skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once stayed in the parking area of a service station while awaiting repairs. Sometimes it's just a case of asking nicely.
It's impressive that this is cutting the numbers by half or so. If this is validated, I hope CouchDB integrates it to make the whole system much faster.
Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees
Sorry, I didn't get something... what's the objective of parking on top of the piece of wood?
Would the Nook count?
"A Piece of Blarney Stone" 10 ways to empower your communication
What's the point of this, exactly? You get Javascript interpreters that Erlang can talk to. Is the point simply to have a more widely known language as the 'scripting language' for the system? Because otherwise it would just make more sense to not bother, or perhaps even to use something like node.js directly and cut out the Erlang middle-man. But I admittedly know little about the situation, so perhaps someone can shed more light on it.
You know a shoelace knot is good when you decide to have kids specifically to increase the knot's chance of survival.
Does anyone think that a viable business exists here? Happy to explore it with people via email.
You need to get your rig level in order for the propane fridge to work. They work by a gravity feed of the material inside. Bascially, a burner heats up the liquid, which forms into a gas, and then condenses and runs down an intricate series of tubes back to the bottom, absorbing heat as it does so. If your rig is not completely level, then the liquid does not run down evenly, and you will burn out your fridge. Then your beer goes warm and the fun has definitely gone away.

Modern RV's have hydraulic/electric 'feet' that extend down and both stablise and level out the rig. These take time to put up and down and are very obvious when the are extended. If you just park on a couple of bits of wood, it's possible to get it level enough for the fridge to work OK. It doesn't look as obviously 'parked' to the casual passerby. And if you need to make a speedy getaway (for whatever reason, be it the law or unwanted company) you can just start up and drive off. That's what the wood is for.
I'd be interested in working on it. I think it'd be low cost to get it up and going; even if it doesn't work, you're out a few hundred bucks in dev units and a few weeks' work. The biggest problem, IMO, is finding a vendor that will dropship pre-flashed units to customers. If you can find that, the rest is cake. It's considerably more expensive if you have to have the units shipped to some central facility for flashing before they hit the doorstep.
Communix OS and virtualization
Paul Romer has a possible fix for the problem of bad governance. It seems to have worked out OK for China:

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
That's the new middle class.

The ones who thought they are the middle class have to move one step down.
Op-Ed Columnist - Is China an Enron? (Part 2)
The blurring distinction between graphic design and software development
Ah, yes... thanks.

Also, how living on a RV impacts "Don't drink and drive" ? :)
Where Does Technology Stand In Your Business?
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India, a case of bad governance
Start building doable things, and start now. The tricky part is not to find interesting ideas but to find the time to implement these.
China’s Avatar Showing Restrictions Cause a Stir
I'm not particularly enamored of Amazon's international deployment for anything. In Europe, for instance, they only have stores for Germany, France, and the UK, and each of those sites is available only in that language. So if you're elsewhere, say Spain, or Italy or Slovenia or something, I guess you just try and get by with whatever language you know, which is most likely English. But there's something lame about them not just simply shipping from the place most likely to get you your products in a timely manner, as they do in the US. In other words... what they have works, it's just fiddly and not very pleasant to use.

OTOH, as a company they seem a lot less evil than Paypal, so I'll be rooting for them.
Ask HN: Does anyone have ideas for an independent study?
I've decided to take an independent study this semester, and I'm looking for something research worthy that I can conceivably build in a semester. The professor I've teamed up with focuses on pedagogy and reliable systems, so I'd prefer to do something in those areas.

I've previously tried to set up classes in the high school I graduated from to teach interested students how to program/build websites/etc., but it seems my old high school is uninterested in educating their students for free (go figure). I suppose with connections in the university, I could probably do this more easily, so I haven't ruled out trying to figure out how to get high school students interesting in CS. I have a particular draw to this because if it were not for a particularly good teacher in high school, I would've never discovered my passion for CS.

I'm a web developer by day, so doing something with the web is also of interest to me. One idea I had kicking around was to build an automatic failover to EC2 for sites not hosted on EC2.

If anyone has any other ideas or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.
I imagine with a bit of planning of what I'll be working on I could probably download the vast majority of docs and manuals I need in advance. Sure it wouldn't be 100% coverage, but good enough to keep me hacking. Then every time I completely hit a wall I'd make a note of what I need and move on to some other part of my project. Next time I have internet I'll look up everything on my list and repeat.
Google Ads Tout its Stance on China
Another reason is that rich countries usually benefit from poor countries staying poor, so the try to keep them that way
Oh boy... Along with the launch and repair facilities, this would be the dream gift for an aspiring supervillain.

My birthday is March 3rd ;-)

I wonder if they would bundle some spare SSMEs for the same price.
Actually I went to the Syntax party in Melbourne last October. You can see the retro invitation in the article (number 5).

I met some cool Sydney based sceners and we had beer and food at my place a couple of days ago. We've just formed a new group.

We'll be doing PC based demos and c64 demos.

In the scene in the late 80's for a couple of years, then lurking for a lot of years... and now back in.
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A Medical Miracle Is Ready to Run Past Another Milepost
Human population has mostly been ~50,000
On top of the passengers and crew not permitting another hijack, there's also the sadly-new lock on the cabin door.
Ask HN: Why was a comment I made killed?
The comment was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063863

I wrote:

----

From what I can tell there is no fee to send or receive payments with a limit capped at $500/month. Once a CC and bank account is verified, the limit could be either raised or removed at Amazon's discretion. A business account carries charges. Details are here: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees

The user agreement says that the difference between a personal account and a business account is that personal accounts may not receive credit card payments.

----

I would not have known it was killed but for an email I received which I first regarded as suspicious, alerting me to the fact and telling me "It will probably look fine for you, but only other logged-in users with [showdead] turned on will see it. Try making another comment and see if it shows up when logged-out. If it got killed, you've been hellbanned." The user goes on to tell me that s/he sends out a few of these type of emails a month to people who get banned capriciously, but that my case is completely ridiculous.

I can only guess that perhaps there is some kind of filter on HN that picked up on something in my comment?
If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online
10 Fresh & Insanely Creative Blogs – the January Edition
I've used a Verizon 3G card; worked well in New York and Tampa.
This is the most ridiculous stuff I have ever heard. We Asian loves the west, especially American. I have never heard anyone hates the west like you've mentioned. Bottom line, China wants to be the center of the universe. They would do anything to score a point. They don't have systematically governance. That is why I call them a gang instead.

If they go to great length just to censure some minor stuff, what do you think they would not do?
Thanks for the feedback, man. I really appreciate it. I'm really not a fan of openID, however. I think it's too big of a pain in the ass for non-geeks. I'll have to look at doing something with FB connect, though. I just started noodling around their api's this past week.

And,thanks for the kudos on the design. I've been tweaking it quite a bit the past month. I've found the summaries useful as well. I have a hunch that one of the reasons that Digg has outpaced Reddit for quite some time, is that Google has more text to index with Digg's summaries, and is therefore more Google friendly and gets more organic search traffic. We'll see how that decision pans out.
Simplicity Wins in the Top 25 (iPhone App Store)
Does it have WiFi like the iPod touch does?
Setting Up ProFTPd + TLS On Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
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For over 50 years, Sandlin Custom Homes has been building quality into all of our homes in the Dallas area.
Yes, the article only has one sign (hubris), spelled out repetitively in 19 numbered paragraphs.
Unfortunately, patent attorneys are required to write patents in understandable English. This is what 'understandable English' has turned into after decades of legal precedent on what that means.

For example, you will see numbers written out longhand in patents - eg, 'two hundred and fifty six', because that is supposed to be more understandable than 256.
Any idea what is the price of living on a RV vs sleeping on cheap motels?
I was going to post my endorsement in this thread, but it would have basically been a copy and paste of this one.. Just with capital letters.

I use the quick knot for my every day shoes with cloth laces, and the secure knot with boots and difficult laces.

Ian is great.
Not all problems can be solved by competition. This specific one could be best solved by a strong medical association, backed by strong laws, enforcing ethical behavior.
The problem is that adding structure to the default data means specialized APIs to access them. This is why a generic, object oriented data store would be very complex to maintain.

While fundamentally necessary, files are not the answer to everything. There are designs such as file attributes to cater for file metadata. I suggest reading on ReiserFS ideas.

Filesystems have to be there though. They are complex and have done a good job at hiding the complexity such that people like the original poster may even start to think they're unnecessary.
Renault Ersatzteile
It's not always fun to have a competent foreign power administrating your country...
From the sound of it they will only sell to federal and state government organisations - which makes me wonder whether they would achieve a higher price if they sold it to anyone willing to bid, no questions asked. (Just put the damn thing on ebay?)
stick with measurable advantages. Nobody rational expects a salesman to tell the truth, so when you have a measurable advantage, the salesguy has got to work extra hard to make the sale.

If you are charging $20 for something that is measurably quite similar to what your competitor charges $70 for, well, they have to do a lot of talking to close the sale, while you are in a pretty good position just slapping the price and how you are measurably similar to the competition on your webpage.

Having a liberal money-back guarantee (and following through with it; people talk.) also helps overcome credibility gaps.

I think Paul Graham wrote something about how 'you might be able to out-hack oracle, but there is no way you can out-sell oracle' or something like that. I'm probably misquoting him. but the idea is that large companies have huge sales advantages that you simply can not touch. your product needs to be a better enough value that it doesn't matter that the competition has better sales than you do.

at prgmr.com, I focus on picking up the 'cheap' customers- I don't just mean people who don't want to pay, I mean people who don't cost as much to support. Don't be afraid to loose high-effort customers to your competition. (as much as possible, do so gracefully.)
BillG joins Twitter
Seat Ersatzteile
Seat Ersatzteile,Seat Zündkerzen,Seat Motor,Seat Anlasser,Seat Dichtungen,Seat Lautsprecher,Seat Leuchtmittel
Kudos for actually making the effort to take the measurements. Thank you
I too thought you could have cheap reliable nationwide 1mbit connection with 3G these days...
The taming of the newbie - a comedy on IRC
What does your (and the GP's) definition of "competent" mean, "imperialistic"? Were the native Americans less competent because they weren't always trying to expand and conquer? Looking at today's rat race, I don't think it's conclusive that we did a better job than they would have. Sure, it seems likely that we ended up with better medicine than they would have had by now, but the rest of it?

"I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines."

This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?
Would you like a data centre with that server? Package deals - good or bad?
I don't think we know enough about quantum mechanics. My understanding is that right now we model it as random behavior, but we have no real reason to believe its random rather than subject to some other factors that we can't/don't yet measure. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Sifteo meets world
Living 365 days a year in a mobile home (caravan) in the UK is illegal, because the occupier must be registered to pay council tax in a local authority, for which caravans do not apply.

Perhaps this is why the UK is floundering in the technology/start-up field?
Cross-Site HTTP Requests Now Supported in Firefox
try reading achebe - one of his books (it's in the african trilogy collection) describes quite well, if i remember correctly, how the colonial system created this problem in the first place.

or just read this article again and consider how close it is to living under foreign rule - colonialism replaced whatever working, local solutions existed with a system that meant that the logical thing to do was screw over others. colonialism and dictators are very similar.

you can argue that things only collapsed terribly when the colonists left, but that ignores the fact that it would have been so much better if they had never been there...
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I think there's a good argument for that approach being applied to the description of the patent. That's the part that a person skilled in the art should be able to use to make the invention.

However, it's not so applicable to the claims of the patent. This part is for lawyers to use to determine the exact extent of the legal protection conferred by the patent. The description is of just one embodiment of the invention; it is natural that slight variations from that embodiment should also be covered - but exactly how much variation is covered? How general (or how abstract) is the coverage? Especially when you consider that the given embodiment isn't necessarily the "center" of the inventions - it is not the embodiment, just an embodiment. This extent is difficult to specify, and special language is needed.

To use jordyhoyt's analogy, it would be like expecting Erlang to be readable by a layman. Of course, we can do better. The point is that it's hard to serve many masters.
<<<linear algebra library>>> finds several good ones with Google.

[EDITED to add: That's if what you want is specifically linear algebra. <<<numerical library>>> does pretty well if your needs are more general.]
You need to give us a video tour of the inside too, like Tynan.

I guess you won't be offering your apartment for future YC interviewees on airbnb anymore :-P
You mean a train station? Yes I would.

Get on L'Eurostar at StP and you'll get your bag X-rayed. Get off at GdN and there are soldiers with assault rifles guarding the place.

The least-hassle way to cross a border is usually by sea. It'll just take much longer.
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A brother-and-law and his wife retired some years ago, and now spend several months every year RVing. He mentioned a book popular among RVers called _The Next Exit_. (When first mentioned to him by an RVer who was a good deal older, he thought it dealt with end-of-life issues; it doesn't.) You might find it useful. They also travel with a motorcycle, to be able to park the RV for a few days and take side trips.
Here in the US, the land of the TSA, I've taken trains both domestically and internationally (Canada) and never been x-rayed, metal detected, told to remove my shoes, or seen anyone with a gun other than the occasional cop. Even the border crossings are super easy when you're on a train.
What's the mechanism there? How do they benefit? Exploitation is rather impossible these days, rich countries cannot anymore just waltz into any country they want and dictate the terms. If they are doing business with some poor country that usually leads to progress, not exploitation. It might very well be that rich countries want to use poor countries for cheap labor and - by keeping them poor - preserve that source of cheap labor. But it might also very well be that those two wishes are one too many. Maybe you can have only one at a time.
Clojure 1.1 - And beyond
WhiteHouse.gov: Anywhere
Those shootouts are usually poorly planned suicide/attention attempts. With a couple of trained guys with good weapons, armor and tactics it would be pretty easy to rack up a serious death toll in a crowded mall.

A few dynamite and ball bearing bombs dropped in trash cans in the food court could probably get you into the hundreds pretty quick.
The only thing I can think of is that it got flagged by several users for some reason (though what that might be I cant imagine). I cant see how an editor would kill it.

Or. Potentially a spam filter caught it; that would explain the behaviour (of appearing to you but not to others)
Why not design an information system for individual/small group tutoring scheduling, that collects small groups of students having trouble with some subject and matches them with someone interested in tutoring them? This could work for both high school interest groups (that needn't be bound to the classes already defined by the school) and university (especially first-year students getting up to speed).
I think Yahoo knows it can't compete with Google in search results, so why creating a page where the only thing you can do is experience crappy search results and nothing else?

At least this way they're attracting a niche of people who do like a more portal like search engine. And in some places that niche is the majority of the population, like in Japan, where Yahoo seems to be very successful.

If the users just want a search box they have http://search.yahoo.com/. I don't know if they can customize that do be the default.

So the thing "Yahoo don't quite get it" doesn't seem right to me.
My argument is at atomic level, Heisenberg principle comes into picture and somehow stochastic nature is inbuilt into it.

Your argument applies more to CPUs than brains.

Like with neurons, transistors in a modern CPU signal each other with pulses of charged particles. In both cases, the motion of those messenger particles is stochastic; it is primarily determined by diffusion due to concentration gradients (with transistors, the E-field as as important, but not more). Thermal electrons move a lot faster than small organic molecules, though, so there is correspondingly more quantum uncertainty about their position.

So assuming neurons are what we think with, human thoughts are at least as deterministic as computer calculations.
Why are you asking the community this question?
Why not just ask an admin like you would on any other forum or irc network?
Why do people think that this is something other HNers need to know about?

[edit: this is a genuine question to establish a motive that might stop me flagging this and other content, this post is worthless clutter for all I can see]

[edit2: anyone care to explain their downvotes?]
Why don't they just tilt the fridge?
That's obvious nonsense. Look what Japan, China and India have done for the world. First cheap fast-growing investments producing low cost goods (aka sweatshops), then a rich economy that can do its own investing. Even countries that get a smaller slice of the pie now still have cause to be glad that the whole pie is larger.
Here's the source of the blog post, from the company forum:

http://www.collectorz.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15...
Tell HN: I've made Quotty.com for quoting articles
This is my weekend project, which I'd like to share.

I've noticed how often links on HN get comments, that summarize the article, so that others don't waste their time. In fact, I always read comments first and look for such short summaries. So, I thought it'd be nice to have a place, where you can store a couple of sentences from the original article which best characterize it and then share a short link to this quote on twitter or elsewhere, instead of a direct link to the long original article.

quotty.com
clickable: http://quotty.com
There was a link to amazon.com, so the most sensible explanation would be spam filter. Let me try that now:

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees
I would applaud any effort to make comment-killing and user-banning a more transparent process on HN. You don't know it happens when it happens, it's often for a shaky reason, and there is no place to discuss it other than emailing PG (which just seems wasteful, a feeling that was reinforced by PG's very curt tone throughout).

When seeking assistance for a hellban of my very own, I was emailed by several helpful HN power users, all giving basically the same opinion -- "The HN moderation is capricious and deaf", in one user's words. That's an uncomfortable assessment from regular site contributors.
How so? I'm not convinced the leaders of rich countries think much beyond their next re-election, and whilst there may be some benefit to having cheap labour, you need a reasonable infrastructure in place to take advantage of that. You can't run a factory if you don't have a reliable power supply, for example.
I'm looking for the same thing, except I don't expect to find one.

I'm just wondering how practical using a regular android phone without a sim card is.

Are there parts of the phone that just don't work over WiFi (i.e. work only over a cell connection)?

Are there unexpected things that won't work without a data connection of some kind? (Excluding the obvious of course.)
I agree. I've been using this knot for a few years now and like it a lot. It's really fun to amaze my young cousins at how quickly this knot can be tied.
This is something other HNers need to know about. The policy and process around killing comments is utterly mysterious and apparently capricious. As a community, we should have a clear understanding of:

a) What comments will be killed; and

b) What process will be followed to determine whether a comment is killed.

Sorry, but security through obscurity is no excuse for not making this stuff transparent.