skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure if policies in academia are relevant to you, but it's $5,000 at Georgia Tech. More specifically, it's $5,000 per year per vendor for supplies/materials/services, and $3,000 per item for equipment (I don't believe the $5,000 yearly limit applies to equipment, so you can e.g. buy five $2000 computers from Dell without permission). From (http://www.admin-fin.gatech.edu/business/purchasing/0500218....):

The PCard [credit card] may be used for:

Equipment: Single units under $3,000.

Supplies, Materials, and Services may be purchased for
less than $5,000. The Institute will monitor activity for
purchases for the same supplies, materials, or services
from the same vendor so as not to exceed $5,000 per year
unless competitively procured as detailed in DOAS
regulations and BOR policies and procedures.
The Math Overflow (http://mathoverflow.net/) format looks promising.
Signature is only required when a compliance process has begun. So, for example, when you check your transactions and see one that you can't recognize then you call your bank and object that trx. In that moment the bank ask for the physical documents and may check your signature, but it depends on the rules of your card operator (Visa, MasterCard, Amex).
$500 at the bigco where I work. :-(
Cruel? It might make a callcenter employee smile. It's borderline humanitarian.
Firstly, who are encoding.com? Unless I'm mistaken, only a small percentage of the market use their services.

The same editors in Techcrunch who believe that H.264 won because of the results from one web encoding company, probably also believe Apple dominate the market after walking into an Applecentre, and that Techcrunch dominates the news market.

This is perhaps the most deceptive article I have ever seen. I am so sick of Apple users standing up for Steve Jobs with clearly misleading evidence. Doing so may help keep their stocks afloat, but its terrible journalism. No, H.264 hasn't won, and cannot in fact win because standards keep changing.

Also, Apple certainly doesn't dominate the market! Their sales figures are absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the market and whilst the flash-disabled iPad/iphone may be selling well, their sales figures are insignificant compared to the number of flash-compatible internet devices out there (and with Android getting flash, this will likely hold true).

If anything, due to the way that Steve Job's is treating developers, it's possible people will see what jerk's Apple are, and return the trend to flash again.

Anyway, I think it's too early to say though. Sooner or later browsers will decide on a common format, and it's unlikely to be H.264 (because of the patents, and the fact even companies don't like paying licensing fees). Furthermore, just because Steve Job's says "all video formats have patents", people interpret it wrongly to mean Xiph will get sued. It could be possible that Steve Job's is just being an idiot too (Steve Job's also is happy to give off the impression that OSX cannot get viruses).

Thing's will change soon, but it is difficult to say which format will win still.
I'm similar. I use it to keep in contact with some far-flung family, but without Facebook I'd be using Skype more than I already do, or I'd just go oldschool and pick up a phone and call on a weekly basis.

Facebook is a mild convenience to me, like finding a good time to make an international call was a mild inconvenience. Once it becomes a mild inconvenience, facebook will be long gone.
How exactly did they violate it?
I'm a Ruby developer with a few years of experience with PHP. PHP is not a normal programming language. Its first iteration was a set of Perl scripts and it was never meant to grow outside the scope of web development.

Ruby and Python are better suited for growing beyond the web and into great areas.

In my entourage I believe Ruby is more of a startup language and Python more of an entreprise language. Though both see their fair share of use in both.
Applecare is like 250/300 is this a third party insurance?
As a rule of thumb, you are better off buying your Mac with a credit card that extends warranty by a year such as American Express. I've had a smooth experience dealing an expired warranty repair with my macbook - all I had to do was get an estimate from Apple, then fax it to my cc company. I received the money in no time.

This should be good enough for 2 years (1 Apple + 1 cc company). That's all you need anyways.

As about other stuff like tv, get third party warranty.
> It's highway markers look like gel capsules
There's a long-running bug in Mapnik (the rendering engine for the tiles) that, when completed, will allow for SVG highway markers.

It doesn't really matter that they'll be fixed in the future... What matter's is that's how they look now

> Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far
Can you give more examples of this? More than likely it's due to problems with the import of TIGER data a couple years ago. It should have been fixed

See: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.64&lon=-82.05&z...

New York: insignificant NYC suburbs are visible; NYC isn't (Huntington, Islip)

Michigan: no Detroit on the map; but Zeeland and Warren appear

Indiana: Angola, Auburn, Warsaw -- all cities <15,000 pop.

Ohio: Louisville and Willard

Illinois: Algonquin and Harrisburg

Pennsylvania: no Philadelphia on the map; Hazelton and Camden

> There seems to be 80 airports in every county
Yea ... I'll give you that one :).

> It's incomplete in many places
... and in many more places it is more complete than Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

This is subjective.

> It doesn't even give you directions
http://openstreetmap.org/ doesn't (the website is for the data and the community around it), but there are several examples of websites that do offer directions using OSM data: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing/OnlineRouters

Your solution is too complicated for normal people (read: non-tech people) to figure out.
Your Office Chair Is Killing You
These machines definitely exist in the US as well. My work has one. It doesn't pre-boil the water, but it does keep a cool and hot section. If you just loaded it with boiled water to begin with, you'd be set.
Ask HN: How many of you aren't on facebook ? 
How many of you out there aren't on face book or other "social" networking sites ; I specifically mean sites such as facebook , myspace , orkut. It would be great if you could reason out too. I frequently hear about people quitting "FB" and wanted to understand what turns off ppl.
As a student, re-buying a MacBook Pro would seriously hurt my financials.
Emacs minor mode: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ZenCoding

Doesn't seem all that life-changing to me, but I guess it could speed you up if you churn out a lot of html every day.
This is excellent! I wish more systems would let you configure the secret question instead of giving a set of predefined questions... (eg. mother's maiden name, first school, first friend, first town, etc), and most of those questions can be found out about a person with some small talk. For places like that my solution has been to give scrambled answers (eg. city of birth, the answer 'colombo' becomes 'obmoloc'. Also this isn't my scrambling method or answer, just an example).
Most people don't realize that you can buy AppleCare any time during the first year of ownership. I always wait until the 1-year standard warranty is about to expire before deciding. At that point you have a better idea if the machine is prone to having problems or not.

Also, you can gauge how your hardware is holding up against new technologies that have popped up since you bought it. Perhaps you want to ensure the machine lasts at least 2 more years... perhaps you have your eye on something a little shinier.
Left it a year ago, but more because it was a time-waster than over privacy.
Activision Blizzard signs deal with developer of Halo video games
Agreed, students more frequently setup and move their devices compared to the average home user or business user. If you're moving between 4/5 classes per day and moving in crowded halls of people, then the warranty is probably more beneficial, especially considering that many likely can't afford the replacement cost mid-semester.

I generally avoid warranties completely. I seriously hate being asked for certain things, especially purchasing DS games (I've had cartridges survive washer/dryer cycles and being run over by a truck).
Web Laureate Classic: "Plurk: The Plurks are Flying"
Advice From Founders Who Bootstrapped Their Way to Success
This is a strange article. H.264 is clearly the leader, and clearly the best video codec available today. But everyone already knows that, and so it isn't news.

The news is VP8, which will finally give H.264 some competition. "Microsoft won - makes up 90% of desktop market" isn't news. "ChromeOS captures 50% of desktop market": now that would be news.
The princeton study's methodology is as bad as that 'science in action' photo would lead you to believe.

The short version:
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/

The long version at Ars:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructo...
It's always nice to see people talking their book.
I created a facebook account a few years ago; looked around; decided that there wasn't anything interesting to see; logged out; and promptly forgot my password. I haven't heard anything since which makes me think that I'm missing anything.
There is a huge difference between open specification and open source.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation (Google TechTalks)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311484
I think python, but of the three I only have first-hand experience in it and php. I think it depends on what languages you currently know, and which of them is the most different.

I started learning PHP in 2001, coming from web development in ASP3 written in VBScript. At the time, developing pages in PHP and VBScript was very similar, and it was really more a matter of learning the few syntax differences and the core library.

Python is a much different language than PHP and VBScript, and as a result working on learning it has made me a much better programmer and it has been a lot more interesting because I'm working with concepts that I might not otherwise cross paths with in my day-to-day programming and gives me a leg up as these concepts are added to php.

If you haven't already, please also consider learning javascript. There's a lot of nascent node.js webframeworks that you could start with.
How to Solve Inbox Congestion
Well, I can say that Python pays better and in general leads to more interesting work (rather than PHP that is). I imagine Ruby is similar.

However, I think Python is a better investment all around.
Samsung ac for sale
$5 billion is only whats directly invested in GS. With a book as big as Buffet has and the interconnected web of finance GS going down hard could have repercussions to his portfolio of a far larger magnitude.
Interesting; one of Jobs' famous email zingers was directed at someone who was refused AppleCare service after getting his MBP wet.
This is a general flaw of predicting the future: people usually try to extrapolate along a single axis to see what will happen, all other things being equal. This is the model of:

the future = the present + <some innovation>

- now what are the ramifications?

The problem is that it's really difficult to bring all the other innovations and changes into the picture, and predict how those innovations will synergize (and antagonize) with one another.
I feel similarly about all these HTML improvements (although i would love some CSS variable action like in SASS).

Almost any homepage I create that's not a one-shot throwaway for a client is going to running on top of some sort of framework. That means that for any table like this, I'm only going write a single row (at most), and then have my framework iterate over it and turn it into pretty code.

I love any time-saving or code-saving functions and features in my code as much as the next guy, but this seems like an unnecessary complication to already rather streamlined coding.

Also the fact that any IDE with decent auto-complete will be able to do the same thing with just three strokes instead of all that. (For example, in Eclipse if I type "<tab" then press enter, I get a fully formed pretty table in 5 key strokes.
Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA
Thanks. That is indeed an inverted form of what I was wishing for, and I didn't get the idea from the initial response to my post.
$2500 here for "procard" purchases. Anything higher requires budget approval.

Edit: "here" is federal government/DOE contractor.
If this clever answer/question takes off - nobody will provide an open question format.
Keep in mind that Buffett also invested in Moody's, who made this mess possible by rating junk CDOs AAA. I agree that he's generally an ethical guy, but his investment doesn't automatically confer absolvement.
"Was it really so difficult to predict in 1969 that women wouldn't all be stay at home mothers?"

Maybe not difficult to predict, but easy to deny and ignore. I was 12 in 69, and "women's lib" (liberation) was a current term, which could either be used positively or negatively.
I'm sorry to hear about this. I have had real panic attacks, and they're pretty awful.

The worst part was the month during which I thought it was a physical medical condition, and the absolutely rotten quality of treatment I got in many cases. One example was (during the worst attack I ever had) a 7-hour ER wait, including 6 hours locked up in the psych ER, without being told why this was happening. Once I was able to see a doctor (1 doctor on staff for the whole psych ER) he was able to explain what was happening and why, but even then, all he could prescribe was Buspar, which doesn't do anything for panic.

My experience is that the attacks don't go away entirely, but they become rarer and much more manageable. The depersonalizing attacks that feel like bad drug trips don't happen anymore for me (and stopped happening once I got appropriate medicine) because once I get to a 4 or 5 (heart racing, painful muscle tension, inability to concentrate) on the panic scale I can get it under control, taking a benzo if necessary.
The trouble is that most of these "pranks" boil down to testing the attention of service-level employees of corporations. They don't give a shit, and shouldn't, given the realities of filling as many orders as possible during a shift.
Giant Blizzard on Saturn so massive it can be seen from the Earth
Also, anxiety and depression are often comorbid, so a person who is depressed may come out of the depression but still have anxieties about doing the things necessary to recover. An extreme example of this is agoraphobia, where a person's anxiety reaches such an extent that he becomes unable to leave his house.
$0 here.

I can almost always get anything reasonable approved, but they want to approve it all.
Flash isn't an open standard by any useful definition.

Sure they specified the container format, bytecodes, and data structures — but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.

It's like saying that Windows is a completely open platform (save for the patents) just because Microsoft publishes a stable userland ABI and fairly comprehensive API documentation for downstream developers.

Gnash is no further along than ReactOS.
At least Shaw's didn't multiply the price by ten. Sounds like the manager at Shaw's cleverly identified getting rid of all of his (probably profitless) bottled water as fast as possible (and posting a sign outside saying they're out) as the best way to prevent clogging the store with the hoarding hordes.
Does that mean that we should throw the CEO of McDonald's in jail too because he knowingly sells junk food to customers? No, we shouldn't. And the reason is that people are free to buy whatever food they want. If they want shitty fast food, that's up to them. Similarly, the clients of Goldman were free to buy or sell whatever securities they want - Goldman's job is specifically not to make a claim as to whether something is "good" or "bad" especially when it's not very clear cut. Their job is instead to be ready to sell to or buy from clients who come in with requests. If these securities had worked out well, GS would be considered geniuses - hindsight is always 20/20, especially in the blogosphere.
If there weren't laws against price gouging, I'm sure they would have strongly considered multiplying the price by 10.
This site does something similar based on when you tweet. It's reasonably accurate for me: http://www.sleepingtime.org/nahurst
Why is it only for the 3rd world? Wouldn't something like this be useful for all hospitals, all over? I can think of this being used so that mothers with pre-mature babies can keep the baby at their home instead of paying huge hospital fees, esp. in US.
Google's pretty well known for not being so good with design, but when design affects how functional their product is then the do a bang-up job.
This may not be what you're looking for, but I can vouch for Lexapro on personal experience.

I had a bout of crippling panic attacks in the spring of 2008. I lost my job because of this (I was a trader at a hedge fund). I had about 30 attacks in the first 3 months.

It was obvious from the 3rd or 4th day on Lexapro that the drug was doing something: I had some mildly annoying but harmless side effects in the first week or two-- sweating, "the yawns", tiredness, and weird visuals when going to sleep.

After about a week on the SSRI, I began to have a panic attack while in the park and something weird happened-- the attack just ended after 5 seconds, and I felt no worse than if I'd been startled by a loud sound. The attacks became milder and more manageable. Now I have about one per month-- unpleasant, but not something that'd make me unemployable-- but none at any level of severity approaching what I had before I started taking the drug.

Some of this improvement is due to lifestyle changes and increasing skill at handling the problem, but a large fraction of the improvement is directly attributable to Lexapro.
Find the sleeping schedule of your Twitter friends
Turn Off the Tweets, the Third-Party’s Over
Studies have shown that ibogaine treatment reduces craving for opiates, stimulants (like cocaine or methamphetamine) and even alcohol after a single dose. What is especially intriguing to scientists is the fact that this effect can last a long time (anywhere from ten days to a few months), allowing the person to experience a state of mind they may not have anticipated experiencing again.
Please visit http://www.ibogaine-treatment.com for more information.
Ultimate collection of iPhone and iPad mockup guy elements
Reminds me of this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...

If you want to give up Facebook, just fucking do it... but realize that nobody else cares.

(For the record, I haven't updated facebook in about 5 years, because it bores me. But I don't go on and on about it...)
This plugin really shines in conjunction with your editor's power features. I use Zen Coding with the SublimeText editor's multiple and reflective selections.

Writing lengthy boilerplate code becomes trivially fast.
It sounds like the problem here has more to do with irresponsible diagnosis (which most of us would agree is a serious problem regarding mental illness) than the drugs themselves. If someone has a manic reaction to antidepressants, the response should not be to diagnose them as having bipolar disorder, and then treat them as if it were the case, because it's unlikely that the person in innately/biochemically bipolar. It's to try a different drug.

I'm not bipolar, and I've had a manic (or, much more likely, hypomanic) reaction to a vitamin (when I stopped using it, I was fine, but had done a few really moronic things up to that point). It happens, and aggressive diagnosis is not the solution.
That editorial doesn't even mention the house bill, but confines its opinions to the Senate one. I take your point, but I hope we can do better than just competing links or editorial opinions. I tried to include a fair amount of other substantive information about this legislation.
I've often tested the limits of credit card signatures to the point that I now regularly pose as several Disney cartoon characters.
The Sports Network - National Basketball Association
I have both, The Panchatantra, and 1001 Arabian Nights. Much (or may be all) of the world's wisdom lies in there. What amazes me is how timeless these nuggets of wisdom are.
Great books, both. As a child, these were simply fun, entertaining reads. Now, I find myself going back to understand the lessons in there and just relishing the stories once again.

To your question - the most popular ones are The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. Jataka Tales as someone has mentioned below. Also, Tales of Tenali Rama and Vikram & Betal are good reads too.

While this doesn't fall under the category of myths, perhaps one of the most comprehensive works on finance, war strategies, and international relations (yes, this from ancient India) is Chanakya's Arthashastra. Another book by Chanakya, Nitishastra is about the ideal way of life. Look up Chanakya on Wikipedia.
Almost all Facebook users use the Facebook.com web interface, while the majority of Twitter users use a third party client or SMS. Comparing them by search activity isn't reasonable.
It's like the brain is slowly figuring out the best way to operate, self-optimizing for years and years, so that when the clock speed goes down it can still keep up.
I mostly agree, but would say, "Assuming the seller isn't stupid or you have information they do not...", which is sometimes the case. E.g., you know you'll be subjecting the device to conditions that contribute to failure but don't void the warranty.

For example, I recently bought a comprehensive SquareTrade warranty for my Roomba because they priced it as a "vacuum cleaner", when in fact I know that the Roomba (a) an immature technology compared to most vacuums and (b) more likely to fall or be knocked down the stairs. I did the math and decided the odds of this thing dying or being killed in the first three years were greater than the warranty/purchase price ratio.
Google Ventures Team
"Their job is instead to be ready to sell to or buy from clients who come in with requests."

So their clients walked in and requested securities made up of crappy mortgages?
They do save money by having a lower recidivism rate. I do wonder how much it costs compared to other types of prisons.
Just the other day I went out and bought gas at a gas station for my friend's bike, with his credit card and his cell phone in my pocket. (He got his licence the next day)

The scanner didn't work so I had to go to the counter, and had to fake a signature. Nobody even batted an eye. It was exhilarating, and unnerving at the same time...

Maybe I should just chalk it up to my mind-busting ability to play it cool?
I'm changing my bank to this one immediately.