skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anybody found this article informative they should hand in their hacker card at the door.
Planning for Failure - You Get the Reputation You Deserve
FaceBook, Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress.. etc. - all supports UTF-8 characters
Ah... so Reuters blocks outside-U.S. visitors?

Well, you didn't miss much here. He just notes that for many people cell phones replace much of functionality of many devices (citing: landline phones, watches, gps devices, cameras, iPods).

Then he asks... what else? [but he has no insights to suggest]. That is worth a blog post?
If you're using a iPhone, you can also use Glyphboard, which has lower page loading overhead and is right sized for the platform...

http://www.mrgan.com/gb/
Yes, that caption gave me high hopes for the article. I thought it might be about slow living, enjoying the journey, and how optimizing these things make them harder to enjoy. Instead, it was just a trite lambasting of apps I'd never be caught using, rolled into a broad brush to paint the entire userbase.
The free version of Avira by default puts up a splash screen on almost every reboot, and then also regularly shows a temporary notification above the system tray nagging the user to upgrade.

To disable the splash screen: open up regedit, go to HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Windows->CurrentVersion->Run, find the "avgnt" key, and add " /nosplash" to its value.

To disable the nagging: in Windows XP Pro and most versions of Vista, navigate to Avira's program folder, find the "avnotify" executable, and disable Read & Execution in its security settings. If you don't see the security tab in its properties dialog, then go up to the Tools menu for the folder view, choose options, scroll down to the bottom of the advanced options, and disable "simple file sharing". For other versions of Windows (Windows XP Home, some configurations of Vista (I think)), you have to reboot into safe mode to do this. This will not prevent Avira from notifying you of infections or other actual alert events.

We recommend Avira because -- according to extensive testing by http://www.av-comparatives.org/ as well as in our own experience -- Avira is consistently one of the top free antivirus programs in terms of catch rate, while also running only one monitoring process and otherwise having a very very low impact on system performance.
Here's the synopsis (since copying the text will likely get us all sued):

Smart phones are killing, or at least threatening, lots of stuff. They already demolished PDA's (Palm is now worth only 3% of it's peak value). Landline phones and watches are feeling the squeeze. Also on the hit list are GPS gadgets, exercise monitoring equipment and odometers, iPods, cameras, and radar detectors (although I haven't seen the app for that).

Other things that may soon be threatened: All the stuff in your wallet or purse like keys and credit cards. Mostly credit cards, IMO.

While this kind of creative destruction creates losers (telcos with no wireless business), it also creates new winners (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) as well as plenty of entirely new companies.
Lean startup viability: how to know when to quit
How do you determine the viability of a lean startup? Or more importantly, how do you know when to quit?

In a VC or even angel-backed startup your viability, assuming you are not profitable, is generally based on one thing…. The ability to raise additional funding. When the money runs out either you raise more funds or you go home.

In a lean startup however, there is no such Darwinian fate. By the very nature of a lean startup and its iterative customer development process, a lean startup can live virtually forever and perhaps never find success. Therefore it falls to the entrepreneur to decide when to cut bait.
Seems really snappy to me...I'm in Phoenix on Verizon.

I looked for a decently large file to download from their site, but couldn't find one.

Granted, I'm used to dealing with VPS hosts like linode and slicehost; maybe offering something like that isn't customary for hosts like this.
Thinking of it, this is a genius statement, because it also captures why I like really hard games which allow me to fail and die in horrible, hilarious ways. Thinking of it, this is a reward in itself a reward for me, the player (I just recall max payne 2. "Oh my lord, look at this, those sneaky ba^W gangsters camped in that room with grenades and shotguns and they are like 10 people, and I just opened the door and WOOSH I was gone, and look at that ragdoll physics! Haha!", followed by the reward of actually getting through such a room after like the 8th time).
You can possibly get rid of the pair of 9V batteries by using a floating ground that you make with two resistors.
I just noticed that the bridge can be divided into two parts. Have you thought about how many new track patterns you can create if you allow some of the pieces to be elevated and use the two separate parts of the bridge as slopes onto and off of the elevated track?
No offense, but why this and not campfire? (who has a free version)
I can never remember if it is:

ln $file $link

- or -

ln $link $file

There are good arguments for both, and I have a 50% success rate at remembering. I was really hoping for some mnemonic for this. oh well.
☛☺☚ twitter users love attention
Easy Party Appetizers For Your Christmas Hors D Oeuvres
First of all, you can't do ORM without knowing SQL it's an inherently leaky abstraction and that's not changing anytime soon.

Using SQL is great except what do you define as 'SQL'. Is it MySQL, Oracle or Postgres? How do I migrate between them? Forget data migration, I'm just talking about the data model and constraints. Today I run my app on MySQL but tomorrow the environment will demand Oracle.

I have an app that can run on any database that Hibernate supports with zero code changes and 1 line in a config file including my data constraints.
Note that about half of these symbols appears as empty boxes on IE6.
The mnemonic I use is to pretend ln is cp, the source file comes first.
Are those red box areas auto-classified as potentially dangerous? I wonder what kind of algorithms they're using to do that.
Fight the Terrorists vs. Protect the Children.

Aliens vs. Predator.
Yeah, but I find notebooks to be in the same category as mobile phones where you don't get anything but bulkiness in return for your time. You might get a better use for your time building your own servers and workstations.
Run PowerShell as a shell within Emacs
Better yet- Twitter fully supports other languages such as Arabic and Japanese rather well (or at least AFAIK).

While it seems simple, loads of programs and services don't support them well. Can you make a HN account with a name in one of those languages and have it show well? (maybe you can, but I'm unsure)
I agree. That's why "keep the data on the server" is preferable to "send it to the user but protect it with custom crypto".
If the iPhone added an alarm/scheduled notification API and location trigger API, and functionality to start an app up automatically w/ user permission and then quit itself and restart the previous open application. This would replace most apps that need backgrounding for various tasks. Apps like locale, sweet dreams, im apps and calendaring apps could all be implemented with this kind of functionality (some of them not as well with android), yet avoid backgrounding applications.
One to add to the list - the yellow pages.
Habbo Notícias  - Dia de reis
Four reasons why 2010 is going to be a year of A/B split testing
The ambiguity of your quip amuses me. (Color? Shape? Species-specificity?)
The subsidy (monthly lot population -> payout/discount) that danw is referring to happened many years ago now (2005? 2004? earlier?), long before they outlawed gambling. The lot-use subsidy DID result in a lot of casinos and 'strip clubs', but it also resulted in shops creating community events - weekly giveaway parties, etc.

While it can be argued that the subsidy resulted in some shady areas of SL, it should be noted that the massive decline in SL's popularity happened after they were removed, gambling was banned, age verification happened, etc etc. So it's hardly arguable that the subsidies killed SL.
Watching the TSA squirm over these millimeter scanners is almost entertaining.

They want to do a full body scan, but...err..they have to blur genitals, so you could hide something in your groin region.

They want to scan everybody, but...err...not people under 18, so you could hide something on a kid.

So what do we end up with? We end up with what is, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting invasions of my privacy I could have even imagined and we're not even really benefiting from it because we're so concerned about being immoral (while taking what equates to naked photos of everyone) that we cut some huge massive holes in our security wall.

Awesome.

To me, this feels like a boss that screams up and down about security, then insists that his workstation be able to bypass all of it.
Companies Google might buy in 2010
Pretty sparks!

As a kid I got my hands on a HV transformer from a rooftop light installation.

Two pieces of curved wires attached to the terminals, touch the base between the wires with a hammer and a spark would ride up the curve.

As soon as the spark extinguished that would temporarily excite the coil to an even higher voltage because of the circuit breaking, if you set it up just so that would be enough to jump the gap between the two wires at the bottom and the cycle would repeat.

Friggin' dangerous but lots of fun.
Best Buy also sells Apple computers (MacBooks, iMacs, etc.). Does anyone here know if they try to sell "optimized" versions of those as well?
single page view:

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/05/stephen-wolfram-ta...
My anecdotal experience recently backs this up.

I had to give up using AVG (it was adding several minutes onto my netbook's startup time) so tried Avast. It was okay until I couldn't figure out how to stop it running a full system scan every day that would lock me out of doing anything useful with the machine.

I then tried Comodo but that was an awful resource hog. It really slowed my system down and I couldn't stand to use it. It also quarantined the netbook's touchpad driver as a potential virus without much of a message to tell me what was going on so that didn't make me like it too much.

Avira has been pretty good so far. The splash screens are a minor annoyance but nothing major. I had some problems updating it for a while but that seemed to have been a momentary problem. I'd recommend it.
Thanks -- that's a good criticism.

But remember that the point is to find the things you do ALL THE TIME. You probably don't dial the phone often in one day, so that wouldn't have been on your list.

About six years ago I was on the phone all day, and yes that was a real problem. In the end it was much more efficient to get a device that dialed a number that was selected on the screen.

So when you consider that the point of the exercise is to identify those things about you and your particular workflow, it makes more sense.

Finally, you can probably appreciate that the "write EVERYthing down" is clearly not something you should do all the time, but rather an interesting mechanism to make you THINK about what you're doing.

That is, get you thinking meta rather than just working heads-down. That is the true lesson.
Upgrading cookies is a bad idea. Revoking them and requiring reauthentication is better. See the talk I gave at Google on web crypto where I talk about exactly that situation.

http://rdist.root.org/2009/08/06/google-tech-talk-on-common-...

Your last paragraph shows you now have better understanding of this.
I'm always confounded by people who are so willing to see their software bound up in chains while claiming this somehow imparts more freedom.
Make your mind up.

"a lot of those are impulse buys. There is nothing wrong with that"

three minutes later,

"That is what makes it obscene...they are impulse buys..."
Is that bug called 'strings'? ;)
I don't understand how you get "computers are insecure" from "Arbitrary-MAC(UID) is not a useful protocol".
If they did it in place of a real class, I'd quit too. But I'm always open to a free "Come here if you want to learn X from Professor Zed" so long as "X" is interesting enough.

Lack of a physical whiteboard might make things tricky though.
Same in Firefox 3.5.6 in OS X.
You might be able to speed it up considerably by adding

2a. Continue with next iteration unless the turning number of the sequence of curves is a whole number.

You add 1/8 to the turning number for each clockwise curve and subtract 1/8 for each CCW (for numerical stability you would rather add of subtract 1 and check for multiples of 8).
Normally new media is initially funded by porn...and evolve into something else. Second Life has done the opposite. Sounds like a dead end to me.

Second Life is only one instance of a new medium. That's too small a sample to declare the whole medium non-viable. MMOs are really another example of the same medium. (Though the structure of most "games" devolves into exploitation of variable reward schedules and everything becomes pretty much a resort-casino.)
Sure, except when that doesn't make any sense.

I embed Python in my application. My highly graphical application requires XY,000 KB of memory. It's probably not wise to re-invoke my entire app Z times simply so that Python can properly take advantage of the user's multi-core OS while scripting inside my application.

Any time you embed Python (e.g. a game, a browser, etc), the multiprocessing support isn't going to work very well as it is today. Ideally we get to the point where threading works great in the core interpreter.

I asked Guido about this in front of his keynote audience a few Pycons ago, and his answer was a sad shrug and saying to use Jython or IronPython instead.

I'd love to see the GIL improved/removed because CPython-embedding apps don't have the same options as everyday pure scripting.
The Problem with User Stories
Hah, no. Believe it or not it's just regular furniture and fittings for people who like to recreate their dream home on their tropical beach resort. I've got no qualms about taking people's money if they have no imagination.
Does anyone make a "good PC" anymore? I know many will answer just build it yourself. That's a worthy answer for me, but not for the general public. If my mom wants to buy a PC tomorrow that isn't cluttered with crap (just an OEM install), offers great service, and looks great, what does she buy?
I've got the same train set at home. I also bought the extra parts with the fork an extra brigde, trestles, and tunnel. Sounds like I've got a new project to help me learn processing.
I just received this email:

Dear [Callahad],

Congratulations on locating the coin and thanks so much for visiting the site. I AM THE COIN is a collaboration between artist Micah Lexier, writer Derek McCormack and a dedicated crew of craftspeople who all worked very hard toward producing this year-long installation. In the first few days we have had a flurry of activity on the website, including numerous people who wrote to redeem the FIND THE COIN prize.

We hope we have not overstated the prize, which consists of one of the extra tokens from the installation. It is meant as a symbolic thank you to those who took the time to interact with the project. The site also caught the attention of a group who just looked at the computer code rather than read the story.

We are happy to honour the contest and send you the prize token, but before we do so we wanted to confirm that you do in fact want the prize sent to you. We only have 100 prizes to award and we want to make sure we are sending them to those who wish to have a token of their interaction with this artwork.

Please write us back by JANUARY 11, 2010 to confirm that you would like the prize sent to you. If we do not hear back from you we will assume that you are fine with not receiving the prize.

Thanks so much for your time.
Lord Dunsany comes to mind. Note quite the same, but he was a national chess and pistol-shooting champion in Ireland. Also, he was a really good fantasy author. He's from the pre-Tolkien era, which is somewhat rare and very distinctive.

I hear that chess champions have to have a surprising amount of physical stamina to play chess for so long.
There's a lot of space left over from the dot-com run-up, and it's built for a profile of VC-funded startup that's been on the decline since the bubble burst. A lot of the empty space I see in the south bay is of the old 'big open space in the middle surrounded by offices' model that assumes the big, florescent-lit cubicle farm that used to be the norm.

So the space is there, but it's a good thing for a type of tech company that seems to be getting rarer.
Beacon is a new Android app for Basecamp
That's a fair case, but it's not exactly a rebuttal to what I said either. If you can fit your problem into a multi-process solution (and most web stuff qualifies), then yes, there are many advantages there. But some problems benefit from both CPU parallelism and fast shared memory (think numerics work, graphics, games, data stores...). And this is an area that (due to the GIL contention visualized in the linked article) Python serves poorly.

But don't fool yourself that "MOST" of anything works with any one architecture. It's a big world.

And I assure you I've read Stevens.
I don't see what the big deal is. It's a black and white odd looking image. Even if it were a full color perfectly nude image, we're all going to be subjected to it so won't the novelty wear off? A standing image of your nude body is not pornography. It's a very basic natural image.

Get over yourself. Nobody cares about your security photo shot. If you really can't handle it, you can always choose not to fly.
>she was told installing software yourself, "negates the vendor’s warranty."

Wait, installing software on a laptop negates the vendor's warranty? I thought the whole point of owning a general purpose computer rather than, say, some embedded device was the flexibility to install (and write) whatever programs you want.
> I had some problems updating it for a while...

Oh yeah, I forgot about that -- though I don't know how, it was a serious pain for several months.

Avira's update servers were located in Germany, and would completely fall over every time the continental U.S. decided to update. If your update schedule was done in the middle of the night, it wasn't so bad.

Avira-the-company at first blamed its user's network connections, and then admitted that their update servers were completely overwhelmed. They do seem to have recently fixed this, but only in the last month or so, so we're still waiting to see if it's a long term fix or not.

If this happens to you, you can always run a manual update. Go to http://www.avira.com/en/support/vdf_update.html , download the file, then go to Avira's control panel. I think the menu is labeled "Tools", and "Manual Update" is below that.
Thanks for the research.

It still doesn't seem quite right to me that our government should invest so much money in something that will reduce food production (and, at the same time, make corn too expensive for people to buy for food in some countries - this is already happening in latin america[1], though Mexico has since set an upper limit on tortilla prices[2]) when world hunger is an important issue. The only sources I could find for this were two years old; not sure if things have improved or worsened in the meantime.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/18173/?a=f
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/world/americas/19tortillas...
"It detects big bruises too?" My thoughts on seeing the images.

It's interesting how the people seem to agree it's immoral to take nude "pictures" of people in non-erotic positions, but seem perfectly content with shifting all the immorality of actually looking at the pictures (surely the stuff doing the imaging can't be considered immoral) to one person in "a remote location". (And if it's really one person, who bets they'll just start clicking the "Okay" button after getting bored?)
Do you really know what you really know?
How many startups in San Diego get someone to give them money to pay their rent? How many in the Bay Area?

Any questions?
http://www.tripadvisor.com/restaurants
great article. thank you for posting.
It is really so ridiculous to think that there is some drug such that:

* The drug provides a modest health improvement.

* That health improvement happens to be smaller than the health improvement do to the placebo effect?

I don't know what the typical magnitude of the placebo effect is. If it is substantial, then actually working, actually helpful drugs might be being denied to people. The very mechanisms for the placebo effect he hypothesizes (e.g. people taking care of their health when on a study) certainly seem like they might vary with our culture...
I'm interested/ been heavily exploring:

PCs in the living room (everything from custom linux distro, XBMC Live modified, and windows 7). 140 million HDTVs sold in 2009 alone, hardware is getting cheaper, and content is readily available.

Education space. ie- how do we provide easy access to all the materials that exist out there? My hypothesis: everything we could ever want to learn exists already on the net or can be taught to us by a person we can be connected with in seconds. How do we easily organize it? think more of a directory than a search engine.

Bringing local businesses into the 21st century. Most don't have a website and still use yellow pages. The existing solutions out there suck and are filled with slime.

Email newsletters. Why not create the weblogs inc of newsletters? Look at what thrillist, dailycandy, etc. have done. Create a network of these around a plethora of wide open niches along with building a strong advertising platform for email newsletters (it doesn't exist yet).

Human powered purchasing decisions. How do we help people know what to buy with specific criteria that transcends checkboxes and a search engine? Something human powered is the way to go about it. As geeks, I'm sure you're constantly asked- what phone should I get for price x, features y, etc. Purchases such as these are expensive and spending a few bucks more to get a personalized recommendation would be worth it.
"Protectionists warned that if sugar tariffs were lifted, then the value of slaves working on the sugar plantations would collapse thus causing a general fall in slave values throughout the South."

Sugar tariffs originally supported the slave industry. There's a muckraking point against HFCS that I hadn't heard before. I'm surprised it hasn't been exploited.
Stanford University Course: Introduction to Computational Advertising
The worst thing is that it's entirely possible his contract with the publisher is structured in a way that if he makes the book available as a free download or sells it on Lulu.com, the publisher will unleash their lawyers upon him.
Can you make something that looks at what someone is wearing, and then alters colors, patterns, etc? So I try on a certain shirt type, and then it'll show what I would look like with other shirts of the same cut?

I would also enjoy a gesture controlled UI for a simple computer. Maybe something that can turn sign language into typed English?

I've got no idea how difficult these systems would be to build -- absolutely no experience in the field.
I think it's sort of like asking where's the "good TV" without ads. Margins have gotten so thin on PCs—possibly even negative—so that successful manufacturers are forced to cram them full of bloatware to subsidize the purchase price. Given too equal machines, most people will buy the cheaper one every time regardless of what extra crap it has on it. The only way to reverse this trend would be to actually make that a marketing point like No-Ad products, but I'm very skeptical as to whether enough people would care to make it a successful strategy.
No. The image wouldn't class as indecent.

They need better researchers :-)