skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you considered letting the non-tech users post profiles of some sort as well? I can certainly see some difficulties, but it could be useful if you found a way to make it work.

Particularly, I'm thinking of people with specialized expertise or connections in a specific domain--people who know a niche, and could build a business, but need technology to make it happen and don't have the resources to just go hire a team to make it happen. Advertising to such an ill-defined demographic would be awkward at best, though.

As someone who is, for most purposes, a pure technologist, my ideal in a hypothetical cofounder (given basic things like "being able to work toegether") would be someone older, deeply familiar with some business domain populated by companies that are a bit behind the technological curve. Tech startups drive innovation in markets that tech people care about--but there's a lot of markets that get ignored, when a tech startup-style approach could seriously shake things up.
http://www.google.com/profiles/mkbunday
Yeah I retracted that slightly in my post, sorry if I stealth edited it later than I should have -- I actually am not going to argue that the "big bang" was necessary for Buzz's success, only that Google seems to have made that decision.
There is a difference between sour grapes and rationally deciding that your prior goal has no value.
A big chunk of the people who join gyms stop going after a month or two. Gym equipment is also really expensive. I'd be surprised if the average gym could stay in business very long if infrequent exercisers weren't subsidizing more regular gym-goers via long-term membership contracts.

Which also explains the lame high-pressure sales act. When you walk in the door, they already know there's a good chance they'll be taking your money for a service you'll barely ever use. You avoid being this kind of rube by being somebody who will derive enormous benefit the gym instead, in which case manipulating you into joining is for your own good.
But it does tend to stick out, when spoken (not in print). When people say something sarcastically, they don't say it deadpan and straight. There is usually at least some difference in their tone of voice, though its not necessarily an over-exaggerated sarcastic teenage drawl.
Very true.

I'd rather take the attitude that I played and failed, and will come back next time with more experience.
A Syntax Option for Project Lambda (Closures for Java)
Gyms make all their money from people who never go - that's why they all have 12month contracts and sell 90% of them in January

My local gym does per visit, 10 visit, 1, 3 and 12month with increasing discount - but it's city owned = socialism eh?
There are academic scientists who don't get grants. They are denied tenure outright. Since she was denied tenure, it's worthwhile to note that she did have grants. If she had no grants and expected to get tenure, then that would tell us something. This also tells us she met some requirements for tenure. (But not much, because we don't know how much money these grants were, and how much her department expects.)
What are facts if not just opinions we agree on?
This guy's experience is that Linux users buy his indie game at about 2x of the rate of Windows users, about equivalent to the conversion rate for OS X users: http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for...

The app market is probably different than the game market, though.
Full Screen Weather Is a Giant, No-Frills Weather Map
I would assume that their profit equation works something like this: they need enough capacity to ensure that during the peak season, nobody is unhappy. If 90% of their contracts are in January, then that peak is huge, so they can't really skimp, even if most of those people never come back. If, e.g., 90% of signups were on the 1st of the month, it would be a lot easier: the peak occupancy would be much lower.
This looks like it's going to be technically quite impressive versus the iPad: Pixel Qi screen[1024x600], multi-touch (plus a backside trackpad!), camera, 3 USB ports, running Android, Ubuntu, or Chromium, with a dual-core 1Ghz Tegra CPU + GPU.

More specs: http://www.technoholik.com/news/exclusive-a-sneak-peek-at-th...
This is interesting and hope HNers will use it. Frankly I'm puzzled by attempts to do startups that are basically targeted at other geeks.

However, there's potential for a lot of "abuse". The top suggestion now is:

I wish there was an app where you could report a car whose alarm has been going on for hours, and car thieves will read it and steal the car

I hope you don't try to ban that sort of thing, though.
I agree wholeheartedly
As President Obama said in his State of the Union address whatever the truth is can be considered irrelevant, because the rest of the world believes in curtailing pollution, and will look to invest in the countries that are delivering greener solutions. With that perspective it makes sense that the U.S. pursue such policy for economic benefit if nothing else.
8 Types of People That Belong on Twitter
I liked those features. I liked not having to click to follow people and be automatically signed in with everything already configured. But I don't think everyone else did. I think we have different viewpoints and enough people got pissed off for them to change their policies.
I didn't take it as confrontational. I've seen a lot of people mistakenly comparing Buzz to Twitter and being let down, but I think that FF is a much better comparison.

As for replacing FF, it's still pretty far from doing that. There's a lot of sites it doesn't connect to yet, and it doesn't offer tools like "rooms" and "invisible friends" that help a lot in organizing social interactions. Right now, Buzz feels like FF lite or something, and excels mainly for its tight integration with Gmail.
I use Devonthink Pro (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/) for note organizing, thanks in part to this article: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... . Is Evernote used for substantially different purposes? If not, have you tried DTP?
Escape from Taxation: The Problem with Increasing Taxes
The can openers in his example made opening cans more difficult.

Yeah, but his point was nonsensical (or at least hyperbole). He said:

and usually the can ends up half-open, half-bent up to the point where it's un-openable short of dynamite.

Automated can openers usually spoil cans? If that were true, people wouldn't use them because most of their food would go to waste.
I don't really do that much "note taking" per se: for me it's more about recording ideas / quotes / so forth. On the go, I use a Moleskine like every other pretentious asshole out there, and at a computer I use Devonthink Pro: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... .
Summary: Expanding on Paul Halmos quote:

*Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?
Am I the only one who dislikes the term "coder"? I'm a programmer, dammit.
A 17-Year-Old Russian Kid

As opposed to a 17 year old Russian adult? Or a 17 year old Russian senior citizen?
It depends on the context as well. It is much more likely to find a bug in gfortran for solaris sparc than gcc on x86 linux, for example. The only time I keep the compiler bug in mind is when working with gcc 4.x compiler on windows.

I don't have the experience of ESR, but I find the advice a bit dangerous if taken as a general one. Especially, the idea that a heisenbug is often caused by a compiler: most likely, the heisenbug is not a heisenbug at all, but just less visible depending on the compiler flags. That was the case for the vast majority of "heisenbugs" I have encountered in C.
Yes, when I started reading, my first thought was, "wow, sounds like someone pretty inexperienced." After I noticed it was written by ESR, that changed to, "wow, sounds like someone pretty arrogant."

The fact of the matter is that a compiler like gcc is used by thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of people almost daily. Usually you have to be doing some pretty crazy stuff to find a bug in it. Bugs that go away when you turn off optimizations are usually either race-condition or memory-access related.
TuCents.net
Those maps at the beginning of books, or, a few words about teaching
To some degree, I think you are right in that the focus on climate change is overly narrow. That said, climate change is undeniably real; for every scientist who says the world isn't warming, you can find approximately 100 to 1,000 that say it is, and have actual data to back that up.

Thus, while I think we should change the argument to focus on climate change being part of a broader set of environmental problems brought on by unrestricted pollution, I also think that it is imperative that we not lose sight of how massively important climate change really is.
n1 :)
Maybe you could start by seeding content in english. Once there is traction and people start seeing the value of the platform/community there will be volunteers to help add multilingual support.
>"Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?"

Yes. Cost-benefit analysis. Civilization is built on pollution. Humans have been hurting the environment for their own good since before the days of agriculture. The question wise leaders should ask is "how much pollution is okay given the vast benefit we get from polluting activities?" not "how can we get pollution down to zero?".
Why Orwell Endures
This article smells more of self-aggrandizing attitude than sound business reasoning. I'm amazed that he would bother with the artifice of negotiating when he's essentially unwilling to budge from his friend's price tier. That's not negotiating.

FWIW, contract strikes work just as well (sometimes better) on gym memberships as for any other legal agreement. If he's willing to pay the "full price", but doesn't want to deal with a cumbersome cancellation method, strike that clause and see if they will still approve the membership. That's a give and take. That's a negotiation.

Either he is deliberately feigning ignorance as fodder for a blog post (likely) or Mr. Steinberg is unaware of how modern gyms, especially ones located in dense urban environments, actually make money.

Mainly it's through un/under-utilized memberships and revenue-sharing from ancillary services (personal training, first-aid classes, childbirth classes, etc.) and seminars which can best leverage the uncommon properties of the real estate.

What's one business's "Price Discrimination" is another's "Flexible Pricing Strategy". A classic example are the near orders-of-magnitude margin differences for the same 1oz. of Coke depending on the customer (vending machine, supermarket, restaurant, stadium). Same customer, different channel, same product. For those who remember, a similar strategy was leveraged successfully (for a limited time) by AOL to manage subscriber churn.

In this specific example, I highly suspect "Dan" joined the gym during a lull point in the calendar year (low-demand) or was a so-called "charter" member (pre-paying). Though likely the same physical space and equipment when "Dan" joined, the financial profile & goals of the company which own the facility may be very different today--and, hence, reflected in their membership pricing.

That said, there's clearly a market for a "hassle-free" gym, but that business model is going to have roughly the same fixed capital costs of other gyms, but get squeezed between low/no-margin YMCAs & county/municipal facilities at the low-end and high-end "clubs" (like Crunch) where, sadly, part of the business model's revenue is the social and life-style exclusivity afforded by that membership fee. In big cities, high-end gyms are the modern equivalent of country clubs.
Ask HN: How much was pownce sold for?
I'm curious.
> advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists

It all depends on how tight one's definition of God is. If it's very rigid, anything they encounter in the real world except something that sufficiently satisfies all the attributes of a textbook-God (read: Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna) including physical appearance wouldn't qualify as God.
running Android, Ubuntu, or Chromium

Then its not an iPad competitor or alternative. It might be a tablet, but it is not in the same market as Apple is in with the iPad. None of these three OS's is a drastic change from what a computer is or how a computer is currently used, which the iPad is shaping up to be.
Well done. IMO, there are three things that matter when scanning through a list of potential co-founders. Skills (which you have well covered), markets/areas that you love/hate (some people won't touch the enterprise, others would never do a Twitter app), and availability (some people can't afford to go without a salary and some can).

The anonymity angle is interesting, but I don't think it's critical. In fact, it probably hurts. If I can't read their blog, check out their tweets, or scan their LinkedIn profile, there's generally a lot less for someone to get excited about. There will be a lot of "toad kissing" to find a prince.
it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.

Wow, I strongly disagree. Our approaches diverge on virtually every case, as far as I can tell. My approach would be to apply the exact damage to the aggressor that they applied to the victim, except where the victim forgives all or part (for monetary "damages" or some other consideration or reason). If a mistake is made, the same procedure can be used to rectify it. This does mean that completely irrevocable damage (that is, death) can't be applied while keeping the property that mistakes can be fixed or paid for. Murder is already an exceptional situation, not like other crimes of violence, due to its finality.

As far as I can tell, your approach (along with the vast majority of existing legal systems today) requires sentencing or damages to be decided individually by a third party, rather than by the parties already involved, which seems inelegant.

There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.

Oh. Well, there is something to be said for staying on topic, I suppose. :)
It's what keeps social media consultants employed. Mostly nonsensical jargon.
It’s a nice little app. Its purpose was fairly obvious to me once I read two tweets and the design is nice.

Do things automatically get voted up on Wappr if someone retweets a tweet on Twitter?

It’d be cool if you could subscribe to a particular want or desire; for example, I’d want to subscribe to anything related to personal finance because that’s the business I’m in. You could probably even monetize it by offering more advanced features like that.
The thing is, there is a whole lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency, which lowers pollution, with a cost which is paid back in a few years [thus soon becoming lower cost than the more polluting status quo].
why?
do languages now need subtitles?
shrug

Anyone can file a lawsuit.
Looks like a nice resource.

- I'd also prefer optional anonymity.

- I'd rather that the page views (such as the list of all coders) showed 50 or 100 items at a time.
Ideal for Valentine's Day:  Lover's Cups from the MIT Media Lab
Christopher Hitchens gave a fascinating interview on the topic of Orwell for the Econtalk podcast:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/08/hitchens_on_orw.htm...
In some ways, that's even a reasonable argument, but it completely ignores the long-term effects. A large part of the trouble is that we don't ever tend to account for the cost of large-scale environmental damage. For instance, under many climate change forecasts, the coffee growing industry is going to be much, much less profitable (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2009-0...). Beyond just the economic costs, though, we don't tend to evaluate the quality-of-life costs of environmental damage.

Of course, there's also people like me who see environmental conservation as a moral imperative, beyond any economic motives. My only point here is that even from a purely economic standpoint, there are many good reasons to spend immense amounts of money fighting pollution. Even 1% of the Iraq War budget would be hugely beneficial.
Low Powered Mini ARM? It is Now Possible
I like that.. questions, answers and everything else.

Though I think questions aren't there to give you answers, they only throw up more questions.. but I reckon they give you directions. When those questionable directions start to converge you know you are onto something you don't know.
When those questions converge like an asymptote..ad infinitum, that's what we call answers.

Doubt scares people, they just want to know where the line ends. But in the real world the only way find such an direction is trial and error.. i think.
I think we need to change the discussion regarding climate change. For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.

That... really isn't true, you know. Depending on who you're asking, the opinions of scientists range from "a majority thinks it's the likeliest hypothesis" to "overwhelming agreement"--and the consensus tends to be stronger among those whose area of expertise is closer to the relevant subjects.

There are, as always, a handful of vocal outliers, and plenty of non-scientists who think everything to do with climate change is bunk, but scientists in general? For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll find you'll run out of the ones saying it isn't real fast.

Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?

Sure--a simple cost-benefit analysis. Eliminating pollution entirely would pretty much require the destruction of technological civilization (and don't even ask about the ecological damage caused by the crime against Mother Nature that is "agriculture"). The real question is how to avoid causing irreparable damage or creating pollution faster than the environment can handle, while maximizing the benefits to humanity.
Indeed, even though a "series of tubes" is a relevant analogy, it's still plenty obvious that Senator Stevens is clueless with regard to the Internet.
One of the easiest and yet largest changes would probably be to shift cars and other vehicles from a generate on-board model to a model where energy is stored in the vehicle but is generated in a more centralized manner. Centralizing energy production enables better scaling (small ICEs are on average much less efficient than large ones), reduces the cost of deploying new technologies as they become available, enables depending on local opportunities for renewable energy, etc. There are many good proposals for how to store energy in-vehicle, such as capacitors, batteries, flywheels, fuel cells and even pneumatic storage. There's many good business opportunities to be had exploring these options and bringing them to market. See, for example, Tesla Motors and the Chevy Volt. There's a lot of startups doing good work in this field, including one founded by a HN regular DaniFong: http://lightsailenergy.com/ As time goes on, I think we'll see an explosion in this area, but only if we as a society place the proper emphasis on tacking the problem.
>"In some ways, that's even a reasonable argument, but it completely ignores the long-term effects."

Not if you do it seriously. The thousands of scholars who study these kind of issues for a living have thought of such simple objections a long time ago.
edit: Is this query too off-topic?

Obviously not. You seem to have an issue with self-validation. The most salient fact about chatroullette is that it is a piece of garbage. Find out why that is, then fix it, and put out your own service.

Quick idea: Have "categories", like "weight lifting" or "chess playing" or "NASCAR fans", etc, etc. And then have timed quizzes to prove that people actually fit the category. Then they can talk to similar enthusiasts.
Yes. I found that this one to be especially good though.
Backtalics seems to be a neologism. I kind of like it.
Does anyone know of a desktop or laptop powered by an ARM running Linux?
Hmm I kind of think having the reverse relationship for profiles would make a lot of sense. "I'm looking for a tech cofounder, let me pitch you in my profile"

In the non-tech to tech cofounder match, the tech guy actually has more leverage in the relationship on some level
Optimizer and code gen problems are pretty hard for users to diagnose correctly, so most compiler vendors put a high priority on fixing them.
In Chile, that's how it works. No fucking contracts. You buy a x month long membership; for x = 1, 3, 6 or 12; and for the next x months, you get to go to the gym. There is some price discrimination in that it is cheaper to buy more months at a time, but that's it.
Reminded of when voice chat was first available on win95 via netmeeting back in the day where there were maybe 50 people tinkering with it and you just connect to any of the other early adopting nerds to tell each other how frikin cool it was. Random, anon, but friendly.
Buzz is now how it should have been all along, but to be honest, like parent, its unliekly I'll be re-enabling Buzz again any time soon.
Southwest Airlines kicks Kevin Smith off the plane for being "too fat"
But the folks who would bear the costs of improving efficiency don't appear to value the resulting reduction in pollution more than the cost. If they did, they would pay for the efficiency.
"Computer" is the new "man".
Not for the level of freak-out that people had about it. You can light a fire under a company's butt if they think that the perception of their new product threatens their business, as a reputation for recklessness with user's data and privacy threatens Google.
That's rather problematic, though. We can't really control the climate. We can definitely affect it in drastic ways, but to control it, we'd have to be much better at figuring out what change corresponds to a desired outcome. Right now, we are very good at predicting the outcome to one specific course of action-- that is, the status quo-- but that's a quite narrow problem compared to climate control.
Quotepad 2.2 on Windows
http://www.greatsummary.com/ has been around for quite a while. There was a Firefox add-on for the service too: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5321 (which I actually wrote for the GS team), but it hasn't been updated in a while.
This is because the prevalent business model as far as gyms are concerned is signing up a whole lot of people who attend for a few weeks and then never come back (while continuing to charge them fees).

Personally I'm glad that I have all the stuff at home and can avoid the contracts and sleaziness of the average gym while also not having to trudge across town to one of the few decent gyms in existence.
If it wasn't fiction? Here's the thing: I might be open to the prospect of a humanoid 30-something white guy talking to me being an apparition of God. But I really don't get hung up or terribly passionate about things like all the laws in Leviticus, or whether certain stories are 100% literal or metaphors. Maybe I'd ask, but it wouldn't impact my faith one way or the other, really. And if it turned out that the guy who said he was God was just a telepathic, shape-shifting alien? Meh. A lying alien. Big whoop.
> It's a bit of a false dichotomy.

Exactly. It is just as valid to ask "What's better: Saving the world or writing for another tech blog?"
I understand your concerns, but the use of the word rape is at best rather loaded. One could make the argument that Google abused your data, but to invoke a metaphor to extreme sexual violence dilutes your own point as well as disrespects the very real victims of rape.
I saw the headline and took "[Graphic]" in the wrong context and wondered what kind of shocking imagery would accompany an article about password strength.
That's alright. All the really good shit happens in the New Testament.