skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, pure hydrogen will extinguish your cigarette, too ; )

Yeah, I was a bit unfair I guess. Just trying to make a point about people's irrational risk perception - they tend to seize on certain things while ignoring others. I mean christ, the Hindenburg made a big pretty explosion, but there were only 36 fatalities! That's nothing. And yet, 75 years later, oh no can't even think about Hydrogen! It's bullshit.

It's interesting to consider how different the world might be today if the media hadn't caught the Hindenburg disaster in a visual format.
yeah... for how long?

Power and energy are frequently confused. Power is the rate at which energy is generated and consumed. To answer your question the battery rating should preferably be given in Amp-hours or kWh. I suspect the author wanted to highlight the energy density of the battery, connected to a charger the battery should be able to provide 10kW continually for its life. 10kw/kg is actually impressive.
I enjoyed some history at high school but not history lessons in general they never really engaged me. But then I'm wondering if this is like someone saying "I enjoy blowing things up but chemistry lessons never really engaged me".

Basically are the type of historical facts, Plymouth harbour or whatever, that are taught in high school instead the basis on which to build later historical understanding. An 11 year old won't normally be able to combine the relevant facets of the events in James I court with the leaving of the Pilgrims, the situation in Europe and the differences in the main North American colonies to create wisdom. What they can do is learn facts about these situations to use later as the basis for such more complex understanding.
15 Dependable Off-Page Strategies to get BackLinks
With the intention to survive in the competitive on-line Industry, it is essential to follow effective on-line marketing strategies that can help us to avail maximum benefits
Jason Kyle: From Start-Up CEO To Super Bowl Snapper
Is Android at odds with Linux after the removal of Android device drivers?
I don't trust websites that look like that one without extra research (no offense), and google didn't give me too much promising support for the claim. Where is my laptop battery revolution? I want a longer lasting battery =/
The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul
In other news, SAP promises to enter a faster horse into this year's Daytona 500.
I don't know. I read the original article and felt he was talking about building numerous cheap apps and selling those to get rich quick instead of building a single one and hopping it will take over the market. I did not felt like he was talking about spaming!

Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone and selling those. This is opposite of putting all your time on a single iPhone app and betting on it.

The original article was really helpful for me. I disagree with those that are getting a different message from it.
Gmail's killer features for me upon launch were (1) exclusivity of the address invites, (2) storage space, and ultimately (3) POP support so I didn't have to use the web client any more.

I almost never use the GMail web interface.
You're usually better off using coroutines for this sort of asynchronous programming in Lua. There's a larger overlap between coroutines and continuations than you'd think.

Also, Lua doesn't have macros, at least not in the sense that Lisp and Prolog do. It just has eval.
So would you rather people publish in "low-impact" journals and then leave science completely because they can't get a permanent job?

"Intellectually bankrupt" is a pretty strong term to use for people who work for a small fraction of the amount of money normally talked about on this site.

I'm not saying there aren't issues, but blaming the individuals who are trying to make a living by doing science isn't going to help. The success rate of getting permanent jobs in science might be higher than that of startups, but the "payoff" is a small fraction.
"I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different"

It wasn't that different? For me it was just radically different:

ALtavista->Advanced search->"car AND red AND 200 AND horsepower"

You had been redirected to a "portal". Ads flashing every second, and the first two pages filled only with sponsored links. Slow search with non related pics.

Google "car red 200 horsepower"

Clean and lean, text only, with just the information that you were searching for in the first page.
That quote pretty much sums up enterprise/government software consulting and sales. A committee will come up with a grocery list of features that must work, but don't need to work well. The longer the list, the more the consultants make, so they gladly help their clients lengthen the list for a fee.
I'll bet you're right and the risk when allowing people to retain their freedom to make decisions is that they'll make ones with which you disagree.

But I'm less pessimistic than you about people's abilities to make good decisions especially when their children are involved. At least their motivations are better aligned than the government's with their children's interests. Teacher's unions?
But imagine if you were born knowing you had the natural aptitude to be the world's best brain surgeon, or guitar player, or graphic designer.

I see several problems with his argument here:

1) Talent is not that important. Geniuses in any field are made, not born, through long hours of focused practice. Granted, some fields (such as sport) have minimum physical standards to be competitive but for the most part it's due to effort.

(Focused practice refers to practice that's actively aimed towards identifying weak points and improving them. If, to take a simple example, you spend several years writing similar "hello world" programs in C you aren't going to get very far.)

More information on this can be had in the work of Anders Ericcson (a leader in the field of expertise research).

A profile can be found here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/success-...

2) Even if you accept that there's some sort of talent-based destiny, people are still likely to have characteristics that could make them great in a wide array of fields. For example, if you're strongly analytical you could be a programmer, or a quant, or a research scientist, etc.

3) What if the field you're great in isn't valued by society? You might know that you could be a great artist, but there are great artists who are starving and miserable. On the other hand you could be a mediocre accountant (or whatever) and have fun outside your career while not living hand to mouth.

4) Finally, he seems to suggest that what he had was the aptitude to be a great cartoonist. However, looking at Dilbert, Scott Adam's main strengths seem to be excellent persistence and good salesmanship. These qualities (and I'd say they're far more useful qualities than artistic ability and a brilliant sense of humor) could have carried Scott to success in many other fields. The reason he's a great cartoonist is because it interested him, not because of some innate talent.
"What Eamex has done is figure out a way to stabilize the electrodes and prevent the deterioration of tin. Why's this important? Because it means the batteries can withstand a lot more charge and discharge cycles. We're talking about over 10,000 cycles with a shelf life of 20 years."

Not quite what the headline made it sound like...

(WTF that site prevents copy so I had to rewrite this by hand. LAME. Maybe it's time for me to try NoScript after all.)
As Norvig said, it takes 10 years to make a programmer. Why would you want to teach an introductory course badly, when you can create a course that is designed from the ground up to be independent and not depend on 9 years of follow-up?
It doesn't diff the versions, charges you for total storage:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_using_Ve...
Django Advent - Multiple Database Support (Feb 9, 2010)
"What big, expensive thing can I buy to make myself feel important?"
You could say that about any form of currency. For example, cash is trees that we cut down, cover with ink, and put in a vault and pay somebody to guard them. Maybe Mars has a barter economy.
A currency with zero nominal inflation translates to effective deflation in a growing economy. If you own x% of the moon, and no more moon can be printed, you'll hold your lunar notes under a mattress waiting for their value to rise and nothing productive will ever get financing.
Thank you.

That was my first thought as well, but in testing that's quite not the way people like to approach the problem. (In fairness, the form I have on the homepage currently also isn't quite the way people like to approach it.)

For example, here's a sampling of posting from a general purpose (not bike specific) forum from the past 24 hours:

* What is the best comfort bike/city bike for under $500?
* Whats a light bike for city riding?
* Recommendation for Cyclocross Bike for Winter Road Riding?
* Whats a decent hard tail mountain Bike for under 500?
* Suggestions for a $650 road bike?
* I'm looking to spend around $2000 on a road bike. What should I get?

This is the immediate need I'm trying to serve with that form on the homepage.

I imagine I'll eventually have a bike "wizard" like you describe, but from my research (and watching others in the space) that's not quite an intuitive approach for users.
People have agreed on gold's value for thousands of years. I don't think anything worse than the fall of Rome is likely to happen, and gold retained its value even then.
I don't agree with Max' position 100%, but what he's advocating is not spam per se, and the attitude of having 100 dripping taps instead of a single firehose is one that is hard to assail from a 'robustness' principle.

If you only have one horse in the race, if it dies you're toast, so having 10's or even 100's of little sites is good business in the sense that it will never die overnight.

Let me give you some examples of sites I built in that vein, now both defunct because the $1 / day target was not even in sight.

I built a platform that allows you to sell stuff online, and because I figured the good advertising and affiliate money is in financial products I focused on houses and cars.

The two sites were close enough that they could share a single database, free to use for the user and attracted a small group of users from various countries.

But that's where I missed the boat, this sort of thing doesn't work on an international basis, you have to tailor it to each and every market specifically. So what started out as a vision of low maintenance useful sites with solid income slowly morphed in to high maintenance sites with low income. In other words failures.

Spam didn't enter in to it, and if the concept would have been successful I can see a lot of ways in which to create further 'clones'.

Then there was Max' example of the site with the owls. There is quite a bit wrong with that whole view, for one it doesn't really add value, after all, if you go to youtube and type in 'owls' you get the exact same list. Only with a couple of twists, for one that list is up to date, no broken links. Whereas any 'collection' of youtube video links that you maintain will have to be checked periodically for broken links (this can be automated though).

Finding a successful 'template' that you can clone is an essential component to the scaling of many businesses, each of the clones can then be targeted at verticals, just like what I tried to do with the cars & houses, you could do with owls and penguins.

But the line for me gets drawn at having nothing but links to other peoples content, aggregation with razor thin added value is too cheap and spammy to me, I'd like projects to have a bit more meat. But that also means that you'll be investing more time and that may eventually not be worth it, especially not if a project fails.

There's something to be learned from Max' treatise, I agree with the initial impression that it advocates spammy thin sites, but if you look at that as a way of testing the waters to see what has 'legs' then it may not be all that bad.

And I'm really curious about how his experiment with the site he's going to be building will pan out.
Speaking to the need for software to be open source in more than academia?
I think you're the first person to think of it. Good idea. I will be arguing for it from now on, because not only is it divisible and un-manufacturable, it wouldn't inhibit industrial uses of gold or anything else.
s/eschew/escrow
Techcrunch Moves Their 125 Ads Below Each Article Advertising Strategy Shift?
So you are Stewart Butterfield.
Thank you. I agree. It's a mistake to have that as the first big link on page, as that's really a work in progress. As I as wrote below, the stem version - http://www.brightspoke.com/c/understanding/stems.html - is more complete and may be more in line with what you were expecting.
The difference here is that, with currency, if everybody agrees that something is currency, it IS currency, whereas astrology makes false claims about the physical world.
I think there is a whole spectrum of making money online, from scamming/phishing and the like all the way to squeaky clean, not one bit optimized (SEO, conversions) shopping cart.

The debate is where you draw the line to define something as spam, and it also depends on your definition of spam. I mean, you can twist Google's business model and say it's scraping other people's content and plastering ads all over its pages. That sounds horribly close to a definition of spam and yet people love the search results from Google.
Any idea why they don't do it the same way as snapshots?
"I know he is not just advocating building made-for-adsense sites, it’s not the method, it’s the attitude that goes with it, that is the real issue. Lets not care about providing any kind of value, lets not worry about any sort of professionalism, all we want to do is scam some suckers out of $1 a day and believe you me there are plenty of suckers on the web."

I don't get this common reaction to the post? What's wrong with providing something for a dollar, if it's worth a dollar?

What's necessarily unprofessional about providing something worth a dollar?

What is it about online entities that make it necessary for them to be somehow more "worthy" than most peoples' daily slog in a cubicle or behind a register? Yes, the internet makes it more possible to make "worthy" entities, but why must they be worthy?

Just because some people associate their better instincts and identity with the internet doesn't mean that everyone should do the same. Otherwise we'd all be driving Priuses.
Dual Hard Drive Laser Drawing Machine
I'd love to see that screenshot!
(ctrl-t)n(enter) here. I'll admit that it is rare to type in a full website address nowadays. And using Chrome, Google knows everything I type in anyway....
At risk of duplicating things others have said here -

* If I didn't already know why I prefer steel to carbon, or aluminum, I wouldn't learn it from the site. It really doesn't give any rationale for different materials. It looks like you tried to explain the pros and cons of different handlebars, but it's a lot of text, and could be improved with pictures, showing different hand positions perhaps.

* It may be a good idea to keep commuters in mind, perhaps factoring this in to "Bike Type". The equipment trade-offs are different. In particular, there are incidental accessories - reviews of (say) bike headlights would be nice, and I feel more comfortable getting that sort of thing online than a whole bike. You also don't have anything about singlespeed / fixed-gear stuff, another niche that might be easy to add.

* You don't seem to have anything about bike size in there. "Clydesdale" riders (i.e., tall and/or heavy people) tend to need more durable parts, some people need extra-small frames, etc. This will complicate things tremendously, though, and being able to actually test-ride bikes in person is a huge advantage for LBSs.
A long time ago, the question often was:

"What system can we buy to replace our greenscreen in-house financial / manufacturing / sales system, that gives us multi-language, multi-currency, a GUI, an RDBMS, and freedom to choose hardware/OS/DB vendors?"

There was only one answer back then.
I think the matter of the method of the monetization is part of the problem here, Max never explicitly wrote how he intended to monetize the traffic. Selling something for a dollar is one thing, entering the SEO page space war in order to attract enough traffic to get $1 per day per web property is another.
I just did a quick dig through the DB -- looks like ~60% are using that first stamp (or two, if they live outside the US) to mail something to themselves. The remaining ~40% either don't use those stamps at all or they send a letter to someone else.

As for the picture of the paper/envelope, (this is probably going to sound dumb) but I can't figure out how to take a decent shot without making the stuff look terrible. Any tips or thoughts on how to get past that?
Alex Pryce: Poetcasting – Online Resource for Poets?
Crime Survey Raises Questions on Data-Driven Policies and Falsification
18 Important Moments in Black History
How I have chosen what to do in my life
Quintura challenges Google’s Wonder Wheel
I remember reading a sci-fi novel that impressed me as a child about the wife of a recently deceased composer corrupting a politician to not vote for a proposal to extend the copyright on the basis that there are only a limitited number of possible "interesting" combinations of notes. Hence an unlimited copyright is like a death sentence to the creativity of all future musicians. I believe that the actual limit of 50 years is already too much.
1) Instant—in broad sense: instant on, rendering speed, responsiveness to manipulation.

2) Comfortable—allows more flexibility orientation and holding-wise than notebooks. IPS screen with 178 viewing angle helps a lot there too.

3) Interface. Combined with 1) it makes to happen the thing that David Carr noticed: "the gadget disappears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU). When you get impression that you are directly manipulating web page, photos or e-book with your bare fingers without much effort why would you think about GHz, number of USB ports, etc.?

One of my favorite quotes about design is "Good design is invisible".
As far as I know, by looking at things that can be modeled and measured, e.g. drag and engine output per unit of fuel. Also, a better autopilot can run the plane in a more lean fashion while cruising at high altitude.

Operators are acutely aware of fuel costs, it's the biggest and most unpredictable variable cost they face. They will often use the futures market to lock in acceptable prices for fuel.

Hmmm, I'm not sure about the operating costs, but I'd guess they're separate from the fuel costs. The decrease would represent things like less people overall needed to run the craft, lower maintenance due to newer and more reliable components (for example, when you go from direct linkages to fly by wire there's many less moving parts), better technique from lessons learn applied to all of the above, etc. etc.

I'd expect the 17% lower fuel costs would have to apply to each plane, measured for equivalent flight profiles (X cargo transported from X to Z).
> "No game developer suddenly realises that their customers really want a different kind of product altogether."

Not true. Games publishers are known to change their mind at a moment's notice. I've also experienced sweeping changes after the product has been focus tested: it's an entertainment product so human experience is everything.

Designing for change is something you have to do in the games industry. This applies to the artists as well as the coders.
Top 6 iPhone Apps to Learn About the Nature Around You
Here we present six iPhone apps to learn about the nature around you. These are sure to excite nature lovers moved by flitting butterflies, mooing cows, rising moons, flowing tides, and such stuff.
> Why two free stamps per month?

I figured that you need to be able to send yourself at least one sample -- it takes one stamp if you live in the US and two stamps if you're anywhere else on the planet.

> If someone uses your free service for three months, or six, or twelve, what are the chances that they will upgrade to a paid service?

Ask me again in 3, 6 and 12 months. :)

> Why would this be more profitable than a plain pay-as-you-go plan with no free stamps, or one or two initial trial stamps?

I originally had no free stamps included in the pay as you go plan. This idea of including a few free stamps started up just a few weeks ago so I don't have any long term data. The theory here is that I "hook" you buy giving you an easy way to send your first letters... then you'll (hopefully) see the value in upgrading.

> If I choose to sign up with one of your monthly plans, will you offer me a refund of my unused credit if I decide not to use it?

Technically, no (it's in the TOS, etc). (Though, I'd probably refund the money if someone asked for it. I'd rather keep some good karma going...) When you pay your phone company (or 37signals, or anyone else) for a full month and then decide to quit, I doubt any of them will easily give you a refund. :)
Ask HN: Deliberate practice to make for a better developer
I am currently reading "Talent Is Overrated". The book attempts to elaborate on a paper by Ericsson (I posted a link on HN yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109919).

I was wondering, how would one go about practicing deliberately to make oneself a better developer. The book attempt to break down the elements of deliberate practice, some of those are

- The practice itself - The book recommends finding a teacher or a mentor (if you are not already a star performer) to assess and give honest feedback on what your weak points are

- Highlighting highly granular areas for improvement, and then practicing till you get those right - This is one area I could use a few suggestions

- Quick feedback loop - I can see the compiler or your tests giving you a tight feedback look, but how would you know if you are doing something in the idiomatic way, or to tell you if there is a better way of doing it? I guess a mentor could help here.

Has anyone here tried to apply specific principles to improve their code, or their ability to see better solutions? Even when learning a new language or a new paradigm (OO, FP) I feel sometimes I hit the bounds of my comfort zone and never really step out of that.

Furthermore, how do you carve out areas for improvement?

I think this discussion might prove useful to most of here, be it improving your programming abilities or your elevator pitch.

[Update - Edit for formatting]
Believe me, an internal dashboard is in the works! I intentionally forced myself to use Excel to ensure I was looking at the right stuff (and that the numbers made sense in the first place).

Now that I'm starting to get confident about things, it's just a matter of blocking off a few hours on Saturday morning and turning it into code.

And yes, all unused stamps expire at the end of each month -- it's in the TOS. :)

I love the idea of the failsafe... this is definitely going in.
Interesting that 2 people disagree so vehemently to downvote. My point is that the "killer features" aren't necessarily the same for different people.
Serious security problem on Ubuntu- Advise to upgrade your kernel
Certainly hacker-ish, but the requirement of a specific brand of plasma TV severely limits its utility.