skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think of it as a framework to build things yourself. It's not strictly a replacement for MacPorts.
US web users's privacy should be protected by the FTC, IMHO.
Vagrant makes this a lot easier.

http://vagrantup.com/
I'm much happier with real mutually respectful relationships - the kind you can't establish by acting like a politician. I find every time I play these flattery games with long term relationships, it keeps things rolling, but leaves a deep division.

This book is great for people who want to establish a network or run for office. It also provides food for thought in more personal relationships, but it's dangerous to act this way to real friends.
If it worked for you: then you shouldn't.

I had nothing but grief from trying to to get a basic (but up to date) LAMP running on any of several OS X (10.5 - 10.6). Life is too short.
Gunicorn - a UNIXy Python WSGI web server
Oh, that's cool. I didn't realize that about the service at first. They serve two very different and very useful niches.
Fake invasion alarm in Georgia, media didn't warn... [video]
This is great stuff and worth referring back to when you initiate a project.

My experiences as a hiring manager have been from having a dude stiff me for $800 of work, to hiring a full-time developer I found on rentacoder that became a personal friend.
Why learn haskell?
My iPhone Software Company's Struggle Part II (Ad Impressions, Conversion Rates)
> That's pretty amazing in my opinion.

It is. Being 'second best' is usually the best position to be in when dealing with new tech, invariably there are kinks to be worked out.

I think after the imac, ipod and iphone experience Apple has created a solid following that has forgotten about things like the 'lisa', the 'newton' and the 'macintosh portable' and the 'pipin' or whatever that game computer was called.
> using radio spectrum to deliver television content is no longer necessary--i.e., obsolete

There is a huge difference between "obsolete" and "not necessary".
There's only one way to make people like you, actually, or am I misreading that sentence? ;)
Extremely well-written, concise-but-detailed, no-bullshit guide to a process that I have shied away from because it seemed to involve a lot of mysterious complexities.

The author's recommendations provide extremely reasonable advice to follow in any project management endeavor. He emphasizes an assertive but respectful approach, taking the needs of both sides of the project into consideration and outlines a wide range of practical details that you could only know about from having a high degree of first-hand familiarity with this service.

I'm saving this and hope to draw on it soon, now that it doesn't seem quite so daunting. Thanks for posting.
The original idea of patents was to promote innovation through sharing ideas. I agree that the current system doesn't live up to that, but I'm not sure that doing away with patents is the solution. Patents are often like art. You can see a painting and think, "I could do that!" You can look at a patent and think, "I could code that." But you didn't code it before you saw the patent, so you don't really know for sure. Hindsight is 20/20.

Patents are a reward for both the inventor and society. If we reduce the reward for innovation, we reduce innovation. Especially very expensive innovation that may yield products that are easy to copy.

I suppose my big concern is that for the individual inventor, there really isn't any protection at all besides patents. An individual isn't big enough to mass produce products or protect them or market them more than the big corps, but the individual can sell the patent or get investors to help him/her fight infringement.

Yes, the megacorps get most of the benefit now, but that is largely because most inventors work for the megacorps. But a patent only costs a few hundred dollars and is well within reach of individuals who are willing to do the research and put the effort into building a patent to protect an idea. Patents are the only protection left for joe or jane inventor. No megacorp is going to pay for your idea or your invention if they can just build it themselves.

As for free markets, I don't believe in free markets, or at least, I don't believe the market is free -- or ever will be free. It's not free because special interests want to protect their access to the market. I think the market should be regulated, especially when the public has to bail out systems that collapse due to a lack of regulation. But I digress...

Design patents cover end results. If I patent a design, you can't use the same design -- even with a different process to get there.

There is a reasonable way to find out if something is patented, the USPTO has a patent search. It could be better, but no one ever says, "Hey, I should build this, let me search the USPTO first!" They just start coding or building.

It may be too easy to get a patent and the USPTO may not have the experience to evaluate nonobviousness -- unfortunately, Einstein doesn't work there anymore. Perhaps the govt should pay more for people who have the experience to adequately evaluate claims and charge more to get the patent approved.
How about formulæ? :-)
That and even if my drive by wire throttle sticks open and the clutch cable breaks(or lose fluid if it's a hydraulic system.) I can still force the car into neutral and stop quickly with the brakes, then shut the engine off to avoid over revving it.
No. The hardest part is often the willingness to see things from another's point of view - and to have it be all right for the other to have a different point of view.

Understanding comes with that willingness.
Interesting trick with the scapegoat system, but I think it fixes something that doesn't need fixing.

I can't imagine people that would even bother about you not getting your karma but to upvote the story anyway.

That would mean you think there are people that would withhold their vote simply because it is you that does the posting. I can't believe it's come to that.
Science is unintuitive
> I can understand how being attacked by financially powerful interests that have a vested interest in discrediting valid, difficult, scientific work, generates that a "siege mentality".

Let's not forget the group-think and career-killing around AGW.

And the money - grant money is going to folks "proving" AGW.
Much of the advice in this book can be explained by people wanting to feel important. Doing anything that makes people feel less important (criticizing, arguing, saying "you're wrong") doesn't help your situation. Doing anything that makes people feel more important (give sincere appreciation, remember a person's name, let others talk about themselves) likely will help your situation.

I still recommend reading this book. You'll get a lot more out of it than you will from summaries, because the book contains real-life examples that clarify what each principle means and how it can be applied. If you're put off by the title, remember that it was written in 1936. "Influence people," sounds very manipulative today, but in the book it simply means "to be an influential person." I think that's an important distinction to make, because the latter is more relationship-oriented than the former.
It's great to see so many people are interested in this topic. To provide more color on some of the points above, here're some more details from research findings (most are direct quotes from her research article):
How to reduce unhappiness? Overthinking can actually worsen sadness and make it harder to escape unhappiness. In ruminating, we just become stuck with our feelings. What do you do? Learn to disenage from overthinking about both major and minor negative experiences. Go for a walk, read, call a friend, etc. Or find distraction by thinking about something else. Thirdly, compartmentalize your feelings. Talking also helps you get over unhappiness. Often, shift thinking can help. That's also where meditation comes in.
Socializing, exercising more and losing weight are more effective than watching TV.
Someone asked why does deep, hard thinking make one happy? Research has found that "flow" often makes time seem to stand still. There's a strong correlation between the experience of flow in your brain and enduring levels of happiness. We experience flow when there's a good match between our strengths and the task we are engaged upon.
A holistic view of life is critical to an ongoing level of happiness and meaning. Thinking of our lives holistically, as interconnected and overlapping domains, creates the possibility of multiplier effects.
Finally, what's the impact of happiness to doing good business? Making your customers happy and your employees happy are crucial to building a strong business. Fostering a community and encouraging community services or charity are some ways to achieve so. Having a higher mission than pure profit pursuits has also been proven to make employees happier and businesses successful.
Six Delusions of Google's Arrogant Leaders
Almost identical to the this icon set is the Farm-Fresh Web Icons which also includes 32x32 versions and 1000 icons

http://www.fatcow.com/free-icons/
People might resent being asked for an up-vote. I suspect that many people would read something, then move on, not especially interested. They might consider up-voting having been asked, but then feel that the person asking is just doing so for the karma. I want to make it clear that I'm asking to get the item noticed, because I think the item has value, and not because I want the karma.

There are items where I've used this idea and simply been down-voted without getting many up-votes at all. That's fine, I really, to some extent, don't care about the karma.

But occasionally I care about the item, and I want to encourage people to up-vote without them resenting being asked.

I hope that's clear - thanks for giving me the opportunity to expand on my intentions.
One more note: Working for a larger purpose creates happiness and meaning. This is why volunteer activities, caring for your family and friends, supporting a charity, or working to live up to your moral principals all feel so good. Ultimately, we all seek a continuing experience. We thrive on feeling that we matter, and that what we do matters. We also experience meaning when we have a sense of "congruence and coherence" between who we are and what we do.
I think that's all part of the same problem.

Of course there's always peer pressure, but it's also true that science does progress because someone questions the current doctrine (and when you're a young, smart scientist, that's what you hope to do...). And some get the money because they are brilliant, in spite of disagreeing with everyone else.

Science does, generally, work. It's not perfect, but nor is it the kind of monster that people paint it to be.

I have worked as a researcher and the kind of defensive mentality described in that article is not normal. The most obvious explanation I can think of is that they were consistently attacked by vested interests. Money talks. Always has, always will.
I don't believe that.
IPad for disabled person? control without touch
A friend of mine is disabled and not able to move anything but his head. I wanted to hack him some kind of computer system to give him access to ebooks and the internet. But I'm not quite sure how to do it, one option I'm seriously thinking about is an iPad. It's the only touch GUI you could control with one click only. Problem are input devices, at the moment I'm not sure how to control an ipad with dead or mouth movements only. Maybe eye tracking? Any ideas? I'm grateful for any suggestions.
I would like to see two-axis voting. Up/down would mean, "valuable/non-valuable". Right/left would mean "agree/disagree" -- the easiest possible way to register opinion without the effort of composing a reply.

Up/down would show a net score, like now. Right/left would show both totals -- perhaps even a little inline sparkline bargraph (perhaps initially hidden).

It's reasonable that people want a lazy, one-click way to show disagreement. It's problematic that impulse gets channeled into the same downvote-gesture-tally that also means "this is spam; this is rude; this should be sunk and faded out of existence". Those meanings are scolding; the effect of a downvote is censorius (by the ranking/fading). It's coarsening for conversation to cross the signals for "I respectfully disagree" and "your comment should be penalized".
Just posting a link is asking for an upvote :)
It should be noted that Amazon's one-click patent was just reaffirmed[0] by the USPTO.

[0]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/controversia...
I'm starting to take this particular criticism as a major compliment to Scala. Scala makes it really easy to get stuff done and you're not forced to write functional solutions to imperative problems.

Also, I learned more from functional programming in Scala than I did when learning about Lisp. For one, Scala's default data structures are persistent and immutable, whereas the Lisp ones are mutable. Scala's library also operates better on abstract data types, whereas most functions in traditional Lisps operate on concrete data types, making Scala again more functional.

The above two points, by the way, highlight two major problems Rich Hickey had with traditional Lisps and therefore why he decided to write Clojure. See http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/rich-hic....

"Even Lisps are built on some primitive things, and those primitive data structures in traditional Lisps are mutable. I wanted the core data structures of Clojure to be immutable. In addition, I wanted the core algorithms to be based upon abstractions rather than concrete data structures as in traditional Lisps. These are things that can't be retrofitted in a compatible way."
Ask HN: Please review ebay mashup
You're confusing the use of the word "any" here. In the previous post, it was used to mean that there were _no_ applications available for the iPhone.

You're using it here to mean "you can't install arbitrary applications" which is something different.

As far as the initial success of the iPhone is concerned, the device gaining traction without "any" applications (in the first sense) is largely important when speaking of the necessity of the App Store.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Not the Cat and the Hat specifically but the way our whole society is becoming one of visual learners and how we should really be looking ways to convey concepts using visual means and as few words as possible.

Put it this way. Without pictures the Cat and Hat's 236 words could never tell the story. It would take thousands. Now look at the nearest 1,000 page programming book you can find and ask yourself (a) whether it could be told with much fewer words and (b) if it would be more efficient to do so.

Anyway, just somewhere my brain has been wandering to that was slightly more crystallized by the post.
FYI, a HSBC Advance savings account gets you 1.1% at the moment
Wow! Very nice, I like it a lot! I think it's important for you to keep it simple. I think this could really take off if you do.
I can see your point of view, and no doubt many agree with it, but not to me. To me, posting a link is offering something that people might think is interesting.
Save $100's step by step guide to arranging flowers
We at FathomDB do support replication - you can set it up yourself - we just can't yet set it up for you or monitor it. But - as you say - we're working on it.
>Modern monotheism started around 325

So the Jews weren't monotheistic and the Torah never had "you will have no gods before me" in it? You might say, "that's not modern monotheism" but how can that be as Christians worship that same God.
RFC for auto-discovery of IMAP/POP3/SMTP from email address
Also worthy: the physics of mathematical objects. E.g., Why doesn't the square on the hypotenuse just slide off?
As a previous MacPorts user, I love homebrew. I keep macports around, because it has tons of ports that homebrew doesn't, but I dread using them because it is so much slower than homebrew. OS X ships with a lot of libs, and XCode installs even more. With macports, it redownloads and recompiles ALL of them, but with Homebrew it uses what you have. Also, the formulas are updated more often than macports, which I guess could be a good or bad thing.
I find it depressing that the best way to get on someone's good side is a combination of gratuitous flattery and ignoring their faults. Have you ever noticed how much of our language is devoted to simply not offending people?
In addition to this argument, I think comparing them is almost like comparing apples and oranges. They both have their place on your system, but Macports is like a "lower gear" than Homebrew, and it takes a ton of time to do anything with it.
And here is a video of Gabe's talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XEXLhGir3s

He starts talking about "Entertainment as a service" around the 3 minute 20 mark.
If you look closely you can see his gmail address near the bottom of the dashboard frame :)
I've had experience using online sites to source jobs, and I think this advice is right on.

Here are some summary points, generalized away from rent-a-coder:

* don't hire Americans to do commodity work (i.e. PHP CRUD)

* be clear but not ominous in your job description, and include visual mocks if at all possible

* don't try and be secretive - no one wants your dumb idea anyways

* make sure someone has a decent reputation on the site you use

* keep track of the progress of the product and keep in touch with the coder, but don't be overbearing

* be somewhat flexible with the deliverable - aim for perfect but accept done

* test the code thoroughly and request fixes in one shot, but don't conflate new features with bug fixes or no one will be happy

The only points I would modify are:

* Job requests can include bullets, but don't be overly fine-grained.

* You can in fact build relationships with outsourcers via rent-a-coder (MTurk, 99Designs, etc), and you should - this will lead to much better long-term work. A good way to get this started is an unexpected bonus.

* Don't ever screw someone on work. This is just karmically bad. They live in Eastern Europe and are poor. You live in America and are rich. I think the best way is to give someone a piece of work (5-10 hours worth), ask them for a bill, and proceed from there. If the work sucks or is over-billed, you pay and move on. Otherwise, you can give them more work.
The Official March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge
The difference between the US and China is automation. Same is true of India. I've sent designs overseas that can be made by hand cheaper than they can be made in the U.S. with machines.

In this respect, off shoring manufacturing enables a greater range of innovation at much lower risk. I can build 1000 widgets overseas for $1 each, but I can't even get 1000 widgets in the u.s. due to the cost of the machines to make them.

The reason the US is still the powerhouse of manufacturing is because they manufacture simple and common devices like screws, springs, etc with machines. These devices have been used for decades and a market has been established for them.

The devices, many of them anyway, made in china are on the edge of innovation, whereas the items from the U.S. are older commodity items used in many devices, that is, components of complex devices, rather than the complex device itself.
I sat on the homepage for a minute trying to think of something I wanted to buy. You should offer some suggestions.

You're making me choose a category before I see the results? And also confusing me with text about getting spammed? I think some UI to allow people to narrow their search like "Show more items like these" would be better.

Other than that, it's pretty good. I loved seeing pictures of the items when I hovered over them. I'm usually not concerned about where an item is located when I shop on eBay (since I usually just get it shipped), but this provides a sort of craigslist-style take on it.
Did ubuntu suddenly get TextMate support? Also, have they fixed the poor graphics acceleration issues? Didn't think so, go away troll.
Wow. Thanks for the through reply.

The price is high, as you mention - once we have an established cashflow with industrial clients and proven technology it will be possible to gradually migrate into the much more cost sensitive residential sector. To enter that sector from the get-go seems like a huge mistake to me.

Sure, the subscription fee is a showstopper. I'd like to have several levels of subscription:

Free: Live data online, 2 days moderate resolution (sample per minute) / 1 week low resolution (sample per 15 minutes) history. Simple embeddable widgets / twitter usage notifications, etc.

$6 /mo ($10 NZD): As free, 1 year moderate resolution, 10 years low resolution. Add Webhooks, SMS, email, alarms, budgets, etc.
Premium: (this is for industrial, price TBD) 1 month ultra-high resolution (1 second samples), unlimited storage for other data.

Most home users would be satisfied by that free option.

As for your customers:

First Group (price sensitive domestic):

I agree. I'm not even attempting to reach this market right now.

Second Group (CO^2 sensitive):

I think that these users will be most interested in fostering power saving competitions within and between different businesses. Most of them have probably optimised the hell out of their domestic power usage.

They might be interested in leasing our system for a month to validate their power saving measures. If they have off-grid power, our solar integration might interest them.

Third Group (Early adopters):

The device itself isn't that sexy. As you mention, it is the online dashboard that makes it good. To reach this market segment, it is important that we have great integration with a wide range of other tech toys. I'd also like to make it really easy to hack together neat things using our live data via webhooks and the API.

I'm looking forward to the linkerati aspect. Hopefully we can foster a situation like Twitter - people linking proudly and prominently to their GridSpy Dashboard to prove their Green/Geek cred.

Industrial Environment:

Good point about the non-linearities in industrial circuits. Gridspy could be used to hunt down the poor power characteristics that cause industrials to be penalised by the power supplier. Because of our realtime data acquisition, we could highlight the power factor of motors during startup, running or shutdown. This would help electricians locate and fix key power issues.

As you mention we could be used to help cut power usage during certain times of day. We could also perform load-shedding - turn off AC while many motors spinning up for instance. The peak power usage during the day needs to be kept down to reduce power cost. Finally alarms and budgets could be used to attract attention to important issues.

All in all I'm pretty excited about our opportunities in the industrial sector. I think that the Residential sector is too disinterested and price sensitive to enjoy GridSpy.
Cool project! The eyewriter from FAT labs -- it's the open source eyetracker you're looking for! http://eyewriter.org

The indomitable Ben Heck has also made a sip/puff controller: http://benheck.com/03-01-2009/air-pressure-kick-pedal-for-gh... Not sure about ipad peripheral support.

Or, if you want to go another route you could get a 3-axis accelerometer (and/or gyro) to detect head motion/position. It'll output some voltage that you'd feed into the ADC of your microcontroller of choice. Send it all to a python/c#/whatever-you-like script over USB, and process it computer-side. This interface would cost, like, $40!
The numbers you point to make use of http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=pidig...

Which is using GMP, so maybe that particular link needs to be updated?
7" usb monitor. $99 USD.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/