skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I knew all that, I meant more professionally.

Hahaha, he did post this on Twitter probably not because of my comment. It's hilarious:
http://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/8984936638
I was under the impression that when using hydrogen for fuel, the by-product was water (at least in automobiles). The article just triggered the question, I wasn't necessarily commenting on the technology.

Oh, sorry! Yes, burnt hydrogen is water.

My question was on whether or not large amounts of water vapor being released from cars will cause local ecosystem changes. (i.e. If every vehicle in NYC or Los Angeles ran on hydrogen, would it cause average rainfall in the immediate or surrounding areas to increase?

Well, large urban areas already have significant impacts on the local climate--e.g., the heat island effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island

The significant factor, I'd think, would be the amount of water being introduced, which in relative terms would be trivial amounts for most climates. New York is already plenty humid, for instance. I'd guess that any impact from increased ambient humidity would be swamped by the heat island and other such effects, except perhaps in an extremely arid climate.
Their plugin SDK is exclusively Lua I think. In fact I'm looking for someone to build one for us. Contact me if you're interested.
The only thing I can really say to this is to give a metaphor that anyone (most people) can understand:

It's like accidentally walking into a Burger King but
thinking that it's a McDonald's with a new logo, and then
screaming and yelling at the employees and manager
because they can't fill your order for a Big Mac.

I've run into actual people like this in the real world. People that have their head so stuck that they are right and you are wrong that even if an employee would try to explain to them, "This is not a McDonald's we don't have Big Macs, there is a McDonald's down the street if you want a Big Mac," the person would further yell and scream at the employees for who knows what reason.

{edit} Someone non-techie that I know in real life made the comment that these are probably the same people that call 911 to complain that the local McDonald's ran out of Chicken McNuggets.
Nice, that sounds perfect (though I'm not sure Blue Shield operates in NY...). Know of any good sites that show what insurance plans are available in what states? (or did you find that via some other method?)
4chan is one of the purest and most coherent exemplars of the philosophy of Absurdism I've ever seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism
At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer...

The converse (and less stupid) idea is to require every employee at your software startup to do sales/marketing/customer service. There are a bunch of great examples of this, but what comes to mind is how the employees at Wufoo rotate the customer service position daily (mentioned here: http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/).
Welcome to Square
The video is a nice little into to Square. Anyone know how Sqaure is dealing with transaction charges and credit card fees?
New Launches - See What's New In The World Of Internet Marketing
New Launches keeps you up-to-date about new products and sites related to internet marketing and Twitter, so you can be the first to start profiting!
Who says that will be locally though? I doubt they will be turning water into hydrogen fuel locally in places like the US Southwest where they already have issues with getting in fresh water?
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First Episode Of HBO's How To Make It In America (Entrepreneurship Themed Show)
fyi, hbo partnered with youtube on this (it's on itunes too). it's legit and legal.
China Alarmed by Threat to Security From Cyberattacks
> "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault."

I think that it's more along the lines of assuming that everyone on the road took a driver's test to be there. You don't think that people should have learned to drive years ago. People just feel that you should be able to assume a certain level of competency among your users as part and parcel of owning/using a computer. But as we see in the real world, you can never assume that people have a certain level of knowledge/logic ability. (i.e. Needing to put the "do not use top of ladder as a step" warning on ladders because there are enough people that don't realize that's dangerous)
you need to realize lua isnt targeted as a batteries included platform, its design philosophy is minimalist, not junk included but customize for your requirements. where lua absolutely excels is when paired with C (not C++) and not used as "scripting glue" but fully integrated and driving the system. it really appeals to minimalistic / keep it simple philosophy guys which isnt the web community.

lua is not a one stop shop and will never be, which probably why it flys under the radar so much - you cant stamp a powered by lua logo on it.
Though I haven't read Adam Smith, it is my understanding that 'capitalism' itself does not dictate or theorize about the size of businesses, but is focused on the efficiencies of capital.
A few of your points regarding goverments favouring large companies seems slightly mis-guided (though it may be more chicken vs. egg), but I believe it was the power of lobbyists to sway politicians which gave big business these benefits. However I personally believe that the lobbyist power exists due to a lack of organization on the part of individuals.
I understand the concern individuals have when businesses get too much power, but lets not forget that the more powerful businesses are most often made up of a large number of people (employees, shareholders, etc), or are influenced by large numbers of people (customers, partners). Therefore political organization should be able to alleviate many of these issues.

Great read though. You've got a great writing style.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in this service?
We are in the incubation stage of a business built to meaningfully connect potential startup co-founders.

The pitch is this: Finding the right individual to create a startup with is incredibly important, and should not be left to chance or a class roster. And those who haphazardly jump into business with friends or well-funded acquaintances, risk losing not only money and opportunity, but time as well.

Our hope is to create less of a traditional social network, and more of site with creative barriers to entry, i.e., closer to a dating site that doesn't suck than to LinkedIn.

Ambivalence or Indifference?
you apply the bit operator patch to get this.
I work on cricket.com, which is clearly a site about cricket the sport. The homepage usually features a picture of a cricketer and is filled with cricket stories. Every single day I would get a feedback email asking for help with a cricket wireless phone until I finally just removed the email address from the site.
It's actually worth signing up just to see the design. For example, try the flow for creating an event.
@rantfoil Great point. The argument can be made that ALL software is social. In building great software, we build community. Open source forums around the globe, or social networking around the corner.
I am actually a little burned out on the supper club scene... I'm just not that kind of social.

Curious to know what your HN-related project is, yeah.
"Especially alarming to officials, analysts say, was the role of the Internet in ethnic riots last July that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured--the worst ethnic violence in recent Chinese history. Government reports asserted that terrorists, separatists and religious extremists from within and outside the country used the Internet to recruit Uighur youth to travel to Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, to attack ethnic Han citizens."

It's pretty tough for a country if its policies result in people being eager to attack their neighbors after being stirred to action by Internet messages.
Many precious metals have useful qualities in terms of resisting corrosion, conducting heat or electricity, and such. In a lab doing this kind of work, they are likely to have those materials just lying around.

Read it as "we used super-high-end electrode materials because we had them on hand, but the process doesn't actually require them".
Poll: Guns on College Campuses
Georgia HB615 proposes to make it legal to have Concealed weapons on person on college campuses. Are you for or against
Against
Karma well spent.

The doubled-consonants style is very popular with the 12-16 year old set right now. Congratulations on your prejudice.
The process wouldn't exist without the goal in mind. Whether or not the 'original' goal is achieved, we gain life experiences through our pursuit of happiness, achievement, satisfaction etc
My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff out on a computer for fear of damaging it.

You're really talking about the same thing. The fear of damaging the thing is the result of not comprehending it. A person can have the skills to use a keyboard and mouse, but until they develop a working cognitive model that holds up in novel situations, the whole thing remains pretty alien. That's how you end up with situations like this, where people are able to turn on the computer, open a browser, use a search engine, log into a web site, post a comment on the public internet, and still be completely mistaken about what is going on.

You can get someone to that level in a day or two, maybe, but really understanding it in a way that enables them to navigate intuitively in unfamiliar situations is a lot harder. I don't think we've figured out a way to teach that.
I see what you are saying, but I once had to use Fortran for an extensive, difficult project. Fortran IV i think it was. There were, I thought, absolutely unreasonable restrictions where you could put expressions, like they were not allowed in parts of DO loops.

I was sufficiently angry that my next career move was into the compiler field where I wrote code generators for a couple of compilers. Had a blast.

So yes, we probably shouldn't hate our tools. Because if we do, there are consequences.
"Apparently, the 'Flat-Earthers' who created the site were really Trolls who planned to attract Round-earthers, and confound them with silly arguments. Instead, other Trolls showed up and began arguing for both positions."

Wow... I've long been aware of trolls, and of websites frequently visited by trolls, and of subjects that only really serve to attract trolls, but I had never thought of the wheels-within-wheels situation of trolls creating a website on a trollbait topic specifically for the purpose of trolling it themselves.

Truly, the Internet is a monument to human perversity.
> When a computer puts an error up on the screen

The funny thing is, you can turn most people away from the computer and read the error message verbatim (or any other dialog) and they'll be able to answer you. It's merely the fact that it's displayed on the computer that confuses/scares them. Once they've answered you (say "Yes, I want to cancel") you can turn them back to the computer and they'll still have trouble picking the right button.

There is some kind of mental block here -- but I believe that most people can get past it if they're forced to interact with computers. I rarely just click on a dialog for people -- I make them read it. I make them think about it. I make them pick the right button -- over and over. Eventually they gain more confidence and can do it themselves. And slowly they do begin to "get" computers. Dropping someone into facebook without them having the confidence is probably never going to work. But smart people don't have to be dumb with computers.
This is amazing, and has the potential to be majorly disruptive. It has that golden thing that PayPal has—the ability to take payments from regular credit cards, without the other person needing to be a user of the service. Thus, it is immediately useful to merchants, and will spread from them to non-merchant users.
Blocked outside of USA
And for many products ... it doesn't even make sense to try and squeeze any kind of judgement out of potential customers.

Can't agree any more. Doing straight up market research through this "customer development" approach probably great for most products. But there are some things for which there is little precedent, things we would take for granted today and yet would have been, at best, ambivalent about when they were first being imagined.

For example: A PC in every home. Few people would have bought into this when it was originally just Bill Gates' vision, in the way the whole world has bought into it now.

The internet and the world wide web are similar in that respect. As are so many other things, and more waiting to be created - things nobody knows they want yet.
The marginal uillity of programmers have an inverse relationship to the quality of the codebase.

The sale force's marginal utility increased in relative to code quality.

However, all else being equal, it is probably best to hire the best developers and salespersons you can for your money.

I think this sum up the blog post? Maybe I got the explanation wrong?
"I think you need to still sort out what you are offering/selling. Rarely does 'I want to make a...' turn into a business. Come at it from the other direction. 'People need ..., I can serve this need with...'."

That makes sense. I guess you could go with "web apps need accessible help, I can solve that with this."

The problem I have with most web app help is that when I click help, it takes me to a new page and lists ALL of the help items. I'd prefer it stay on the page I'm on, and only show the help items that are relevant to what I'm looking at. If I'm on the "User Groups" page and click "Help" I want FAQs about User Groups.

"Are you just providing a UI element?"
No, that's just a good way to present the help (in my opinion).
Somehow I'm less than enthused.
Yeah I thought about codecanyon. It could work for me, but when you start out Envato (who runs codecanyon) gets a %60 cut. I'll definitely look into that more though, could be worth it.
While I understand the benefits of the more configurable futures approach, in most cases I'd just use the Clojure convention and send my task off to an agent. It's good to be able to fall back to something configurable when that approach isn't good enough though.

Convention over configuration, but allow configuration as an option.
I don't think you can attribute Bill Gates to superior understanding and execution, at 50/100 million or even 500 million, but getting to 100 billion at one point, I don't buy it. Is Bill Gates really that much smarter than the rest of us. The same can be said for most people that's over 10 million I reckon.

"All in all, though, I think it wise to hold yourself responsible for your accomplishments - both geographic location and your circle of acquaintances is something you have significant control over."
I agree in spirit, but the reality is different.

Yes.
-if you're a white/asian male
-born to middle class parents
-and you're parents emphasized education
-and good nutrition/genes so that you grow to above average height
-and that you go to a good college
-and can fit in with the right crowd
yes, you simply move to silicon valley/manhattan/london and fit right in.
IF you're a black man from a poor single parent family in small town mississippi, or the daughter of a farmer from a village in bangladesh, things are much more difficult.
One of my favorite things Objective-C has over Java is no NullPointerExceptions (it's legal to send a message to nil).

One of my least favorite things Objective-C has is EXC_BAD_ACCESS (usually caused by memory mismanagement).
Is this any good?
i sincerely enjoyed it. hbo makes quality shows and the guys behind entourage know their shit. it's not tech entrepreneurship, but i can respect the storyline about the hustle.
unbelievable. sigh.
% /bin/true --help
Usage: /bin/true [ignored command line arguments]
or: /bin/true OPTION
Exit with a status code indicating success.

--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

NOTE: your shell may have its own version of true, which usually supersedes
the version described here. Please refer to your shell's documentation
for details about the options it supports.

Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.

I wouldn't necessarily call that 'bloated' unless you feel that any program that uses one bit more than absolutely necessary should be scrapped as 'bloated beyond belief.'

> there's a damn good reason why "your shell may have its own version of true".

Because why exactly?
There are major problems with hydrogen as a fuel, even presuming that this method becomes practical. First, it is more bulky than gasoline for the same energy value of fuel. Second, it is disastrously flammable, and you can't see the flame. Third, it causes metals to be brittle.

These are major infrastructure and transportation issues that cast doubt on the viability of the "hydrogen economy" even if its production can be done without burning coal.
I understood your reasoning until the last point.

"because our desire for food has been satisfied."

what?

Similarly with clothing.
Gasoline-powered ICEs also produce water vapor. One might assume that the water vapor output produced by hydrogen-powered vehicles is on the same order as the ICE that is replaced.
Every day I bike with a 4.5 pound MacBook... which (incidentally) weighs the same as my bike lock. That's 9 pounds right there -- with the right bag, you don't even notice it.

But airports... oh my god. What's perfect on a bike is a nightmare when you're walking, standing, and waiting.
I guess the low number of points for this post indicates that there are few on HN who are not citizens of the US, or at least few foreign startup founders here. I'm an international student in the US myself, wishing there was such a thing as the Startup Visa.

Paul Graham has an essay basically saying that a startup visa would be great: http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html

He should probably be informed of the startup visa drive mentioned in this article, given the following extract:

If you're a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, we'd like you lend your name to our efforts. You can read about the latest iteration of the proposal at StartupVisa.com. If you're willing to publicly sign on to a letter of support, please get in touch. If you'd be willing to talk to the press about your support, please leave a comment here as well.
The rgba() colors, the text-indent: -9999em's, or the -webkit-transform? Panic's actually been doing that on their blog too: http://www.panic.com/blog/ But still cool stuff :)

Some UI issues:

- The front page acts weird if you have it any less than full width. Things get pushed around in a weird way, including getting pushed off the page. But this is really just a nit-pick, because the important things stay on the page.

- The Flickr import is slick, but needs a progress indicator after you click the Set to import.

- The buttons at the top really should have some text underneath them. By themselves, I had to hover over each to figure out what they mean. I'm sure I'll get used to it after a while, but it's confusing up front.

- Twitter's disabling basic auth in June. Better get switched to OAuth soon ;)

Nothing major and a damn good 1.0. Great job!
US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development.

I assume he's talking about some specific class of company. Anyone know what it is?
Yeah, the attention to detail is simply astounding. Look at this page near the end for example: http://divvyshot.com/#to-about

Instead of going with a plain old Google Maps widget, the designer made a 3D map of their area in San Francisco. I mean, just look at the attention to detail on that map alone. Street names are naturally absolutely positioned, the drop pin has rollover and active images, and clicking on it will take the user to a full map. Astounding job.

Another cool thing I noticed: Move your mouse near the "Sign up now, it's free." link. It start's pulsing. Move your mouse on top of it, and it pulses more strongly. Very nice.
Hacker News I Need Feedback
While it sounds like fun, and I wish the participants luck, it does have the feel of something that MTV would do, no?
I need feedback. I have been putting together this web site and I have not been successful in getting much feedback. Please help. I am looking for feedback in any area. Usability, UI, features, functionality, etc. Please help!

Keep in mind, work in progress!!!
I found the plugins quite bloated, but indeed the best framework ever!!!
For me it is the startup thing. 1 year of saving 1/3 of your gross (1/2 your net) is one year of runway when you quit.
Also 3 bytes: HA!
The next time you guys all think that the "business guy" in start-ups is overrated, think about the time you clicked the up arrow here.

Your eureka moment here is is a akin to a business guy setting up his first website.
I'm curious about your business model. By explaining that, you'd also be giving a better idea of how you expect potential customers to use your service, which would give us more information with which to form an opinion. Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit?
Video games not recession proof? Jan '10 less than Jan '08 Sales
I just checked and all three volumes are checked out for at least a month.
You have succinctly summed it all up. I take pride in inbox zero and I cannot stand that Buzz unread indicator. I don't mind the link or the service, just don't put the number of unread there.
That comment thread is making me sick to my stomach. I didn't understand the true extent of the power that Google wields until now. People will apparently go wherever is first...

Then again, the bottom 1% of 300 million users is still a huge number of users, so maybe this isn't as bleak as it seems.
this will work great as long as your customer doesn't know how to delete a line of css.
> a bunch of definitions for common knowledge

In order to create new ideas, you must play with the ones that exist and argue about how they fit together. In order to do that, you must rigorously and precisely define the terms you're working with. Otherwise, when you, for example, design a new programming language, you'll just end up inventing your own terminology for your business objects (i.e. closures, dereferencing expressions, A-Lists, etc.) and no one will be able to work with the results.
I realize that water is produced by burning gasoline too, but since the only by-product of burning hydrogen is water (IIRC) I assume that the amount is larger.
Great look - feels more like an app then a webpage.

A few usability comments:

- I kept trying to click the buttons embedded into the help tips, but they're roll-over only.

- The ui doesn't respond instantly - probably because it's loading additional content. While we've been trained to deal with this on normal HTML links, the site looks enough like an application that it seems like things are broken. Please add some sort of progress indicator.

- Progress indicator while uploading, too. I tried uploading a directory and nothing happened. Then I tried another dir, and nothing happened. Eventually, the second directory started showing up.

- When I rotated my small image, the UI got messed up - the text field for the name of the image started overlapping the image itself.

Keep up the good work.
The Future of User Interfaces
Developers should be Artists