skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it wasn't just a surface effect, that could have been possible:)
hundreds of thousands or millions.

Are they telemarketing to a planet that I don't know about? Wouldn't that be hundreds of billions?

Are they buying lots of duplicates or something like that, then combining all the info themselves?
It can vary a lot. I flew from London Heathrow Terminal 5 to Berlin earlier this year, and it only took 15 minutes from getting off the tube to being ready to board.
Just layer up a bunch of surfaces then :)
In my opinion, unless your project already has excellent documentation, you shouldn't spend much time or thought documenting your commits.

Making detailed commit messages is "documenting the process". Making code documentation is documenting the product. The latter, in my opinion, is much more important.
At the moment (for various reasons to complex to go into here) I am sporting a huge beard. Other words that may be used to describe my beard are mighty, magnificent and fearsome. Anyway, showing up at the London side of the Eurostar last month, I was "randomly" selected to have my bag searched.

At the Paris side, I was again approached by staff, this time offering me a Halal meal...
3°C is not like Hoth.
The best video converter to convert between different video and audio formats
My bad. Thanks for clarifying that.
Seriously, if another passenger was arguing with the flight attendants about wanting to use the bathroom, the first thing that would pop into my head is that the guy probably really needed to go to the bathroom.
Thank you for that Tokenadult. Comments like this are unfortunately becoming rarer on HN, but they are truly appreciated. Civil discussion backed up by facts.
I don't think it's incompetence, at least not at the academic/professor level we're talking about. Most people who get to be professors at research universities understand the low-level details of performance quite well.

Rather, I think it's often because the details about how a system will be used aren't clear until the system is built and people actually use it. As you know, engineering involves tradeoffs. It's possible to make one operation run faster by making another slower, or it's possible to make the system easier to use by making them both slower. Academics - and startups - aren't in a position to make those tradeoffs, because they don't know how the system will be used. So they'll micro-optimize along one dimension, but it turns out that people really use the software in a completely different dimension.
So where do I store my tax return, Google Docs? Amazon? MS? I think not. Hard drives are not going away, "listen to me now and believe me later."
Maybe they should (if they're actually making such a think), call it the Tabloid.
High-velocity behavior is v^2, which where it matters. The linear part quickly becomes negligible. And wind resistance is still v^2 so it'll still go as v^2 only slower.

The brake limit is an interesting one, though. Apparently brakes are not providing a constant brake torque as one would naively expect, but instead a constant dissipation power. This is why everyone can lock their brakes going slowly, but it's normally quite hard to do if you're going 80mph. (For a normal "family" car.)
Are you talking about list rentals? Sorry, but I used to work in this industry too and you are way off.

First, you know hardly anything about these people. At best you have a guess about their income. You don't know age or occupation or education level. (Not to mention a large number of the names are probably bogus -- I would certainly fill out bogus data.) Realistically, you'd have to overlay it with data from other sources to make it usable to anyone besides, perhaps, other companies selling overpriced puzzles.

I can get much complete and valuable demographics for much less than $1 each. (Female C-Level executives in the marketing industry? $200 per thousand).

Like I said, it's not a conspiracy. It's just a junky puzzle.
What will happen to jewelry prices? Does this mean we can make perfect aluminum jewelry that looks like gold (except for weight and such)? Would people care if they could get real gold or fake aluminum that looks identical and is muuuuch cheaper?
Nor is it difficult to look out the window and see that you're over an urban area.
Interesting Premise.
I suspect that with 300+ People on the list, it would grow to be difficult to read, however. Have you tried following it for a few days? How bad is it? ;)

How often to do intend to re-spider/refresh?
Ah, the band centers are optically thick. I guess that makes sense. Thanks for pointing that out.
I'd recommend testing your hypothesis. A pure split test (A/B) doesn't quite seem right, because it'll be more difficult to compare w/o doing some sort of multivariate regression.

I'd suggest this: peel off a small segment (10%, 20%) randomly out of your user base. Give them the option for monthly / annually. Compare the revenue from that group to the revenue from your control group. Even if you do anger a few of your customers, or the monthly plan costs you a lot of sales / revenue, you've only done it with a small section of your audience.

The only downside to this is that you might find some customers prefer the monthly plan, even if you only want to offer the annual (after testing, you find that annual is more profitable to you).

Each site is different. Each customer base is different. This seems to me like a situation where you should collect data, rather than look for high level advice.
Game Theory, Airport Security and Best Responses
The lack of "ubiquitous high-bandwidth connectivity" is likewise a short-term cost, and may already be negligible depending on how ubiquitous you need it to be and how much bandwidth. It's already good enough for many if not most people, and the gaps are shrinking.
Willpower
it would be interesting to see if there was a difference between music with words and music without-- whether the words themselves occupied a part of the brain that could otherwise be used toward the task at hand. I listen to music when I code, but only fast-paced instrumental-only music.

the music I like is not especially popular (or listenable, some might say), so I don't think I would like a communal music system regardless of the content.
What's the margin on netbooks?
So far Apple was way more interested in making money vs. market share.
> I believe the problem was the deregulation that allowed the creation of entities like AIG Financial Products

AIG Financial Products sold products "encouraged" by regulators.

Regulators realized that there was some risk in securitized mortgage pools. However, they really wanted to be able to call them "no risk" investments so they could push them onto asset sheets and make them more popular among folks who they couldn't bully. (They were pushing cheap housing.)

The regulator's solution was "insurance", which they defined (regulators define what's acceptable for banks to hold as assets) and AIG (among others) sold.

Since "everyone" believed that the securitized mortage pools were "no risk", folks saw selling insurance as "free money". AIG did a lot of middleman work in this area as well as writing its own contracts.

> But there's no way to deny that a LOT of private capital was directed at the building of useless condos.

"free money" pushed by govt policy (through loans and the like) isn't private capital.

> My personal belief is that at the margins taxes have little effect on overall economic growth, especially when they are targeted at the upper income levels

The median worker in the US pays almost no federal income taxes. (They do pay SS and medicare, but the former is an okay investment for such people and the latter will be a train wreck for everyone.) As a result, they have no incentive to get value for money.

Note that the income of "the rich" is somewhat voluntary and fairly portable - that makes it quite volatile. That's why CA gets hammered every so often.
Words like scam, extortion, blackmail, evil don't mean, well, anything to Internet people. Or maybe, everything is.
@jonursenbach
Are there any pre-reqs to being listed? Didn't see myself on it..
Been there, done that.. with hindsight my personal recomendations are:

1. Don't leave your existing job until you have to , keep the income comming.
2. Spend as little as possible, as late as possible.
3. Leverage your knowledge and experience.. stick with what you know.
4. Have fun, enjoy what you are doing.. life is way to short.
Great idea if I may say so myself!

One more thought--how about a page that links in reverse--twitter id back to HN profile page? twitter profiles are weak sauce and don't tell you the HN username (of course) or other startup-y details I'd like to know sometimes ...
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes.

This theme is explored in depth with Stephenson's (fictional) account of the Ita, from his (fascinating) 2008 novel, Anathem.
Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications
Facebook social scam
133,000 Facebook members willingly associate themselves with a malware website.
I'm just waiting for the Red Kryptonite.
I guess that already happens.. they have fakes for everything from gold to diamonds. Electroplating was invented long back - however, the fact that this technique prevents peeling off etc., means that fakes would be more durable. In any case, I think there is probably something more cutting edge they can do with this technology.
I didn't explicitly type out my twitter in my profile, so looks like it skipped me. I don't contribute very often on HN, but I definitely take in a lot of the conversations and knowledge sharing. Feel free to add to me (@WesleyJohnson) to the list, either way I'll be following it.

Thanks for putting this together.
Your analysis of the 2x2 possibility space is simplistic and wrong. I'll attempt to quickly illustrate this.

We assume the desired goal of mitigating global warming is to save the lives of poor of those in poor countries. An argument can be made that the relatively rich will face changes, but will be able to adapt.

So the do nothing and no global warming scenario, while on its surface may not seem to have any negative effects, its effects in fact are quite devastating. The money and attention that we are focusing on global warming could be used to address problems that are actually killing people today. Some simple examples, are vaccination, education, disease research, building infrastructure etc.

So the question is best phrased as giving what we know now, what can we do to mitigate risk and save the most people. Some solutions are:

0. Family Planning & Birth Control

1. Nuclear power

2. Research into drought resistant crops and crops that can grow in warmer environments.

3. Improved monitoring of the earth

4. Research into new energy technologies, so that they can be deployed when they are mature enough.

So I'm not advocating any action over any other, I'm merely pointing out that your analysis is heavily flawed.
Better karate chop: Do the above and shell out 500 bucks for another 16G RAM in the server while you're at it. That way you won't wind up navigating an object graph that's been paged to disk (Lucene terms are all loaded into memory while the index is open, could be 20,000 terms or closer to a million if you have a whole bunch of unique IDs)
I disagree. Good commit messages also document the product. They should describe or reference features requested, bug reported, and the _why_ of the change at least as much as the _what_ of the change.
> In the case that there is no man made global warming and we act, then the outcome is still good.

That actually depends on the "act". Any "analysis" that doesn't have such a dependence is bogus, even if it is in an easy to understand format.
Nobody is going to pull the same stunt. The people building these devices aren't stupid. Kneejerk reactions never solved anything.
This is dated February 1st, 2008. Shouldn't we be seeing applications of this by now?
> In the case that there is no man made global warming and we act, then the outcome is still good

This is the kind of statement that fuels skeptics. If the cost of "we act" exceeds the benefit, it is not "good." Skeptics are suspicious that some are using global warming to advance unrelated causes which (conveniently) require the same actions; namely, higher taxes, more regulation, bigger government.

They might further ask why, if, in your possibility space, there is natural warming, are we sure that we should act to reverse it? That is, there is a chance that a slightly warmer planet might itself have more net benefits than costs.
I don't think "i-joojoo" really rolls off the tongue the right way.
What’s the right amount of seed money to raise?
Why is being an architecture astronaut supposedly a bad thing ?

There are plenty of places that are in dire need of people with that skill, it's taking system administration to a whole new level and not that many people are capable of doing that.

If you're up for a challenge find some fledgling open source project that tries to solve a real world problem that you have some affinity with and start contributing.

Sooner or later inspiration will strike. It usually does when you stop looking for it!

best of luck,

Jacques
Huh. I'm in NYC, and have had the same iPhone for a year. I don't really get dropped calls. Then again, my average call length is 2 minutes.
I was wondering... how do you control those lasers? To have a pulse of one femtosecond you would need something running at petahertz... of course I'm missing something...
We can make the same matrix for other hazards/mitigation schemes too. For example, we should spend 100 billion dollars on an asteroid defense system!

See also Pascal's wager.
SICP presents programming as something mystical and exciting, starting with using a wizard for the front cover.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

SICP was still written to be a college textbook, though, and is now more than 15 years old. I think there's room for another programming intro book. Let us know how it goes :-)
Stephen Fry is a good person.

:-(
Wind resistance is V^3. Drag is V^2, but you multiply that by the distance traveled.
Wow! That's a nice set of buzzwords in one title! =)
What do you do for inspiration? How do you come up with your personal projects? When do you find time to do them outside of work?

I talk to people who have problems. (I recommend meatspace for this since if you just go to HN or Twitter you'll tend to select the problems that people on HN or Twitter have, and they'll say something like "I am really involved in too many social networks and need like a meta-social network, with RSS feeds and Twitter integration", and you'll go off and build something that will never be used by someone without a Twitter account which, by last count, excludes 99.9% of the population of earth.) For my personal project, I solved that problem. Finding time was a matter of looking at what I did between leaving from work and going to sleep and deciding what mattered to me less than being a successful businessman. Bye, WoW, it was nice while it lasted.
same as false rumors on twitter, everyone retweets without even following the link, assuming the research has already been done by the OP, or retweeter.

atleast with facebook you can see the span of who was gullible enough to join. Is there a way to map retweets to see the scope of a false link/post?

btw facebook groups are a joke. period. seriously, most are just a punchline.
I reject the entire premise that web apps are fundamentally "better for you".

You're inserting the word "fundamentally", but the author is not claiming they are fundamentally better than native applications at all. Not every article is "X vs Y".

His premise for talking about commitment mechanisms is that you've already decided that web applications are the long-term optimal choice for you. If it isn't the optimal choice for you, the commitment mechanism is meaningless.
Sigh. Snowfall tracks atmosphere water content, not temperature. In almost all climates, the "coldest winters" are uniformly the dryest. Oddly, it seems like the people who parade this canard (despite constant refutation by those who know what they're talking about) are also the least likely to be alarmed by heat waves...
He doesn't have enough assets or income to be an accredited investor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
The Speculative Prehistory of the iPhone
totally agreed about the meatspace thing! talk to your relatives, family friends, acquaintances, etc. about their jobs and hobbies whenever you're at a social occasion, and if you can see some inefficiency that they're currently forced to manually trudge through, start thinking about possible software solutions to their problems.
'I'm a Mac' Ads Go Honest
If the "ELA" indicates edited regions, why is the region where the most obvious change happened (the bag) one of the darkest?

I'm also not convinced on the lightening of the skin tone. The lighting is entirely different in both pictures, and I have friends who have shifted tone more than that after a summer of tanning. (edit: her hair is much darker as well)
"My problem is - or, rather, one of my many problems (because I surely have more than one problem) - is that my hobby, my passion is programming."

I know its been said over and over again, but I think the advice still holds: join an open source project. Contribute to a piece of software you and others enjoy using. Software only gets better when people are willing to work on it.
That looks really nice, but it is just a layout, no 'live' elements (unless you count the scrollbar and the horizontal resize).

The bulk of the code is normally in making the user interface do something useful, not just to sit there being pretty.
Abstract: Shaping of the phase, amplitude, and polarization state of an
ultrashort pulse is demonstrated using a novel arrangement of a single,
linear, high-resolution liquid crystal array. Orthogonal polarization components,
separated by a Wollaston prism, are manipulated independently and
re-combined in a near-common path, common-optic geometry.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/DirectPDFAccess/D685BD2D-BDB9-...
Great project but you missed me too: http://twitter.com/jot

(probably because I recently switched HN profiles)
No, I'm not talking about list rentals.
JQuery Autosave
2008? There's some interesting stuff from the same team summarized at this link: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/person/chunlei-guo
Let us know how that works out 6 months from now when you have a regression issue and you're trying to track it down.
I contend that if you are using defined? you are doing something wrong. local variables should be local. If you don't know what exists in the current scope, you are dealing with confusing code. Rails erb evaluation for partials makes this mistake, and creates a poor reimplementation of function calls where the function header is defined by the caller with the :locals =>{} hash.
"Hey, we need someone to develop an infrastructure for scheduling and running thousands of jobs on hunreds of different boxes and to keep the status of said jobs, etc." But that kind of makes me an architecture astronaut which, supposedly, is A Bad Thing (tm)

Just doing it to do it makes you an architecture astronaut. Finding somebody with that problem and solving it, especially in a different way, is a desirable thing. You could either out-compete an existing solution by doing it better, or find a chunk of problem space they don't really address (or don't address well).

Then you're an entrepreneur, which around here is certainly a desirable thing :-)

That is to say, figure out what it's useful for and keep that in mind.
Odd, b/c what we have now is a string of failures (cough rackspace cough) (cough DNS failures cough) (cough rackspace again cough), connected to quite a few companies that don't have good guidance on data protection or privacy control (facebook, microsoft/danger), bound up by an internet that isn't nearly as ubiquitous or reliable as we want (AT&T). Access to those services is still in question: net neutrality is still under debate, and I'm seeing services blocked at the employer (can't let corporate secrets get out via google docs!) and ISP (long story) level.

For what? 99% of what we want out of the cloud is solved by a good laptop and a reasonable backup system.

Ask me again in 5 years (and it'll actually be 5, not 1 or 3), but right now, the cloud isn't worth it.
Detroit's vacant factory land to sprout farms
Unless the fraud is directly related to the iPhone - as in people buying the iPhone using fake credentials, unlocking them and selling them at a premium.
Can you rerun the process? Had my twitter username in there (@dharmesh), but not the full URL like this: http://twitter.com/dharmesh

Thanks!
I said, a run of the mill name and number could net you a dollar.

These names/numbers aren't. Granted lots of people use bogus names and numbers, but the vast majority aren't going to that purchase an item of this value.

Yes, before you say it, I realize that nobody here does, and nobody you know does, and blah blah blah.

In the real world, most people do. I wouldn't be in business if they didn't.

I'm going to go with a crappy response, from a clueless person.
That definitely sounds like a bug to me. Either a statement is fully valid and is executed, or it isn't and it isn't. In Python:

>>> a=b
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'b' is not defined
>>> a
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'a' is not defined
>>>

I think that follows the POLA...
This is the exact kind of thing App Armor can be used to shield against. Problem is, it's a PITA to setup right.
Very incisive take on the prequels and Episode 3 in particular. I think clearly that Episodes 1-3 are exactly the movies that Lucas wanted to make originally, but since they had limited budget and effects technology for Episodes 4-6, they had to actually flesh out the story in order to make a complete film. A textbook example of how constraints contribute to the quality of art.
FTA: Since the process changes the intrinsic surface properties of the metal itself and is not just a coating, the color won't fade or peel, says Guo

Oversold. This is technically true, but any corrosion (or even scratching) will muck up the visible-wavelength-scale features on which this effect depends. I'd have to believe this kind of image would be far more fragile than a simple paint would be...
start a blog, build a following, then once you decide to do your own startup, you'll have that first 1000-2000 early users
Duck Duck Go has been doing a pretty good job of it, and from what I can tell, it's just one guy, self-financed.
Link above. Applications include micrometer-scale imaging using terahertz radiation, which is less dangerous than x-rays because it's non-ionizing, and several others...though past experience suggests that the time between lab discovery and commercial products is often a decade.
In the long term however, aggregators arise, and distribution gets consolidated. This same race is the one that killed movie producers decades ago, and indie game developers more recently.

Maybe I don't understand what he's saying here, but it seems to me that indie game developers are doing better than ever. With platforms like Steam, XBLA, and the iPhone, it seems much easier to get your game distributed than in the past. I agree that it may be more difficult to get noticed as an individual game/developer, but it seems like more indie developers/games are getting the chance to be on the level with bigger games/developers than ever before.