skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness [good manners] provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty", "meaningless", or "dishonest", and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best."

- - Lazarus Long
Ordnance Survey offers free data access
(1), (7), (9) and (10) are directly related to the compilation step I was talking about. Of course the iterations are slower, and of course a little error in the source code will break the whole document. Also, (1) is a feature, not a bug: LaTeX is designed to separate presentation from content. It is supposed to be trusted as far as "look" is concerned. Exceptions are few and far between.

(2), (4), (6) and (12) are off topic: I was assuming LaTeX was already installed, like word often is. DVI files can be viewed by evince, which makes it as easy as a pdf file (and no, the absence of a reasonable default document viewer on Windows does not count). Counting words isn't the word processor's job. HTML doesn't solve the same problem as Word and LaTeX.

I already said (8): "It is also less discoverable". Plus, LaTeX aware editors (like TeXmaker) do have those menus, making (8) false when you use them.

I don't understand (3). I just use the pretty default fonts, and that's it. Unlike Times New Roman, they're good enough. I never needed to mess with them. Did you?

(5) and (11) are fair enough.

LaTeX suffer from the fact that it is just a bunch of TeX macros. I believe even Leslie Lamport would describe it as an ugly hack. TeX need better front-ends. A set of mark-up languages, of limited purposes each, would be great. Markdown could be a good start.
Not if you look at the real source (not the github link above)
TEXTp is awesome. i'm watching starcraft in it. i hope they leave it as an option you can somehow access after april first.
Ask HN: common iteration patterns for business development?
What kind of active, and passive methods do you use to:

1, discover potential market/positioning pairs,

2, gather intelligence about potential target markets, and

3, iterate over your target market / positioning / financial model assumptions?

(Question is purposely open-ended -I'm looking into extending my horizon in these areas)
Am I the only one who absolutely hates Facebook's email notifications? I turned them all off because I just don't care when someone tags me in a pic: to me that's just more spam.
It looks like another April Fool post... I hate this day...
How to restore formatted disk for lost files?
Most people know that how to format a hard disk. However,less than half of the people get the way to restore foramtted disk when they forget to back up important documents on the formatted disk. The article will teach you step by step the way to do it.
Totally legit, dude. Pinky swear.
No need to provide a clue, if she can't understand the joke, she probably doesn't worth it, so they both don't waste their time.
Unless he's looking for a fling.
This...this is horrifying.
First off I thought this was an April Fool's joke - Make data collected at the tax payer's expense available to said tax payers - impossible I thought.

but the BBC article looked genuine.

Mind - all of the "open data" links seem to be broken so perhaps I was right the first time....
april fool!
shutdown -h 100000

And it goes immediately... Not good :)
Because, ultimately, making a computer that's stupid enough to be "intelligent" by human standards would be too hard.
I was all excited and boggled by the idea of there being a MUD, but it's actually a (small) text adventure - not Multi User as far as I can see.
7 Awesome Features Coming Up in Wordpress 3.0
Ask HN: Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA?
I've got a bunch of tasks that I think would be ideal for mechanical-turk-ing. (lots of data-cleanup drudgery - manually reconciling different spellings/capitalizations/abbreviations/etc of entity names)

But, I'm UK based, and Mechanical Turk is US only. What do non-US people use for farming out this sort of job?
OS Maps seem to have been made freely available for a while as part of some sites, e.g. the wonderful Geograph site:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/
What is Anal Cancer | Causes of Anal Cancer
Mixpanel (YC S09) now has "really really slow analytics"
There's good (technical) info in the threads on basejumper.com about this attempt.
Interns!
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html

Doesn't say anthing about BOM.
Cleaning up with Vim - does your text editor do this?
I laughed at that too, but it was the only thing I thought was funny. Most of the jokes are obvious or forced. I think April's Fools is a good day to stay off the internet.
/bin/sh: cat's food
A big problem here and most blogs is that you have to respond quickly or very few people will ever read your response. I prefer to think about things longer than is really possible when commenting on-line, which is why I don't comment as much as most people.
This is absolutely not a joke, but we couldn't miss the opportunity to have a little fun with the announcement.
Mechanical Turk is pretty crappy, so I don't think you're really missing out.
Do you have trouble cleaning up with your text editor? Does it cut through the toughest grease, grime and syntax errors? Are you burning your hands on too many hotkeys?

Try Vim - Extra whitening classic scourer. Vim gets the job done faster. Take short easy strokes for lemon fresh scripts. Fast. Bold. Vim.
The rival to the Blackberry is not the iPhone
I hope that one day we go there and build a Smithsonian around it and just leave it in place. Put a little perspex dome over it and make it a central attraction.
Crowd Flower
Stephen Fry meets Steve Jobs
anybody have any idea how this might compare to mysql inno or myisam?
Top Salon and Spa logo
It is a vital part of your business, so it should be designed in a way that leaves an indelible mark on the minds of the viewers. So, here is the list of top ten salon and spa logos with little descriptions of each:
Does cat really? The BOM character just happens to also be the "zero-width non-breaking space", so it should be invisible when printed.
Heh, I'll pay that.
As we’re preparing to open source our Lisp code base, I’m happy to kick off the effort by listing the last few lines of the source code in this post:

))))))))
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
)))))))))))
)))
)

Thats just classic.
If you think it's boring now wait till the tech blogs 'report' each.
So wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to un-censor the cinemas and bookshops ?
If we don't, we're the ones who belong in a museum.
Good old Google, never let us down.

I actually want Google to acquire my company for this day alone.
They nearly got me... I didn't click until the parapgraph before the parenthesis joke.
I don't think April fool's jokes are /really/ meant to damage your own brand. :/
I consume a startup-typical amount of coffee, but I've never had a hint of dependence or withdrawl, which is somewhat puzzling to me. Given how much I consume, I should; I'll go weeks at a time without any coffee because I forget to make it, and then I'll go for a few weeks going through 3+ pots/day. Sometimes I switch to hot chocolate, tea, or apple cider vinegar tea - I think I just like the idea of sipping a hot beverage while I think - but there is at least a placebo effect in play in regards to my ability to focus and be productive.
The apparently soon to be released Gridworks project from Freebase (http://blog.freebase.com/2010/03/26/preview-freebase-gridwor...) looks like it could go a long way to help with data cleansing, especially with grouping and batch editing similar mis-spellings and such.
That was exactly my thought when seeing the website.
I had a project where I had to verify several thousand addresses that I had scraped. I ended up outsourcing it to eLance. I found a company in India via eLance that had 25 people in front of computers with an internet connection, and they chewed away at the list. It took them a month or two but they verified 6200 addresses by hand for me for $700.
I Have a Dream
I absolutely agree with Mr. Rao. I found a longer 50 min version on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20vVbhpM50

I am in the process of starting a business and I find it crucial for our culture to strife for improving the current situation not strife for a particular state.

What I mean is, when you define success for your product/service as the state where it has those 3 features and fulfills those 2 metrics. Those 3 features is the best your application will ever get. Instead one must focus on making the application better every day. Requirements change, competitors emerge, users don't care about your features.
I encourage everyone I work with to start their day with only one question in mind; How can I make our service the best it can be, today?
Link: http://crowdflower.com/
Try "find kitten". :)
Monoprice also sells really cheap mini displayport adapters. They even sell a mini displayport to hdmi adapter (you can't get one from Apple).
Apple’s IPad Is a ‘Winner,’ ‘Game Changer,’ Reviewers Say
Animal communication is definitely very complex. They all have their own language and it's often not just oral.

I've read an interesting theory that cats meow a lot at us humans because they see that we don't perceive their body language well enough. Out of frustration and because they see and hear that we speak a lot they adapt.

We're not to the point where we are able to translate live human communication smoothly. Even contextual text translation is terrible (Google translate).

I guess we're a long way from being able to translate animal communication effectively but I think it's a very intersting subject.
Apparently not according to xkcd. Type

i read the source code
I'm pretty sure April Fool jokes used to be more subtle. All of the ones I've come across today are too obvious to be funny.
Good Friday sms, wishes, messages, greetings, quotes
Public key infrastructure
Tim Bray has some good observations, but no answer ... http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/28/Compartmen...
If you're interested in what's happening in New Zealand you might enjoy this presentation given by Don Christie of Catalyst IT about shifting the government desktops to linux and all the related issues around this:

http://2009.r2.co.nz/20100118/50026.htm
Both my HP LCD monitors came with DVI cables. The last one even came with a HDMI cable and a DisplayPort cable.
Miami Beach Luxury Homes
Miami Beach Homes - Welcome to Miami Beach Exclusive Homes, featuring only the finest collection of Miami Beach luxury homes in the sultry city. Our website is dedicated to providing you with the information and resources necessary to find your ideal home in Miami Beach
Microsoft runs fuzzing botnet, finds 1,800 Office bugs
New app could 'open source' all software
Creately on Google Apps Marketplace
goto comicnumber

takes you the designated comic
Are you rational?
Although for practical reasons (such as sending them separately to the cc processor) I understand why we still collect names in this arbitrary {First, {MI?}, Last} format ... but in the general sense I have yet to understand why names need to be split into First and Last or any fields at all. Same for phone numbers.

A former colleague of mine when he was in high school I guess in a fit of bravado decided to name change himself to just his first name. While a great idea and good for him that he followed through, no software was able to accept his new "McLovin'" style single name. #validation #epic #fail.

His first job ... for the sake of anecdote let's say his name was Andy ... his first job ... on all his job identification ... id badge, enterprise login, payroll, tax forms etc ... he was identified as FNU Andy, with FNU being an acronym for "First Name Unknown".

LOL
Intel, Nokia give MeeGo OS to developers
Brisbane developer, into govt research mostly. Involved with humbug (unix/linux), brispy (python), dorkbot (arts/eletronics), the edge (creative/design/tech), hackerspace (engineering/electronics), linux.conf.au and other things most likely :)

cheers,
Internet's not special, says communications minister
There is some amount of theory to account for this effect, but I'm not familiar enough with any of it to restate particulars.
In general, the two approaches I know of are to strongly favor simpler models, or to increase expected error as you develop new hypotheses.

A related effect is the tendency of finite random samples to express spurious structure, which is guarded against by simply assuming the general structure of the effect.
John Blackbourn — Facebook Consultant
Not on the landing page atleast.
Unfortunately, this is not an April Fool's day joke.

This mouthbreather's latest dribble:

Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were "100 per cent accurate - no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds".

Later on in that same interview he asserted that his filters would only reduce the response time about 1/70th the speed of a blink of an eye, or about 5-6ms

6ms != 0 impact
I use Python a lot and have never gotten tired of installing libraries, except when upgrading Python versions.

So what I really need is a version-upgrade tool that asks what I want to upgrade to, and looks around Sourceforge to ensure all my modules have version-appropriate editions, and then maybe helps me do the upgrade.
How RIPT Apparel increased their sales by 6.3% using Visual Website Optimizer
Implement writes and sell it as a migration tool to companies who are nervous about switching. You will friggin clean up.
Further to the main question, should the blog be on a different domain or is it preferable to have a blog subdirectory on the main website?
I think the author simply believes people should not be using Windows notepad to edit scripts intended to be run on *nix. I can't think of many situations in which it would make sense to do that anyway.
Am I missing something? Who said anything about google maps?
WakeMates are shipping! Congrats WakeMates
Rilasciata Alpha di Linux ITIS
What's up with kernel.org ?
Try SmartSheet - Based on Mechanical Turk.
Thanks for the link on Kiyosaki.
Usability On The Cheap and Easy
Anyone follow the "brand equity" link?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/8/11026499_17a91590c0.jpg

Is this a dig on China?
Despite running under a form of Unix, my iPod is crippled in that I cannot run a "cat nasty_notepad_corrupted_file.txt | od" to check.

Should be simple.
I want to get an iPad so I can try supporting this kind of interaction in OpenShapes (http://shap.es/docs) - probably using Raphaël http://raphaeljs.com/ as the rendering component

The bulk of OpenShapes is in JavaScript - so should be good fun making the editor work with the touch interface.
It's actually on GitHub, obfuscation-free (and linked from the site): http://github.com/chromakode/xkcdfools
Yes ... estimate for me is July 31. Delayed a bit.
You think it's bad on BSD, try porting stuff to Plan9!
To anyone who is getting one: I would really like to know how well it works. It is cheaper than the Zeo, so it is attractive. However, I don't feel as confident in the technology it uses to detect sleep patterns as the Zeo technology, so I'm apprehensive about getting one.
Long term data archiving and preservation.
Founded in 1998, The Permanent Data Company is based on more than twenty years of previous research by Steven Lacey about long term archiving and preservation of data in all forms. Utilizing proprietary platforms The Permanent Data Company has developed processes to photo chemically etch images of text and data into the surfaces of stainless steel, as well as various metal alloy groups. The end result is a metal protection master with a shelf life in excess of ten thousand years.

In the usage of this process, government, publishers, motion picture studios, music publishers, insurance companies, investment and banking, and all commercial industry in need of protection from data loss, will have permanent storage and protection of documents, information, and media The Permanent Data Company can replace commercially available, non permanent methods of data storage with permanent media recording “film.” Having completed early proof of concept tests, we are now poised to initiate comprehensive testing and validation of our processes.
No, it's not. It's lame. If you are going to do an April Fools joke make an effort. That was done without thinking at all.
April fool?
Youtube Text-Only Mode
Tomorrow's Toilets
And shouldn't it be PPI? DPI is a property of printers and CRTs, not scanners or prescaled images.

edit: oh! and speaking of tagging digital formats with physical scale information, it took me ages to understand why text processors measure font size in points, which here refers to absolute size when printing, but don't display the text at that size on the screen (which is where it matters more, imho). maybe things are different now, but the only thing I remember from the adventure was that I decided never to touch anything typographic.
You're welcome.

I found it very much worth buying the new MMM edition for his revisiting the "plan to throw one away, because you will" discussion on prototyping (e.g. see Joel's discussion on this). Very useful to me since I'd by then experienced most of the possible outcomes of this question.

He's not one to rest on his laurels and is to be commended for turning an epic disaster into a lifetime of suggesting to us with style and verve how we might manage to avoid such ourselves.
Yahoo Answers Clone Script
Question Answers Websites have always been a hit, which is the very reason many people keep launching new ones. The best part is that the script comes with preinstalled categories and allows you to setup Search Engine Friendly pages.
I signed up for facebook on my spam account because I wanted access to friend's photos. Thats it. I don't even know if FB sends me notifications :)
Paralysed limbs revived by hacking into nerves - New Scientist
This is the only one so far (apart from XKCD) to make me smile :)
"Based on your pre-order date (11/25/2009), you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner." :-/
UK Government site requires invalid details to be entered
They've moved the hosting to Australia.
Programming patterns in sed
Welcome to the worst day of the year to use the internet.
http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
NHS refuses to sign revised £3bn CSC deal
I don't understand. Is that a picture of Xinjiang?
A/B test results: Mandatory sign up for the free trial ?
Putting the blog in a sub-directory on your startup's domain will give you more content on that domain and therefore more "google juice".

If you put it on a subdomain, it is considered a completely different site. In this case, just like if it was on a different domain, you theoretically get some benefit from back-links to your primary domain. Putting the blog on your personal domain allows you to blog about things not related to the business. This gives you a bit more opportunity to write interesting articles that aren't overly self-serving. Assuming you can find an audience, you'll get rewarded with traffic to your startup's domain.

Of course, you could always have two blogs, one for personal, sometimes talking about the startup and one for the startup. Probably not worth it unless you really have enough content for both sites. An added benefit of using your personal blog to talk about the business is that if you sell it, you don't lose all of your content.
Rate my startup: Prize Glutton
I've build a rewards site where users complete offers and refer friends for points, they then use said points to buy real items (iPods, games, etc) from our store, all from the familiar comfort of Facebook. (US/CAN only.. for now)
Perhaps Wakemate learnt from the late-release PR disaster and have decided it's better to offer pessimistic worst-case-scenario delivery estimates and over-deliver than to offer over-optimistic delivery estimates and under-deliver.
I was going to make a mirror/davinci joke, but sadly they didn't swap the horizontal axis...
5 reasons your startup should teach everyone to code
I've build a rewards site where users complete offers and refer friends for points, they then use said points to buy real items (iPods, games, etc) from our store, all from the familiar comfort of Facebook. (US/CAN only.. for now)
I find this far more interesting than the Topeka Google thing and yet this only has 14 points to Google's 56 in the same amount of time.
Considering that when you rotate the view, the image offset doesn't change at all, I don't think this represents any additional information beyond the standard 2D streetview.
The article appears to have vanished. I get redirected to the front page. MSNBC links always seem to do this to me.
It works from the command line, but not from the browser "headers incomplete".

However it's pretty annoying that there's no access control through svn. I just checked out my private repo without entering any credentials :(
There is no visible tab bar, but there is a way to switch between pages... at least that's how I'm interpreting it.
London escorts
'Nobody to spoon at night'... Ugh, my heart is bleeding
A word of advice: Don't make product announcements on April 1st.
Microsoft Continues its Tradition of Misinformation with IE8
"cat -v" saved lot of my time in cases like that.

I had similar problem with nbsp, until I moved nbsp from second level (shift+space) to third level in XKB configuration in my Gnome/Fedora/Linux.
What's your situation? How many users working from where, and what do you actually need to get done?
Home-baked graphics
Hehe, for April fools, I turned my GFs laptop screen 180 degrees around.. :)
Thanks Stephen for giving us the whole history of Apple, Steve Jobs, and the iPad on pages 2 and 3... NEXT!
See this video to understand the reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NZ04BG7TfA
How they did it?
Unicorn Avatar Generator implemented on StackOverflow
US to accept H-1B visa applications from today
How would you measure the click through rate of facebook notifications? Also, why is the click-through rate of notification e-mails important?
DIY Social Media: A user's Guide
Wolfram Alpha lowers iPhone app price, will give refunds
Science writer Simon Singh wins libel appeal
Re: I wrote the article linked above. Just wanted to share with your all something that was bugging me for quite long. Apologies for the long post and the shameless self-promotion.
Ask HN: time lag for comments?
I noticed that my upvote doesn't immediately take effect after around 2 -3 minutes. Did pg implement this feature recently or is this just my imagination?
I quite like reddit's admin access mode too. (Probable bot 16.84% certain)
Yeah. I've read a lot of articles lately that try to divide the entire computer-using world in to two groups. The geeks (us) and the rest (mom). That doesn't jive with reality. There are a lot of people with different levels of computer savvy.
Unicode has upside down versions of most characters, most of them for the phonetic alphabet. A simple algorithm can replace the characters with upside down versions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_of_text#Upside-d...

For a demonstration, see http://www.sevenwires.com/play/UpsideDownLetters.html
Syncfu: Online retailers install widget to enable group buying
There is, try checking out someone else's private repo. You can't :)

(For example, defunkt/github)
You guys rock. This doesn't really impact me, but releasing this feature on a day like today--brilliant!
If you look at the HTML source you can see that characters are flipped in the HTML as well, so it can't be simply a CSS style.
IFixit tears apart an Apple tablet