skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US government spends most of its money (roughly in order) on:

-Wall Street Bailout

-Military Spending (which, in large part, means pre-emptively attacking sovereign nations we don't like)

-Inefficient entitlement programs

-Interest on our existing debt

If memory serves, only about ~5% of our money goes to what I would consider really worthwhile programs like NASA and education. You can up that to about 20% if you include things like roads, infrastructure maintenance, 'vital services', and so on.

I imagine that Derek prefers to have more control over where his hard earned money goes.
Which part of it is genius?
I don't have much experience, but I'll throw out some guesses to prime the pump. The CrunchPad is a very non-trivial design, there is probably a couple million invested either as real money or contributed effort ("IP").

a) Cost of a prototype... it depends. :-) Your hypothetical is badly underspecified.

In the boat owner world, we use a unit known as a Boat Unit of Cost (BUC) which is typically defined as $1000 ($100 if you are cheap like me, $1,000,000 if you are Larry Ellison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison#Sailing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_%28yacht%29).

Lets define a "Prototype Unit of Cost" (PUC) to be $100,000.

Designing the hardware (schematic, mechanical) if you don't do it yourself.

1.0 PUC for a starting point for design to schematic capture.
0.5 PUC for a simple layout.
0.5 PUC for mechanical design.

Software, assuming you are using open source (say porting U-Boot and a Debian-based linux distribution to your device). If you add custom application software on top of this, you will add 1-10 more PUCs.

1.0 PUC (linux boots and runs well)

Fabbing a 1-4 layer board is pretty cheap for prototype quantities, a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. This is probably your cheapest purchase. :-/

0.1 PUC

If you are using small surface mount parts (i.e. need to use automated machines to place parts), it costs a LOT for the first unit, but the next 10,000 are pretty cheap. If you promise to build large quantities, the assembly outfit will build the first few prototypes at a fairly reasonable price. If you stiff them and don't go to production, well, that probably only happens once. Ever.

1.0 PUC. Maybe less, likely more.

If you need a custom or semi-custom enclosure, $$$ (my crystal ball has no experience, and it will be heavily dependent on what the enclosure is).

0.1 - 1.0 PUC

If you need FCC/CE/UL certification (i.e. not a hobbyist device), add a lot more. Again, my crystal ball is inexperienced, say...

1.0 PUC assuming passing the first time (perhaps with some minor mods).

So, having said all that, my gut feel is:

* Hobbyist device... $1,000..$10,000

* "Collection of already certified modules" simple commercial device, mostly self-designed... $100,000..$500,000.

* Outsourced design, software, with a more integrated design (less buying of pre-certified modules)... $500,000..$5,000,000

b) You own all the IP that you paid to have developed. The legal doctrine that covers this is "work for hire." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire (Disclaimer: IANAL, you always want your lawyer to CYA for you on this!)
Jonathan Heiliger on Facebook development methodology
Recently at work, I wondered if some acronym we were using was incorrect. I wrote my boss an email saying, basically, I think we have this wrong and got the reply "I googled it and it comes up so it's right." Um, yeah, I googled both terms before sending the email and both versions bring up this form. So I got curious and spent about 40 minutes searching for information to verify which acronym is actually correct. Ultimately, I found we were using the correct acronym. Curiously, most of the sites that were using the correct acronym were for-profit business sites and most of those using the incorrect acronym were government sites.

My point: Maybe if the American government were more competent, Americans wouldn't be so anti-tax.
I don't think the google van would fit in most of the streets in Venice, and the van is too big to fit on a gondola :)

Venice is beautiful. I was just there on September.
I have 10+ years of experience with google go and Windows 7, I would be interested in working with you.
I rather not work with a developer or designer who might want to go out of their way to support a browser that is horrible broken, at the expense of his/her creativity. Regardless of how many people who uses that browser.

Remember, the prospective audience for this site are developers/designers who are fairly tech savvy (or should be). Someone who is using IE8 (out of choice) shouldn't be there.

To be on topic. The site looks nice and the interface looks awesome, but not for a website. Maybe for a desktop application (specifically mac). It takes too long to load.

I would suggest a more traditional design front ala linkedin (minus everything that is wrong with linkedin).
No, Rails 3 is also Merb 2.

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/
To my (limited) understanding, Bayesian statistics are just as subjective. If you and I start with different priors, and are then are fed the same evidence, we can end up with vastly different conclusions.

Since priors are defined as a function of my state of mind (or state of ignorance, as it were), it seems pretty subjective that the 'result' should depend so heavily on my initial state of mind.

E.T. Jaynes' book has a example of this with regard to E.S.P. research (I believe http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ETJ-PS/cc5d.ps is the relevant chapter - but it's been a year or two since I've read the book).

A real statistician should feel free to correct me though - I'm more of an algebra guy ...
The Startup Visa and Why The Xenophobes are Wrong
Ask HN:  The older you are, the more you want to see non-tech on HN?
I suspect that the older you are, the more interests you have that have accumulated as a result of life experience.

Tech starts to look the same after you have seen so much of it. In fact, I think that the older you are, the less likely you are to browse through technical books in a bookstore/library.

Moreover, you would be more interested in topics such as consciousness partly out of intellectual curiosity and partly out of consideration of your own mortality.

Finally, I suspect that older readers are more tolerant of others expressing various theories that they have about all sorts of things -- even without citations. And this probably has something to do with placing greater value on life experience.
There types of sites are very popular in Finland, there have been like 10 services coming after the first one. And it's very good business, even for a such little market as Finland.

It's pretty easy to create bots for these type of sites. Couple of my friends created bot and got something like 30k from the process. Of course the sites try to limit the usage of bots.
Do you really think Apple will continue to develop TWO desktop music apps simultaneously (or for that matter iPhone apps)? Best case scenario for a Lala desktop client now is for it to be rolled into iTunes.
If a lot of them like new, then why haven't they switched over to python3? You can hardly fault the python core devs for wanting to wait until users have actually caught up with the language.
Exactly - they'd have to create something just for Venice, by putting their gear onto the right kind of boat. Which is one of the ways that it would be cool.
“There was so much data about each MySpace user, which Rupert got immediately,”
says Levinsohn. “What would you pay to get someone’s name, age, geography?
With MySpace, you would also know what car they drive, what music they
­listened to, their favourite movie star.”

I know this but it still sends a chill down my spine. Even Rupert Murdoch got it.
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Success & Motivation: What Will You Remember When You are 90 ?
I am a counter-example to your musings. I'm 50 and have virtually no interest in non-tech on HN. That's not why I'm here. I'm interested in programming, science, math, and technology, and interested in topics such as psychology only insofar as they impact on usability.

I do have very broad interests outside of technical topics, but regard as pointless and irrelevant here postings on consciousness, etc.

Including this one.

I've noticed in the past that whenever you try posting on topics outside of technical matters you are repeatedly ignored or flagged. Perhaps an alternative hypothesis is that while these things are of interest in general, they don't really belong here. The evidence seems to be against your hypothesis. Try applying some science and changing it.
If you lent me $1000, and then offered me a fair coin flip for $1000, would the fact that you "won" the coin flip and I stiffed you for the $1000 I borrowed be adequate consolation?

If so, can I borrow $1000 and do you have a quarter on you?
And there is constant controversy about whether these are auctions or raffles.
The Android system of notifying the user exactly which APIs are being used by an app, prior to install, seems like a step in the right direction.

The talk mentions that class unmarshalling, encrypted payloads, and other tricks that make this a very hard problem. The truth is that code-based analysis can only go so far, especially when what you're looking for will be deliberately obfuscated. The legal barriers that mechanical_fish brought up are probably far more effective.
why are they tracking the # of page views and not the # of uniques?
Couldn't agree more. MySpace has always stood out for me as the popular site with the most obviously terrible implementation. Their key "personalisation" feature was originally an accidental security hole!

Meanwhile, Facebook were hiring smart engineers and building generally innovative features. I remember the first time I typed a URL in to a Facebook message - a little panel popped up showing me thumbnails that had been scraped from that page, asking me to select one to illustrate the link.

It's also interesting to contrast the process side of things. The FT article talks about MySpace having to take lists of feature proposals to News Corp for approval. Meanwhile, Facebook are leading the industry in their adoption of A/B testing and letting their own users' behaviour direct their engineering efforts.
The Landscape of Music
Well, the nation certainly doesn't act secularly since they treat people differently based on their religion (the law of return, as an obvious example).

And you're flat out wrong that most Jewish Israeli's live 'secular lives.' It's a common misconception - but the most comprehensive survey done on the matter that I could find (http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/relinisr-consensus.htm) says otherwise. About 20% of Jews in Israel identify themselves as secular - but most of those aren't secular for all intents and purposes (they attend temple, perform rituals, believe in God, etc).

Over half the Jews in Israel believe that the Jewish people were 'chosen' among other people by God. A substantial minority (more than are actually secular) believe that non-practicing Jews are a threat to the Jewish people!

So, that is where I get the idea that they don't question religion.
But what is he trying to "say"?

Is he implying that it is a cabal, or that being Jewish is superior? If the latter, does he think it is a memetic or is it a genetic advantage?
Google Chrome Extensions: Upload
Exploring New Frontiers
Israel is made up of a lot of different religion - but it's about 75% Jewish. Of those, the clear majority are what I'd consider religious (i.e., attend Temple, practice religious rituals, believe in God) according to http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/relinisr-consensus.htm.

I have no idea why you are comparing Israel's religiosity to Americas, since I never claimed we were any better.
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First Dogpatch Labs Exit: Google Buys Former Y Combinator Company AppJet
I completely agree. If you don't want to tech related material there are many great websites for that (just not HN).
Nope, sorry, I think you're totally off-base.

I'm 36, and have been on the interwebs long enough to know where to find the other non-tech bits of interest.

I prefer just the facts here.
Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful?
I am writing a few developer-oriented how-to documents for an application I have developed. A friend of mine suggested that I do several short screencasts instead (e.g. installation, customization, etc).

I dislike screencasts but they seem to be awfully popular. Since I don't have the sufficient Karma to run a poll, I want to get some general feedback from HN developers.

Do you find screencasts useful? More precisely, do you find screencasts more useful than traditional how-to documents?

(It's a tough question to answer without specific context of the topic, but I'd rather not ask with context -- the responses are typically more illuminating.)
I don't mind a short screencast. In some cases, they can be particularly useful. However, they should never replace written documentation.
Non tech on HN is called 'Reddit', you may have heard of it.
Face-to-face communication contains significant non-verbal information which lends itself to trust. The human organism has developed ways to test others for inauthenticity, lack of confidence, etc. These tests are difficult to apply online, but humans do them naturally face-to-face.
Here's a hint: http://cbm.csbruce.com/~csbruce/cbm/transactor/v8/i3/p006.ht...
Not the case with me. I'm 24 and I like reading all sorts of news on HN. The community here provides a level of commentary that you don't get at more general interest sites like reddit and digg.
I find screencasts most useful for getting a feel for new software relatively quickly. Seeing how an experienced used does things can get you started a lot faster than reading through docs until things click. To me their utility begins to decline after this.
Looks awesome. Seems to be sourced from Last.fm.

Also, don't miss:

map of movies: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MovieMap/index.html

map of tv: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html

and map of books: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html
James Grant: Requiem for the Dollar
Wow, a single post where football, the Beatles, coin-flipping, dish-washing, waitering and the implied programming ... appear together.

> Look at virtually any modern band

If modern bands don't have to practice so much to be famous, that says so much more about their quality and the record labels that promote them.

And I don't see any "modern band" being as popular and as eternal as the Beatles. Michael Jackson was close, but he wasn't exactly known for his quick and painless path to success.
That's something entirely different from what ryanwaggoner sketches. The point is whether this is a criminal or a civil case, not whether the casino should get their money back.
This is not the thing to test. DNS resolution time is important, but even if the google resolver returned results faster than your local ISP resolver it would still make your browsing in the general case slower. The problem is that the IPs for the resolvers have presence in very few locations around the world. I believe this number is just three at this time (Virginia, London, Taiwan). The big problem with this is the effect it has on CDNs and GSLBs. The DNS response you get for large sites, like www.bing.com for example, depends on the location of the machine asking the question. If you use your local ISP as your resolver then you'll get an answer that's close to you. If you use the google resolver you'll get an answer that's close to the google resolver and that will generate additional latency for all the rest of the browsing session. This obviously will affect all big sites that are NOT google. They're obviously aware of the problem since they have special cases for their own sites. If you have access to machines in different countries you can see the responses you get from 8.8.8.8 have good locality properties for google sites. So I'm guessing they're just forwarding the queries to their location-aware DNS servers. Obviously they won't do that for akamai, and others.

End result: you're farther away from the resolver, farther away from your web pages, farther away from your CDN. I don't see how you can make a case that this is an improvement in general.
Parapsychology: the control group for science
I don't like them. With a screencast I have to sit through it at the pace of the presenter. With an article I can read at my own pace and skim it if needed.

ETA: Good point below, screenshots enhance an article more than a screencast would, for me anyway.
(America Needs to) Save and Invest
Perhaps it's more of an industry vs academia distinction then?

A post on consciousness is of interest in theoretical computer science for example:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/is-there-a-test-for...
I'm a big fan of screencasts but don't use them _instead_ of documentation.
Differentiating Parsers
I intend to replace Etherpad
IMHO, you can communicate a whole lot of information on a short screencast * if * it is well done. Like a long winding documents screencasts can be a bore.

In my experience.. a well done screencast usually takes me longer to do that a written document.
And to complete the anecdotal refutation, I'm 21 and I'm perfectly happy to see non-tech articles on HN, as long as it's pepper over the techy meat & potatoes.
42 year old here who has just rediscovered this site as a welcome source of focussed news. i can find more general stuff elsewhere.
eBay + gambling = Swoopo like services :)
To my (limited) understanding, Bayesian statistics are just as subjective.

I'm still reading, but that seems to be the point. As Yudkowsky puts it, "probability is ignorance and ignorance is a state of mind"
Save and Invest
In Indonesia, a 3rd world country not known for its internet, there are 13 similar sites already.
Why not port Linux kernel to Common Lisp?
No. There is no way to appreciate the information communicated because I cannot take it in at my own tempo (faster / slower). It's hard too see whats going on in the cast. More important it eats my time unneccessarily.

I much more prefer screenshots with loads of text.
Is the service I created any good? I'm the last person who can answer that.
The article behind this small webpage was a blog post by Eliezer, which I see has now been submitted to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978124
This is similar to what I found. It is still faster to use my local DJB dnscache than any of the ISP DNS servers. And Google DNS was slower than the rest.

I did notice that level3 and OpenDNS seem to cache better -- they get considerably faster on the 2nd request.
Disagree completely. I am ~ 50 and really enjoy the tech stuff. for fluff I can always go do digg.
I'd rather be able to skim and search/jump around through text than have to read through a video. Plus videos typically are fuzzy and hard to read what needs to be typed (I can't just copy/paste), and are a waste of bandwidth.
Taggle
If it's a screencast for a framework, I'm all for it. Example being RoR. There are so many different files and different steps to take to get things moving, that hearing somebody else talk about it makes it easier for me.

If your how-to documents are doing anything like teaching RoR, then I'd recommend a screencast or 2.
Have anyone tried to fit something more complicated such as solution of some nasty PDE or just Bessel function?
He missed: Learn how to read code, and read lots of it.

Also: Find someone who knows how to debug, and sit next to them for an hour or two while they tear apart a problem, fix it, and make sure it's solved. I've had a couple of tough sessions with world-class debuggers, and learned an amazing amount in a very short while.
I agree - I can't grep screencasts, so while they may be sort of useful once, after that they're just annoying. In terms of information/byte, they are vastly inferior to screenshots + well written documentation.
I'd spend more time on the written docs, and I definitely wouldn't replace written docs with screencasts. Especially for how-to documentation, people want to skim first, then go back and follow the steps themselves, and the latter part is more difficult with a screencast.

As a side note, I only really watch screencasts for stuff that I'm already very interested in. Watching a video means plugging in/finding headphones if I'm in the office and making a commitment of a couple of minutes.
You can always go to another website. I'd prefer websites to be focused. I'd want HN to be mainly about how to realize your dream in creating a successful startup. If I want hilarious stuff I'd go to YouTube, TMZ, etc.
I find a written document, perhaps augmented with screenshots, to be most helpful. Screencasts, by themselves, I find to be next to useless. A screencast demands investment of significant time before one can even determine whether its going to be helpful. With a written document, it's usually possible to tell from the first paragraph or a quick skim if it's something worth spending more time on.

Screencasts are undoubtedly faster and easier to prepare than a written document, perhaps that's why I tend to see so many involving technologies such as CMS platforms that cater to folks who want quick solutions that they don't need to understand very deeply.
It's not the action I object to, it's the dismissal of what taxes do.