skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He mentions E-Government... I have thought about this subject for great length. My ultimate conclusion, is while it may certainly be possible to make it happen today. The idea itself is most likely not what is best (at least in todays world) My first idea on the topic was to make an open source platform for a virtual currency. I imagine the currency could be distributed via interest free loans. Transparency would be important. The key would seem to be convincing people to accept the currency, as it would have no value of its own... The system could on its own evolve into an E-Government as regular government experiences troubles. For instance the US seems to be heading towards an inevitable fate due to our growing national debt. As an ideal, this seems like a good idea (though i believe an economy based on debt is a bad idea, but couldn't think of an alternate method) but most people are not informed, and easily tricked. My solution to this was a competency test before you are allowed a vote. Of course, the test can be manipulated to a groups interests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test)
Drop.io API Hackathon + party in Brooklyn Dec 17-20th 2009
Looks interesting. Is this taking advantage (or do you plan to) of HTML 5?
How Apple gets it all wrong, and still is on top
I agree. However, with all the bitching about how bad it is to be "poor" in America, there ought to be people standing on the sidewalks in nice communities advertising their cleaning services if they can get these prices.

It's worth it, but I question why the market clearing price isn't lower.
It would be interesting to see someone convert a random JQuery based App to RightJS and see what differences there are - especially in modern browsers.
Headline: "Pledge to Build"
Actual language: "examine the construction of"

It's not as momentous as the article makes it out to be.
I think that she mentioned 'bad debt' -- this is typically a reference to consumer-level debt, often at 15-26% interest. Assuming 20% usury, the interest payments alone are $500/month, or 20% of her disposable income assuming she's lucky enough to have a assistant professor post (45-60k) -- adjunct professors make far less. Likely she also has another 20-60k in 'good debt' as educational loans at a more reasonable 8-12% interest.
Do you plan to eventually use Canvas/SVG or do you find this way works better for the long term and overall?
The argument for condom use in porn in not so much about protecting the actors, but rather communicating to the audience that condom use is "cool", "the thing to do", etc. etc.

The gay porn industry is mostly there (there are a few production companies that specialize in barebacking, but they're generally frowned upon).

Whether the govt. should be involved or not is a different question altogether.
That seems like a lot of money. But if you will, please consider this simple scenario:

Even after you obtain your degree you will start out as an Adjunct Professor. These jobs pay about 2-4K per course.

After you have done that for about 10 years or so you might land a job as a professor at a community college.

Now you're making about $40-55K. Teach there for another 5-10 years until you finally get a job at a University to make that $80K.

Compare this (if you will) to the same person who leaves college with Ph.D and starts at $75K.

The difference in earnings over a lifetime is huge.
May be "humanity becoming immortal demi-gods" is like "having flying cars everywhere". It's always 39 in the future.

http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/song-chart-memes...
Isn't a lot of the singularity idea based on flawed math? I always hear about and see graphs of exponential curves about to "go vertical", but... exponential curves definitely don't do that. You can zoom in on any point of e^x and it will look like it's about to have a singularity...

In more general terms... if ~technology has been getting better with some short doubling time for hundreds of years... why is it that the NEXT doubling is supposed to be the really significant one?
That's only if doing what you love is truly not useful, which it usually isn't. I'd say that 90% of the time, a person who does what they love is more useful than a person who does what they don't love.
Nice comic. Needs better lettering.
Interesting! I've been using underscore myself, great stuff! Are you going to maintain your fork in the future?

As far as getting faster than jQuery goes, I agree with what you're saying. What is difficult is getting faster in a "meaningful" way - everything else seems like a waste of time to me.
I can have a REPL with easy dynamic access to S3 for compute power? Nice.
There is no demand for Humanities professors. Look at the job boards of the colleges and most of them are hiring either science, math or nursing professors.

Also this person seems to have studied a fringe subject that would have a far weaker demand.
You're basically saying that a humanities education doesn't have professional value. I disagree completely. A lot of employers (myself included) would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major. For many careers, a corresponding college major is 80% useless and 100% unnecessary.
Because cleaning ladies don't sell cleaning. They sell trustworthiness. You have to be able to trust this woman to spend a lot of time in your home, without supervision.

Anyone can clean. Only some people can be trusted.

This is the same reason that bank tellers are paid a lot more than Wal-mart cashiers.
Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative.

It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life.

Rhetorical question of self-examination: how would you feel if she were a math professor instead? Being an academic mathematician is just as self-indulgent as anything in the humanities.
Any movie that has co-directors means it's going to be bad. Particularly when one of them is not in the film business at all.

Yes, I'm aware of the films made by "brothers" but those are exceptions to the rule.
So what happened? The entire team fired?
Why You Shouldn't Save Blogging for Old Age
The wholesale ripoff of the Basecamp UI is just unforgivable. I can't believe they thought they'd get away with that.
This is true for many people. But if you have a choice - and large portions of the world do - you're better off being underpaid and enjoying your work, than being paid well and hating it.
For those interested in preparing: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation

Just so you know, the "Gardenhose" (a spam and relevance filtered stream) is already available: http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.xml
There are more than enough work projects to keep the excess males busy.

Motivated by what, tho'? Don't underestimate biological imperatives. How much money is enough to pay a hundred million men that there simply aren't women for?
His. ;-)

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/compare

(personally I have no opinion on the matter)
If you have a chrome window open, or a zombie chrome process, running it again will just fork a new window from the existing browser process.

Make sure you shut them all down before running.
One important thing to notice as a codebase gets large is that it's going to slow you down. Accept that, and pay more attention to maintaining a high quality codebase. Invest in reviews of new merges, refactoring of stale code and documentation. Automate as much as you can - make sure you can create good API docs, and that there are tools for working with the existing codebase. Finally, try to remove code as much as you can (refactoring, or simply deleting code you no longer use).
It's tempting to make a snarky comment about ivory tower geniuses trumpeting the discovery of the obvious, but I have to concede that the compulsive anti-microbial contingent has all but eliminated common sense. The immune system, like the muscles and the brain, can grow stronger with use, and atrophies with disuse. Why on earth would one go out of their way to make sure it is never exercised?
+1 to (4)

Also, another good thing to keep in mind is to avoid partialitis. Many people tend to start making partials for every single widget on the page. Don't do that. Only use partials when it DRYs up your code, and sometimes, it's better to encapsulate UI elements into helpers. Also, partial rendering can get expensive.

The worst is when you're faced with a directory of dozens of partials that are ambiguously named.
If you haven't read Peopleware you really should. It's one of the best books on managing people working in IT around, still. If you like Spolsky, DeMarco and Lister were talking about this stuff years ago.
I would pay money to see this fight.
It does say "Design inspiration: Basecamp" at the bottom, but at this point, is not called inspiration anymore. When you actually use the exact images used in the original, it's definitely either "ripoff" or "theft".
When To Raise Venture Capital
> Are you going to maintain your fork in the future?

I've been working on building a library like Narwhal's. This fork of underscore is my util.js equivalent.
This video was pretty good -- "Living with legacy software": David from 37signals talks about how they refactored the Basecamp code as it grew:

http://railsconfeurope.blip.tv/file/1555560/

Breaking pieces out into modules (and even further into plugins) can help keep it manageable.
Women entered the workforce en masse because all the men were busy fighting WW2.
Huh. Very neat. I was actually kind of planning on messing about with Node.js and a javascript-only client to make a multiplayer game...
Hi, currently this is pure JS/DHTML but we are considering Canvas for the future. We go into a little bit more detail in our FAQ. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/docs/Freq...
I wonder if they are using machine learning, humans editors or both.
I am going to rock this!
Same question (as I posted in the main thread), if it possible to you to answer. Are you using machine learning, human editoring or both?
I simply don't see the reasoning behind high competition = low chances. The whole idea of web startups is to be able to move fast around big, slow competition.
Hookworms and other now-rare diseases, are because of better modern sanitation. Outhouses are apparently 6 feet deep because that's further than worms can crawl.
http://mrhartansscienceclass.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/wnyc-r...

At the same time, I'm with you that I think people are too germaphobic. I see people throw away perfectly good food just because of the expiration date. It's not like food is laced with arsenic, you can taste and smell if something went bad.
Honestly, who cares? If your bottleneck is really your JS library, you need to re-evaluate what it is that you're doing. In a practical situation, you would never manipulate thousands of DOM elements at once. Benchmarks are fun, but largely irrelevant.
Erhmm.. this was the one I actually watched:

http://www.vimeo.com/1752667

Same presentation.
would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major

Why? Business is essentially just economics, which is history (macroeconomics) + philosophy (microeconomics with a little bit of sociology and psychology thrown in). The day YC News readers stop throwing their own feces at business majors will be a fascinating one indeed.
How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one.

I understand that you believe her field of study to be an unwise economic choice, such that the cost of acquiring her expertise exceeds the commercial potential. To me the problem is that even though students are paying more than ever for school, the perceived value of educators continues to fall. a story like 'girl starts out poor, gets PhD and job at top university' ought to be an inspiration, but now apparently we have to tack on '...stays poor because she picked some frou-frou field of study I don't approve of'.

MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.
Only extremely rarely does a billion-dollar invention arise. When an employee signs an invention-assignment agreement with his/her employer, the employer is on the hook (usually) for a known salary, benefits, etc., in exchange for which the inventor is giving up his rights in inventions of unpredictable number and -significance. That usually gives the employer the bargaining power.

It's not always that way: I once had a software-company client that paid commissions to its product architects; the architect of one of the company's flagship products ended up making a ton of money, as did its shareholders. Sadly, companies that can do this successfully are few and far between.
"Inevitably" vs. "necessarily" vs. "may no longer/have been" is an important distinction.

The community itself, the nitty gritty of the mechanics, and moderation all play a role in success/failure in respect to the underlying biz goal(s).
This was my own thinking. If this is another one of those "runs .1 seconds faster in the benchmark tests", then I am not really impressed. On how many websites are you really going to notice this?
Military purchases 2,200 PS3s for Supercomputer
Ugh. I don't support the proposed plan, but protecting "employer coverage" is just about the worst possible reason to oppose it. Why should my employer have anything to do with my health insurance, any more than they do with my housing or auto expenses? In fact, much of my opposition to Obama's plan is that it strengthens that foolish and harmful dependency.
Linux Foundation introduces new promotion - Linux Critic
I think this is a huge problem for America.

It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press has to play along with this, if they don't nobody will read their newspapers or see their newscasts. Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.

It's an economic problem because in the future (and now) we have to be pretty darn smart to compete in the international arena, and India, China, etc. are basically eating Americas lunch.

Education is one of the best and most important investments a country can make, and to be frank I think it's despicable that a college professor doesn't make more than you do.
>> "The jQuery example, from the beginning, was creating DOM elements from HTML strings, while RightJS was wrapping the document.createElement API. This is not the same thing and you cannot learn anything from comparing apples to oranges."

What you can learn though, is that using the built in DOM methods, or wrapping createElement if you need to, is far faster than using some other abstraction from the DOM.
Why maintain your own list when EasyList exists?
Yes, I plan to (at some point), thanks, but it will probably take me a while until I get experienced enough at CL to be able to judge how concise it is.
> But isn't every Dilbert about corporate nonsense?

Nope. :) http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-11-04/
I tried Crystal Galaxy and it was amazingly smooth and felt native. Nice work.
UCSD Report on American Information Consumption
I've found that in technology, it's a bad idea to use negations. If you say things that should "not be done" or "will never happen" or "is not possible", at some point in the future, someone will quote you and laugh at you.
It's a good thing we have large, inefficient, hierarchical corporations. Having most working people doing things they hate that are also pretty useless really puts the damn proles in their place. (Sarcasm, obviously.)
Just a minor nit, there is no such thing as "Obama's" plan. There is a House bill and a Senate bill (currently under review for amendments), and he hasn't endorsed either yet.
There's some pretty sluggish websites out there due to poor use of js libs. Browse them on a phone or netbook and it all adds up.

You'd certainly manipulate hundreds of DOM elements at a time, consider say a twitter stream, where each post has "10 seconds ago" marker, and they all need updating.
congrats on the new hire to you and the team there at Carbonmade. its exciting to see what you guys have going on! can't wait to hear about employee number 5!
jhancock - thanks a lot for your suggestion. That is what I am trying to do as well.
IMHO, giving a Management or Marketing class to a 20 year old is like learning a foreign language from a textbook, without ever speaking with a native. You're better off spending 1 year actually doing it than 4 years studying.

Studying history, philosophy, literature, art, etc. helps you learn how to think and communicate. Someone who knows how to think and communicate can pick up business or programming easily enough, and can consult formal training when they're ready for it (which is rarely at the age of 20).

These aren't absolutes, of course - there are plenty of philosophy majors who can't think their way out of a cardboard box, and plenty of business majors who think really well.
The great thing about youth's obsession with 'immortality' is that once you hit the 35-40 age bracket, and you get the first of your chronic pain sources, the idea suddenly starts to get a LOT less attractive.
Having worked in similar environments in the early 90's on desktop software, there are some serious downsides to this approach.

Basically, it can lead to having a rift between developers and QA, and in a big corporation, it can become a bureaucratic mess and a 'us' vs. 'them' attitude between groups. I've been in long heated meetings between QA and Dev arguing over individual bugs, not so much on behalf of the customer as opposed to face-saving exercise.

From the article: "And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture." In a perfect world with unlimited time, it's great to find bugs through contortions but usually there is some costs associated with it either with QA not focused on other areas that matter, or having a developer focused on confirming that bug as opposed to working on something else.

Sometimes it's great in a bigger organization to have a unique culture so I agree with the jist of the article and to other HN comments. For instance, I worked at a company on a smaller Macintosh team that fostered a healthy competition with the much bigger Windows team which worked well. I'm just not so sure it works well when people are essentially working on the same project where interfacing with each other is a requirement.
MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.

Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale).

Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.
Scott

You are assuming that I haven't talked to my co-founders. Seeing how I was struggling with my financial issues, my CEO was the person who suggested that I go look for consulting positions to keep myself happy and motivated to continue with the startup. fwiw, I have worked with this team for the better part of 9 years now - I wouldn't do anything to harm them. We are way more than colleagues at this point in time of our lives.
Not to mention that you can get herpes while using a condom.
IntelliJ IDEA 9 Released, Includes Free Edition
Vevo (Music Industry YouTube) launches... and goes down
Kohana, Codeigniter...how good is libraries/plugin support on these.. Any other competitors?
Cruise ships (and some other ships) generally have armed gaurds. I heard that it is popular among Israelis (after conscription and before working) to work on a cruise ship as armed security.
I think her work probably does benefit others. Maybe the benefits of teaching the history and situation of a defeated indigenous culture are not all that tangible, but I suggest that that is in part due to a weakness in our social mechanism of assigning value.

The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.
On humanities and "self-indulgence": I hate the corporatization of academia in general, but professors really dicked themselves over when they took the attitude that their research was their "real work" and that teaching was commodity grunt work to be delegated to TAs as much as possible.

Star physics researchers can get away with this-- just as, to use a fictional example, Dr. House can slough off his clinic duty-- because they are retained for their brilliant ideas. Most academics can't.

This attitude fails the humanities especially, because the entire point of these departments' existence is to transmit culture from one generation to the next (e.g. teaching). Most humanities research (unlike in the sciences) is not very useful, especially if only academics can understand it.
I agree that measurability is important, but there are plenty of measurable objectives that don't inspire this sort of espirit de corp exhibitted here. I would love to know more about the leadership of this group, and if the leadership of the group fostered this sort of group identification. Is there a leadership lesson here, or did this emerge organically?
Ask PG: Can we get an RSS feed for articles we upvote?
I am an avid HN reader and generally upvote articles which I find useful and interesting. Currently, to keep track of the interesting articles found through HN, I bookmark them. However, it is becoming more and more difficult for me to keep them organized. If there is an RSS feed of the articles we upvote, I can use that RSS feed to parse them and create a GUI to categorize them and organize them and post them on my personal webpage which would be very helpful.

Additionally, subscription (optional) to articles we post or are interested in for comments would be a great addition to HN.

I am not posting it in the feature request section because I am not sure how it is being tracked since there is no subscription option for a thread.

Thanks
Tell HN: my Hacker News iPhone app is on the App Store [iTunes link]
Especially if they're currently able to mandate monthly testing without making performers full employees.
Hi, again, this is pure JS/DHTML but we are looking at HTML 5, specifically for audio. We go into more detail on our FAQ. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/docs/Freq...