skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some good advice (don't be pedantic, don't tell people what they should do), some not so good.

Becoming a geek is more socially acceptable these days. A lot of people are interested in technology. A few girls find shy, geeky guys attractive. (Though perhaps that's just the fashion for thick-framed glasses).

Seriously, being a geek is a lot less shameful than you might think. I can think of multiple people I know who don't seem geeky but have multiple geeky interests. A dope-smoking guy from South London who downloads graphic novels. A rugby-playing privately educated girl who played Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. A weightlifting Australian who enjoys bad fantasy novels.

My personal advice: Be interested in people. Try to make others feel good about themselves, as opposed to making yourself look good. Match your speaking style to the other person.
It does not need to take that long. My mother got her second doctorate at 58 for fun, and it only took 3 years.

IMO, Getting a PHD is fairly close to real work. So, if you aproach it as a job it's not that bad. If you aproach it like your X year of collage you will probably fail.
End of the article (read all of it): yeah sometimes cooking is a pain in the ass, last night I got Chipotle for the kids so I could play an extra game of pool.

The title is sarcastic. It's making fun of the notion that America would think it is too stupid to stick a chicken in the oven for an hour and then put it on a platter.
Ask HN: Please criticize my idea =) OMyBills.com
3D Meninas explained
It's handy, but could still use some polish. For example, when I was looking at the bread ratio the other day I noticed I could only see salt and yeast as weights even though the weights were far too small to measure without science equipment (down to the milligram). I imagine after an update or too it will be even better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ34RDn34Ws
Are We Behind On Innovation That Matters?
Stop, you're killing me!

I live with the worlds biggest Rafa fan. :)

(Actually, I also prefer him to Federer, perhaps because of canonization of St. Rodger.)
One thing that something like this may be useful for is in help at solving a particular problem (e.g. sending POST requests in Python and interpreting the responses).
In college we had a joke:

Those who study engineering learn to ask "how does that work?".
Those who study the sciences learn to ask "why does that work?"
Those who study account learn to ask "how much will that cost?"
Those who study liberal arts learn to ask "do you want fries with that?"

This is a bit self-serving, it having come from an engineering school (where I was a CS student), but there's some truth in there.
blog.ruhlman.com: too stupid to scale?
NASA: Kepler telescope has turned up five 'exoplanets'
How flipping websites is like the stock market
Nice title
Indian VC/PE Investment Drops in 2009
If someone could explain why I was voted down, that would be great. Thanks.
I used it a bit over Chistmas, and I recommend it if you don't own the Ratio book, but the book is more useful than the iPhone app. The Achilles Heel of the concept is that it is so effective that you can mostly memorize it, and a single index card is a decent replacement for the app.

The one caveat in favor of the app is, at least twice I've totally fucked up cookies by spacing out on math when scaling them up.
Since there are no physical impossibilities involved, it's just a question of time until it is possible to completely acquire and simulate an organic brain on a computer model.
I really like this thing, but I don't see why it has to be even this complex. Although since the servo is powered in both directions, the machine will work even when upside down.

A simpler alternative would have a STSP switch with a battery and motor. When you turn the switch on the motor raises the arm and switches itself off, a weight on the arm could lower it. Then again my version wouldn't work in zero gravity.
It's not really cheaper unless you make an effort to be cheaper (by making rice-and-beans style food, or by being careful with portions and leftovers). It definitely tastes better and it's probably healthier.
Healthcare spending and life expectancy: a comparison of graphs
i laughed at this version i found on the related video list: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M
Different context which doesn't apply to my initial post, and worded in a harsh manner to attempt to demonize my idea without presenting an argument against its merits (i.e. "around your neck"), but I'll bite.

Stepping on an individual's property doesn't endanger others' lives needlessly. It's pretty easy to call the police and have a trespasser removed/arrested. Plus, in some states, you can shoot and kill trespassers so long as you've given them fair warning, and can legally carry a firearm. People also have attack dogs, surveillance systems, etc...

You can't shoot and kill someone who's speeding endangering your life. If you call the police about a speeder, they'll usually look for them if they're not too busy. But police departments would quickly be overwhelmed if they had to police "every" speeder on the road. There's simply not enough police. Also, you're defenseless while being in the presence of their illegal driving behavior.

Trespassing, on the other hand, is a rare occurrence. Penalties tend to be harsher than speeding (jail time rather than a fine). It must be much easier to speed than trespass since I don't know anyone I've met in the last year who hasn't sped, yet I can't pick a single trespasser out of any of them. I'd imagine this is the same for most people.

People have little incentive to trespass too. Why do it? To steal something? Murder? Most people don't need to steal things or kill others.

Speeding, on the other hand, has a number of incentives tied to it which provide immediate benefit without significant perceived risk (tickets are rare - habitual speeders may only receive a couple a year | accidents are even rarer). For one, it might save you time^. It also makes people feel good (release of aggression, showing off, feeling of freedom, etc...).

My initial idea isn't one of punishment, but one which increases safety. What's the goal of driving? Going from A to B in a safe, efficient manner. Why wouldn't you want it to be safer, within reason? So you can cut 4 minutes off your 60 minutes of travel time?

^This isn't always the case. Roadways are much like assembly lines. Their slowest points set the pace of everything on the line. Speeders mostly zip from one bottleneck to the next, never really decreasing their net travel time. Time yourself driving the speed limit to work and back one day, and time yourself speeding the next. How much time did you save? A minute or two? None at all?

NOTE: Most vehicles already have governors which limit their top speeds, though aren't used in the manner which I suggest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)
It is quite easy to time for yourself. Try timing it many times with a sig_bytes off by one(only one character changed). Then compare that with the correct one. You'll notice the (small) difference.

There are no tests for it in the keyczar that I could find. I doubt they tested it.

The reasons are many... but this is python, so each operation is much more complicated than C/asm. There are lots of branches, memory usage and cache effects - so code is much more input dependant - especially the integer ops used here. Take a look at this code to see one of the reasons why this python code has variable timing depending on input(like most code does).

x,y = 3,3

id(x) == id(y) # python shares ints in different variables
California to "aggressively seek new federal assistance"
Yeah, I got there.

The problem with his premise that lots of cooking is just as simple as the "convenience" option is that it assumes away the time involved in obtaining the knowledge of how to roast a chicken or bake a cake.
My best advise from a friend who is a successful entrepreneur is that "legal issues that are unimportant to you when you are successful are also unimportant to you when you are unsuccessful." Interestingly, the opposite is also true. For example, vesting of Founder stock is that one issue that is important whether or not you are successful. Ownership needs to be earned and there has to be a vesting schedule even for the Founders' stock. It matters a great deal how you can discharge a partner if they don't perform. This is true if the partnership is a success and interestingly even more true if the partnership is a failure (since you would need to restart the company with different partners). Over-protecting yourself is counter-productive but not protecting yourself adequately is irresponsible ... true for sex, true for startups.
World hottest news: China manufacturing growth boost
I was hoping this story would be about actual snowflakes discovered with unusual structures.
Are there still bills that can't be automatically paid?
maybe there's just an oversupply of human beings in general.
What. We don't pay the bills. We just bug you to pay them yourself.
A New Decade, Thousands of new Opportunities
My answer: I'd implement a real SSO solution, like CAS: http://www.jasig.org/cas -- Open Source, started at Yale, and supported by an amazing team of people.
Recent, well grounded opinions questioning the value of TDD and unit-testing
TDD is declared as no longer being controversial. Is it?
Rest of the end of the article (read all of it): turn oven to 450, salt chicken, stick lemon in hole (note: optional), put chicken in oven, wait one hour, rest off heat 15 minutes. How long did that take you to read? That's the amount of time he assumed away.

(You don't really have to make yourself a drink or go have sex during the hour the chicken is roasting. The chicken will taste better if you are slightly buzzed and freshly laid, but it will still taste pretty good if you aren't.)
1) It's "What's the Big Idea?" and not "Whats the Big Idea?". And there are more spelling/grammar issues on the "About" page.

2) The layout seems a bit off: http://i47.tinypic.com/jj7hpg.jpg

3) Many banks now offer this sort of feature with their online banking. What makes yours better or different?
Simplify - Minimum Viable Product
This problem has already been solved sufficiently. I use Google calendar and its reminder feature.
Anyone got a TL;DR version?

Basically encryption isn't authentication?
Seesmic acquires Ping.fm
I feel like eating something really good but I hate everyday cooking

Me too, but thats why god (or somebody godlike) invented freezers. The secret to eating good food every day if you don't like to spend time cooking is just to make stuff in big batches and preserve it.

Today for instance I spent 30 minutes or so making possibly the most delicious stew man has ever tasted. I made enough for eight servings and am freezing most of it. It would have taken me almost as long just to make one serving.

People make plenty of excuses about why they can't cook but it's rarely true.
Kepler team just announced the discovery of FIVE new planets
The only data-dependent comparison you've got to work with is a comparison between two register-scale fixed-width integers. I think you're doing something wrong.

Perhaps whatever you're doing to create the "off by one" case is disrupting the cache, and you're just seeing the effects of that.
I wonder if hours are the best metric? All of the advisors i've had outside of school have rarely spent a whole hour with me, but still managed to help me a lot. Unless you are a complete beginner to programming, I suspect that a lot of the problems you have are of the "how do I do x in language y" sort. So maybe it could be priced by question, or by problem?
The point someone made up thread, is that unlike the radar, if you are paying attention, you will likely notice them approaching to cut you off which the radar certainly cannot.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart startups neglect to have a big fat link to their company website on their blog.
No... Apple didn't call the Knowledge navigator a research project. This too shouldn't be misrepresented as one.
How many years of driving experience do you have? I only ask because this sounds so much like something a new driver would say.

Your car is not a finely tuned Formula 1 Ferrari. It shouldn't be driven like one.
How much time though ?

It's only a matter of time before we make contact with an alien civilization. But that doesn't mean we need to go and wonder overly long about how we'd dress for the occasion, it is simply too far off for that.

What kind of an upper limit would you put on this kind of thing becoming a reality?
Burj Dubai is the height of architecture, just don't look down
Writing letters about the fact that artistic snowflakes aren't the same as "real" snowflakes is like writing to complain that the symbol of a heart for "I love you <3 " looks nothing like the human heart.

While scientifically correct, he's also a little pedantic.
lots of interesting and new stuff happened in perl5 land in the last 5 years. Major perl5 releases and lots of interesting projects. To name a few (mainly related to the web, which is the area that matters to me):

- Moose http://bit.ly/8J7qJu

- Plack http://bit.ly/4NhAOl

- Tatsumaki http://bit.ly/4zJbWG

- AnyEvent framework http://bit.ly/4ODUiX (with a lot of extensions: XMPP, irc, etc...)

- strawberry Perl on windows

- About day to day usage: NYTProf3 is out http://bit.ly/6drmyT

The community is vibrant as you can tell by looking at github, stackoverflow, perlmonks, http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/ etc

Yann
Webfinger
Ask HN: How many tech IPOs this year?
And will it include Facebook? Will the floodgates finally open this year, or will it take until 2011 to start to see IPO exits?
Hey, you're in Chicago, right? Any time you want to trade a security review for an hour or two explaining automatic market maker algorithms for me, I'm game.
Well... It's not water ice... 8 sides, symmetrical four-by-four at a 45 degree angle, no stems and only borders...

I won't say it's impossible to naturally form it, but I am certain it wouldn't involve clouds of water vapor. Perhaps around proteins or some biological process...
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx
Most of the ostensible value of prepared food is made possible through the false economy of massive public subsidies for the commodity crops that make up the bulk of manufactured food products.
I'd have to make an effort to spend more on groceries than eating out, and I eat zero rice & beans. A diet of nuked frozen vegetables, eggs, butter, yogurt, and various cheap meats/fish costs me I think a few bucks a day. Prep time is usually less than ten minutes.
Remember when Steve Jobs proudly introduced the iPhone and said "works like magic…and boy have we patented it"?

Apple plays very nasty on the IP front, so I can't muster any kind of sympathy for them.
Flipping websites could be a similar experience to flipping houses: fun and profitable while the market is rising, but dangerous and unprofitable while the market sinks. Add a little leverage in there and you have potential for huge ups and downs.
If the server can handle keys that are signed by either system FOO or system BAR, and the keys themselves don’t provide any clue about how they were signed, the server can just try to verify the signature using FOO and, if that system doesn’t return a “signature valid” response, fall back to BAR.

Obviously if you’re permitting ten different signature-verification algorithms then this technique starts putting a significant load on the server, but if your protocol allows for ten different signature-verification algorithms, then you have bigger problems, right?
How To Run A Meeting Like Google
The problem with most blogs is they don't use static page caching. I'm willing to bet this person didn't.
Is washing dishes by hand really that hard?
Really cool effect that it changes the map from light to dark depending on the time of day where you're looking.
It's not a tax, and it's not new. It has its basis in common law that goes back nearly a millenium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat. Also, DC is not the only state that follows this doctrine.
All I saw initially was the red input box. I initially skipped completely over the error message, thinking it was an ad. Only after being thoroughly confused for a minute did I notice it.
I'd happily solve/tutor a one-off problem for 2 hours at a lower fixed price ($100-200), but as much as I like the idea of one-off tutor sessions, I can't get behind a minimum wage rate.

At my usual $150 hour rate, it would take 17 hours on WageMachine to match one hour of work. I could just as easily spend those 17 hours finding that one hour of work (and it wouldn't be just one hour).

[Edit] Thinking about it more, I think your idea is very good, but lacks any real traction without being able to genuinely pay real experts -- I don't mean "highly talented, industrious, college educated, English speaking, and lives in the United States", but rather, someone who has at least a decade of work experience, is near the forefront of their field, and would like to invest some time in assisting, teaching, solving other people's once-off issues.

One of the primary reasons I don't participate in StackOverflow is that the vast majority of questions are simply boring. For $150, nobody is going to ask a boring question (and if they do, at least they're paying market rate for the answer).
Which has absolutely nothing to do with your monthly food budget.
A mouse for the iPhoine -- why doesn't Apple support hardhack developers?
Again, I read it. Again, I am the sort of person who would read an article about how to roast a chicken.

Time spent reading his roast chicken recipe: 10 seconds

Time spent reading cookbooks/articles/magazines/blogs so that I knew that roasting a chicken is easy and good and so that I knew that Ruhlman's blog or book might be a good place to find out how to do it: 8 years

Like the apocryphal story about the itemized index: http://www.ruqus.com/the-red-x
A hundred years, at most. The problem is not the computers to run the simulation, but capturing enough of the state of an organic brain to run a consistent simulation. That is the tricky part.

The brains we simulate today are currently running on clusters of machines designed for word processing. If and when we decide to take brain simulation seriously, we will probably do so on machines designed for that purpose.
A package of chicken thighs (how much cheaper do you want to go?) is still $2/person/meal, and that assumes that you're careful about leftovers/trim.
"Again, people shouldn’t make decisions based on past investments."

This works for poker, but doesn't really scale to things like a college education. I've invested two years into a B.S. in CS, took off a year, and now I'm back at it. And yes, the decision to go back is based on my past investment.

I suppose I just don't understand parts of this article. What's the point on giving advice if you just say "Always make the best decisions". Be perfect and then you'll.....be perfect?
It seems that auctomatic is just the app you are looking for.

I'd LOVE something like this for Craigslist!!
A good tip to improve around the margins, but fixing your main product/service needs to come first before you devote time to details like this. This tip will increase your revenue 5% once; an improved product might increase it 5% per month.

In other words: prioritize.
They are still talking about dynamic compression there. The music went through a different mastering process for the CD than for the game, and the game version was left with more dynamic range. His use of the phrase "digital domain compression" is misleading here, as it refers to dynamic compression performed in the digital domain.
> Everybody else is paying the mobster, why don't you ?

The patent system is set up so that innovators (like Nokia) share their research in exchange for a limited time monopoly on the fruits of that research. You can argue that the system is fucked up, but if Nokia hadn't been promised that monopoly, they probably wouldn't have shared all that research. They did, and now companies like apple can make phones with no need to do basic research, instead letting them concentrate on building UI's and such. This is how it works, and this is how every other phone manufacturer in the world is comfortable with it working.

> If Nokia had a leg to stand on they would have sued apple the day they first released the iphone.

Not only do they have a leg to stand on, they have successfully defended many of the patents in question in court in previous cases. And why didn't they sue earlier? I'd be ready to bet you a lot of money they have been in talks with apple all this time trying to make a deal without having to resort to a legal battle.

> I can't wait until we reach the 'lawyer event horizon' when progress outside of open sourced hardware and software grinds to a messy halt because all the time and money is taken up with lawsuits.

Or then, people who clearly use other people's research to build stuff could pay for it without wasting time taking stuff to court like every other phone manufacturer does.

> The phone was an invention worth patenting, the cell phone is variation on a theme, and the research that went in to it was largely funded by the public.

The cell phone was not worth patenting? Please. There is ridiculously lot of manhours spent in thousands of little details that had to be worked out so that lots of people can be served over limited radio channels in a noisy environments. And, while it's true there was a lot public funding early on, there were also many private companies spending a lot of money getting basic research done, including, but not limited to, Ericsson and Nokia.

> LONG before Nokia got in on the act cell phones were a reality, it's true that the current crop is a serious improvement over what was available at the time but we're talking incremental improvements here.

Actually, Nokia has been in mobile telephony since NMT, and when things got digital they were on the leading edge -- for example, the first ever commercial GSM call was made on a Nokia phone in 1991.

> In the name of interoperability that stuff got standardized, after that point you compete in the marketplace, patents should get tossed out.

Or, people could agree on fair terms to licence each others patents like the cell phone manufacturers decided. Nokia pays other people for using their patents.

> Otherwise patents become a measure to control the competition instead of a device to foster innovation.

When you refuse to license them for reasonable terms, that's exactly what happens. Good thing that's not what Nokia is doing.
Basically you shouldn't use a library which provides AES-support - you should use a library which provides encryption/authentication/crypo-support.
Where do you think the money to pay for those subsidies comes from? (Note: the response "my grandchildren" is technically correct but misses the point.)
Search Engine Optimization Toolkit
Wish I had this for iPhone and/or Android, here's my vote to make it happen.
Meaning there is a digital domain and compression can be performed there. It is still ambiguous as to what kind of compression is being described. I agree this was intended to describe dynamic compression.
But understandable, since seeing the ad in Nature was probably the last straw.

I wonder how many manifestos are the result of someone snapping?
I don't like the term 'flipping'. A website is more than just a bunch of bits, it is usually associated with a community of users and you don't just 'flip' the investment that 100's if not not 100's of thousands have made in you.

You need to take in to account the party that receives what you've created and you have to make sure that that party has your users best interests at heart. If not you'll end up with some money in your pocket but a tarnished reputation.

And if you buy websites purely speculative you have to ask yourself if there isn't a market better suited to that kind of behaviour.
Tell HN: Check out my app, RunMeLater, Web Service for CRON Jobs/Scheduled Tasks