skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is my first blog post. I'm just trying to get some ideas down, but I'd appreciate any feedback.
Merlin Mann interviews Appsaurus (YC S07) at Macworld
Luck doesn't exist. It is essentially a magic enchantment that provides its recipient with an ability to gain a positive outcome of chance events at a frequency above those provided by normal probability. Sure, there are some people who will 'beat the odds' on a regular basis, probability provides for this, however more people report being lucky than the probability suggests as well. Further, luck has a social connotation roughly equivelent to fortunate, but when the term lucky is used there is a nod to vague supernatural forces controlling outcomes, a la the Fates.

As such luck really cannot be isolated as a factor. Instead tho, people who claim to be lucky can easily be isolated. They can be studied for what makes them "lucky". In this case it seems to be at least somewhat correlated with openness to unexpected outcomes.
In fact, how many open source apps have dedicated UI designers? Probably Mozilla stack, but who else?

Even very popular OS apps, such as GIMP, Inkscape, Open Office have questionable design.

Granted sometimes UI designer can misunderstand user experience in a particular domain, but programmers are more apt to do so.

Disclaimer: I program and sadly, also design(not by choice, I can't really design) UIs on Linux.
Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals, interviewed by Pipeline
Competing with the iPhone
Also relieved that the usually self-promotional jgrahamc didn't post the link here himself.

I figured that you didn't need to hear me repeat a story that I've already told here.
Replacing the office keys with iPhones, N1s and Twilio
How about using iSight to find my face, locate my eyes on the face, trace along the path of my gaze, and place the damn cursor there, when I push a pre-defined button? Mousing is tedious. I'd much rather push a button and just stare at where I want the input cursor to be.
I would hope so -- lucky is a magic property. Luck itself may be chance, but lucky is nonsense.
The figures are apples and oranges. I have no doubt that you can get to a reasonable number of 400% for some form of debt. But if you do that you need to do something similar for all countries you compare.
How do you trap a J programmer anywhere?

Swear excessively, censoring yourself comic-book style, and watch for infinite loops.

(for those who aren't familiar with J, here's a "SPAM" printing loop from rosetta code)

-@:(][ 1!:2&2@('SPAM'"_)) (^:_) 1
woah:

The farmers are in their third week of blockading all routes from northern Greece to the Balkans - 75% of trade has been stopped and fruit is rotting in its containers.
I feel your pain. And no I don't want your job.
Soundex
Three way to visualize (prove) the Pythagorean theorem
How do you actually prove the Pythagorean theorem? This article shows three visual and elegant ways to do it.
Semi-Bold = Ugly? Now I'm confused. (Seemed ok to me on a XP machine.)
The duplicate checker only checks for duplicates in the last x months (3 IIRC). I believe that this is deliberately so that "oldie but goody" posts can be reposted.
20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Are Already Browsing With Chrome
Pogoplug (2nd Generation) Reviewed
Know about hard drive bad sector
Many computer users come across error message about the hard disk "bad sector". Fortunately you can recover or repair the bad sectors. know how?
I've known the founders John and Kwin for a few years, so here's a few more details:

- It really works. The key difference between this and other gestural interfaces is that it doesn't require any markers, just a couple of video cameras. The magic is in the processing, they're able to get millimeter-accurate positioning from your fingers. That means you can use your finger like a laser pointer, even for delicate work. I spent some time using it two years ago, and it just all works.

- You don't have to get gorilla arm. One of my first concerns was holding my arms up, since I suffer from RSI. It works fine with your hands by your sides.

- They self-funded for a couple of years getting a prototype working, then got VC from the Foundry Group, Brad Feld's firm.
How to Get a Panel Speaking Spot with O'Reilly and Other Conferences
Rendering fast reflections with OpenGL
John, congratulations for the friendly email! (wondering actually who you emailing next:) Glad to see a .pl making headlines! You obviously spent some time with the data and I would appreciate it, if you can shed some light on the 'average'. Does the average really represent a fair average over the earth's surface? How is it exactly calculated? Are the met files raw data or is it data that has gone through some homogeneity tests?
Yeah, I figured that out after playing with it for a while. Another nice feature would be a skip button.
Ok, let's leave aside that Ubuntu is basically just Debian with much better "OMG usability" hype--the biggest difference is that Ubuntu doesn't have as many packages available by default.

With the increasing acceptance and widespread development/use of Linux, I have progressively seen it become more and more like Those Other OSes.

Once upon a time, Linux was fast as hell on any hardware. It isn't these days. Now, we generally run a massive desktop environment (GNOME/KDE) on a massively bloated display system (X.org), so we can display disgustingly huge programs (Firefox/Chrome, OpenOffice, even Pidgin is a pig). I run Debian on my T22 laptop (PIII, 512 MB of RAM), with the 9wm window manager, and it is slow.
5 Reasons Founders Hate the Question “So What Do You Do?”
Yes, hardware acceleration is nice, but the lack of raw access to it isn't the issue here. Flash has always worked fine on Windows without it.

Apple's position is that if you want to decode+display video, it would be best to use the QT API with the codecs they ship, and get acceleration for free where available. Given Adobe's track record, they don't want them mucking about in the bowels of the video drivers.

Accelerated video drivers were the number one location of kernel panics on Windows XP, so Microsoft spent a lot of effort to rearchitect the system in Vista, where it now causes a "kernel oops" instead, and the user just gets a 2s pause and a taskbar notification while the driver reloads. They took a lot of grief from users over the slightly decreased performance and the transition when their drivers didn't work at all, but it was the right thing for them to do. Apple has not yet needed to invest in this.

The Flash plugin is by far the most common cause of application crash reports on Mac OS X. Nearly every user experienced them, I used to get them on a daily basis! Very few of their users have ever seen the OS X kernel panic screen, especially without having failing hardware, and Apple would like to keep it that way.
I can (cynically) see Big Corps somehow making this mandatory to avoid injuries and reduce their workman's comp insurance rates.
The unlikely connection between primes and quantum physics [2006]
Well this comes at an interesting time, since Kublax (UK equivalent of mint.com) just announced it's entering the deadpool today
I'm not worried about the US becoming Zimbabwe at all (northern or otherwise). But under extreme circumstances, when the alternatives are to default outright or to inflate the debt away, the latter will always be preferrable for a country indebted in its own currency. It's not an option for other countries, so I think it's a useful distinction in spite of the issues you correctly point out.
What makes you think that people don't do something similar for other countries?

I don't have direct access to the necessary statistics, but based on the figures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_d... and guessing that most of Greece's debt is externally held, it is looks like Greece's total debt load should be somewhere in the 50-60% range. That looks a lot better than 400%. And fits perfectly with the article's contention that the Greek government has a debt problem, but the rest of Greece does not.
Looks like I didn't thoroughly research the idea before posting about it - a similar solution already exists: http://www.postureminder.co.uk/

(I'm the author of the original post)
Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions, I can't add a skip button in:( Same sort of problem with Pandora. You can only skip a certain amount of tracks in a certain time period, so I've just excluded the option to skip tracks.
Don’t be creative about the wrong things
Come on, he wasn't CEO until April of 2006; all you can fairly say is that he failed to save Sun, which is a very different thing.
I think people like their own puns but tend to roll their eyes at other people's (while secretly enjoying them).
The night I Met Einstein
Thanks. I've gotten some reports about problems with Flashblock/Clicktoflash. I'll hopefully have an update to fix that tonight. Thanks for checking out the site!
Teela Brown? So lucky that she got to go see and save the Ringworld as her first and last mission.
MVC with Node.js - Which modules?
Direct link to ScanSafe PDF report: http://www.scansafe.com/downloads/gtr/2009_AGTR.pdf
Publishers warn of hurdles to iPad deal
I agree. But that's exactly what the article says repeatedly.
I hate having this conversation with family members and normal people. It's just excruciating and everyone likes to play devil's advocate. The best is the: "oh yeah but isn't that like [insert well known company here]".

They'd rather hear something like: "yeah, im a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs." or "yeah, im in law school". They can comprehend that stuff a lot easier.

It's great practice, but it just gets really annoying. It's caused me to be a very defensive person at times.
Not quite sure when he joined elance but with big names like John Doerr and Ram Shriram behind him already - the post is hardly surprising.

I'd love to hear how someone with lesser traction or brand name VCs raised cash and how it took them 10 months.
Unlocking Achievements: Rewarding Skill With Player Incentives
right...i think this is super common...very strange dynamic...
"Dr. X was the ideal man for this job because of his very disreputability. He was a reverse engineer. He collected artificial mites like some batty Victorian lepidopterist. He took them apart one atom at a time to see how they worked, and when he found some clever innovation, he squirreled it away in his database. Since most of these innovations were the result of natural selection, Dr. X was usually the first human being to know about them.

"Hacksworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned." (Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age)

Don't diss the forgers.
Please don't give Google any ideas. I'm still mad they're calling tags "labels".

Using well known terminology helps people understand the metaphor. I also think "follow" is for social interactions whereas "subscribe" fits better into a publishing metaphor.
Facebook Launches Zero, A Text-Only Mobile Site For Carriers
Very hard. The infrastructure to do it simply doesn't exist. Some of the station data and instrument runs are not actually connected to anything, they're on a human retrieval basis.
FF better watch out. It is are going to be losing market share as fast as IE pretty soon.

Yet I still cannot believe the world has not discovered how great opera is yet...
Especially with "groaners", where part of the fun is inflicting the pun on the receivers ;)
The Secret of Social Media
This is l33t beyond all words.
You're right that the current Congresses have been extraordinary in their dysfunction, but a little late on your timeline for Supreme Court appointment battles: Reagan's Bork was shot down 42-58, GHWB's Thomas was confirmed 52-48, with both debates waged in the media.

In the times of 90-vote confirmations, horse-trading of variegated appointees just went on behind closed doors. Now that things are so fractured, a president can only get away with nominating a slate of judges all partially partisan in the same direction.

It wouldn't be the constitution being amended anyway, just Senate procedural rules, but Harry Reid is never going to go for that.
The top 10 ways to get to know Neo4j: Neo4j v1.0 released after 10 years of dev
Easy to get around by just reloading. :)
Green Email - does it make sense to promote green energy via email signature?
I don't think I can really do your questions justice. I would suggest as a first port of call the paper that describes how the Met Office generates CRUTEM and HADCRUT.

Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed
temperature changes: a new dataset from 1850
P. Brohan, J. J. Kennedy, I. Harris, S. F. B. Tett & P. D. Jones
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf

That paper is long and covers how the Met Office generates the trend data you see, how the data is modified and gridded, how error estimates are generated, etc.
Some of us automate our installs.

Check out the FEBE and OPIE plugins for firefox. Host the archives someplace (dropbox works well) and write a little install script and you're done.

Installing stuff by hand is so last century...
Can someone explain the differences between this and weak references in a VM with garbage collection?
" . . . in democracy, for example where a majority takes rights away from some other minority."

That's the Tyranny of the Majority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
The EduPlug - Go for it, Tonido
I agree, perfect picture for the feeling.

Perhaps another lesson: You are starting your own business, you don't need validation from ycombinator.
I like it a lot, reminds me of muxtape before they got taken down.

One suggestion - the onmouseover gray hover color gets a bit annoying for the current song playing. Also, a fast forward link would be great, in case the song is a little "out there".
A blog with a 1995 design and a grid background that doesn't align with the text criticizes the Windows Phone 7 interface for being ugly and illegible. IOW, nothing to see here.
Except that remembering the image source is much easier than remember the "A", which ISTR is the Anchor, but that never made sense to me either, as I'm not anchoring anything.
This is one of the single most insightful and inspiring comments I've read on here. Thank you.

If you have any more to say, or can recommend any related resources - books, articles, or so on - that would be massively appreciated. But even if this is it, all I can say is - wow. And thanks. The gears are turning in my head, as you've cleared up something for me that I could never quite get down. Thank you, this was huge.
While the pictures are cool, I feel that using them as the background for some of the slides distracting. For instance, on the slide that says "26 billion tons of CO2" with the sun peaking around the earth, does the background picture really add much?
Little trick for finding the right language construct (using Google)
I second this. One of the most eye opening and impactful classes I took in my undergrad was the digital circuits class. It finally made it click. Breadboarding a simple ALU at a workbench out of simple logic components, making them work off of a clock (seeing how the clock was just a final input that forced the operation to occur blew my mind), etc. etc. then doing it again in an FPGA was awesome. Suddenly all of the stack made sense, my compiler class made sense (when we wrote an emulator for a fictional target system to compile to, I kept thinking about how that system would work as a logic diagram), the OS class made sense (thinking about how the contents of an instruction could be swapped out for context switches in a multi-tasking system)...

I wish that the curriculum at my school had started with that class. It would have been a much better foundation to start off of than C++ and Prolog.
The Tao of Web Performance and Uptime
I like the clean design. Do you have a blog with notes of the whole process - plugins used / css / js / hosting.
Sure. And none of the future climate-change revelations will overthrow the conclusion that the Earth is experiencing relatively unprecedented warming. Until the one that does (if that happens). Given the continuing flood of revelations and the incestuous nature of this field (there is very little truly independent data), the "consensus" 5 or 10 years from now may be quite different from what it was 5 or 10 years ago.
I switched from ff after the latest ff update succeeded in slowing startup speeds even more. They seem to be more focused on ribbon/toolbar customizations than achieving <5 second start ups.
California General Transcription
Dial toll free 1-877-323-4707 for transcription services in California, the voice-to-text service is charged $ 60 to transcribe an hour of audio/video and the T-A-T is 48 hours, call Transcriptions Service now.
If you know any similar trick, let me know in the comments !
I'm actually surprised by how many programmers still install stuff. :)
There's nothing secret about enjoying them to me, a good pun is like a good steak.
Also don't forget to package up those assets. I recommend jammit (http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/), as it can use the google javascript compiler to squeeze out a couple extra kb.
I think they're so many light years ahead of "here's a whole fuckload of text" that it doesn't really matter.

And if you're going to have slides which don't have lots of bullet points you need something to give them visual panache.
Tail replacement - allows an entire directory of logs to be watched.
Love the idea. Education is a gigantic set of institutions that could be made much more efficient with free-market models; and what better entrepreneurship model than Y-Combinator?

As with the whole hacking-education movement, it's an interesting intersection of forward thinking educators and social change organizations, as well as business and technology experts (hopefully) seasoned with lots of startup experience.

Our startup - http://betterlesson.org is an early entry into a growing movement.
The list you point to includes only external debt and combines private and public debt. What that says is simply that US and Japanese citizens borrow at home whilst many others borrow abroad. It's a reflection of the size of a country's debt market and says absolutely nothing about the likelyhood of a government defaulting on its debt.
I found myself using this each day more. If you want to watch everything that happens inside a directory (merged into a single window) - like I always do, you will need a command similar to:

multitail --mergeall -f -iw "apache-tomcat-6.0.18/logs/*" 1

Multitail is smart enough to figure out if files were erased/created/re-created etc - on the fly. This saves quite a bit of time for me. Since I only heard of this recently, I figured it might be a good idea to spread the word...

The software is a big buggy, but I still like it a lot.
I am not sure it is about "glamor" but location. I bet you can't find that many mobile home parks within any city limits. However, most major cities do have harbors...
While I was blabbing on and on about whether we should take more, or from whom we should include in the round, Bill said, “Take the (blank) money.” From that day, I have advised the same to every company I’ve since worked with.

I'm not sure that this is great advice. If you don't have a conceivable use for the money taking too much could kill you thanks to the expectations that are attached to said finance.
There's a lack of demand for $2,222 11-inch TVs? I'm shocked!
I think the caveat to "People will not pay for what they can get for free" is "People will always think something costs money if it once did". In my experience most still think of Opera as a browser you have to pay for.
Industrial computer
ADEK Industrial Computers is a leading computer manufacturer. We design and build custom computer systems based on exact customer specifications and requirements.
The US carriers want to charge you at least $30/m extra for the privilege, and it's an easier sell when there's extra hardware involved.

Eventually they'll give up as more open phones fill the market, the same way the consumer broadband ISPs gave up on locking service to client MAC addresses and charging extra for more IPs in the face of $50 Linksys boxes flooding the market.
A Collection Of Redis Use Cases
No doubt it's not the only show of the time to have an anti-thatcher bias. Many shows openly ribbed the government particularly in comedy like spitting image and Alexei Sayle. Why should anyone take notice of a show that tries to say it subtly when everyone else is saying it openly.

No wonder it got cancelled, the script-writers sound pretentious. Perhaps they thought they were Huxley, Orwell or someone.
I startup my browser about once every two weeks. Perhaps it's a waste of developer time to focus on achieving a faster startup time.
A brilliant article with many lessons. Some of the comments from last time it was submitted are interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589608

Another story about Einstein is told by a small girl who sees an apparently crazy man standing in a public square in front of a fountain waving his hands in front of his face. He turned to her and said:

"See! If you wave them at the right speed and look through your fingers, you can make the droplets stand still!"

That's the story that has always stuck with me, the delight in simple, elementary techniques to reveal things that otherwise can't be seen.

The story of progressing from the simple through phases to greater and greater complexity is also of value.

Oldie, goodie, and definitely worth remembering.
Nanoscale Energy Storage Material Under Development
Interested
This site is really great. There is nothing like it on the web. It makes creating NFL player databases really easy.
Are you guys just parsing data from NFL websites? This is what you mean by collecting yourself right?<p>Could you create team information as well? It would be really useful for spread analysis.
Greece: Cash Business Transactions Over €1500 Will Be Outlawed in 2011
I work on the grammar checking software After the Deadline and I use this trick all the time. I'm working on making my software support more languages and I have to rely on this to tell if something my software says is indeed accurate or not. Like pawing in the dark. :)

For English I use it at times too. If someone says "hey, you flagged this word as misused". I paste the window or words AtD can see into Google with the original word and later the suggestion. I then compare to see if it's reasonable my software made the decision it made with the limited context it looks at (2 words to the left, 1 to the right for misused words).

Fun stuff.
Yeah this is strange. I keep thinking of how your mother would get mad at me for reading in her class.

Anyway, feel free to contact me any time about rails or ruby stuff. I've been doing rails work for more than four years now and would be happy to help out. My email's in my profile and my AIM is willmakeawhisper
It's extremely important to realise that the register is essentially on the side of climate change denial. It isn't shy about it and will only ever present articles that reinforce it's argument. It isn't balanced or reasonable reporting.
Telecommuting
GetApp.com launches business software live demo in the Cloud