skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, this one looks like it will work in Europe too, and will be, in some ways, a good reference implementation for the immediate future. I want one:-)
Exercise your consumer rights
They say that the costumer is always right, but sometimes this is not the case. Sometimes companies and corporations can get away with crappy products and services because filing complaints in consumer courts take a long time.
I regret that my program doesn't record how it achieved each number, so without running it again I can't tell you how to get 2036 or 2086 as per 3pt14159's request above.

It's at http://pastie.org/767276 in case anyone cares.
Top Reasons You Don't Exercise
What if there is no psychological effect? Maybe the sugar pill is a weak panacea for all our ills.
You could offer multiple placebos.

For example, here you have your basic generic white placebo which costs $5 a pill, which we all know is totally worthless because it is made out of sugar. Now, you sir are insured, so if you want you can have this cutting edge blue PlaCeBo (TM) -- just between you and me, it costs like $80 a pill and has nothing in it but sugar but who cares, insurance covers it. Alternatively we have the PlaSeBo which is the cheap Chinese knockoff and hasn't killed anybody this week that we know of, not that that is too surprising, because it is made out of sugar.
I would speculate that when placebos appear to work, it is primarily
because they don't do anything, besides possibly providing some
increased hope to the patient, allowing the body to work without the
"side" effects of drugs. The human body naturally tries to heal
itself to the best of its ability.

Here's a very interesting example of placebos being administered on a routine basis, for years.

Natural Hygiene, as it is today, can be traced back to Dr Isaac
Jennings (of Oberlin, Ohio, USA) who, after practising medicine for 20
years, began to ask questions when, during a fever outbreak in the
summer of 1815, a patient who rested, drank water and did nothing,
recovered in absolute record time compared to patients who had been
medicated. Based on this, Dr Jennings noted similar results with many
other patients.

He then went on to treat many patients with what must have been one
of the first placebo (dummy pill) treatments. In 1822 he gave up
medical pills, plasters, powders and potions and treated patients with
pills made from bread and vegetable-coloured water for the next 20
years. This he only did to keep the patients’ confidence in him. He
would then advise his patients to correct their lifestyle and diet to
a more natural approach. He then practised for a further 20 years the
"do nothing mode of treating disease." He wrote three books, "Medicine
Reform" (1847), "Philosophy of Human Life" (1852) and "Tree of Life"
(1867).

Natural hygiene was often referred to at this stage as Orthopathy
meaning TRUE or RIGHT AFFECTION or BEHAVIOUR.

Dr Jennings had a great influence upon Dr R T Trall, who went on to
do more for the hygiene movement than any man, next to Dr Herbert
Shelton.

http://www.mary-anns.com/Natural%20Hygiene.htm

I've read this account on other sites as well. The Jennings story can be verified by other sources online. His deliberate use of placebo for so many years is fascinating.

More information here on Jennings: http://naturalhygienesociety.org/past2.html
He's using Task Queue service on Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/).
Previously http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912
Computer controlled gear box
I've had nothing but bad experiences with these automatic payment schemes and they ended up costing me more money than if I had mailed the check myself. What makes it even worse is there is no system in place to resolve disputes. No help from the banks, no help from the payee, and no help from any government agency. You're pretty much at the mercy of them sending you your money back whenever they feel like it.

When I moved across the Atlantic, my wife was much more comfortable with the system here. Every company sent you a form to do deductions and the bills arrived a few days, or weeks, before the deductions were processed. And they are easily reversible if something isn't settled. You've got to love a system that is fraught with abuse and little power for the consumer.
Don't be so fast and loose with the word "realistic". We live in tough times but, you know, in the details - in the minutiae - there is some good beauty and pleasure to be had. We struggle, as a rule, sure, but... I dunno, look at the bugs on the sidewalk or the birds nesting in the eves of your apartment building or the dirty water down the sewer drain or the nice smile that stranger gave you one day. And think about all the good stuff that must have kept your ancestors going, in their own minutiae, to get you here. There's nothing bleak about it. It's all in what details you pay attention to.

I think (personally, unscientifically, just guessing) that techno-topia is probably for a generation or 3 out from here (if we're lucky) -- but that there's plenty of good for us 'twixt here and there. Unsolicited advice: Don't let go of your bitter perspective or feel pressured to deem it false - it ain't, exactly, false. But, don't jump to conclusions either. Don't worry about "redemption", hour to hour. Don't conclude "bleak". Don't (again) make questionable assumptions about "realistic". Hang in there. Really. Go out for a 2 mile brisk walk. Do you drink? Get a beer at a nearby pub (walking to and fro). Shake your head vigorously. Feel the sunshine or the rain or snow and seek out what is nice in them. Get back into your body. This whole concept of "humanity" such as you are thinking about it is some crazy invention, but a few centuries old. Put this whole "what is the point of humanity" thing aside for a bit, go out and seek some gentle personal pleasure, and then come back.

Suck it up and take care of yrself by caring beyond yrself.

-t
NoSql Databases – Part 1 - Landscape
I would speculate that when placebos appear to work, it is primarily because they don't do anything

I like your argument but, amazingly, there's some research that seems to indicate that placebos affect a physical change. In cases where heroin was used as a pain killer, a placebo could be blocked using the same chemical that blocks the effect of heroin.

Here's more:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7892
Blio preserves the original format of books including typography, and illustrations, in full color

Why do people continue to believe that this is a feature rather than an annoyance?

The fact is that different devices, having different sizes, resolutions, brightness, etc., all provide different experiences for reading. Forcing us to consume the document in the same manner despite the strengths and weaknesses of the device is torture.

For example, I do my ebook reading on a PocketPC. It's got good resolution at VGA, but with a 4" screen, trying to faithfully reproduce two-column text as shown in the OP is just absurd.

Similarly, I can't fathom why we want to preserve pagination. The reader software I use allows either smooth continuous scrolling or half-page-at-a-time, which I prefer. It allows me to maintain continuity without having to remember back to the last words of the previous page after turning pages.
I've been following Carlsen in the news here in Norway for quite a few years now, and it has been a fascinating ride.

He hired Kasparov last year as a trainer, and it really seems to have taken his playing to a new level.

It will be interesting (to say the least) to see how he does in the next World Championship round...
> Magnus Carlsen plots 20 moves ahead and can remember matches he played six years ago move-for-move

Wow.
Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For
And as a further consequence -- real naloxone blocks the effects of placebo morphine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=567913
Planet-hunting telescope unearths hot mysteries
Sites That Will Matter in 2010 (including Postabon and Justin.tv)
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces [video]
You might be interested in the documentary, King Corn, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/

The US Government subsidizes corn production to the tune of like $22 an acre or something like that so corn based products are artificially cheap.
I often refer to revolving doors as parallel to serial converters. I my last employer's building, when walking out in a group we had to form into a two by two column to get out of the building through the two revolving doors.
wasn't there something kiva-like for startups? but I second the friends & family suggestion. If all you need is a throwaway prototype / demo it is amazing what you can get done for very little money & a little ingenuity these days
It's 2am: Do you know what algorithm your load balancer is using?
It's really not possible (or practical) to plot 20 moves ahead in a chess game. Every different piece moved by your opponent would represent a new 'line' that you would have to compute 20 moves for.
Unlikely. USB 3.0 isn't as revolutionary as it may sound with eSATA in the mix, and external storage is really the only reason most people would need USB 3.0 over USB 2.0.

DisplayPort is cool and will hopefully catch on but with HDMI and DVI-D already out there it's not at all revolutionary.

The biggest computing technology change in 2010 will likely be the growing adoption (due to increasing quality and lowering prices) of SSDs. They've been on the market for a while but the affordable ones used to be crap (slower and less reliable than a magnetic disk) and the good ones were targeted at industry and correspondingly priced out of the reach of the individual. Not to mention a few hickups along the way (such as poor wear-leveling implementations causing massive performance degradations over time). In late 2009 there was finally a convergence of all the critical factors: several key SSD quality issues were addressed, leading to higher quality SSDs; high quality consumer grade SSDs started to hit the market, which delivered the huge performance boosts that people had been expecting; and SSD prices fell into a range where they became attractive to many PC enthusiasts.

Prices will continue to fall, capacities and quality will continue to go up. In 2010 the default high-performance workstation configuration will include an SSD (at least for the OS). By the end of 2011 or so I suspect the majority of notebook models will use SSDs rather than magnetic disks (it just makes sense, not least because speeding up the process of coming out of or going into hibernation by one or two orders of magnitude huge win on a notebook).

Now, WiMax is a much more revolutionary technology than all the rest, but only very much farther down the road when it is much more widely adopted.
Agreed. RedHat doesn't make that much money either. I picked it because it’s been around for some time, it’s popular, and because its business model is well-documented.
I completely disagree. Do you really think the most successful open-source products like the Linux kernel, Apache, and Firefox are "Try before you buy"? As far as these three examples are concerned, there is nothing to buy after "trying" it.
I suppose the actual amount of government debt is an interesting concept and you can't directly compare different G20 country debt amounts fairly so using the debt to GDP ratio seems like a pretty good idea.

The thing is that I have no intuitive sense that this being large is better or worse. I would think the most important piece is: who owns the debt? If I sell a lot of debt contracts out to my kids, did my family get poorer? What about if I sold them all to the neighbors?
How to convert Adobe PDF file to PowerPoint?
Most presentation are distributing in PDF format. We suffer a lot from extracting text and images from PDF to PowerPoint. This tutorial tells you how to convert Adobe PDF file to PowerPoint to make a great presentation.
There have been trials of placebos against placebos. That's how it has been established that more placebos are more effective than fewer and also how the shape and colour of the tablets relates to their effectiveness.
If you want some references on this, look up Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. It's a good read, btw.
It can get a bit mad sometimes though. The main issue is that if a hardware fault is found it is sometimes too late to rectify without a massive cost.

My management was recently trying to convince me to rewrite a FAT file system in high level code due to issues with power management, corruption and the disk we store our most precious data on.
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Sun's Lively Kernel
Free Javascript Library For Pop Up And Lightbox,TopUp
> It's really not possible (or practical) to plot 20 moves ahead in a chess game.

20 'best' moves ahead, according to the observer/player/chess-engine; assuming opponent played the best moves (according to the observer) in reply.

Remembering a game played 6 years ago or being able to "think" 20 moves ahead may seem an amazing feat to regular chess players. But for professional players of GM or IM status - I don't think it is something amazing. Professional chess players memorize 100s (if not 1000s) of chess opening moves and their variations for many years. Remembering a chess game is not very impressive in that context.
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Tell us why your language sucks
Yeah, since both logos contain W. What else do you expect?
Apparently placebos are effective, even when you know it's a placebo. See http://www.placebo.com.au/node/31 for a reference to research on this (on the site of a company that sells placebos...)
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Isolate: Utility for isolating Unix processes, minimizing their privilege
You can ask that of a lot of math as well. A lot of stuff has only become useful recently though. E.g. abstract algebra is used in material science.

From here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_theory

"An understanding of group theory is also important in physics and chemistry and material science."

In short, any time we break a new barrier we open ourselves up to something potentially useful for the future.
I'd imagine at the top level being able to see say the 20 best moves ahead would regularly occur similarly as predicted by the player and if things deviate it could be there there advantage anyway.
A thought - I just skimmed your comments. There's some fantastic technical comments, good business comments, but then a lot of pessimism/contrarianism/snark/etc on some more general topics.

If I may, humbly, let me say that I think this is something that kind of sucks for someone so bright. You're obviously a very very smart dude, but what does the 10-20% of contrarian/snark really add?

I don't know, maybe I'm making much ado about nothing, but I get an inkling here that you've got smart-person-and-like-to-show-it going on. Y'know how I see it? I used to do that shit a lot. When I realized how often I used to do it, I cut it out, because it was crippling. Even a small percent of no-value-add critique/snark coming from me made me a hell of a lot less likable despite 80-90% of what I was saying being somewhat valuable stuff.

It doesn't mean I don't think the critique/snark/etc, I just try to kill it before hitting the "post" button online. I still write a lot of those comments, just try to realize it and eliminate it reasonably soon. If I must critique, I try to insist on adding some value while doing it. It doesn't always work, but I reckon I get a lot more mileage out of conversing now after doing that. Kind of a hard slog to eliminate that old habit, but it's very much been worth it.
In my previous job we had several KLUDGE_TABLES as a way for our DBA to remind people that they were asking him to add a dirty hack that they promised to remove once the 'crisis' was gone. Five years later, they were still in there. At least the person querying it still had to type 'SELECT * FROM KLUDGE_…'
Writing W3C spec and smoking crack are not mutually exclusive activities
The bad wheel that forced them to drive backward was a hardware problem. They should have designed it with 2 axes of symmetry!
but sadly, kurt's answer in the book wasn't very satisfying. you could join the 'reeks and wrecks' and be miserable for the rest of your life, or revolt and be executed.
How effective is hand sanitizer compared to hand washing? Is hand sanitizer more likely to be used than hand washing? Does the introduction of hand sanitizer reduce infection more than hand washing? It's always more useful to compare to a baseline or a standard practice.
This reminds me of a "finder's fee", where you pay someone for recommending your product. It's similar, because the recommender has an incentive to promote your product, regardless of whether it is appropriate for the buyer or not. I know these kinds of arrangements are common, and they form a nicely logical model - but I don't like the moral hazard.

It also reminds me of advertising-supported media (free to air TV, newspapers, magazines, and of course... google's internet), in that there are two parties who may collude to the detriment of the consumer. So, you have "advertorial", that appears to be impartial, but isn't; and advertiser-friendly news stories and angles. Have you noticed how the Simpsons and Futurama depict drinking alcohol? Have you ever thought "I wouldn't mind a drink" while watching? Advertiser-friendly. Even Sponge-bob square-pants features burgers prominently. And that's just for cartoons!

What to do about VISA... Protest? Buy stock? http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=V&t=2y Or start-up a competing transaction provider? (e.g. Paypal).
We are going in circles. I see no reason to believe understanding how the lump of meat inside my head works would require an upheaval in scientific knowledge. Given our current progresses, I would say it's an overly pessimistic position to believe we will eventually discover stuff that makes simulating neurons impossible for any significant period. There is no need for a huge breakthrough - just the incremental improvement in processing speed and scanning accuracy.

Remember - nobody said the process wouldn't be destructive to the brain being transcribed into a simulation.
The Hindu : Sci-Tech : Sixth Sense inventor to open up
So, he is attacking the Kindle with Acrobat Reader. Good luck.
Protecting Cloud Secrets with Grendel - OpenPGP keysets to secure user data
I would say that the address book (or People app) on my Android along with Google Voice is a step in the right direction. Syncs with Gmail. Tracks Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, Youtube, other? updates by that person. Uses their Facebook image for their photo. Obviously it doesn't help me communicate with people not explicitly remembered outside of people that have called, messaged or emailed me.
4 hour workweek, etc etc. It all screams 'bs' though.
Toyota have a very similar rule that they actively promote: every worker has a button with which they can shut the line down if they see something wrong.

It seems to work for them...
It is not slightly misleading, it is very misleading. To become champion, he must win the world championship, which involves winning the candidates tournament, and then beating the current champion in a match. Which is very different then being the top-ranked player.
INSERT or UPDATE in django's save() method
Over the years I've read perhaps more than a hundred books on my trusty Tungsten C. I love the fact that the screen is backlit, which means that I can read at night without disturbing my partner. The idea of preserving pagination for an electronic device makes no sense at all. Just give me plain black text on white, allow me to adjust the size, and let it scroll continuously in a single column.
I have some friends who are "ultra efficient" in finding the best deals for just about everything.And me being the lazy types more often than not will just follow them and buy the same stuff from the same place if I need that stuff.Blippy will be pretty useful for that
In a Carlsen interview:

Q: How many moves ahead can you calculate on the chess board?

A: Sometimes 15 to 20 moves ahead. But the trick is evaluating the position at the end of those calculations.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948809,00.htm...
Richard Réti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Réti) was famously asked once about how many moves he looked ahead in chess and his reply was:

only one move

The astonished questioner then asked why only one move? Réti comeback was:

yes only one move... the best move!

:)
As pets maybe... but I've never seen a Golden Retriever clean a floor.
I don't get it. I thought the whole benefit of having an ebook reader was the e-ink. Until someone develops an actual color e-ink, how does this differ from a tablet with some pdf software?
Thanks, are the details of the basis of that public now? Since the code was released open source, it doesn't seem to be a technology IP acquisition (even though they appeared to have unpublicized patents).

I got the impression that it was mainly to recruit the tech know-how of the founders - and that the amount was not in the range mentioned here, of up to $100M.
Systematic Unit Testing in an Read-eval-print Loop
Infix expressions as the ultimate protest against significant white space
You need to get a better bank. I used a credit union that refunded the fees. You did have to remember to keep the ATM receipts (which were usually lost for notes, laundry, blow out the window). The alternative was to use a bank with wider coverage (Citi, BofA) but they make you feel absolutely miserable as a customer.
This is exactly what I am thinking. The problem with it is that I am by far not fast or concentrated enough for doing this parallel to my job. I still wonder if I ever will be able to speed read. Is there a special technique or habit you have embraced or developed? It would be so great being able to read real literature again and not only having time for technical books. Sometimes I feel like turning into a machine myself.
Deploying Clojure websites
A good game should be comparable to a good book or movie. Nearly all modern games are like Dan Brown pieces.

I'm 29 and get off my lawn!
Wow. That's a lot of information there.

Nitpick; the presentation is almost impossible to digest. A few tables instead of endless bullet lists would work wonders here.
It does not have a USB port.

The serial port is also a non-standard (for serial ports) connector (it is a standard DIN connector). My guess is that the average Roomba owner doesn't have a PC with a serial port, and probably wouldn't want to acquire an uncommon connector and wire up a serial converter cable, and then run some program on their PC to dump the firmware image in to the Roomba. The osmo dongle makes the process near foolproof for soccer moms and grandmothers and so on.
If you know the most sensational aspect of a story it gives you a good idea of the range of the story.

I like the title 'Four Hour Workweek' because it tells me right off the bat that it'll probably have some extreme stories of increasing productivity and working for smaller amounts of income. When you know the extreme you have a better idea of the story.