skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't this be a simple incremental improvement--hold it by the seat post, for example? Every bike has one of those, and they are pretty much in the same place. You'd also need a pair of 'arms' to keep the front wheel from falling to the side, but they would only need to provide guidance, not support.
The education system is like a low pass filter follwed by a high pass filter. The people who really enjoy school math, doing sums, applying equestions, get to university and find it's really hard and abstract and switch courses or drop out. The ones who might be really good at university style math get bored, disengaged, and don't do math at university, never suspecting that it's completely different.

The problem is that school math is trying to accomplish two things at once, and they're at odds with each other.

On the one hand, regular people who go on to regular jobs need numeracy and some facility to understand graphs, sums, and to follow a line of reasoning.

On the other hand, anyone going on to the sciences needs a good background in (school-type) algebra, some geometry, a little calculus, and some statistics. Way more than most people need in everyday life.

The latter group also needs a glimpse of some cool stuff to keep them interested. That's why in the UK there are math masterclasses, "Maths Inspiration", Further Maths, and other groups that try to get kids interested.
Clearly this depends on how much you need to make per year, and on how much risk you're willing to tolerate, but given those variables it's not hard to calculate. We can get 5% return at basically no risk, which is on average 2% real yield post-inflation, so you need 50 * N where N is your 'salary' per year. Which is twice what @patio suggests, because I'm allowing a lot less risk than he/she is. So if you want $100K/year, you need $5M.

As has been mentioned in other similar threads, that's "do nothing" money. You'd need a lot less for "do anything" money, where you would continue to work but could choose most any job regardless of what it pays, and/or could work less than full-time.
Google Closure. Will you register your code with the Borg? - John Andrews
"There is nothing inherently wrong with marketing whatsoever."

So can I sell your email address to all the spammers?
why does this keep showing up here? the last posting was flagged and eventually removed...
Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
RedLaser ― Impossibly accurate barcode scanning
The Art of Community Now Available For Free Download
Solving problems TRW (the right way) almost always takes longer than quickly hacking together a solution.

I would rephrase this to:

Thinking about solving problems TRW (the right way) almost always takes longer than thinking about quickly hacking together a solution.

Or graphically, with "t" as "minutes thinking" and "d" as "minutes doing":

The quick way:

ttttttdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

The right way:

ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttdddddddd

If you want to do something right the first time, thinking about it almost always takes longer. But actually doing it can take less time, often much less time.

When trying to convince my customers to do things the right way, I often tell them, "It's not how soon we get started, it's how soon we finish."
Overreaction in this case is absolutely rational. You lose nothing by panicking loudly, but you bring more public attention to the issue.
College Enrollment Hits All-Time High, Fueled by Community College Surge
Why Philosophy Matters (for business and you)
There is clearly a Google-risk in many markets -- especially those dealing with content and aggregation. It's hard to compete with the massive scale that Google has at its fingertips. They can quickly enter many markets, outside of their core, if they choose to do so. Most of the time (but not always) they will become a major competitor. Think GMail, Voice, Mobile Maps, etc.
Venture Capital For A 5th Grader
2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2
I agree.

Good developers work fast and well. They produce less bugs and better code. That's just why you pay them more.

If your experienced developer is slower at doing better, he just doesn't have the proper amount of seniority.
I would say it was the only "clever way to make Apple fans buy stuff" that is a huge benefit to software developers, end-users and the community -- it gets developers (who many are on here) exposure, saves end-users a good deal of money (and in this case costs no money at all), which in turn becomes a great benefit to the community (for those involved, as well as the added benefit of these apps, especially in the past, being time savers for productivity and utility.)

It should be promoted on Hacker News because it does relate and benefit many in this community.

But I think your concern is appreciated and it is always great to have those watching out for the community's best interest.
I like the name, it reminds me of the old del.icio.us
thanks for the tip...I'll look into this!
That's your best response? To conflate all marketing with spam? Grow up.

Know how you found the computer you're using? It was marketed to you. The books you read, the movies you watch, all marketed. Do you read content online? It's paid for by advertisers who're marketing their products. If you've seen a movie in the last decade you've seen things paid for by product placement. Every article of clothing you wore was marketed to you, either in a catalogue or just positioned in the store in a way to catch your eye.

Marketing is an incredibly subtle trade. I should know: It's what I'm learning. Practically everything counts as marketing. When I make my headline big on a web site, that's to market the title to you. When I make my fonts attractive, I'm marketing a certain attitude as a designer, which is why a site that uses certain fonts looks and feels different than other fonts. It's all manipulation, which isn't to say it's bad. Manipulation is a natural part of life, and it helps us find things we wouldn't see otherwise.

Because I'm learning this, and spending quite a lot of effort to comprehend it all, it rather bothers me when you, Anonymous Internet Person, denounce it while simultaneously showing you don't know what marketing is. I follow politics, too, does that mean I approve of Naziss? And I really do like technological advances, which means I definitely support nuclear weaponry. Of course I don't like spam. But this isn't spam. It's marketing.
Sounds like Ruby on Snails for some reason...
Android, and How It Will Take Over the World
I actually like to hold on to the idea that the universe is non-deterministic. It keeps the concept of free will alive.
In my past life as an "enterprise" programmer, most people at best paid lip service to doing the "Right Thing." Most code I saw was incredibly bad, written by programmers who knew they would switch groups or companies, or go into management, before they had to seriously maintain it. Programmers I met who worked in an "enterprise" were not into their work. Few of them knew of anything outside of their prescribed Java or sometimes C++, or followed anything new or interesting in their field. I could mention something like The Mythical Man-Month, or talk about looking up an answer in Knuth, and get blank stares. Explaining closures to all but a couple was like talking to a wall. This was at a top-tier company, in one of the most prestigious groups in its IT organization.

I think real experience and talent as a programmer shines in the ability to find a solution which is both correct and takes the same amount of time to write as garbage. This is not always possible, of course, but I would caution against coding without thinking about this trade-off.

In the case of the original article, the author cites the foreign key debate. Truth is, because reasonable and good programmers disagree on which is better, this is not even a good example of quick-and-dirty versus the-right-thing. If anything, it's an example of difficulties in storing data in traditional relational databases.
Skype: "We've settled with Joltid"—now owns its core technology
Perhaps you could count how many references you see to, for example, jQuery (without worrying where it's hosted by those sites). Then assume all of those sites loaded it from Google. Then take what you know about the traffic to those sites and obtain a rough estimate of two extremes: everybody hosting locally vs. everybody hosting in a single location.

Possible?
...I do spend some time looking for errors that the Haskell type checker would tell me about immediately. But what that means, is that I have to find my type errors by thorough testing. Oh, wait a minute, I'm working with a testing tool! I actually find that the type errors are found very quickly by QuickCheck tests, so I need to write QuickCheck properties for testing, anyway, so that it's not as big a problem as I might have expected not to have the type checker.

I'm sure it's perfectly logical in context, but I find it amusing that he's writing a program that finds errors in itself.
Addendum: Another interesting thing would be to load every single piece of js from all of these sites and compare it against a minified version of itself.
I am wary of comparing one states education system to another. Not every country is created equally and although it looks easy to look at some raw numbers and state this country is doing better than this country. Most of these comparisons tend to not look at the overall picture.

The developed countries that have the lowest scores tend to have high levels of immigration. Predominantly this is Canada, the UK, and the US. While programs such as the US "no child left behind" has been an educational disaster, this has been a problem for years. Schools have a limited, and shrinking, budget. The student population isn't getting any smaller so as an educator your options are to cut funding to a bunch of smart, but bored students, or cut funding to the lowest levels. In one instance you might be denying the next Bill Gates. In another you might be keeping someone from turning to a life of crime.

Usually from the same immigrant families, they will complain about the education their children receive in the host country but if pressed to send the children back, even if just for school, most would rather take their chances in their new country.
Cool!

@flooha - App + addon builder and hosting.

http://flooha.com
You seem to be missing the point of the article: producing less bugs and better code can be wrong if writing that code slows down finding out what the problem is. Speed-of-writing-good-code is an orthogonal parameter, here.
Interesting interview, though I must admit I can't stand the format of the site - I always copy the whole transcript into Emacs, m-x fill-individual-paragraphs, and read it there.

This part really jumped out at me:

"If you do generic programming in Haskell, you can write a
paper about it. If you do generic programming in Erlang, it's 4 lines - one for lists, one for tuples, one for basic values."

I'd like to hear from someone with more Haskell experience (it's not my thing), but it helps here that Erlang matches and dispatches by structure, not types per se. It's common to use a tagged tuple, like { point, 1.5638, -2.4144 }, for informal type annotations, but they're not mandatory.

Another significant difference between Erlang vs. Haskell and OCaml is that since Erlang is dynamically typed, it can far more easily accommodate incremental changes without having to stop it. Doing static validation of changing types in a running, distributed system adds major complexity, with many of the same problems as handling schema changes in a database. Erlang's design reflects that it's probably simpler to let it fail and put effort into recovering gracefully, rather than trying to make it bulletproof.
Years ago, i wrote a compressor for javascript.

I called it "Arnold" because it was strong and squeezed javascript into a smaller shape.
Python 3 has read-write closures. Check out the nonlocal
declaration.
Tichy, I don't believe that was the context in which they meant it.

Furthermore, take a look at the top 30 currently on HN, approximately 1/3 of them are in some way promotional (either of some product or self-promotion, delivered as news or a testimonial or story).

Like these headlines:
1. Thank You Rails
2. The article about Mark Pincus at a startup at Berkley Mixer
3. HP working on distributed sensory mechanisms
4. The physics of bras
5. How to write a great novel
6. The interview with Y-Combinator that wasn't
7. Japanese teenage boy improves rails
8. Being open and honest about the startup process

In some way, these articles promote a company, a technology, the author of the posts value, and so on.

This post about MacHeist is just feels more blatant.

But I am happy to have people like you in the community that open up debate.
This attitude is one reason that I really like the Django community. I've found, almost without fail, that most Djangonauts are friendly and patient with the framework's users, new and old alike.
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That seems to be my impression of this years offering. But still willing to give it a shot and I really want to try ShoveBox.

Maybe the big values (like in MacHeist past) will come in later?
It's hard to get accurate data on this, but I wonder how many startups avoid doing morally edgy stuff at the beginning. Reddit used fake accounts; Kevin Rose reviewed Digg on his TV show and submitted affiliate links; Google and Yahoo! used Stanford servers; eBay told anybody who would listen a completely fabricated story about the company started.

Obviously, none of that stuff is as bad as Zynga's scam ads (or Myspace's wrinkle creams and spyware). But is that because Zynga was evil, or because they didn't get around to stopping until they were too visible?
The five biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make | VentureBeat
I wonder how long it will take them to get slapped by someone though? In the UK papers have to clearly identify adverts if presented in an editorial format. Why do google get away with presenting adverts as search results without clearly identifying them?

A greyed out 'sponsored link' in the right hand corner is just pathetic, I bet most users don't even understand what that means.
Notes on a Nobelist: Kahneman on Framing (3rd and final part)
Were we reading the same article?

"But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right."

"You’re led to a completely crazy point of view."

"My own view is that quantum mechanics is not exactly right, and I think there’s a lot of evidence for that."

"INTERVIEWER: In general, the ideas in theoretical physics seem increasingly fantastical. Take string theory. All that talk about 11 dimensions or our universe’s existing on a giant membrane seems surreal.

PENROSE: You’re absolutely right. And in a certain sense, I blame quantum mechanics, because people say, “Well, quantum mechanics is so nonintuitive; if you believe that, you can believe anything that’s non­intuitive.” But, you see, quantum mechanics has a lot of experimental support, so you’ve got to go along with a lot of it. Whereas string theory has no experimental support."

"[My new book] is called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. Each of those words stands for a major theoretical physics idea. ['Fantasy'] is quantum mechanics at all levels...."

All of those quotes sound to me like pretty clear rejection of string theory and quantum mechanics and an implied rejection of much of modern higher physics. Yes, he accepts experimental proofs where available, but he seems to be saying that these theories are wrong because they don't make sense to him, or because they don't match the way we perceive the world. But when I look at the Hacker New logo, I don't perceive photons of wavelength 590 nanometers bouncing off my retina--I pereceive the color orange.

Personally, as I read this, I kept hearing Clarke's 1st law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws) looping in my head:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Sure -- but I don't think this is the point of the article. Let's say your ratios are correct, and you want the "t" to "d" ratio to be high in most cases, for shorter overall "t+d".

The article is saying that you often want to get through each of the following lines as fast as possible:

ttd (release)

tttdd (release different feature set)

td (release totally changed and simplified app)

tttttttttttttdddd (now we understand the problem, do a good job)
maybe the people that did not read it last night (now that it is lower on the main list) are reading it for the first time. Some people don't live on YC News.

Since (at the time I write this) 11 people have up-voted it, there is interest in the story
I take it from this response by you that a big reason you participated in giving away your software with this MacHeist was to increase your user base to garner more feedback for your upcoming version?

That is a great idea friend and not one many are willing to consider because they would feel defeated by giving something away that they work so hard on.

Cheers and the best of luck. If you want any feedback directly from me as a first time user of your software with high hopes, let me know.
One could say that Google did and continues to promote a variety of scam offers through AdWords/Sense. They've tried to clean things up, or at least move the small players out with quality score, page 1 pricing, etc, but the real results show:
http://www.google.com/search?q=acai+berry&pws=0

The second result when I searched was "www.CNN.com" What you want to bet that it really isn't CNN but some scam site? These clicks cost about $3 or more a pop, so Google is still making big money off of rebills.
That's how US papers identify advertisements, too. Fortune has a multi-page article on how effective corporate jets are (it actually has about as much data and case studies as a typical Fortune article), and that piece has a modest "Special advertising section" header.

However, organic and natural results are both the result of spending money and effort; the only difference is the that you can get high organic results without much money, if you have a lot of time.
I'm not inclined to panic over the "copyright treaty" part, I am inclined to panic over the "secret" part. If there was nothing to worry about, why is it secret? The article above seems to hold the position, "Don't panic, we don't really know what is in it." My position is "Panic now so that we can know what is in it!"
The Failure Project
I also stopped using RJS once I switched to JQuery. I however haven't moved to HAML just yet. Something makes me nervous about not working with raw HTML (especially with all the non-rails front-end development work I do). Why is HAML + JQ an amazing combination and am I really missing out on something here?
Just got mine no candy :P
GetJar appstore
Android is really great for competition. All these handset makers can compete with each other on pricing, features, performance and design and not worry about the OS or developing their own third party application library. I don't think Android will fully Windows-ize the handset market though because both Apple and RIM are very strong. It could go 20/20/20 with the last 20% being a mix-mash of WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc. I think Nokia will jump on the Android train sooner or later. Maybe Palm as well. The way things are heading I'm not sure Windows Mobile is going to even exist in a few years. I think it's more likely Microsoft will make a first party Zune Phone and WM will be forgotten.
No one get upset over the problematic math behind the unemployment rate.

Even when I took economics in university and we got on this topic, our professor said that it is a very flawed number for such a numerous amount of reasons, but until the government adopts a better way of substantiating, view it as nothing more than a number that may or may not help you gauge the economic climate.

In other words, there is some benefit in understanding our situation with this surveyed number, but you should always question it and the media and government will use it how they please for their own agendas.

The debate on the unemployment rate is very interesting; Google it if you have time and read up.
Don't forget that some of those final t's are because you already invested a lot of other t's and d's into doing it the wrong way.
I love this post. I've only recently gotten into development (< 3 years) and my biggest complaint about the development world is all the fighting between languages, frameworks, etc. I credit Rails with being the reason I was able to get into development in the first place - it made web development extremely accessible to people like me with little to no app development experience.

So all that said, I really appreciate the author's candor. The negative attacks people make against other frameworks and languages really discourage people who are just getting started with this stuff because it casts doubt in their minds about whether or not they bet on the right horse. I may actually play around with Django now to see what it's all about.
Agreed - I understand the point of the article and that my post does not directly address that point. But it does challenge OP's statement (which I italicized) that he uses as a basis for his conclusions.

I fully agree that iterative analysis and development is usually quicker than the waterfall method. I'm just adding that a little thought each step of the process can make everything quicker. If you think things through enough (which more experienced people often do better), you can have your cake and eat it too.
Mindblowing natural user interface concept demos from Microsoft Research
How to write a great novel - has some solid ideas for indepth bloggers too
New Business, Not Small Business, Is What Creates Jobs
It is important to note that unemployment is a lagging indicator; we may be in recovery while unemployment worsens for some time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagging_indicator
OK, does anyone get reminded of Minority Report when watching how the bikes get stored after entering the door?

Maybe my memory of Minority Report is rusty, but it reminded me of how people were stored after being frozen.

Pretty cool.
hung off the wall by a wheel. http://www.tuskstore.com/images/usatusk.gif

would work for all but extremely deep rims or discs.
New Drug for H1N1 Flu Offers Hope
SimplyMEPIS 8.0.12 is now available for download - Linux Critic
I get "502 Bad Gateway". I guess that's a good idea ...
No, not really! (Though, he would make a good sitter.) I was trying to be funny, but I guess I should stick to making silly faces in pictures.

However, he does enjoy making lattes for visitors at Fog Creek HQ, and people around the office.
I'm not sure what you mean -- that if you hadn't done the first three steps, you wouldn't have needed so many t's in the last?

you already invested a lot of other t's and d's into doing it the wrong way

But the first three steps were an incredibly valuable investment -- now you know the right problem to solve!

(Maybe you mean something like this, just not sure from your comment.)
That CNN site is hilarious:

http://www.cnnhealthonlinereports.com/news/dieting/acai-berr...

I'm amazed that this works. (But clearly, if they can afford to pay for the second highest search result, it does.) The article goes straight from a slightly newsy story (CNN investigates scams) to a pitch, complete with product screenshots and a list of benefits. Reminds me of: http://www.infomarketingblog.com/images/Mark_Haroldsen.jpg