skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm I guess I was being to obtuse from the downvotes. Having not found the code from the article I was very interested in checking it out when the link was posted here. Sadly the code is written in such as way that makes it extremely difficult to easily learn anything from. Reading the code is often the best way to understand how a program/problem runs. I went to the source to answer the following questions: How is the snowflake generated? What factors need to be taken into account? Looking at the code if you want to figure anything you would have to put a lot of time and effort into it. Badly named variables and function names are just one of the problems. Take for example 'initialize()', what does it initialize? Is it only initializing snow flake code, only X11 code, both or just a dumping ground function? What about the check() function? What does it check? and chi()? There is a shape12, but not a shape6 or shape3 function, why not? What does parupdate do? What about norminf()? None of this answers the original questions. How do I simulate growing a snowflake?

If the code was written in a sane way you would be able to skim through it in two minutes and have a good overview of how a snowflake is made. Given that it would probably take a good hour at least to understand it and I am only so-so interested in learning I wont bother. This is especially sad given that this is coming out of edu where I would presume that part of the purpose is to teach how a snowflake is grown.
That's what he was asking. I think he meant "is this the only reason why we use high fructose corn syrup everywhere" to which I think the answer is "no." There's no shortage of corn subsidies, and farmers have been looking for new ways of utilizing corn for years. HFCS has been one of the ways which has payed off. Additionally, fructose is rated higher than sucrose on the Relative Sweetness Scale (140 and 100 respectively) so that less product may be used.

But yes, the above reason is vital.
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I despise businesses that don't take credit/debit cards almost as much as I do the companies that make the cards.

If it's some taqueria that's keeping things off the books, I'm fine with that. But if it's some pretentious place that I'm paying $9 for a sandwich and I have to go to an ATM and pay another $4 to withdraw a $20, then that just makes me not want to patronize the place.
You don't really say, what is it about your evolving business that dictates a change in mail provider?

That being said, depending on your volume and functionality you require, http://www.aweber.com is also an option to consider.
Good points. An alternative model might be competing for money with your friends, and the system simply is an escrow service and fun web site. Complaining about the results would involve direct social pressure and unlikely to cause grief to the payment system.
Alcohol will damage the lipid membrane enveloping certain viruses (including influenza) which helps them enter cells. I for one didn't know until now that some viruses are unaffected because they don't have this.
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"you probably stash your money somewhere safe".

Yet unless you have a good understanding of basic investment principles (and I mean principles grounded in rigorous theories which you will likely not find in the kinds of books you mention), you won't know what "safe" means.
Love 156: "Basic Economics," Thomas Sowell is the Dr. Seuss of market economics.
I think this proves the point, doesn't it? :)
The article suggests otherwise (though does not quite say so in: And some makers of germ killers wish they could say their products kill the swine-flu virus -- a claim that some can reasonably make.)
The Game is a better read. Rules of the Game feels like leftovers.
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I know of one. How should I contact?
The money isn't my primary problem with buying so many books, though it is a factor...it's the weight of having all those books. When I moved from Austin I sold 26 boxes of books and several bookshelves. I promised myself I would never collect that many books again. I'm moving into an RV this week, and so had to sell all the remaining books (and any that I'd collected since that last move), and I sold 8 boxes of books and three book shelves.

Having large piles of things, like books, makes it too easy to slip into a rut and stay in the same place doing the same thing out of mere inertia (more mass==more inertia, and books en masse are heavy).
Isn't this protectionism? Socialism would have given us a State Sugar Company, which we could then privatise in the name of efficiency, and end up paying massive subsidies to protect the workers when the private buyers threatened to shut it down.
Anyone see a license in the git repo? I cloned it and did a text search for "license" and only see licenses in the deps. In main.m it says "All Rights Reserved".
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Agreed, but even then how many emulators do you want to install? I already have iPhone, webOS (Pre and Pixi), and Android.
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I'm actually trying this now with a Facebook game... a game for people who find Mafia Wars and Farmville too challenging. The gameplay for those games is already almost-non existent, so why not abstract away the meaningless clicking?
Not to mention he is an active angel investor, which is basically as risky as it can get, so that makes sense to safely diversify.
Thanks for posting an abstract of the article's abstract. May I humbly ask if you could condense that a little further in order to reduce reading costs for those of us for who file almost anything longer than say 10 words under tl;dr
1) I do remember a post a while back where a Firefox user submitted a bug report due to actually encountering a MITM attack, so not 100% are false positives. (the post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353376 )

2) A minute a day may outweigh the phishing losses, but who says you need to spend a minute? My browser has warned me once in the past 4 months about a possible phishing site, so I spent something like 1 minute in 120 days to check it out.
I really agree with you about the movie industry and also the music industry. That's because they didn't analyze that copying a movie or lending it to friends is actually a feature.

There's also much more to music and movies than just the product. It's Art, it's a way of communication. It conveys cultural and ideological values. People can have a deep and emotional link with a movie or music. Adding "don't pirate this" movies and making it hard to share what you love with your friends is really killing what your business is about.

Software is different. ISV are actually hurt by piracy. Platforms have died because of Piracy (Atari, Amiga), and most importantly it's possible to protect a little bit from piracy without annoying your users. I think asking for a serial number once or calling home from time to time is really reasonable. It doesn't affect the user experience and protects both you and your customers.

Where you are right is when you say you must evaluate how much piracy costs you before doing anything. Copying your software must not be "trivial". You want to avoid the situation where it's easier to find a pirate copy than an original one.

But spending months adding anti-reverse engineerings features is just plain stupid.
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It depends how big the books are. How much time do you spend reading everyday?
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Maybe I'm not seeing the obvious but how do you get a list with past purchases?

Er, I do know you can log into your account and check your past purchases very easily but that isn't very convenient if you want to post that list on your blog with links to the books.

Is there a convenient API call or do you have to resort to html scraping?

Can't find anything like that in the Amazon API documentation but maybe I'm just blind... :D
That's too exciting for me - too many exclamation marks and too much love for my surly old brain to handle. One more balsamiq article and my mental backlash against all things popular will start. I love the underdog, but not the frontrunner when he is all excited and he loves all his fans and so on. Yes, I said it. I criticised Balsamiq.
"Having large piles of things, like books, makes it too easy to slip into a rut and stay in the same place doing the same thing out of mere inertia (more mass==more inertia, and books en masse are heavy)."

This is excellent insight and something most people don't consider until they have to move for the first time after a few years in the real world and suddenly their possessions which used to fit in the back of a SUV in their college days now require a small truck to move.

The problem is also compounded if you are the kind of person that feels bad about throwing away perfectly good books etc... out.
This is what happens when you work at a company which doesn't have the sense and engineering leadership to arrive at a single core set of collections and such ala CoreFoundation: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/CoreFou...

Microsoft has a hodge podge of several attempts at the same, and because none is truly core and universally available, it's quite easy to be ignorant of what's available and roll your own crappy, limited data structures.
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What do you mean when you say it is not a hobby? Is it your job?
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1018470
If there are enough children entering your building, it might just work.

On a more serious note, people do actually use this to improve the supply with drinking water in developing countries by attaching a water pump to a roundabout, search for "playpump".
as someone not living in the u.s. i think it work better by connecting tutors from countries outside the u.s. and people from the u.s.
except for the better incentives , it's probably harder for someone outside the u.s. to find work in the u.s , so the introductions might be more helpful.
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A motivated, well documented, and standardized limit is sometimes appropriate. This is not one of those times.
Seen on a 12-pack of Pepsi on Sunday: "Retro Pepsi! Now with Real Sugar! (limited time only)"
Maybe there should be a wrapper that runs them all and spits out the smallest file?
Apart from the interestingness angle, can somebody explain to me how the value of π to 2.7 trillion decimal places is useful?
Just a few off the top of my head ...

It's still not known if pi is "normal" - has an equal distribution of digits. This can be used to test the hypothesis.

The digits of pi are apparently random, so different calculations on different machines can be compared to see if either is behaving oddly.

Computing pi is sometimes used as a benchmark for a machine's speed.

Some people are unreasonably obsessed.

The digits of pi can be used as "concrete random" numbers.
> That you were in position where a screw up could have shut down a fab as an intern is nothing short of terrifying to me.

To me, the converse is a lot scarier: what if I, feeling no personal responsibility for yield, wasn't there after-hours looking for bugs in the first place? Or what if I did find the critical bug, but had to wait weeks for forms before it was pushed through? Or was blocked by office politics?

There's nothing more disheartening as having a fix for something serious that you can't push through. I've worked at companies like that: taking away the power to break something means taking away the power to make it better.

Not to say that I somehow dislike code reviews or generally fly by the seat of my pants: the situation really was a real emergency. I can't talk specifics, but the bug had already cost more than the damage it would do to if I broke something.
Woah, it's go 3D page turning support! When can I buy it!?
Slightly more charitably, perhaps Apple recognized that for many app manufacturers who offer both paid and free versions of an app, Apple already has an existing financial relationship with them, so allowing Apple to handle the ad payments from the free version of the app is going to be more convenient.

Of course, there's no reason it can't be both.
Eh...you're confusing antibiotic resistance with the fact that alcohol-based sanitizers aren't 100% effective. There are two different things going on here:

1) Most anti-microbials aren't antibiotics. They're compounds that happen to kill bacteria by smacking them with the chemical equivalent of a sledgehammer, preventing them from sticking to things, or some other, broad-spectrum mechanism (i.e. they don't generally work by blocking an ion channel or targeting a specific protein or pathway, as would an antibiotic).

2) Hand sanitizers are a special case of #1, where the vast majority are simply alcohol-based gels. Effectiveness of these is determined by concentration and time of exposure (the longer, the better), and in real life, people don't leave them on long enough to be 100% effective.

For the most part, anti-microbial treatment is broad-spectrum, meaning there's no single thing that an organism can do to escape damage. Membranes are dissolved, cells are dessicated, proteins are denatured. Saying that a bacterium could evolve resistance to this is a bit like saying that if you dropped a car on a group of people, the survivors of the catastrophe would be more fit to survive future car-droppings. It's hard for a bacterium to evolve a protective mechanism against having its membrane proteins denatured, or having all of its critical energetic pathways blocked. The damage is simply too extensive.
Six months ago I would have said that was a stupid question, but Apple has bought a mapping company, now an ad network, and a gigantic server farm in middle America -- it's really only a matter of time before it begins to make sense for them to expand that server/advertising combo over to the web, at which point a search engine becomes a sensible purchase. Maybe they'll buy Ask?
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I think the people in that article failed to pay in time and the company requested the outstanding payment correctly. However, in UK there is a standard form for direct debits which says "If an error is made by <the company> or your Bank or Building Society, you are guaranteed a full and immediate refund from your branch of the amount paid." which puts the responsibility on the local branch directly and doesn't allow a refund to wait till some random day in the future (so closing the direct debit should work the way people from the article wanted). Does anyone know if there is a similar rule on automatic payments in US? - I'm just curious.
This doesn't seem to have anything in it that PDF doesn't.

Also, the idea that it's not using e-ink is not a selling point; I don't want to read lots of content off a backlit screen with (if mobile) comparatively lousy battery life.
Whatever you call it - it seems insane that it was profitable to smuggle sugar.
You can build it completely in the cloud with a service like twilio(1). This would be good to get a temporary setup going very quickly.

If you need something a little more permanent and flexible, you can easily build it yourself with asterisk(2) or freeswitch(3). If you know what you're doing, you can turn a centos server into a dial-in conference bridge in about half an hour. This will open the door to all kinds of awesome like skype bridges, web embedded soft phones and whatever custom apps you can code up. We once created a conference call where participants could drive a robot with DTMF.

(1) http://www.twilio.com/

(2) http://www.asterisk.org/

(3) http://www.freeswitch.org/
Between the two banks that charge me, I usually pay $5 for a "foreign bank" withdrawal. God, that annoys me.
I've found this paper quite enlightening (PDF warning):

http://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/psr/rwp/WP04MerchCardA...

Aparrently merchants continue to accept expensive fees even when those fees exceed the benefit of accepting that form of payment (WTF?)
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This was the exact question I had when looking at it (Why do it on your site instead of my own?) Would be great to put this right on the home page in a few bullets.
He writes RPG's. I've never played his games, but I just finished Dragon Age:Origins (great game btw). The game wasn't skill based - it was story based. Sure I can ramp up the difficulty now and try and solo it - but the main reason for playing it is to explore the world and to follow the story. In some ways it's more of an interactive movie than a game (albeit a 60 hour movie). The reward in a game like this is not the playing - it's the world/story/vibe. Making it really really easy (as the default) is good. (Even better is a good explanation of the difficulty levels..)
You should take inspiration from Progress Quest: http://www.progressquest.com/ They've masterfully abstracted away every part of your standard MMORPG that doesn't require thinking.
>The digits of pi are apparently random, so different calculations on different machines can be compared to see if either is behaving oddly.

Can you please explain what do you mean by this? Digits of pi must be same no matter which machine is used to calculate.
Yes -- this is absolutely key. While the first couple of years in a PhD program can be like a Master's program, once you get to the independent research portion, it's completely different.

There is no more "standard formula" to follow, there is no more just being satisfied getting classwork done. You have to find your own ideas, your own schedule, and your own plans.
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Terrastore is a new born project, and one of its main objectives is to build an healthy open source community and ecosystem.

So feel free to comment on those project ideas, as well as propose new ones!
Ask HN: Best way to outsource web design and development?
I know it is better to understand the programming and make the product yourself but I am not at that level yet (currently enrolled in intro to CS). What process do you recommend going through to find the best programmers and designers to create your website?
It's dependent on your bank and it's policies as well as how you setup the automatic payment to begin with in the US. To avoid what happened in the article you can use your banks automated bill pay instead of signing up for the vendors auto mated payment program. That way you have full control over when to start and stop payments. Of course that only works for fix monthly payments for things that fluctuate like water and electric you really have little choice.
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Not a job, but it's stuff that keeps the job/company/vision straight. Broke into an industry all on my own with no training, mentor or previous experience.
While generally I agree with you. New type of software/hardware tends to reach a point where subsequent improvements doesn't add _huge_ value to end users. Which is when I think it is a perfect time to buy a new technology. Some example I can think of is:

Iphone Original and 3g. The original was good but with 3G Apple reached a point of equilibrium where it is safe to say that waiting 6 months to a year for the next iphone won't give you hugely superior product. (Maybe a free firmware update to a better software)

But ereader market is not very matured, until recently it was dominated by sony, who didn't care much about innovation - because there was no major competition. With big players like Amazon - B&N - Apple entering the market, just now, it will initiate some major changes/improvements in a very short time. Which is why the perfect time to buy an e-reader in my opinion is at the end of this year.

Personally I read a lot on my macbook, which I think is a great indoor reading device.
This is crucial. He is a tech startup angle, not enough literature for those, it's mostly gut feeling and personal experience. Hard to write valuation texts for this industry.
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In case you didn't know, this is the guy who started ffmpeg which does the heavy lifting in projects like VLC, etc.
Actually, what this story shows is the problem with our federalist system which gives way more political power to the inhabitants of the farming states at the expense of the big population centers. The 2 million people in Nebraska get as many senators as the 37 million in California.
Because everyone who does do this will provide a better user interface than you do. You can choose to make your life easier or your users experience nicer.

Personally, my strategy is simply to not write HTML or CSS. I write to a DSL that is implemented based on what browser is being served, so there are no sniffer scripts in the pages themselves. True, this does mean the same, otherwise static pages, may need to get generated over and over, but this is where caching comes in.
Does the Roomba have a USB port? jwz mentioned a 'serial' port...
Doesn't Plaxo sort of handle this problem?
:) Definitely, cloning Progress Quest was my original idea. Since then the design has gotten a bit more ambitious, but I still think a mostly straight clone of Idle RPG or Progress Quest could work as a Facebook App. I wouldn't be offended if someone else takes that idea.
http://FeedmailPro.com is great for RSS based email campaigns.

The way I look at it, might as well make the email a blog post (for Google juice, so future people who look for it can find it, etc) and then just use an RSS to email service.
How is climbing Mount Everest useful?

We do it because it's there.
Interesting talk. I was surprised when he mentioned that he regretted putting it in the public domain because (among other things) of the need to keep track of copyright releases for contributors.
I'm not going on a rant about this but I would like to chime in to say that a lot of people I've known who have done automatic debit have regretted it for the reasons stated in the article. It doesn't stop after the specified time and it's an adventure to get your money back. YMMV of course.
Google Moves to Keep Its Lead as Web Goes Mobile
First thing I notice is your logo looks a lot like the center of the Wordpress logo.
Just a few non-books though, and people has been sharing book lists for years. If Paul really wants to test the privacy implications of this trend and see what it feels like, he should post a history of his bank accounts, yeah by all means edit it but still.

I think real geeks can't understand the benefits of social networking because we are not really that social. We should accept it already: technology's main use in the next decade will be for ego inflation and vanity with Twitter, Blippy and the rest being on the leading edge. Triumph of empty form over substance.
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