

(3) The 280 North guys are smart guys. They listen. Complain. Send them mail.
There are very few IT contractors in london making 500k+/year.
From the voters perspective I fail to see how this is in any way more complex than what they currently do. Fill in a bubble. (Hell, some of them used a pen anyway, so it was literally the same as they were doing before.)

The only extra complexity is an optional post-vote verification of your vote online.

I don't see how one can be so sure of the low frequency of voter fraud when the whole point of this system is to make it something that's actually possible to detect.
Is static type checking a redundant testing mechanism?
An “Adaptive” Move-to-Front Algorithm
It's more important to be able to identify and act upon opportunities if you want to make money (or just be lucky).
She was hardly 'fresh out of school', she was in the middle of doing a PhD. And yes, I do think it's sad that anyone has to make a living working as a prostitute, if that makes me some sort of Victorian prude then so be it.
To some extent at least this can be blamed on the amount of distractions we have in this day and age.

Try the pomodoro technique. It has helped me, perhaps it will help you too: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Note: you can try it even without buying a pomodoro (I use a countdown timer in my cellphone)
No, but look on Jobserve and you'll see that £300 per hour is a fairly realistic rate.
What is Atlas? -> Atlas is a development tool for building Cappuccino applications.

Is it some MacOS thing?
> The law holds that a reasonable person is too stupid to see the difference between a T-Mobile logo done up in magenta and an Engadget one

I think you must take into account that logo colours are often used in other aspects of corporate appearance. The colour may be used as a band across an envelope, a letter, or an ad. Done well, you really only need to see that coloured band to know who's sending it.
Hey did you know that Pyramid Schemes or "MultiLevel Marketing" is illegal in India???

Also, anything that promises you cash for doing literally nothing is a scam.

One company I knew only paid out cash to a few people. As more people joined they started giving out gift cheques. Problem was they really weren't cheques and could not be cashed. Never get involved in an MLM scheme, you are being swindled out of your time and energy.
Good writers and actors don't usually work for free. Just because there are lots of expensive things that don't really improve quality doesn't mean quality isn't still expensive.

Unless you're suggesting that television shows should all be made on a "work for a share of profits" or "work for free to get recognition" basis (i.e., like a start-up or an open-source project respectively). I don't really see most people being able to do that, though.
I think you're badly mistaking what I'm talking about with "looking up answers" - what I'm talking about is considerably more than that.

How efficient will planar electroluminescent backlights be in 10 years? That's a good question - and one we can make an educated stab at given the right historical data, the right experience in forecasting, and a little bit of plain luck. Heck, you're now talking about an entire field of mathematics and engineering in and of itself!

Compare this to the Google interview though - where they expect you to pull a number out of your ass, with no opportunity to consult historical data, no field experts to interview... no due diligence done at all. It is either an extremely poor approximation of real-life problem solving skills, or everyone at Google is recklessly cowboy and trying to deduce every decision ever by sheer will of logic alone.
Vischeck: Test how your site looks to someone that is color blind
A wonderful thing about Forth-style languages is that they are amenable to many implementation strategies, and if you are looking for a quick-and-dirty DSL you can usually do it as a Forth.

Something I did recently is a source-to-source compiler as a series of function calls, e.g.:

1 2 +

may translate to

stack.push(1); stack.push(2); add();

in an Algol-type language. You don't get niceties like a "real" namespace or interactivity with this approach, but if the function calls are inlined, the only performance overhead comes from usage of the data stack - making it a good candidate for "glue code" that doesn't need to be dynamic. It's basically "Forth-like macro-assembler" at this level.

For things like runtime mutability, interrupt-and-continue behavior, and interactivity, another strategy is to build an interpreter loop where each word is a list or array of data containing two types - values and function calls. Lots of features become possible - even easy - once you do that.

Since I started experimenting with stack languages I've been trending towards this approach: build a Forth-type API on top of whatever language is best for the task. Then build the app in the Forth. On the one hand you can say "ah, but that's not necessary," but on the other, it focuses your energies around setting up the plumbing well, so that the final solution is small and easy to extend. And that's always a good outcome.
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Your comment may be valid but in your conclusion you're confusing performance and scalability.
I get it, I just feel that it's incredibly shortsighted. I'd like to think that if I were a label, I'd be trying to figure out how to survive in this new world rather than trying to just grab as much money as possible before dying in a firey crash.

Then again, I'm a quite different person than record label executives, so I shouldn't expect they'd think anything like me on the issue...
I think it is a combination of both. "luck favors those that are prepared for it".
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cappucino+applications
Tell HN: Auto-Blackmail
I've got this dirty secret. I blackmail someone and it takes me places.

I call it auto-blackmail, and here is how it works:

Whenever I come up against something I really don't want to do but that I know I have to do I go out of my way to tell others that I'll do it, and when it will be done.

That way, if I don't do it I'll end up looking like a fool in front of those that matter to me.

I call it 'auto blackmail', the similarities are strong enough to warrant the title. I'm sure it is not original but it works wonders for me.

Blackmail is threatening to tell on someone if they don't do something you want them to do, Auto-Blackmail is a preemptive strike, you tell those whose respect you value that you will succeed, failure, after that is no longer an option.

This in response to some of the 'how to stay focused', 'how to avoid coders block' and other posts of a similar nature that I've come across recently.

I don't have a nicer way of doing it, when self discipline fails, blackmail invariably succeeds.

Join me and use the power of blackmail whenever you feel that urge to avoid a certain piece of work (you know, the one you really should be working on right now).

In fact, there is probably a nice little project embedded here somewhere, a place where you can publicly post your next item on your todo list that you'd really like to avoid and when you will have it done, after the timer expires your whole facebook and twitter posse will be automatically informed that you've dropped the ball :)
Apparently the dominant legal view in Germany (and I guess in more parts of Europe) is that once a sentence is served, the crime is dealt with. If society believes that the sentences are too light, it can change the law, but once a judge has pronounced a sentence, and it's served in the proper way, that's it.

"Fame" is a way of society to hand out punishments outside of the courts of law. Such an extrajudicial punishment is especially annoying when there are mitigating circumstances. Usually those are details that courts bother with, but public opinion doesn't.

(Now, that doesn't mean this particular case is easy. Wikipedia also records history. History records the identity of many killers and I believe in a lot of cases that can be an important historical fact. Balancing rights rarely is easy, so I'm happy that we have independent professionals that spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.)
Yup, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I've even got an internal webapp for my company that I have planned to build using Atlas, so as of tomorrow morning, I'll be signing up for the beta program. $20 really is peanuts for a professional development tool.
I wonder, however, if adopting the body language of the way you want to feel will make you actually feel that way, in the same way that adopting a facial expression will make you feel the corresponding emotion.

And with your suggestion to "be competent, confident, whatever by know what you're doing and talking about. These postures, gestures, etc, will flow naturally" - from personal experience I know that being competent does not automatically make me feel competent or confident, and it certainly doesn't make me appear that way.

I can easily see how these techniques can be used for bullshitters, but at the same time it might be necessary for someone learning how to honestly feel differently to know how to act differently.

Have you ever seen the Dog Whisperer? This guy Cesar Milan works with dogs with huge behavioral problems. With a dog that's incredibly fearful, he sometimes takes its tail and physically lifts it up, so it's in the position that a confident dog would hold its tail. When Cesar does this, the fearful dog becomes noticeably calmer. That's not the only thing Cesar does, but addressing the dog's "body language" definitely helps. Probably the same kind of thing works with humans too.
But there's a difference between "not being published" and not existing. Unpublished information is still available to some group of people, stored on disks etc. It could be accidentally or deliberately released. Given the amount of confidential information that does get inappropriately released I would expect this information to, at some point, be seen by people who shouldn't have access to it. Better that the files don't exist in the first place. Maybe it could be a probablistic correlation set at a level which would require a number of votes to obtain sufficient certainty.