skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
on pain of receiving a plurality of punches in the face

I think you mean Claim #1: A painful punishment; Claim #2: Claim #1 wherein the punishment includes physical force; Claim #3: Claim #2 wherein the physical force comprises multiple punches; Claim #4: Claim #3 wherein the punches are directed at the face of the patent attorney.
Not only that but Amazon is uniquely positioned to actually give PayPal a run for its money. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.
My bad, my bad, what I should have said was something that allows businesses to opt-out of the service.
Deal Radar 2010: Should Facebook Acquire Into Vertical Search?
Google has stayed off Vertical Search so far, leaving a fertile territory wide open. Should Facebook take advantage of that hole?
Inflation is caused by one thing, and that's an increase in the money supply.

That is plain wrong.

Think about what would happen if the scarcity of crucial goods like food and shelter increased by 1000%. Would there be inflation? I'd put my money on it!

Well, yes, but that's precisely the point.

No, it is not precisely the point. The economy was already declining when Nixon moved off the gold standard. Why do you think he wanted to do it in the first place?

And if your theory was correct, then why did the economy recover? Last time I checked, we didn't move back to gold in 1980.
Why is he following ashley tisdale? I never heard of her until now, but teen pop music?
the emphasis is on the system for executing such functions in parallel for large-scale data transformation

As someone mentioned: the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and its RTS is such a system...
> Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued.

I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's, I don't know either of them and nobody else witnessed the event so how can any of us judge?
Google's multitouch dilemma
Nearby Tweets localizes Twitter, gets a facelift
I had a problem with this today when upgrading from jQuery 1.3.2 to 1.4. The AJAX functions worked fine in Firefox, were returning "parseerror" in Safari because there was a non-UTF-8 character in the JSON response.
I am continually fascinated by political systems and do follow politics. That being said, this story is not really for HN.
Cairo comes to mind. It has an OpenGL backend that works very well.

Qt also has a GL drawing engine, which turned out to be a good move on Trolltech's part.
As a non-ethnic Chinese who's lived in China many years, the one thing that annoys me is the sweeping access restrictions on sites and blogs related to IT. The other points are fairly irrelevant to me personally.

In May 2009, the whole of blogspot was blocked, including through proxies, feeds, etc. Two months earlier (March), Youtube was blocked, but I never used it so I didn't care. Before that, from before the Olympics to the Youtube block, was 8 or 9 months of general internet freedom. Perhaps falun gong (and similar) and porno was blocked, I don't know. But there were no noticeable restrictions on IT-related sites and blogs. Even before the Olympics, when blogs were blocked, it was only temporary, and easy to get around it with proxies.

But since May 2009, the sudden change in internet policy affects me, and my online interest in IT. I'm not interested in porno or reading about human rights while living in China anyway. So these Great Firewall restrictions, instead of blocking just what needed to be blocked, blocked far too much, blocking what I wanted to access. Not only that, China being China, sites got blocked that had no reason to be, like http://www.python.org/download and subpages. Seems someone in the Firewall staff tried to hide their mischief by keeping the main www.python.org page available. But maybe I wrong, and no-one paid anyone, instead China's just decided to promote a closer-to-home Japanese-invented scripting language by blocking downloads of a European/American one.

Some would ask, why don't I get a VPN? So far, I can't be bothered, China's a cash economy so I don't have credit cards.

As for the other points:

(1) China protects its industries from foreign competition completely. James McGregor's "One Billion Customers" is the most readable book I've read on this subject. I'm not in China run a business. If I want to make money, I'll leave first and go live somewhere business-friendly.

(2) As swombat said in another thread "if I have a choice between the Chinese model of media copyright (i.e., no copyright protection) and the US one, I'll pick the Chinese one. It's a better starting point for improvement than the current US model."

I wouldn't know where to buy or watch a legal English-language movie in China anyway, I don't think they have them outside Jingapore (=what we who live outside Beijing call it).

(3) I just assume my internet-connected PC is being accessed remotely, or at least my emails being read. At one place I lived, I was given a new phone which could listen while it was on the hook. I didn't bother complaining, they could just say it must be from a faulty batch. If I really need to keep some information private, I'll go live in a Western country.

(4) As for currency manipulation, looks like the US and China are in a deadly embrace. By the time it unwinds, the Euro will be the big winner, which was what the Euro was really about in the first place, wasn't it?

(5) Re human rights, if I decide to take an interest in that subject, I'll leave China and return to my home country and begin there. No need to preach to others while there's plenty of problems at home.
Git Magic - Preface
In the abstract, "free" health care sounds awesome. Who doesn't want free stuff?

In the concrete, someone actually needs to pay for it. Then congress piles on with all sorts of pork, crooked parliamentary maneuvers, etc. Basically, the media pays attention, and people see how the sausage is made.

After this, people become unhappy with health care reform.
Prosper.com Refutes @TheBigMoney story by @markgimein and Requests Retraction http://bit.ly/8az3Pv @ProsperLoans #p2plending
The assumption is to achieve big goals in small steps. The growth mindset is that they can get better at these small steps. e.g. I bet I can improve at adding!

For children, you wouldn't expect them to break down their big overwhelming goals into small subtasks for themselves - you'd do that for them. You wouldn't even mention the big overwhelming goals, or indeed necessarily even have them.

Same goes for adults - except we've got to break it down ourselves.
เชลยศักดิ์ เรื่องย่อเชลยศักดิ์
What would you do if it were your kid?
Gate opener accessories from Chamberlain Liftmaster
Chamberlain has a complete line of gate opener accessories designed to help with the installation, including power accessories, safety accessories, and entry controls.
Derren Brown - Subliminal Advertising
Nate Silver, as usual, sums it up. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/why-progressives-are-...
Participatory media and why I love it (and must defend it [from Jaron Lanier])
I'm showing this to my version control-challenged co-workers first thing in the morning!
This is only partially true. a 1br in SoMA is the same rent as a 1br in most of Manhattan, but you possibly get lesser space in Manhattan, so then you move out to brooklyn if you want more space.

Also, DUMBO in Brooklyn is fairly easily accessible and is becoming quite a startup hub. NYC seems expensive, but if you look hard enough you can find good deals anywhere.
It's an interesting connection to make, but I don't think OLED subpixel operating life estimates played a part in the UI design. Remember, wherever there's a white pixel, there's a blue subpixel going at full strength, and there's no shortage of white in Android.
the government as bandit hypothesis makes a lot of sense to me. at the least it explains where money came from (did not arise naturally from barter, was originally a tally for taxes and looting).

the article was tl;dr. did they at least cite mancur olsen for the stationary bandit hypothesis? AFAIK it originated in his book the rise and decline of nations:

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...
I fully agree with this. Far more important to me than a great algorithm is readable, maintainable, and well-structured code.

If your algorithms suck but your code is readable, maintainable, and well-structured, it'll be a lot easier to find someone who has a better knowledge of algorithms to come fix it. While, if your code is unreadable, unmaintainable, and/or poorly structured but has great algorithms, you'll have a much harder time finding someone to fix it (or even fixing it yourself).

Here's what Rob Pike had to say on the role of algorithms in programming (from the recent HN submission on the Basics of Unix Philosophy http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html )

"Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."
How to ensure fast turnaround time from your printing company?
One of the greatest challenges in working with your offset printing company is getting the work done in time. Many customers get frustrated by the poor turnaround time from their printing companies on your London business cards, flyer printing, booklet printing, brochures printing folder printing, newsletter printing and magazine printing jobs. Though there are many highly professional printing companies in the UK that offer fast turnaround times for your printing orders, there are also companies that take a considerably long time to complete their orders.
There is a VC community in Chicago, but not nearly so extensive as SV.
Interestingly enough, the color scheme and theme for Android icons and widgets changed in 2.0 (for the Verizon Droid) from colorful blues to greys. I wonder if that change in color schemes was specifically intended for the Nexus One, or just a coincidence...
While I agree with you, I also find HN's frontpage to be the most interesting list of links available on a given day.
The thing about NYC is that the high end (and much of Manhattan) is indeed incredibly expensive. And if you don't know NYC, you think that's all that's out there.

But New York is huge and you can find a little bit of everything. Brooklyn alone is larger than most large cities, with 2.5 million people (over half the size of metro SF, and about the same as metro Pittsburgh). Everything gets much, much cheaper when you leave the ultra-density of Manhattan. It's like any other city center, just scaled way up.
> You can't patent something that has been publicly disclosed, including disclosure by yourself. Commercial use counts as disclosure.

Incorrect. IANAL, so I will not attempt to correct you. I suspect YANAL either.
Every time I see "daily" misspelled as "dialy" I read it like Bialystock and end up quoting _The Producers_. This kind of thing happens to me a lot. It's like my subconscious _wants_ wants me to be distracted easily!
Hilarious. I haven't lived in the Valley but I've heard this from some of my friends who do. I guess it does make a lot of sense after some thought.
Your joke was funny, the -1 hurt me a little. tear
Great post. I implemented SVN in an environment that did not have any source control, so it was not easy to move folks to a branching model within SVN. Maybe doing git would be easier.

Been looking into the best way to do this, since the individual branch model might work easier for doing tag, release, feature, and stable branches. But mainly if it could simplify merging, which is a little more painful in SVN I think, even using a basic model. So many conflicts come up that I wouldn't think should be an issue.

Any thoughts or links would be appreciated. Thanks.
Interestingly, many camera sensors also have a dithered sensor pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter - but a different arrangement of colors.
AS3IsoLib Tutorial Series - Camera
Suggestion on an interesting open network project?
I recently stumbled upon openDHCP. Do any of you know of other interesting networking projects where you can learn about networking ?
Also, Toppcloud is very young, only being announced about a month ago. It has lots of potential.
I have heard that OLED screens are extremely difficult to read in daylight/direct sunlight, can anyone confirm or deny this? I think this would be a problem in on a phone in some places.
I still want to see some real numbers on energy consumption between a 100% white and 100% black (but still powered) AMOLED. As the first two letters stand for active matrix, there's still a control voltage going through each pixel when it's at RGB000, so the difference may not be as great as it's often made out to be.
Visualisations: Breaking down the Beatles
Ask HN: Idea Management App
Hi,

I run a startup (we are a 3 people team) and one of the challenges we face is not having a tool to record/share/discuss ideas. Tools like basecamp/trac are very task driven but lot of times we have an idea that we want to brainstorm a bit before assigning it to someone.

I would basically love to see an app where I can record an idea using web/iphone and then share it with the team. There should be an easy workflow to discuss and then accept/reject the idea. At this point, probably the accepted ones can be imported into your project management tool of choice.

I wanted to know if there are others who feel the need for a tool like this too? What if I go ahead and make it. Will people pay a monthly fee for this?
Ask HN: Handling Aggressive Competition
It came to my attention today that a competitor of ours is spreading false information about my company in their sales process. My co-founder occasionally takes meetings, on behalf of our clients, with other marketing companies. At a meeting today, the account manager of one of our competitors gave my co-founder incorrect "factual" information about our company, unaware that while my co-founder was representing the client at the meeting, he represents our company full time.

While I'm not terribly concerned about the competition, as I feel we have a superior product, and I know we have a substantially lower price, I am concerned about the nature of the information that they are spreading. Essentially, we know that they are willing to tell our clients that we have poor search engine visibility and substantially less traffic than we actually have in order to encourage them to cancel our service and transfer to theirs. Neither of these statements is true, we currently rank first on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the appropriate keywords.

In addition to their statements, I am also concerned by the company itself. Unfortunately, the competition in this case is a Fortune 500 company. My concern is that their status and partnerships will lend credibility to their account manager's false statements, and start costing us clients and future sales. The situation is essentially upside down; we have captured the market in this geographic area, and the new entrant is our large competitor.

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? What do you do when your competition isn't playing fair?
Google says it has postponed the launch of two Android based mobile phones in China following a dispute with the government over censorship.
I actually went to the email thread from the store owner - (http://www.flickr.com/photos/44269394@N06/sets/7215762259508...) - I can see why the police tended to believe the customer, and not the store owner. While I recognized that "tone" doesn't carry well in email, I'd be seriously concerned for my welfare if the person who had written those missives showed up at my door one day...

"Do you not have a girlfriend? Are you divorced? I can see why...." , "world of pain", "Goodbye pussy boy and I will be contacting your employers", and on, and on...

Yowsa!
Sesamouse: More magic for the Magic Mouse
30 Rock DVD 1-3 DVD - 30 Rock DVD Complete Seasons 1-3 DVD Boxset
What is your eye color?
NASA Stealth Copter
I felt similarly. While a neat effect, I really don't see the practical use of it at current. Maybe there are some sites that will use it to good effect soon?

Design-wise it really detracts from the rest of the blog page.
Still, it's in the same category as the LCD panel dithering suit referenced. Both are measures that technically reduce fidelity but are effectively invisible to the naked eye.
If it's a large company, talk to the manager of the person who is sharing incorrect information and ask them politely to talk to the person about it.
That could be really interesting, but I think the implementation could be tricky. I'd love to see something like that if it was done right.
Active matrix just means every pixel has it's own switching transistor, as opposed to just every row and column. There may be drive voltage at every pixel but not current.
Good look. Thanks!
Crayola's Law
Urban Adventure
True that you're responsible for yourself, but would you rather go to an airport with no metal detectors, no X-ray machines or armed personnel?
Cool .. what challenges do you see? I think getting the flow right can be a little tricky. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to do this right.

Once I have a MVP ready I will ping you for feedback
> I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's

FTA: "Over the next few hours, she sent several more angry messages. She warned of a 'world of pain.' 'Goodbye pussy boy I will be contacting your employers,' she said."

Compare this with the story's quote of Sean C. : "TOTAL MESS"

Hers was not a proportional response.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/12772/the-big-lebowski-world-of-pa...
mmm bad example then,
also according to the spec it's valid to have a <li> without a <ul> or related tag, didn't know that
"The software engineer (the project lead) takes care of identifying the sub-problems, after creating the Use Case with the domain expert (often the customer).

The programmer solves those sub-problems bottoms up, by focusing on creating the atomic parts as efficient as possible."

This is how yucky enterprise monstrosities get built. The "software engineer"/programmer division is nonsensical and sounds like something one would find in Wipro or Accenture, not so much at (say) Google or Facebook.

"I think you might have confused the programmers job with the job of actually creating the entire software - which in general terms is nonsense."

:-D .

The term you are looking for (since you seem to be fond of labels to sratify coders), for people who just implement whatever their "lead" tells them to is "code monkey".
The title is pretty misleading. It makes it sound like the TSA was paying "third party" bloggers to shill for them on their behalf, under a false pretense.

In fact, this was just on the TSA blog. Doesn't make it okay, but let's try to keep sensationalist, misleading titles off of HN.
In older times a dysfunctional country would be quickly conquered and fixed by the nearest competent neighbor.

I don't even know what a solution could look like today?
There was a web app that purported to do this kind of thing at Intuit. There was even talk of Brad Smith managing to convince some CEO folks in other companies to license this. So there does seem to be some need for this.

(In my opinion this was crapware and rarely produced any useful results. There were a lot of shiny pages and features though and management loved it.

But that may have been a result of it being deployed at Intuit - which is a typical dysfunctional Big Company- vs any problem with the tool (or idea) itself)

If I were you I would just go ahead and make it for myself and then see if other people wanted it.
If you're looking for dating, you should consider Austin. Plus you could save thousands of dollars a month in rent and pay no state income tax. I may have to write a post on this.
"... Why? B/c there are no girls in silicon valley. If you are in your 20s, or early 30s, you are probably wasting your best dating years away ..."

But you could try the jzw approach ("our 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?") and still stay in the valley ~ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Neat, straightforward idea management.
http://www.kindlingapp.com/

Iphone feature, bit more commercial.
http://www.ideascale.com/

And of course probably the best option:
http://www.evernote.com/
In the same vein as "Statistics Hacks" I'm sure those same fans will be fond of "Numerical Hacks". :)
I will grant that typing in Dvorak could be a nice "break" from QWERTY for my wrists.

On the other hand, I just typed in Dvorak briefly and I've already confused my QWERTY typing. Just going to Dvorak for 3 minutes, after a ~2-3 year hiatus, has temporarily slowed down my QWERTY by ~25%.
Nike WMNS Dunk Low NKE 6.0 Metallic IN BEST DISCOUNT
WITZEN wants you to check out a photo on MySpace in the My Photos album
Having lived in both places, I can wholeheartedly agree. Don't come to SF/SV for the women. The downside of NY is the innovation is in finance, not in tech.
PodSixNet - Lightweight Multiplayer Game Library in Python
> What alternative services are there to PayPal that offer the ability to act only as payment processors that get called via an API?

What you're looking for is called a Payment Gateway. The defacto Ruby library for utilizing them is called Active Merchant (http://activemerchant.rubyforge.org/) and it includes ~30 different companies. If you're looking for a list of all the big ones, that's a good place to start.

I've personally used Authorize.net & Paypal before. Braintree is the company name that gets thrown around in 37signals' circle.
Evernote looks cool. However, can you use it to discuss ideas with co-workers easily? From what I saw it looks like a personal note taking app rather than a 'discuss ideas and arrive at actionable items' app. Just trying to get your perspective on this.

Kindling also looks pretty neat but they don't mention their pricing anywhere
I think this is just for personal use. If you want to use Amazon as a payment processor through your website, you probably need to use a business-class service like the Amazon Flexible Payments Service listed here:
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business
Load Data while Scrolling Page Down with jQuery and PHP
Ok, so a coop or factory in a "3rd world" country needs to pay around $5k to a European organization to get this certification for this Fairtrade thing. It seems to me this just continues the racist attitude North America and Europe have toward certain countries. I'm sure not every factory or coop in the "3rd world" takes advantage of its workers. Maybe the "3rd world" should come up with some type of similar program for U.S. farmers to prove they didn't exploit migrant farm workers.
I won't even go into all the stupid problems that occur when you create an artificial floor price for a product.
The OLPC uses a similar technique; apparently the effective resolution is not totally obvious: http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2008/05/27/higher-resolution-than-w...
Hmm, I'd imagine that most big organizations already have something like Kindling already. Yahoo! did when I worked there for instance.
The Internet is about to get a lot safer
That doesn't completely defeat empiricism though. Controlled experiments are best, then uncontrolled experiments (checking that the theories are backed up by real data), then pure reason (non-reductionism) is a cop-out.