skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey ambiate,

I think you were one of the first few hundred USB NerdKit customers, before we added the 2N7000 MOSFETs to the mix. Those would probably make your life easier in terms of controlling a bunch of of LEDs at once just for pure power handling reasons. (Won't dive into this here -- ask on our forums for more info.) If you haven't logged in to our site recently, then be aware that we have lots of customers playing with IR at the moment, for example:

a custom IR TX/RX remote control (two separate microcontrollers) plus accelerometer at http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/458/

a intervalometer, sending commands to a Nikon or Canon camera via IR remote protocol at http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/338/

as well as lots of customers getting into our recently-released LED Array Kit and controlling lots of LEDs (although where individual control is favored over total brightness).

Mike (co-founder, NerdKits)
Military may Crowsource Haiti Relief
Find Your Ideal Business in 5 Simple Steps
Have you always dreamed of owning your own home business but never been able to figure out exactly what business it is? Does that innovative idea of yours often look so near–and yet so far? You’re not alone.
Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White
I'm stuck in Gaza, can you get me through?
Neuroscientists Say Brain Scans Can Spot PTSD
Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill
... "the director of graduate admissions, a software engineer, told me he had burned some political capital to get me admitted despite my crappy GPA, that he had a lot riding on my success, that he'd gambled on me because of my work experience, and that I'd better not let him down. (That was the last time I ever talked to him. A month later, I realized I didn't want to do software engineering.)"

Wow, and you're proud of that?
The Original Lambda Papers by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman
I agree with everything you have said. My comment may have been a manifestation of my fear that HN is becoming increasing politicized with dynamics that favor arguments over conversations.

However, you may be -- and I believe you are -- correct regarding the utility of story. Each time this topic is explored, it tends to move to a slightly different region of the conversational search space: new data, new movements, new ideas. My comment was not without merit; however, it was misplaced.

(The weak irony is that, as someone who thinks the IPCC does "bad science" (TM), I found this story self-gratifying.)
‘Piracy Isn’t Killing Music’ Radiohead’s Guitarist Says
HN Meetup Boulder?
Are there enough folks from HN in the Boulder/Denver area to try a HN meetup? Let me know in the comments if you would be interested and I can try and put something together.
I tend to drop windows ports of a bunch of unix command line utils somewhere in my PATH

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
I still file on paper. Why? Because it costs me a first-class postage stamp. E-filing has a fee of something like $15.
"This needs the ability to save to a flash drive and it would be golden"

As I understand it, this isn't possible; The board isn't 'displaying' anything, the stylus just presses on the crystal and changes the state of the crystal. The only time electricity is involved in the panel, is when you press the 'erase' button, which uses a single refresh of all the cells.

Since the 'state' is only in the LCD itself, adding on a method of saving the drawing/doodle, would require a lot more electronics, and cost, than there is. Probably magnitudes more.
Why do you guys work with a GPA system? Why not use percentages?

What is a 4.0 GPA in percentage?
The huge variance in form factors makes GUI apps a little hard to test effectively.

The time to market aspect of Android makes it desirable, but the fact that there are 213049283 free versions of everything means it is relatively hard to sell your app there comparably still.
10 Common CSS Browser Compatibility Issues/Bugs You Must Know
Everyone had some valid points and we're all a lot better for the discussion. But don't become another Mark Cuban. :)
Industries Venture Capitalists are now Avoiding
> But they do have one point: Why do we care so much about Chinese censorship, as long as it is only affecting people within China?

Because as shown quite colorfully in the recent attacks on Google and others, it doesn't only affect people within China. I believe Martin Luther King said it best when he said "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...
R-Tree Madness
Bumptop: First on Windows, now on Mac
Much inadvertent wisdom in this: If you're a student, you will (usually) learn more from trying to solve a problem and failing than by reading the answer.
I agree. I think HN is moving towards people talking past each other and pointless posturing, A lot of it, no doubt, is people consuming political material from other media and then sort of regurgitating it here. That's great if you can barf up more than just an arguing talking head. It's not so cool if you all have is rancor and mindless talking points.

I find that I have to be the most careful about the stories I agree with. That's when the critical thinking shields are down and bad stuff slips through.

As a defense to the HN-is-going-to-heck problem? I just don't read HN comments that much any more. I use my aggregation site to view all major tech sites and browse stories from there (shameless plug: http://project-management-methodologies.net/)

HN is still a great place to hang out with like-minded technical guys working on startups. It's just moved from a small coffee house to a large stadium, and the crowd has changed from people wanting to make things people like to a smorgasbord of folks in all kinds of situations. It's a lot noisier and the chit-chat isn't as focused as it used to be. I still like it, but I find the downside of engaging in idle non-focused chatter to be bigger than the upside of learning something that can make a difference in the world.

Didn't used to be that way, sadly
JavaScript BDD framework in less than 200 lines
"What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it."

Right..so if e-commerce businesses just hired smart people to build algorithms and hope for viral effects they will rank high. You make it sound so easy.. unfortunately I would say this is unrealistic in most cases. In a realistic world you have to admit that it is very hard for businesses in saturated markets to just add "interesting content". Having a budget for online marketing, including seo, adds measurable ways to achieve sales. Spending a fortune on technology might be out of proportion compared to your business size. Having a sale, good customer service, coupon codes will give the same kind of buzz in the blog scene around your product. It is still part of the puzzle and you need more than one part to solve the puzzle.

"I don't think you get how this works."

Then tell me whats wrong with my statement about the appstore. Just telling someone he doesn't get it has no added value. You can make your statement more useful by, for example, adding some links to blog posts from people who write about the process of gaining a steady income stream using interesting content.

edit: oops deleted the original post, had to repost it :/
Dr Ken Kamler Remembers 1996 Everest Disaster
If you want to make it even easier, set up a payee in your online banking (most banks will have either Cumbernauld or the other UK tax office - forget its name - built in) and just send it through that :-) (Or even set up a direct debit, which I believe they allow now.)
A Brief History of ClarisWorks from birth to AppleWorks
I pay my rent with check. That's the only way my landlord wants it (no cash, or any electronic way). I've seen (though rare) people paying with cash in stores (I live in LA).
Do you have references concerning this ?
I wish Dan Brown novels were 1% as complex as the US Tax Code. At least then they would've been interresting...
There are more types of websites than just content based websites and sometimes websites who have to compete for the exact same content. The one who understands internet marketing the best will have better rankings than the ones that don't. A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. Also the "interesting content" might distract people from what they have to do, order tickets. People have to realize that internet marketing is here to stay and it is something you have to think about.

Also your statement about spending time on interesting content gives your the highest ROI is not true. Hollywood and the game industry prove from time to time that they can create hypes and market B quality productions and still make tons of money. This also counts on the internet. Content is evaluated by machines (Google, Bing etc) who determine if it is interesting or not. Doing A/B testing to test which landing page works best is better time spent than spending your time hiring people to create interesting content. Just changing your button can increase sales by over 100%.

Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.
I don't know who gave him that awful code for checking array membership in perl, but you can just do:

grep { $_ == VALUE } @array

and evaluate that in a scalar context. The intent of this is pretty clear if you know what "grep" does.
A Strategy Guide to MyTown (from a 'billionaire')
"Population ponzi" ? I suppose the welfare state could be described that way.

People necessarily produce more than they consume in order to survive. Almost all people produce wealth greater than that required for bare survival. Population growth necessarily means higher wealth and standard of living for everyone. Welfare schemes (for rich and poor) turn this on its head. Thus population becomes a problem, because a greater and greater portion of the people are producing nothing.
Investment 6 (Possible 12) Bedroom Two-Unit Duplex NW Canton
It's worth emphasizing that "where people are informed about a product" is particularly critical for us when the product is a "new thing" and we have to educate people about what it is and why they need it.

E.g. when I started in document imaging in 1991 it was just moving from the mainframe to PC domain and our salesmen spent a lot of time teaching potential customers. Nowadays if you buy a Windows PC and an all-in-one printer/fax/scanner you get it all for free.
Patrick, incredibly spot-on and valuable, as always. Thanks.

In my experience with ViEmu and Codekana, recommendations by highly respected bloggers are what help sales the most. In most areas, there already is a "network of trust" out there, and getting in through someone up in the food chain can make a great difference.

I do think some presence in Reddit, Hacker News, etc... are helpful in order to establish credentials and a solid background from which to do more specific actions.
Another implementation of the Burrows-Wheeler transform is BWA, by the same folks who made Maq. Both Bowtie and BWA can output SAM and/or BAM (binary SAM), which is the file format used by the 1000 Genomes project and the (highly useful) GATK.
How are the attacks on google a result of censorship?
Google’s Nexus One muzzles the foul-mouthed
As old as good: One Time Passwords
Pure, extensible exceptions and self-returning functions
...be passing the burden onto others without solving much.

The burden of what? Deciding what video content is acceptable? Like I said before, that should not be Mozilla's role, but it's the one they've taken on.

they wouldn't be aware of patent issues and wouldn't care

Restricting them to Theora doesn't change this, as sites will continue to deliver h.264 through Flash to user agents that don't support it natively. I contend that Mozilla's approach to "educating" users about these issues is a bad one that fails to educate.

there are also big websites using theora such as dailymotion or wikipedia

DailyMotion also uses h.264 for every other platform. Wikipedia's reasons for using Ogg are very specific to Wikipedia's aims. Neither of these constitute a good reason to artificially restrict users to only Theora.

But there is a huge differene between a html tag and a plug-in.

Yes...and? What's your point?
Do dating sites deliver what they promise? (video)
I find for me if I have a more interesting class that one that I don't really like or just don't get initially I won't go to.

Last year we also had a group project which you could end up spending near unlimited time on, got a little unhealthy but I'd pretty much written up the whole core of it and was pretty happy with it so I kept pouring all my time into it. Also had an operating systems (mainly concurrency/compilers/memory management) which I loved and really aced. Also had a class on probability which was the first time I've had probability taken past the basic stuff you learn in general maths. Didn't get it well at first so it got next to none of my attention, didn't end up doing the homeworks which contributed to the end mark, crammed for it but still just failed. Hoping I find it more interesting this year.
If you look at the historical data, the US, when it geared up for war, had an industrial base that beat everyone else in the world without the bombing. The lack of ability to get the industrial base was kinda the reason Japan was going on the conquering kick. Jeep carrier is a pretty good starting point for research.
Do you know how comscore does this? Just using statistics?
I also know plenty of people who are skipping because they either have no idea what they want to are to lazy to achieve what they want.

College is such an easy life if you don't need to work to much to support yourself, many are happy just staying where they are and are fairly unconcerned about failing things.
good article, never noticed the the scraped content part
Project Tuva (Bill Gates's new Project - Feynman lectures)
Requires Silverlight 2 (Works on Safari/Mac OS X 10.6, but some of my folks were unable to get it on Linux).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073473
It's a nice idea but it's not compatible with our political landscape. It doesn't help anyone right this second. The laid off auto worker or construction worker probably aren't top candidates for a tech startup staff. Voters want easy answers and instant gratification. In their minds we should have been able to create 10 million jobs last year and fix all of our problems while cutting taxes and reducing the deficit. Why? Because they've been sold on decades of political non-sense from both parties. Easy answers, quick fixes, idealogical extremes. Politically the Republicans claim to support small business but they aren't too keen on giving anyone assistance in the form of government handouts. If the Democrats try it they'll be called communists and the American people, predictably enough, will be scared and oppose it. Maybe the Democrats would do it but it will be so watered down it doesn't actually work as intended so it looks like a gigantic, expensive, failure. I think this country has become so crippled by political fear and hatred that we just don't have the capacity to govern ourselves anymore via a democratic system.
I don't think that point was to infer one led to the other, but rather that DRM didn't lead to rampant piracy that demolished sales (as many predicted would happen).
I hate this, the other example is using lectures a good 10 years old that they inherited from a previous lecturer. Lectures from a book are terrible, they present a little bit of everything and nothing really substantial because there just a big book condensed down into some key sentances.

The lectures who have taken the time to write their own lectures always have more interesting lectures worth going to.
What Does Twitter Consider Spam?
This pretty much proves once again that gaming search engines is here to stay. There is still a lot of research to be done to make it harder to get away with this type of websites, but luckily there are more and more ways, other than Google, to find the content you are looking for.
Comscore's Bogus Logic For Its Blackmail Fee: We Don't Make That Much Money
Great article. "the willingness to lie just to get a bit of media ink" very succinctly captures what I most disliked about my experiences amongst the movers and shakers of California.
Seth Godin’s new book "Linchpin" and "There Is No Map"
Much love for tornado, though I ditched their templating for genshi. It also works pretty good as a Cron sort of engine for polling/scraping.
HN: Help me pick a logo
Hey all,

I've been working on creating a crowd-sourced freelance translation site for the past few months. It's now time for me to choose a logo!

Could you help me out?

Contest:

http://99designs.com/contests/35426

My favorites:

http://99designs.com/contests/35426/entries/44

http://99designs.com/contests/35426/entries/47
I saw the transition from "dumb terminals" to desktop workstations/PC's. I think there will be some pendulum swing back to "no local" storage until people figure out that isn't all it's cracked up to be. Think the real answer lies somewhere in between, possibly personal data chips carrying OS settings, apps, and data.
In case you didn't make the connection, this material is by the professor who wrote the recently posted article: "Getting into a PhD program with a low GPA". His undergraduate GPA was a 2.4/4.0, according to his website.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072923
Intertwingle - free E-Book by Judy Breck
Site: http://www.caterpi.com

Contest: http://99designs.com/contests/35426

My favorites:

http://99designs.com/contests/35426/entries/44

http://99designs.com/contests/35426/entries/47
Interesting observations. How then would you suggest improving security against phishing? For example Grandma gets an email saying "You have initiated a large wire transfer from your Building and Loan account. Please log in to confirm this transfer." The email includes a helpful link to building-and-loan.ru, which Grandma clicks and her woes begin. I should add that the building-and-loan.ru site is "verified by Equifax".

What about that?
The Democrats problem isn't the Republicans. They had a huge polling advantage and large wins against Republicans in the 2008 elections. The problem is that the administration hasn't focused on the problem of the economy. Instead of focusing they have been on this massive social engineering kick. It could be argued that health care is a part of the recovery, but given the timelines in the current bill, this just isn't true.

The sad part is that this is a repeat of the 1970's. Look at the articles from that era about the "failed experiment" or how the office of the president should be replaced. Some of that is from Nixon's behavior, but quite a lot of it is economics problems suffered by all the presidents (Nixon, Ford, and Carter).
Abby Sunderland's Boat - Wild Eyes
My recent reads in Information Retrieval - Indexing
This would be funny if it were clever enough that the drawings actually answered the questions. That doesn't seem to be the case with any of them.
The provided shameless plug is not working for me. I'm getting an HTTP 200 response with content length 0.

It's just moved from a small coffee house to a large stadium, and the crowd has changed from people wanting to make things people like to a smorgasbord of folks in all kinds of situations.

Well put.
Jason, any comment?
If you go with logo 44, the 'i' (and thus all the text) should probably have a different font face, or should not be capitalized. I say this because:

(a) There is ambiguity between that capital i and the lowercase l. Although the rest of the text is capitalized, it is not worth the risk potentially confusing your customers.

(b) Caterpi and Caterpl are both reasonable ways to shorten Caterpillar, so which adds to the confusion if there is typographical ambiguity.

Cheers!
Did Windows 3.1 have a Paint program?

Also, this reminds me about how I used to carry around MiniVMac (a Macintosh emulator) running OS 7 on a thumb drive to keep random notes and drawings. It would be kind of cool if you could sign up an account on this site for that purpose.
Great suggestion, Thanks!
Arxiv:  thousands of CS, math, and science articles
I am in for meeting up in Boulder.
I will add that according to some, this death has something to do with Bahá'í faith/cult - more info here http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/Kelly.htm and in this documentary -

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-760569989112215408 Part1,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1716751462345868958 part 2
Does it need to be done at the federal level? I'd imagine this could be done at the state level with nothing more than a good governor and mayors that care?
Did Apple Fire a Genius for Unauthorized Volunteering in Haiti?
Ask HN: Sunday HTML Puzzler
I have a small website. It's just a lark. I probably make five bucks a year on it. So this isn't a critical question, just more of a puzzler.

Here's the site.

http://project-management-methodologies.net/

The thing is, just after I posted a link to it here on HN (when else?) suddenly the text in the HTML is not showing up.

Viewing the page source, the material is in there. I loaded in Firebug but it says it's not in there! Yet I can see it in page source. The HTML is not corrupted, all the tags close.

Best I can figure it's the Google AdSense code somehow corrupting the rest of the html.

Anybody care to take a look and share your thoughts?

Not important, like I said, but interesting, especially if it involves Google.

UPDATE: Now it's working again. @#$#@$!

Very interesting bug. I hope it repeats itself so I can track it down. I'm almost certain it was Google though.

You guys are awesome! All I do is ask the question on HN and five minutes later the site is working! :)
Good link - I had Jeff for algorithms a couple years ago and he's a dedicated and passionate teacher.
Just registered. See you guys there.
You actually don't need all that much authority to get away with ranking scraped content in Google. Despite their FUD, Google's duplicate content detection algorithm seems to be largely non-existent.

For example, check out the Google results for http://hackerne.ws, which is a page-for-page duplicate of news.ycombinator:

http://www.google.com/q=site%3Ahackerne.ws

10,000 pages indexed, not a single word of original content.

Note: I know hackerne.ws is not trying to be spammy, and merely parked the domain improperly. If the owner is reading, all it would take is a simple 301 redirect to fix.
Music downloads on the other hand, don't provide that and so....

Amazon MP3s have no DRM, and pretty much everything in the iTunes Music Store is also DRM free these days.
Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes
Somehow the first part is in Arbic... I am on iPhone now and not actually able to find english version now... but I guess someone else will. Maybe
very neat.
If it's in June or later, I'm in! I'm moving there then.
I'm definitely in.
well this year I bought a condo and want to file for the 8K tax credit sooner rather than later.
From the displayed logos I like #44, the caterpillar is very cute. I also agree with the suggestion to change the typography to something that is not capitalized.