skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a 5 year old kid, you realize that they aren't real.

I've seen a lot of parents go a little cuckoo with fear and frustration because they don't understand that. The kids get frustrated and stubborn because the adults don't get that it's very important to pretend that they're real. Kids can go a little overboard with the inconvenience and even danger their fantasies impose on them, but they know what's real and what's not. Their crazy parents don't give a crap about anything except their overblown fear that their kid is suffering from some delayed or derailed development that will affect their SAT scores someday.

There are also parents who are fine indulging their kids' whims except where it involves fantasy. They'll smuggle a ziploc bag of corn into a restaurant because their kid won't eat mac and cheese without it (seen it happen), but they'll yell at the same kid if she takes an extra twenty seconds helping an invisible rabbit into the minivan after dinner.
Most netbook owners I know also have laptops (usually as their primary desktop replacement). So I guess laptops have becomes desktops and netbooks have become laptops as far as people are using them now.
On Language Design: Magic Variables in Compojure
At least in the UK it's recommended that the average male consume 2500 calories per day. I have a really hard time coming up with something close to that without carbohydrates - am I just being unimaginative? How do you solve this problem? How much fat is it reasonable to eat? (I'm sure this is covered in detail in Taubes' work - unfortunately I haven't found a short summary of his ideas).
Ok, thank you very much, I will definitely credit you in whatever I derive from it.
The case of the unbootable Mac mini
If you view your phone as more of a toy, rather than a tool, I suppose boredom applies.
The speed doesn't come from Android 2, it comes from having decent hardware. Android 1.5 and 1.6 on the Archos tablet run fine, because the Archos has a decent (800MHz) processor. The Dream / Sapphire / Hero / etc. are massively underpowered and would probably have trouble running Windows 3.1 properly.

It is nice that Android devices are finally getting hardware on-par with what Apple ships.
How will Google dominate in the post-scarcity society? Google makes its money on the fact that market players need to find each other. It's just an interesting thought-experiment, but if Google has made everyone's lives so easy (assuming that scarcity has essentially become all but extinct because Google gives everything else away), why would anybody need to advertise their goods?
Script to play Winterbells (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm) based on pydroid:

import pydroid

INIT_COLOR = 473428
BELL_COLORS = set([12702690, 8950940, 9016477, 9017249, 9018536, 12505567,
12505568, 11715538, 10862803, 12965603, 12439776, 12834019,
14411502, 8953000, 5401724])

def find_init_color(screen, xr, yr):
for x in xr:
for y in yr:
if screen.get_color(x, y) == INIT_COLOR:
return (x, y)

def init():
while True:
screen = pydroid.bitmap.capture_screen()
first = find_init_color(screen, xrange(0, screen.width), xrange(0, screen.height))
last = find_init_color(screen, xrange(screen.width - 1, -1, -1), xrange(screen.height - 1, -1, -1))

if first is not None and last is not None:
return first, last

def check(first, last):
screen = pydroid.bitmap.capture_screen()

for y in xrange(last[1] - 1, first[1], -1):
for x in xrange(first[0] + 1, last[0]):
if screen.get_color(x, y) in BELL_COLORS:
return pydroid.mouse.move(x, y)

def main():
print 'Searching for Winterbells...'
first, last = init()

print 'Found at %s, %s. Running.' % (first, last)
while True:
check(first, last)

if __name__ == '__main__':
main()

It's far from perfect, but it's a good start. To run it, execute the script, then open the game in a resolution large enough such that the whole game is visible.

All it does is find pixels with colors unique to the bells and moves the mouse there. I made the same script in C# a while ago. This script is faster (even though it's Python!) and far more concise. It was astonishingly easy to make too thanks to pydroid. The only time-consuming bit was finding the bell colors. Kudos for the nice library!
What iPhone apps do you wish you had on Android? My experience is that Android apps cover everything you would want to do with your phone, and they are usually free.
There are quite a few of these. Check out http://code.google.com/p/downy/source/browse/#hg/proxy

I know this because the building where my office is has filters setup on the internet (I don't pay the bill, so who am I to complain). Because of the AppEngine proxies, they block all appspot.com domains.

The crappy part is that I have a couple of projects hosted on AppEngine, so in order to access those I have to run a reverse tunnel to get around their filters. (Making this thread circular).

I use this for my proxy (and set a system wide SOCKS proxy on OSX):
ssh -CfgN -D 9999 myserver.com
Apologies for being vague. Art is always a hard one to define in absolute terms, but the question that makes it easier (I think) is what is left for art? How does one become an artist these days? Is it enough to be purely ornamental? When we have advertising, music video, and graphic design to satisfy those types of creative spirits, what does the artist do to compete as Artist? Also with language in the West in the state it currently is in (words as symbols), art can mean anything to anyone, which is kind of a problem.

In the ways science must update its language when the language is polluted by society (cult, idiot, retard, etc), the language that describes creativity might do well with a refresh. I don't know - I look around, and every corner of every room has some genius sitting in a chair. I mean really, is this at all possible, and if so, new words should be invented to distinguish the great genius and just genius. I think the same problem exists when describing what creativity is, because to say it's all art is to say everything is merely art.

What I think art has become is a perspective. To be successful in art is to be able to initiate a unique conversation about the world using the Artist's worldview. A craftsperson requires a skill set - the ability to shape matter into an object, but almost nothing more. The artist must use what they create to say something profound. In an environment such as programming, this doesn't seem possible, but I'd love to be proven wrong. In saying that though, if there was to be any art in programming, it would be to program in a such an ugly fashion that no-one would think possible that the code was functional, but it would be.
Yes, the finnish/swedish keyboard layout is just horrible today, when most stuff is designed to be used with US keyboard. That's why I use modified* US-intl layout on my computer even if its bit confusing to use other computers.

*added ä and ö keys, as they are needed in finnish.
How Cutting Small Costs Can Make a Big Difference
Tubes are cool.
I've started to do this more and more.

Think about this: Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.
Anything "Crunch____" for a website might put you in a trademark dispute. Or it might not.
A program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon
A friend of mine, influenced by CrossFit, just launched a startup of his own: http://www.paleoplan.com/

I love the concept, and want it expanded to other things (how many people have tried vegetarianism only to end up eating nothing but pasta?) but I don't eat enough meat to really consider Paleo.
Intel AppUp Center: App Store for Netbooks
The point in a mere six words:

Computer science is not programming.
One of the first things I would think about is charging.

I am sure there is a definition for it - but the act of paying some money - whether it is incentivised by returning a percentage of the money dependent on commitment/progress etc, or is taken as a running cost, has the effect of increasing dedication/loyalty and filtering out the people who like the idea of learning it but aren't willing to actually learn (or so i hypothesize...)

If you haven't - have a look at Clayton Christensen's "Disrupting Class", "The Online Learning Idea Book" - Patti Shank and "New Designs for Early Education" - by IDEO (its aimed at early childhood but some of the ideas revolving around increasing user involvement are really interesting). They delve into some extremely interesting ideas, not all relevant but theres some gold in them.

And I have not done nearly enough research into it, but I believe an understanding of Game Mechanics and how effective Social Interactions work on web would probably paramount to the effectiveness of this web app (theres a tonne of this info out there - think zynga/gowalla for learning).

Just my 2cents
Feeling That Cold Wind? Here’s Why.
On-duty with the Nexus One: form factor, battery, Android
> "You're just not used to it" is extremely dangerous reasoning.

I wasn't quite trying to say exactly that, at least not in a blanket manner.

But, let's take scrolling as an example: I haven't noticed that the android scrolling is jerky, not even a little bit. This is probably because I've never used something as silky as the iPhone. ((Or, perhaps, if I did try an iPhone, I would find its scrolling too smooth with no satisfying 'thump to a stop' at the end of a scroll or 'jump into motion' at the beginning.))

In other words, it's not "You're just not used to it" -- it's "without the other point of reference, would you even notice it?"
"Code [is] written to be executed by a computer."

Maybe. It also is to express the author's understanding, description and specification of the problem domain and problem solution to other humans. After all, most code will be compiled. The compiled output is what the computer executes, and there can be many high-level input languages that (theoretically) compile to the same machine code.
Note that this doesn't directly tell you what people want. It tells you what people want and aren't getting. For example, the fact that boyfriends don't search for "...love me" doesn't mean that they don't want to be loved; maybe they want to be loved but are loved enough.
I think Android is heading in that direction, though. Clock, Car Home, and the new Gallery application all show signs of a potential new direction for the Android UI, and it looks good. Gallery in particular: Check out what happens when you hit the share button in the app. It's a very Mac-like look and feel.
Have you travelled in Europe ? Say from the Polish/Russian boarder (or the Romanian one) to the coast of the Atlantic?

In spite of those 'requirements' the differences are vast, and yet, for the most part people still live where they lived before the borders opened up. Not as stark as in South Africa, for sure, but very real nonetheless.

The plumbers and the manual labourers have some increased competition but nothing they can't handle.

The only difference probably is that what used to be illegal labourers are now legal labourers, with (for the most part, though there definitely have been documented cases of very bad exceptions) better living conditions.

We don't all have to be rocket scientists in order to be able to compete for work at a fair rate. If a Polish guy could do my job they'd be welcome to it, I'd do my best to educate myself to a level where I could compete again.

I've been self employed for a long time, and in spite of a huge influx of Polish, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian and former Jugoslavian citizens there has been hardly a ripple in the market. In fact, some of these people set a new standard for quality of workmanship, something the 'locals' had gotten a little laid back about for lack of competition.

Borders are arbitrary constructs created to foster areas of artificial scarcity and control of people, the world is a much better place without them.

It seems to me that you are scared of something, South Africa is a place that has a history of very strong inequality, likely the shockwaves of the change there will reverberate for a long time, especially because of the enormous differences between those that have and those that don't.

For Europe, the opening of the borders has been a major boost in the average quality of life here for many, it will still take decades before the distribution is more uniform but at least we're underway. 50 year too late.
It's not too hard to MITM HTTPS traffic in a corporate setting -- you run your own internal root CA that approves the same cert for all domains, and add its public key to the browsers on all of the company's computers. Then instead of running a normal socks proxy, you just route all external IPs to a gateway box that proxies on 80 and 443.

I've seen this proxy method used at a company before, but I'm pretty sure they just passed through the https traffic instead of fucking with the certs. I'll have to check the next time I'm on-site...
Strange. I use my eee as my primary computer when traveling. Obviously my 8-core i7 machine at home is much faster, but this one runs exactly the same software, is super-light, and hardly ever needs to be recharged. It is the ideal traveling companion. It does everything I need it to do; I have the exact same config files on my home desktop as I do on the eee.

I am not sure how one Linux distro could be slower or less powerful than another. Same exact software, slightly different settings. (I use xmonad, which is going to feel fast on any hardware. GNOME/KDE/Win 7/OS X is going to feel slow on any hardware. It's designed to.)

I prefer to be at home with a 24" monitor and an 8-core processor with 6G of RAM, of course, but when you are stuck in the back of an airplane (which I am right now, incidentally; row 30, baby), nothing beats a netbook. When you are at your desk, nothing beats a desktop. (The laptop is truly a cumbersome device. It will never be as powerful as a desktop, but it needs a huge battery to last for more than 3 hours. And, a big screen would preclude opening it when you are stuck in economy class. Would not want.)
Most of the things described in this article are AI-complete.
PayPal is not evil.

I can't think of a company that has done more to democratize banking than PayPal.

Setting up a Merchant Account can be a real pain (and I too hope PayPal improves in this regard), but I really hope the author thinks harder about the title next time before making such a generalization.

If you want to know why PayPal is not evil, try this experiment:

Go to your bank and try to open a checking account with a debit card with no minimum balance, a positive interest rate, ability to transfer money instantly without writing a check (basically a wire transfer) for free, no insufficient fund charges, no monthly fees, free online and mobile banking, etc.

PayPal offers this to everyone, regardless of how rich or poor you are. If you don't have a lot of money other banks such as WellsFargo, Bank of America, etc., could care less about you and will try and take as much as they can from you in the form of ATM charges, monthly fees, overdraft charges, etc. Of course, I may be making my own over generalization here, but suffice it to say that I don't think PayPal is evil.
Mine has spent 200,000 miles in my backpack, and it looks the same as the day it came out of the box. (Actually, I replaced the default stickers with some of my own. But you get the idea.)
Done.

Rather messy since github doesn't do redirects, but I suppose it's worth it.

By the way, to uninstall the apparently poorly-named pydroid:

cd ${PYTHON_DIR}/site-packages/
rm -r pydroid pydroid-0.42-*.egg-info

where ${PYTHON_DIR} is "/Library/Python/2.6" on OS X, "C:\Python26\" on Windows, etc...

Then just run the new installer shown on the script page (or install from source), now at:

http://github.com/msanders/autopy
Thanks. Charging is something I'm considering adding at some point. Maybe I'll do that sooner rather than later. I haven't read either of those books yet. Thanks for the suggestions.
droid is a shortening of android. How can that be trademarked?
A default Debian install also recognizes all the buttons. There is no need to use special software for a netbook; they are exactly the same (to the software) as any other laptop.
I think this article may be relevant to the discussion.

'The Switch From iPhone To Android, And Why Your First Impression Is Wrong'

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/09/android-iphone-switch/
I think you are reading the root comment with the wrong perspective in mind. He is saying we are doomed if there is life on Mars.
Does salesforce not count?
Users don't care about whether the platform is open directly. But they do benefit from the openness.

An example that has been beaten to death; Google Voice. On my open phone, I dial with the normal dialer and my call is connected via Google Voice. On the iPhone, that is not possible. You have to go to a web page, dial a number, and wait for Google to call you. Not a good "user experience".
For starters, $100 jeans are on the low-to-mid-range end of the denim market.

$20'ish - el cheapo house brands at Target, Walmart, etc.

<$50'ish - Gap, Levi Strauss

<$100'ish - Lucky

<$200'ish - Diesel, Seven for All Mankind

~$500 - Prada, etc.

If you think about what Avelle provides (LHaaS), it's a way for women to accessorize themselves for a big night out in a way far outside of their typical budget. That super-trendy, $1000 Fendi bag won't lend itself well to everyday usage for most people. Those $200 jeans, on the other hand, cannot and will not be worn for that Big Event.

Imagine you're going to a cocktail party with a bunch of big-time politicos. If you're a woman, you might rent that Fendi bag from Avelle. No one in their right mind would say to themselves, 'hey, I'll go rent some trendy jeans for tonight's black tie event.'

A serious online competitor to those god-awful tux rental shops could be cool, though.
I'm not sure how "dumb" it is to consider the economics of resource consumption/exploration/extraction. On a practical level, the last drop of oil will never be consumed or x resource mined because substitutes develop and markets are forward looking.

While this article doesn't talk about the substitutes specifically, have a look at the availability of natural gas as just an example of why energy prices will go down. What I think they suggest here though is that politics and technology make it more available. Now as for "serious analysis", it's impossible to predict what new technologies will show up in the future as the massive _new_ abundance in natural gas in the last couple years (compare to just 4-5 years ago) shows.

Now consider the emerging technologies that could have a major impact on reducing both cost and carbon dioxide emissions (e.g. thorium, pebblebed, thin film solar, concentrated solar, non-corn biofuels, etc.). To bet that we'll "run out" of oil/peak oil is to place a bet against our ability to innovate and adapt.
I always solve that problem by ordering hot chocolate.

There's usually just one of those, compared to a dozen different latte flavors. Plus, I don't even like coffee.
autopy is really perfect.
It's reminiscent of autopilot and much more descriptive of what your tool does.
Colour picker application for McCLIM: crhodes
I can't remember the percentages that Taubes suggests.

Personally, I solve it by replacing carbs with fat - but without actually measuring. I just eat plenty of flavorful food (and drench my veggies in butter).

Mark Sisson has written about fats in the diet here:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat-healthy/

The general idea floating around on his forum seems to be "when in doubt, eat more fat".
Well said.

To each story there are both sites of the story. No point was being written outlining the reasons why his accounts was being closed.
If he would be serious about doing business, he could have provided all that information in the beginning.
> Nothing good ever came of government programs.

DARPA is a rounding error on the defense budget. It isn't an "innovation program", like synfuels and the other debacles that got, and continue to get, real money.
Paris is rich because she's rich, and famous because she's famous. To me, she's a symbol of much that's wrong with the US today. None of this says that she's particularly intelligent or savvy.
Navteq maps the world in 3D with lasers
Blood Plasma Arbitrage: How one company made billions
> On a side-note, the name sounds a little inapropriate in Russian.

What does it mean?
Quite the impressive series of tubes.
> fixing it causes a breaking change. On my team whenever we come into this situation and realize that fixing overlooked things can actually "break" people, we really think twice about the fix.

Answered in the 2nd comment from Rasmus:

If this was changed in a minor version, I'd
agree with you on the BC change, but we have been working on catching these weird edge-case scenarios that lead to unexpected bugs.

i.e. they thought about it and decided this version was an acceptable one for making breaking changes.
No need to use an old Linux distro; new ones are just as fast. Moblin gets you from GRUB to a working desktop in about 5 seconds, even when booted from a slow SD card.

My completely-non-tweaked Debian install boots in about 13 seconds. And this is with filesystem encryption that severely cripples my SSD. (The raw SSD can be read at about 100MB/s. The Atom can only un-blowfish at about 22MB/s or un-AES at 17MB/s. Ouch.)
breck,

I disagree, to me when you don't offer customer service availability to departments and don't offer any real explanations for denial of service, that is bad.

Just because a "big bank" is worse, doesn't make Paypal "good". Credit Unions are the only true "good" in the banking industry. The credit unions are non-profit and thusly they don't try to gouge you.
> Do you realize how ghastly a concept that is? To say that if you think things Ayn Rand thinks are bad, you're essentially killing yourself? We call that fascism.

Actually, we don't. We don't call it racism, fundamentalism, or homophobia for that matter. Unless, of course, you think that those words mean "you're poopy-head and I don't like you".

I realize that you think that calling someone "fascist" is a winning "argument", but that doesn't mean that all of your opponents are fascists.
I'm old enough to remember quite a few predictions of when petroleum would be so scarce that it would be economically useless, each of which has been proven wrong in turn. There is the distinct possibility of technological change in renewable energy production and distribution coupled with technology change in petroleum synthesis resulting in oil always being available enough for the purposes for which it is unsubstitutable.
Beware of sample bias: People who have netbooks may be universally happy with them, but you're not hearing from the population who found the keyboards too small to type on comfortably (even for short-haul typing such as emails) and opted for something with a full-sized keyboard. Jeff found a model with a full-sized keyboard, but those are very recent. Stores in my area don't stock them yet.