skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That'd oxidize the coffee too quickly though. It'd be gas-station, burned-in-all-night coffee in 30 minutes.

Wounds heal. Good coffee is forever.
PG doesn't actually like Common Lisp, which is what #lisp is dedicated to.
Not really. Anyone that's a hard worker can get an undergraduate degree, while there are many brilliant people who, for whatever reason, don't. Undergraduate degrees better correlate with family income than they do with IQ.
I don't have a problem with someone tinkering with coffee cup designs if it gives them enjoyment. I just find the pretense that it's going to make a non-negligible difference to the environment puzzling and intellectually dishonest.

What's wrong with a feel-good distraction? Instead of implementing "Hello World" in 120 languages, why not tinker with papercup designs?

Why not do something actually meaningful?

There's an awesome talk by Richard Hamming on pg's website
(http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), where he recounts:

And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!
How about blasting it with steam for 30 seconds? And I do mean blasting, none of that wimpy froth-your-milk-wand stuff. That'd sanitize it and pre-heat your mug, and requires no questionable fingers on the inside.
There isn't any downside. But if the test costs are negligible and you can afford to run a test for a week longer, it is always great to do so. I have seen too many tests where confidence level after touching >95% came back to 70% or so once extended the test.

An even better way is to do a follow up test where you do an A/B test where both variations are red. And if you see enough variance in that test, then I don't think you should take results seriously.

When you are testing it is always better to try proving a hypothesis wrong rather than trying to prove it right.

EDIT: clarified some parts.
I must ask:

As a general rule, how many here don't prefer Safari over web-pages-as-apps? A few exceptional cases aside, I'd be willing to bet Safari is a better browser than whatever "they" can cook up.
PostgreSQL 8.4: sampling random rows
It's definitely more consistent... and more blue.

Not saying it's not neat, and it appears to be quicker than Sky. Just that it's kinda lame if that really is the highest density.
China essays can be very interesting to prepare
Writing about any country will educate you on its culture, geography, history and architecture among others. The same is applicable when writing a China essay. As this essay requires thorough investigation into the topic many students will find it difficult to write. However, with the proper help, you will be able to submit a well written essay.
Exactly, if you're serious about startups, you need e-school not b-school: http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262670582

I dropped out of my business program after creating a startup during college and realizing I was learning far more from my startup. My classes began to seem so non-relevant by contrast. The only selling point for school is access to smart people.
I am the guy you're looking for. I've rarely found people like me. It is a tough card to fill. You want a designer that codes on dialup. They're visual, understand the nuts an bolts of the design, and make it tiny so it downloads fast.
My point is that the government builds highways instead of trains.
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce (1983)
Coming from an iPhone 3G, I hate my Nexus One's screen (ATT/2.1): it's far, far too blue. DisplayMate tested the Nexus One's white as being 8870K. I find the display to be fatiguing and useless for viewing photos. I've noticed this problem isn't Nexus One-specific, either, as a friend with an HTC Incredible has the same terrible color calibration.

I'll be dumping the Nexus One as soon as the new iPhone comes out. The display is one of many issues I have with it.
It should really be called "The Density of Degree Holders"
This is a PDF, from 2001.
Content Apps I use:

I use iBooks and the Kindle app a lot. The interface they present is just better for reading books. I can also highlight a word and look it up or see a mention of a book and quickly check it out on a website, so there's no loss of interactivity for me. I much prefer WeatherBug to websites because of response time. Maps is also indispensable, and I think more reliable than a Web App would be. Now Playing also has a superior interface. It's basically a mashup of a Google Maps search for nearby theaters with Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Netflix is indispensable, of course.

As for Web apps I use instead of local apps: FlightStats, Google Voice, and Google Reader. Google Voice is only available as a Web App and isn't really a content app, but the other two I've chosen because I think they have a superior interface compared with the other options I tried.

Most of the rest of the apps I use frequently are utilities, toys and games.

These facts about my App use corroborate Fred's observations. It's about the UX! However you can achieve a superior UX, do it, but remember that you must beat the web. This is harder to do on the more comfortable screen of the iPad. On the iPhone, it's easy, because the screen is cramped.

The biggest threats to Apple right now are HTML5 and NaCl. If those are widely accepted, then multitouch tablets will quickly become commodity, just as PCs became a commodity platform to run Windows on.
One of my favorite coffee joints (at the local library} actually gives you a discount for bringing your own cup. [it also has cream instead of half-and-half]
They might still consider it "wasteful" since the same number of cups would be thrown away. But I believe they can be made with the waste products from the processing of corn or sugarcane that already happens.
thanks, I will.
> I have rather limited sympathy.

And of course, you never ever used pirated software, listened to downloaded music and viewed pirated movies.

"Piracy" is exactly like masturbation : there are those who admit doing it, then there are hypocrites.
This proves the #1 regulation that should be created after this is a relief well MUST be drilled at the same time a main well is drilled, regardless of cost if they want to do business.

A few of these per century will really destroy the environment, and who knows how much worse this is going to get with just one hurricane in the next few months.
This reminds me of an old legend from a semiconductor company where I used to work. You used to have to test your ESD protection (grounding heel/wrist straps) with an ohmmeter and log it to a notebook before going out to the factory floor to be sure that you wouldn't zap anything.

Engineers being engineers, someone analyzed the log data and discovered that the skin resistance of female workers tended to vary on a monthly cycle, and you could predict these cycles based on empirical data. This soon spread around the office.

At some point HR got involved and shut it down. The ohmmeter was replaced with a red/green light.
"58 billion paper coffee cups" doesn't sound so negligible to me? Sure, it is might not be as paramount as plugging the oil spill to me, but perhaps making a small impact is better than no impact.

I just mentioned the 120 programming languages because I am sure that post would make it on HN, too.

Are you working on superimportant stuff all the time?

Also read Richard Feynman's books - he claims when he was stuck for a while, he only managed to make progress again when he started to do calculations on the rotation of thrown paper cups just for fun for a while. He later derived some quantum mechanics stuff from those paper cup equations.
That sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those kinds of options. Thanks for using it!
"Ebola has very few genes - only 8. One of its genes, called L protein, is responsible for copying the virus itself. Two others, called VP24 and VP35, interfere with the human immune response, making it difficult for our immune system to defeat the virus."

Genomics and nanomeds, now that's amazing!
Call for Ideas to Raise the Savings Rate
While true, you'll need a whole lot of slow selectors before your CSS will be the speed bottleneck.

It's more noticeable if you use jQuery/other complex javascript DOM selectors, but the solution there is caching or using .find(). JS dom querying is also going native with QuerySelectorAll, so in time it will become less of an issue here, too.

Write your CSS for yourself, make it maintainable and easy to read. Let browsers figure out how to make it fast.
Road Rage: Hackers Say 'No Latinos' on Highway Sign
People have a bizarre sense of price vs value. This guy's self-serving article on human capital and economic growth is perverted because:

- America isn't the world, and it is becoming less important in the world as time goes on. A country with 100% debt:GDP is the last place I'd look for insight into the relationship between intelligence and economics. I'd be more inclined to look for valid relationships between intelligence and economics on a global scale. Better sample size. Less systemic errors.

- "Smart people of the highly educated sort" wouldn't have the resources to participate in the Information Society without cheap Microsoft Optical mice made on the backs of near-slave labour in other countries.

- Equating the density of human capital solely to educational attainment density is weak. Do all those MBAs on the walls belonging to High Frequency Traders on Wall Street really prove they're creating wealth? How about if they're just promoting and profiting from an economic system that reinforces the "value" they create until the next bubble bursts?

- Sustainable growth is more important than growth. You know what else I think of when I read "San Francisco, NYC, Boston"? Bubbles. Check out the unsustainable home price appreciation levels in those areas from 198*-2006. Yeah. Smart/educated.
The Road to Therapy: Finding Good Uses for Memory Manipulation
The flaw in your question is the word "here", as in "people here on HN".

Dangrover made an important point in his currently-on-the-HN-front-page blog post:

I made this crazy argument to a friend of mine over beer and he countered "but don't people know what websites are?" It made me think.

Well, no, as a matter of fact, not really. The web is messy. Webpages link around to each other and, if you're not tech savvy, you can't really keep track of which one you're on or if it's safe to put your bank password into it. Most people don't know if they should search for them or type them into the URL bar.

There is one vital feature of the web-page-as-app: navigation. The "Frypaper" app that I downloaded yesterday is guarsnteed to lead me to Stephen Fry's blog, and not to a phishing site. It will do so in one click. It is helpfully labeled with a big picture of Fry with a silly-looking but eye-catching luminous green glow surrounding him, so that I can't help but find the app when I am looking for it. And once I'm inside the Frypaper app I will see the Fry-endorsed experience. I will not have to wonder whether my oddball browser is rendering his stuff right. I will not have to inform Google of anything I do.

The cruel fact is that the first step in web navigation - finding somewhere to start clicking - has terrible usability for non-hackers. People don't understand what URLs are. Even those who understand them can barely read them. Google has made billions of dollars exploiting this fact; even I find things on Wikipedia by tabbing to the search bar, typing a word, then clicking the Wikipedia link on the ensuing Google page. (It is, famously, always there.) The amazing thing is that Apple has made the app install process so seamless that apps have better usability than browser bookmarks. And that's why they are better than plain browsers... At least for people who don't read HN.

Having said that: I agree with the OP that all the CD-rommish nonsense that app designers put us through actually detracts from the experience. And I do wish it was possible to install browser enhancements on the iPad that persisted from app-to-app; e.g. if I open up a web page from my Twitter client I want to be able to use 1password in that web page.
I already knew that many 'smart people' were in fact dense, but it's useful to know where they congregate.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this here before...
If Apple's plan is to sell more hardware through Safari lock-in, it's time to short their stock because they're doing it allll wrong. Safari can't be "the next IE6" because it lacks proprietary features

Uhh, isn't the entire iTunes App Store/ecosystem one very large 800lb gorilla of a proprietary feature? I think that's what they're betting the farm on. Devs will keep writing apps because of the gold rush mentality, and users will stay with the iTunes App Store ecosystem.

However, I agree with you that they're wrong. Unless iTunes App Store apps can stay compellingly better than Web apps, then Apple's strategy is flawed. Through HTML5 and NaCl, Google hopes to enable a compellingly good (natively supported) UX on any browser on any tablet, smartphone, or other mobile device. This will act to commoditize all mobile devices.

Google vs. Apple was inevitable. Google is motivated to commoditize its complements and one of the complements is mobile device hardware. Hardware is a core of the Apple business.

EDIT: The question you need to ask, "Is there any fundamental reason why a 'Web app' can't do everything a native app can?" The answer is no. Integration with the native OS won't be so much of an issue on an iPad-like tablet -- the whole point of it is that the OS gets out of the way! There are security issues with accessing local resources like the baseband, GPS, and filesystem, but these are solve-able. in fact, they're already been solved in non-mainstream systems.

EDIT: Will Apple go the way of Sun? Not necessarily. There will always be pain points in everyone's personal digital infrastructure. Apple will always be able to carve out a niche at the high-end of UX. The danger is that Apple will get stuck in a rut and get left behind at the high-end of irrelevance.
Ask HN: Can Wolfram Alpha be made to calculate time series ratios?
I tried the following at www.wolframalpha.com but it seems the jam up their server
(us median home sale price time series)/(gold futures time series).
If, not are there any web-available services that will allow new time series to generated from combinations of existing time series?
Well, there's a slight unfortunate thing that I, and many other people, bought TextMate 1.0 with a promise in writing that TextMate 2.0 would be free to us when it shipped. I'm really sorry that Alan didn't think things through well enough to realize that doing that was a poor idea, but I paid for what I paid for. It's illegal and immoral to change the rules after you've closed the deal.

EDIT: I'll add that I don't think that this is a greedy proposition. While I know a lot of people are truly thrilled with TextMate, I wasn't. I didn't ask for a refund, because I understand what it's like to be an indy developer, and thought I'd gamble that Alan would ship the features I'd need to switch to TextMate over Emacs when the 2.0 release got out the door. That gamble didn't pay out, which I'm okay with; 2.0 never shipped, and I'm not mad that 1.0 failed to materialize with the features I needed. But I also don't think it's fair to say I shouldn't get the 2.0 release, when I almost certainly would have asked for a refund based purely on the 1.0 release. I doubt I'm the only one in this boat--especially given how many blog posts I've seen over the last several years as developers, frustrated with TextMate's lack of progress, have reverted to Vim/Emacs/BBEdit/what-have-you to get the pet features they want.
Oh, sorry didnt see that there.
...and it wasn't any better of an argument then.
This is a silly article, as explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1344641
Most forms asking for an email address use the same field name (or one of a limited number of field names), so the browser remembers what you typed last time, and it'll suggest it to you in a pop-up for autocompletion. All it takes is to type one letter, press down, and enter.

Not a lot of chance of mistyping, there;
Most of the debt problems in the US are the result of poor decisions made by Republican governments during the 1980s and the 2000s. These Republicans get the bulk of their votes from rural folk, where the density of college degrees per square mile is virtually 0, or from the long tail of the curve. Look at the cities that are at the very bottom: Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, Birmingham, Louisville, Nashville, New Orleans, Kansas City, Memphis. These are all Republican strongholds.

Geography plays a large role in the housing prices in San Fran, NYC and Boston. They're located on islands, peninsulas, or capes. Unlike Oklahoma City, for instance, land is scarce in those three cities, and they can't just expand in all directions. Greater scarcity does often lead to higher prices.
I'm pissed at BP and the entire petrol industry for doing everything in their power to continue our dependence on their products. Every time a promising alternative to a fossil fuel starts to bubble up magically it gets snuffed out by the car industry and / or big oil.
koenigdavid = king David
Criteria #2 eliminates Smalltalk. There has been a revival of Smalltalk with Squeak/Gemstone/Seaside. You get very powerful features like continuations that make it easy to write web apps. But speed is a major concern and it also consumes humongous amount of memory.

This is a very bad sign right here for this article -- using hearsay and preconceived notions in place of facts. Smalltalk actually has one of the most efficient memory models for a high-level OO language, and beats Python and Ruby by a big margin. Gemstone is still one of the better VMs out there, and can run circles around Python and Ruby.

What Smalltalk doesn't have is mindshare. That's enough to reasonably eliminate it. Mindlessly parroting preconceived notions in contradiction to the facts is a very bad indicator for article quality.
The only one that should win is "a government policy", specifically raising real interest rates. Note that a strong deflation (which we just might be in) can have a significant real interest rate with a nominal rate of 0%.
A blog by a VC linked to on HN.

I don't think the target demographic is particularly broad.
Go?

It's a modern version of C with garbage collection.
About a 30% weight loss would be ideal, and probably very doable.
I'm awfully glad to see that erlang stayed in the running so long - this guy clearly shares my bias.
Can someone clarify if the colours visible in the image are an artifact of instrument used for capturing the image? Or are they natural colours of stars?
Ask HN: Best first linux distribution?
I have been working with the command prompt in windows more and more and getting into git, ror, php, mysql ect. I just want to learn programming from all angles and I feel held back on a windows machine. Will it make me more productive or will I see myself screaming to come back to windows? My first and only thought was ubuntu. Whats your linux text editor of choice?
CNNEXPRESS.COM: Five Tips To Improve Your Home Cooking
I've said this before, but: People only think Steve Jobs is a "non-techie" because he went into business with Woz, next to whom almost anybody would have looked like a non-techie.
When "mistakes" results in deaths, in the "normal world" this may be considered manslaughter.

At this point, I don't consider a Congressional investigation to be a criminal investigation. Even an appointed independent investigator/prosecutor will not suffice unless empowered to bring criminal charges. (And not merely against a chosen fall guy or scapegoat.)

This is anecdotal, but the behavior and comments reported remind me all too much of what I've seen in (not the oil) industry. My own experience has shown my how prevalent negligence and cover-ups are, particularly in corporate environments. And how difficult it can be for ethical employees to counteract those trends.

Sometimes -- often -- negligence may originate in part in ignorance and stupidity. It's not an excuse, especially when people die and livelihoods are destroyed -- to say nothing of irreplaceable natural resources. And irrespective of punishment, those responsible need to be removed from the ability and opportunity to make such mistakes again.

If this makes it more difficult to find people willing to engage in oil production, maybe that is an economic incentive to accelerate development of other energy sources.

EDIT: Sorry. This morning's coffee seems to have aided me in "getting my grump on". What I stated is a bit strong and perhaps simplistic. On the other hand, now is precisely the time to get -- publicly -- a bit "pissed off" and push for some real change.

FURTHER EDIT: Well, it would have been better to push for change before such a problem occurred. But, to be practical/realistic/pragmatic/resigned about it ;-), now that it's in everyone's face, best to make hay while the sun shines.
Being self-employed, I couldn't possibly answer anything other than 'yes'.
Ask HN: How can I grow this or gain more traction?
I built http://todoneapp.com/ about 2 months ago. I actually built it for my wife who doesn't work well with normal todo lists. She would have cracks of time in her day between chasing our kid around and I devised this tool to help her maximize use of that time. At its core To->Done is basically an ultra-minimalistic todo system based around just getting you to do SOMETHING rather than encouraging a meta game of managing todos. It's not really supposed to compete with anything else out there, it's not a "stripped down" RTM or Tada list. It's really just a whole other (new?) kind of system for taking action.

Anyway, I got To->Done featured on the front page of Lifehacker and got about 30,000 visits the first couple days after launch. Two months later, traffic has trickled to a crawl. There are definitely active users that visit it every day, but not a lot of them.

I'm wondering what I can do to take this to the next level. It's by design uncomplicated, not a ton of features for you to get lost in, etc. So I'm not even sure what the "next level" means. I'd love to have more traffic and users, but I'm not sure how to bring them in. I don't see a way to make the site viral, since todo lists are inherently private. I'm definitely not going to pay for traditional paid search marketing, since I'm not trying to make any money on the site right now.

I really just don't know what to do with it, and wonder if what I built is just inherently ungrowable since it's an application for private actions that has a philosophy of ultra-minimalism. Should I go gung-ho into this somehow or just put out a feature every couple weeks and switch full focus onto the 100 other ideas I have laying around?

Thanks!
Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web
"Here are my criteria for selecting (a non domain specific) language to learn."

This is a correct use of the word "criteria" as a plural word.

"Criteria #1 eliminates C and Fortran."

"Criteria #7 eliminates D."

These are incorrect uses of "criteria" as a singular word. One criterion, two criteria.

/English grammar pedantry
A lot of people say the problem is in a lack of feedback.

The English rule AKA "Loser pays" requires the loser to pay the other party's attorney's fees and it really dampens frivolous lawsuits.
> All I have left to do is complete the new battery pack, which should boost the battery life to around 8 - 10 hours. I'm hoping to have that done in the next couple of weeks.
The vast majority of computer users don't know how the internet and its tubes work.