skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same for me, flying there from Estonia in a few days, most probably staying March 26-31 (interview on 29th). In addition to above, would love to meet other teams during those days. Our project is http://Emp.ly/ (still in very early prototype phase, just starting serious development). My e-mail is on my HN profile page.
What's in the bill right now is pretty much set in stone -- the reconciliation process is just the process of merging the current house version with the previously passed version in the senate. The house doesn't trust the senate, so they set it up as an "all or nothing" reconciliation process -- so it's not going to change.
Pandora.

Sometimes classic Coltrane era Jazz, sometimes 70'-80's-90's rock amalgam, sometimes acoustic guitar (Kaki King, Doyle Dykes, other non-alliteratively named artists), sometimes trance/electronica. I like to kid myself I play bass guitar, so sometimes a custom-built bass guitar heavy station.

As someone else mentioned though, mostly nothing. I find it easier to concentrate.
In case of sensitive HF inputs (eg. oscilloscope inputs) there is not much you can do about protecting them from overvoltage without significantly harming sensitivity or bandwith. In most cases such things are designed such that something relatively cheap blows up and can be easily replaced. But that something is usually input amplifier itself (overvoltage protection diodes that are fast enought tend to be more expensive and will also burn out so they are not used). It is worth to note that input amplifier transistors are cheap compared to whole scope, not compared to anything you would call cheap.

But miniaturization (and also precision requirements) tend to make replacing such things extremely labor intensive, so it might be more cost effective to simply throw the whole thing away.
JQuery Spritely
Either the HN culture is so broken that every 2-3 months we need a plea like this one or people are just overreacting.
Dear MSFT and AAPL, Embrace Theora
Insanely cool. Thanks.

Some suggestions:

I would prefer a triangle-in-a-color-wheel arrangement for the color picker.

One nice addition too would be a complementary color generator with the same saturation-luminance.

Another would be having the #rrggbb color so it could be easily copied and pasted between settings.

But swill, as it is, it's awesome. Thank you very much!
For what it's worth, my wife really liked those Pre ads.

Anyway, I used to work in the cell phone industry and the suits at Palm have been disconnected with reality for years. Their VP of Marketing was once bragging to me of their growing dominance in the PDA market, long after it was clear that smartphones were about to destroy the unconnected PDA market. What's that joke about buggy whips?
Quantum Dots Can Transform Cellphone Cameras
Aw, that kind of deflates my joke!

My installation of Inkscape (latest version) wouldn't open the SVG, by the way (not that I have an actual need to edit it).
Whatever the Coffee-shop or Lounge I'm into has, usually some form of lounge or ambient music.

When at home I don't have a particular style. If it's quiet, I'm OK with that.

When it's noisy (usually some neighbor's dogs or own music) I just pick the album I'm currently into and loop that. Nowadays, for some reason, I'm listening to the the Twin Peaks sound track by Angelo Badalamenti.
I used to be pretty shy myself. I would say to some degree I still am, but when necessary I am able to overcome that.

I can say a few things that helped me a long the way. First off though, on the computer you feel "shielded" from reality. Even if you showed me your blog, and I told you it was horrible, I still have no clue who you are, so you feel a little more safe. So having the blog and showing it to people that do actually know you might help a bit, but I think this all starts in "public."

I took a speech class in college. I was absolutely terrified that I was going to have to take this class, because all throughout high school I had to do speeches for certain classes and it was always a headache. However, college was far more different. They allowed me to give speeches on topics that I was already interested in. Being interested in the topic made things a lot easier. I would say that speech class didn't help immediately, but in the long run it was a big help.

I also had a bunch of customer service style jobs early in life that required me to interact with the public...I think these early face-to-face jobs helped a lot.

Good luck to you!
Building a world-class team: six mistakes I made early in my career
The Constitution actually provides for Federally funded and managed roads for the purpose of mail delivery.
That would be nice. I'd love to have a play with it on the Nexus One... :)
I think it does cleverness to do with figuring out what's content, what's site headings, adverts etc. but yes there should be some equivalent thing in browsers if only for accessibility reasons.
I listen to music without words since with them I tend to try and listen too closely. However, music with indecipherable words or repetitive phrases are OK. Right now I'm listening to mostly:

Grouper, Burial, Ricardo Villalobos, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, some classical sprinkled in, Ben Frost, Julianna Barwick, Black to Comm, Eno's Ambient stuff, Stars of the Lid, Magma, Boards of Canada, Gas, Leyland Kirby, Rachmininov, Zelienople, Belbury Poly, Mt. Vernon Arts Lab, Basic Channel, Eno-Moebius-Roedelius, Fursaxa, Jannick Top, Philip Glass, Wouter Veldhuis, and Montauk
If you were living in China where these things are built by hand, it would probably be a little cheaper to repair than to replace. In countries with high wages, repair shops can't compete with cheap foreign goods. It is sad, but at least you don't have to pay ten times more for a new one.
You're wrong. Don't assume, read the article and the papers it cites.
nice catch. I hope they are , been waiting on an Android version for a while along with their new build and selective sync
The Balance Sheet
Get Organized: I found that in college you can get away with being un-organized, with a business you really can't. Dropbox, Google Docs, Zoho, various Chrome extensions, and other Task MGMT software have saved my life.

Workout in the morning:I found this is a great way to start the day, make time to workout regardless. Morning if you can
I was super impressed when I saw their demonstration video of WebOS from an event, but as of present I've never sought out or even seen a Pre in real life. iPhone is evidently 'good enough' for me.
If I didn't just get my arduinoscope working (http://code.google.com/p/arduinoscope/), I'd probably ask where your trash dumpster is located and I'd be there on 3/23 :-)
Mashable is the obvious choice:

-unbiased coverage
-nice people
-fair

Techcrunch going by visitor counts has no power anymore.
Yes, I also want to come here to read and talk about code/startups - that also means NOT reading and talking about HN itself all the time. I'm fairly tired of seeing so many "meta" posts like this voted to the top.
1) Trying to solve any hard problem bears the risk of failure. But as you already mentioned, if you succeed, you might have a competitive advantage, because it can't be easily duplicated. I think the risk of Google entering your market affects every internet-related venture. But at the same time, the fear is often unjustified. How often has that happened? Orkut did not kill Facebook, Buzz did not kill Twitter, etc.

2) I would build the technology and a cool showcase, but I would not directly target the consumer, but rather someone who can use your technology to make money.

Your technology might be interesting for advertisers to ensure that ads are only displayed next to articles with a positive sentiment towards to product. E.g. to avoid Toyota ad next to the latest news on stuck gas pedals. Maybe show a Volvo ad instead. I don't know if something like this is done at present.
I'm flying in from Japan, would love to meetup. Just sent you an email.

Also, I found a place to stay on CouchSurfing.com if you're still looking for somewhere to crash.
patio11 seems to be doing ok.
I just noticed my account will roll over to 1111 days tomorrow & I still don't consider myself a real part of the community. What I've learned from my bout of extreme lurking on this board is that these kinds of discussions pop up every few months and every time HN seems to auto-correct. No worries. We'll be fine.
Not just 25% of memory saved, the same data will use just 25% of the memory needed before hashes.
Only IRS jobs. Expect the nursing shortage to get worse and doctors close to retirement to start closing their practices in droves. No, I'm not going to go into the details for you, the bill language can be found here: http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/show
For a back-pocket planner, I think it's nice and simple. Clearly it's not intended to incorporate all the features of a dayrunner or whatever. It's just a simple todo list + time-blocking.

1) The space is adequate if your appointments tend to be short eg Bob and Cathy or lunch and not complex like Bob, Cathy, sys-eng group rep. re: develop timeline to cost out and deploy new server cluster for foobar project (see 3/10/2010 emails "foobar server" and 3/5/2010 "how do I price a webserver?". 6th floor conference room (call in number 1-888-555-1111 p:142678)

2) The downside of any paper-based time planning is that it gets messy if you need to change things very often.

3) If you have overlapping appointments very often then I think you need to fix a more fundamental problem with your scheduling.

Unless you are some sort of genius, it seems really unlikely that you can seriously pay attention to more than one thing or person at a time. By trying to split your attention, there's a good chance you are less useful than you would be if you told one of your appointments to take a hike.
Switzerland votes to ban violent computer games
We got rocket science pretty much right 50 years ago. Don't let the fact that it sounds hard discourage you. Somebody's going to get this right eventually - why not you?

There have been a great many successes in the AI field. It's easy for people to forget though; once something works, nobody calls it AI anymore.
Sorry, I should to be downvoted for my critical answer.

DDG saves me time and I like its privacy policy. And I do like the duck, as compared to google's logo or google chrome's "evil watching-you robot eye."

Pretty much everything described in DDG's about page, I find valuable.
How to maintain your laptop keyboard to extend its life
Certainly they're not futile to pursue in limited domains.

There's a paper I'm trying to find for you about analyzing affect in news articles for the purpose of trading stocks - I think they got things working fairly well.
In general I think "local karma" in a thread is quite indicative of comment quality (with some exceptions).

Global Karma is somewhat linked to activity though, agreed.
Surely the correct (hacker) way to fix this is to alter the karma mechanism until behaviour falls into place. Assuming it's not there already.
Indeed, the title of the paper is "Motivations of play in online games." Since the author considers addictive behaviour as pathological, the current title doesn't do justice to the content.

Could an editor change the title accordingly?

To winter_blue: I tried to vote you up, but my account is apparently too young (or perhaps not active enough?) for it to take effect.
I go with SomaFM.com's Groove Salad, as most of the music is without words, so no distraction.
My understanding is that they passed two things last night.

First was the Senate version of the bill, so that is basically the baseline now.

Second was an amendments package that "fixes" some parts of the bill. This package is what is going to the Senate for "reconciliation". The reconciliation process allows these amendments to be passed by a simple majority, provided there are no amendments added by the Senate (there is a risk the Republicans will try to add some). If the Senate passes the amendments as they stand, then they would also become law. If the Senate passes them with changes, then they would go back to the House for another vote.

Either way though, the reform voted on in the first part (the existing Senate version) is law.
NC District 8- TellMyPolitician
i find this kind of thread to be the equivalent of a reddit becoming digg rant.. i know that im fairly new, but doesn't a thread like this perpetuate what the op was trying to change?

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/97sy0/redditors_h...
Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.

1) I'm fortunate to be in an industry where I can get by with zero employees, which is exactly how many educated people in my town would be willing to work for a one-person company that didn't have major corporate backing.

2) I may be forced out of my current apartment after leaving the day job, on the theory that I present unnecessary risk to the landlord of nonpayment of my ($450 a month) rent, since we all know how dangerous small businesses are. (I haven't discussed this with the landlord yet. I think I should be able to finesse this, but I'm a very, very quirky guy by definition because I come from the perspective that this is something that I can negotiate with the landlord rather than a condition he'll impose that I'll just have to accept.

Social acceptance doesn't stop at landlords and bank officers, either. For example, take prospective in-laws. You want to marry your daughter off to a nice young salaryman or a post office worker: he'll give her and your grandchildren stability. You don't want to marry your daughter off to an entrepreneur: one bad quarter and your grandkids won't be able to afford cram school!

Without casting any aspersions on the motivations of parents of young ladies I may have dated, suffice it to say that for at least some people "salaryman" is such a good quality it trumps obvious negatives like "he's, ahem, well... he spent a lot of time overseas."

3) Have you noticed how I use the world's most efficient distribution channel, the Internet? Japan lags the US -- by quite a bit -- in the "ads -> web page -> purchase consummated online" space. It looks like America in 1996 in a lot of ways -- I have software engineers at my company ask, in seriousness, "But how do people pay you when they get your software?" "I take credit cards." "PEOPLE TELL YOU THEIR CREDIT CARD NUMBER!?"

Oh, the entire Japanese payments infrastructure is optimized around Big Freaking Enterprises rather than small businesses. You know how painful it is to get a merchant account with no corporate history? Think that "about that painful, cubed" for taking non-cash payments in Japan.

4) I am sharply limited in what I can say of the Japanese government's entrepreneurial promotion activities having once been employed by a sub-branch of them (prefectural technology incubator). Here's a general statement, make of it what you will: the government giveth and the government taketh away.

5) Hypothetically assuming I were Japanese, my resume would read DAMAGED GOODS right now, because I had the brass ring (salaryman employment at a good company) and I let it go. (Foreigners interact a little... quirkily... with a lot of Japanese social norms. This is one of them.)

Let me try putting it in American terms: how attractive would YC be if it were widely known that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and almost every other company worth working for considered anyone who either a) did not secure employment at graduation or b) has ever left a company as the moral equivalent of a felon?
Hi danielh,

Yes, there are already advertising networks that do semantic-targeted contextual advertising, e.g. peer39.com, collective.com. Not sure how they are doing though. Either way, it is something that we will look into. Thanks.
It has always seemed to me that open source was fundamentally non-democratic. An open source license does not protect your ability to influence decision making in a project, it protects your ability to fork a project.
Oh. I see. I thought you were referring to responding with tl;dr to other people's posts. You were in fact talking about summarizing your own posts. In that case, why not just say what you just wrote, as in "Summary: ..." and place that at the start of your post? Using tl;dr is certainly less polite.
If you can underline it with data, I'd read it.
How will the senate be able to pass this without a 60 member majority anymore? None of the articles I have seen have addressed this.
I guess it's because most of the old timers around here where active on reddit some time, ago. (Paul Graham put up a link to reddit from his site when reddit was started as one of the first yc funded companies was started. (Back in the day I even contributed a bug report to the reddit guys.))
Computer Company Started In Garage 30 Years Ago Now In Smaller Garage
That's language that one of our sponsoring banks unfortunately has not yet removed from the agreement. It's boilerplate language that is optional for us to enforce. Regardless, we're working with them to get it removed because we maintain that merchants can cancel their services at any time without a termination fee, and that language is clearly inconsistent.

Since that language is in there, we have always provided an addendum to the agreement that provides assurance to merchants that they can cancel whenever they want without having any termination fees. The addendum is located right next to application and is completed with every new customer that signs up. It states the following:

"WHEREAS, Braintree wishes to assure Merchant that Merchant will not have to pay any termination fees for the Merchant Agreement with Braintree or any of the processors used by Braintree; NOW THEREFORE, for good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, the Parties agree as follows: Merchant may terminate the Merchant Agreement with Braintree, and any processor utilized by Braintree. If Merchant exercises this termination right then Merchant shall not have to pay any termination fees."

We have never had contracts and have never charged a termination fee.
If I could choose, Techcrunch, for sure.
Relevant link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

It popped all right. The largest players that survived were a sound investment. But then again, if you invested in Microsoft or Cisco in the tech boom, you'd be sitting pretty right now (I think; didn't check stock prices). Doesn't mean that it wasn't a bubble.
Natural Top Tips for Fair Complexion
Too Long; Didn't Read.
from: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/print/62051

"As a result, a new plan would call for the House to pass the Senate bill and send it to Obama. The Senate would then use budget reconciliation rules to make several changes demanded by House Democrats. Those rules prohibit filibusters."

What reconciliation rules they are I don't know.
Very cool. I wonder how widely used it was.
thats exactly my hypothesis. TC crowd have different usage patterns. i read that Mashable has surpassed TC in traffic or is about to.
PolyFuses/resettable fuses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettable_fuse) are often at the root of that sort of behaviour.
What's the easiest way to make a living?
What's the easiest way to make a living today?

By "easiest", I mean in terms of time and attention. The idea is to have lots of time to work on projects that you enjoy. That time has to be good "maker time", not time when you're mentally exhausted from working at a job that consumes you. Think Einstein working at the patent office.

By "make a living", I mean enough money to pay the rent on a modest apartment, eat cheap food, and occasionally buy nice toys. US$24,000/year is probably the minimum.

Inheritance, sugar daddy, and living off your parents are amusing cheap-shot answers, but that's not what I'm asking about. I'm thinking that since technology has made us all so productive, it ought to be possible to work very few hours to make a passable living, and thus enjoy much more leisure time. Most people don't do that, though. People in the U.S. seem to be working harder than ever, but not getting much enjoyable leisure time. What might we find if we looked seriously at how to earn a living in a way that leaves the most time available for person projects that probably don't make money? Such projects could be anything from taking care of your kids to painting pictures to proving theorems.

Example: An entrepreneur friend of mine works four days a week as a cab driver, and spends his remaining time working on two small businesses. The money from cab driving is terrible ($60/day, with a lot of variance), but it gives him time and freedom, and he enjoys cab-driving. But let's not limit this to "Ways to finance your start-up." Just, ways to pay your rent, long-term, while you work on whatever you like, regardless of financial return.
My first experience with COM involved a week of staring at a dialog box saying "Error -1" and twisting knobs in my code until the error dialog went away.

This was from a piece of COM that was entirely procedural, no UI at all. Yet someone had had the bright idea of (a) indicating an error with a dialog box instead of a return value, which brought the entire synchronous call to a screeching halt, and (b) reporting an absolutely useless error value.

It would have been more useful had the COM code in question /crashed/ -- at least I could have debugged it.

It's not just Microsoft, I've seen this "error -1" behavior in many APIs, on many systems. I've seen code that reported /any/ error as being "out of memory" (trying to blame it on someone else? I've never understood that one, if it's not just being lazy).

Detailed error reporting is as much of an art as designing the working face of an API. The problem is, if you flub it, you're trying to mollify and calm an already irritated user. Think of errors as the first line in customer support, and get them right.
The power of small teams
Unfiltered twitter streams are bad, mkay
I think this is what happens when you lack a coherent explanation of the business cycle. If you think that speculation is the issue then things like this might be interesting. The real question is "Was the speculation funded by inflation or savings?" If it was funded by savings then failures aren't a problem. The capital is liquidated and the investors rebuild their savings and try again doing something. When debt is involved things get a lot worse in a fractional reserve system. The equity bubble of the 90s was largely fueled by inflation and the real estate bubble was as well. Both bubbles required bailouts. See the failure of Long Term Capital Management for more information on how the equity bubble of the 90s lead to instability.

"America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard provides a good introduction to the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle with a good historical analysis. Rothbard also covers alternative explanations of the business cycle. Even if you don't buy into the theory of the business cycle the book is worth reading just to learn just how involved in the economy Hoover really was.
Third alpha of Drupal 7 available for testing
"Maureen Dowd’s opinion pieces are so powerful because they are packed with insight and fact, much of which stems from the access she enjoys as an internationally recognised columnist."

In what parallel universe does this occur?
HP gets Slate ready to battle iPad
That's an incomplete analogy. Specific Open Source projects aren't democracies Open Source at large is, or something resembling it.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 beta1 and didn't like the button arrangement. It was trivial to fix it by just doing: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stownsend42/light-themes

If enough people don't like the default setup of Ubuntu someone will just fork it. In fact there are already three forks that I know of: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu.