skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For perspective:

Last night's Lost finale got 13 million viewers, 2.5 hours each, so that's 32.5 million hours wasted there.

The Superbowl gets ~100 million viewers and lasts... what, three hours? So that's 300 million hours wasted there.

The soccer world cup final is rumoured to get something on the order of a billion viewers, so... that's a lot of hours wasted.

And your entire life, if you never do anything in the least bit worthwhile, will be a waste of approximately 700,000 hours.
Thanks for the info.

The problem with the "use what you like" approach is that the emacs/vim learning curve are too steep. By the time I am actually using one of them I'll have spent so much that the fear of change starts to strike and I'm stuck with that editor.
I'm not asking them to be serious, I'm just asking them to be interesting.
Django 1.2.1 released
It's true. Overall, I feel like Twitter is better this way. Constraints force you to be creative.
Not that much. Typing basically 8 characters is easier than navigating, but I am one of those vim guys...
Well my point is that $2/hour is kind of low.

Whenever I see people giving these estimates about how their blog is earning $5 a day without doing anything, they always seem to be low-balling the amount of time they spent on it.

I've had multiple ad sense websites and they all net below $1/hour. I'm sure I can improve that, but not enough to be a worthwhile part-time job.

I would be happy to have someone prove me wrong by helping me build a low effort $10+/hour blog, but until then, I remain skeptical.
Won't someone please think of the ghosts!?

How many ghosts were tragically chomped in the pursuit of this so-called diversion?
Are you saying that web applications are more standalone than most other pieces of software?
It'll be interesting to see if that prediction bears out. I'm skeptical. E-ink may be better for reading than an iPad-class LCD device, but it's certainly not a hundred times better, and that's what it will take to avoid being completely steamrollered by iPad-class devices that can offer a hundred times more functionality.

If E-ink devices are given away free in cereal boxes, then yeah, they'll win the market-share battle, but that's hardly a fair fight.
True. But Apple's shown they use utterly fantastic displays, unlike nearly everyone else. * shrug * I guess density could be good enough.

I'll definitely go in and give it a run-through, but B&N hasn't exactly proven themselves as good device makers, IMO. (see another of my comments here, I won't go into it in this thread) ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374992#score_1375363 )
It would be a pretty strange place for Google to be in if folks perceived them us having an ethical responsibility to steer us towards things they see as productive.
My CIS costs 1/10 of cartridges.
I've setup about 3000 seagate drives in 2008 and 2009 (90% are 1TB Barracuda ES2). In the second half of 2009, the quality dropped sharply. The number of disk failures went through the ceiling (from about 1 to 3% per year to 5 to 8% per year) and we switched to Hitachi.

I still don't have enough data to evaluate Hitachi drives reliability. Come back next year :)
I dunno, if you make the interface basic enough, and treat it as a reading device, I doubt there would be a need for a capacitative screen. Tap to go forward, tap back, and basic dragging is easily possible with other methods. Capacitative is just a bit more reliable (with fingers, worse with anything else) and reads multiple inputs more easily.

If it's not a generic app platform, do you need multiple-finger input? Especially on a decent-sized screen? On an iPhone, certainly, there's no room to waste on UI, but on 7"?
Not all of them go on the grid to power entire cities. There are many wind turbines that only power a school or a hospital, or a section of a small town. IIRC, here in MN there are State grants available for people who want to start renewable energy businesses. I think (it was a while ago I heard about it) that their focus is on the smaller end; e.g., a laid off electrician who wants to start a business installing wind turbines.
Yahoo and Nokia join forces (and Yahoo CEO tells Arrington to "fuck off")
Median is better than mean as a metric for "average goodness of driver". To take a median, you only need a strict ordering; to take a mean, you need to quantify. Any reasonable method of quantifying how good a driver someone is will be heavily influenced by environmental factors. The worst driver on an infinite, featureless plane would be involved in fewer accidents than the best driver in, say, New York.
Top Android 2.2 Features Developers Can’t Wait to Use
"This is a meaningful article, but the title / thesis that humans triumphed because of tool making ability does not represent the consensus of archeological findings at the time when Neanderthals disappeared."

That's not the thesis. The thesis is that humans flourished because they started trading, which led to innovations and also allowed people to tap into the "collective intelligence" of other groups.
Wow, 4 News Outlets Get 80% Of All Links From Bloggers
Just do it. Pick a project and program it. Then do another. Practice is the key.
Patents are really just like prostitutes. You can have all the sex you want you just have to pay for it. This doesn't hinder the level of sex it just raises the cost from zero to something a little higher.
Ask HN: Finding mentors?
I'm in my mid-20s, and never had a mentor. Is there a way to explore and find mentors?
Oh, me too, I've no idea if it'll actually happen. I just hope so. Or at least enough that it'll be a viable option, instead of having to deal with the mostly-crap lock-in readers we've got now.

Emissive displays are a pain to read for a long time, IMO (and others), and they perform poorly in large amounts of light / outdoors. That, coupled with high power use, seems like a death-knell for my purposes.

But I want a device I can take camping with me for a week, and never have to charge. And put ALL my books on, and screw paper forever. An iPad doesn't cut it for me (sans color-printed books / magazines of course, but I have precious few of those).
"The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around."

I see what you're trying to say here, but you've picked a terrible example. The probability that these men would meet and there would not be cameras around is negligible. Non-zero, I concede, but in a Bayesian world absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, under the right circumstances. (The conventional phrasing is wrong, it ought to read "Absence of evidence is not 100% proof of absence", which scans much less well but is actually correct; the phrase is intrinsically Aristotelian.)
As an author whose book was published on one of B&N's imprints, I can tell you this first hand: do not underestimate B&N's ability to sell stuff. It's unbelievable.

My book (Winning Texas Hold'em) was one of the best-selling poker books of all time, despite my not having notable appearances on nationally televised poker events. I sold far more copies than poker players who were considerably more famous than me for no reason other than my book was on the stand right when you walked in the door at thousands of their stores.
I still got everything done on Friday I thought I would, even though I spent about 15 minutes on Pac-Man. But I don't build widgets, so it may be different for people who do tiny, Mechanical Turk type tasks.
Nothing a printer has ever done has pissed me off more than the time an HP "all in one" printer 'expired' $180 worth of unopened ink cartridges we had on the shelf as spares so that we'd have no downtime.

Apparently for "quality reasons" a smart chip in the ink made the printer refuse to use it after an arbitrary expiration date set at the factory. It was only 6 months.

I don't even mind being robbed of the $180. The surprise downtime, however, landed the printer in the dumpster and a Xerox laser took its place.

Edit: I actually tore the scanner portion of the device open and harvested the 2 12-volt cold cathode lights in their beautiful extruded aluminum holders from the scanner bed before chucking it. I mounted them under the desk just over my keyboard drawer to light my keyboard and serve as a warning to other printers that might get any ideas about mishandling their ink...
Taiwanese tablet makers switch from Android to Windows 7
Using implicits is really nice to clean up the interface to some Java APIs (especially for APIs making heavy usage of anonymous inner objects) but I experienced more ugly boilerplate than I would like when having to use Java collection classes from Scala, too.

To be more specific, when I want to transform a collection given by a Java library in a functional manner, I usually ended up with one or two localized import statements - to avoid e.g. scala.collection.mutable leaking into my other methods - and additional calls to convert the Java collection into a Scala specific and back again. This doesn't look like a big issue, but it increased the line count for a lot of cases from '1' to 3-5 ... which puts it uncomfortably close to 'dumb for loop territory'.

Admittedly, this is a small price to pay compared to the constant annoyance that is Java, but for my part I fear that there might be a slight tendency in Scala to fix interesting problems preferably to useful ones.

... lost any type information within the scala language at compile or link time...

How about this use case?

match {
case x: List[Foo] => ...
case x: List[Bar] => ...
}

give me Scala any day of the week

Why do you have the preference for Scala? I'm curious because Scala is my language of choice for my personal projects, but I would ditch it the second a credible F# derivative would appear on the JVM (F#'s stronger emphasis on functional programming, cleaner syntax and abstaining from 'fixing typing' in OOP are the reasons for my preferences).
Try a PR event created by politicians seeking soundbites and justification to expand their authority?

As for whether it is right for any company to profit off the suffering of another human being, absolutely not. It's also not right for people to do so. That's why I hate those doctors, nurses and EMTs, always profiting from other people's suffering.
See: http://www.ers.usda.gov/foodatlas/
Sidenote:

"Google released Chrome about the same time as Android, rapidly iterating on the browser -- now approaching version 5 -- for technology developed first by Apple; Chrome is based on WebKit."

While this is true, WebKit in return is a fork of KHTML. So while technically true, it's a lie by omission (the KDE team was who started the project - both Google and Apple are standing on the shoulders of FOSS with that. Granted, they're standing far far higher than KHTML ever did).
Do you know who else didn't use to have a popular blog? 37signals.

When Basecamp launched, we had something like 4,000 readers of SvN. Now that's a fair chunk, but certainly not unobtainable.
How very odd. I think that I've read 16 of the Board's 100; some I think great, e.g. Yeats's _Autobiographies_. Others, well, Fussell's _The Great War and Modern Memory_ is a fine book, but top 100? Dangerfield is fine, but again, top 100?

Also, are we to believe that a quorum of the board had worked its way through _Principia Mathematica_? In such cases my own suspicion would be that somebody said, Gee, we need a math book--anybody remember one?
The dev team would be behind schedule and the PMs would be very proud that they are macho enough to drop certain features in order to ship

Whats wrong with the above?
I see this discussed now and then, and I never really see the point. I don't care what a startup's chance to succeed is, I only care what MY startup's chance to succeed is. And since these estimates vary so widely even when they're completely general, they're not even that useful as a baseline.
You're still missing the point. Google has censored results before, and future censoring would lead to the types of dystopic scenarios outlined in the beginning of the article. I'm not about to get into a debate about the relative probabilities of a picture existing or not. In part, because just-so stories abound on either side. But more fundamentally: it's not the point of the selection in my first post.
Anyone see action around the "Nook" displays at their BNs?

Not sure where you are, but here in NYC, the Nook has been in demand (I had to wait 2 months after ordering mine).

Without knowing what the Pandigital screen actually looks like, the color aspect could be a game changer.

We publish ebooks in full color, and the difference between how they look on an iPad versus Kindle/Nook is huge.
CA Supreme Court to review Brian Reid's age-discrimination case against Google
"Brian Wansink, the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, estimates we make 227 decisions about what to eat every day..."

That doesn't pass the smell test. The only way I can get that number is to devalue "decision" to the point of uselessness; if I decide to each hamburgers for dinner, well, I decided not to eat lasagna and I decided not to eat spaghetti and I decided not to eat at McDonald's and I decided not to eat at Wendy's. Maybe that's not exactly what they did, but I couldn't find an actual description of the methodology, and j'accuse.
The Google Job Experiment - purchasing AdWords for people you want to work for
In the same vein, Brother laser cartridges will work reliably for months after they are "empty" according to the printer.

In fact, I never managed to actually get it to show any signs of low toner. I just got sick of taking the cartridge out and putting it back in to reset the "out of ink" setting.
Really? I thought nvi and elvis had fallen by the wayside, and now everyone shipped vim (in compatibility mode).
I like to start with the underlying structure of the data as well, which for database-driven web sites means the schema.

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks.
Most people do that on all sorts of non-prenup topics (e.g., sex with third parties, children). What makes a prenup special?
Hmm, to first order I don't see much correlation. Pulling some statistics off Forbes the five fattest cities in America are:

1. Memphis TN: Obesity rate 34%, food spending $4667 (near bottom)

2. Birmingham AL: Obesity rate 31.3%, food spending $7109 (slightly above average)

3. San Antonio TX: Obesity rate 31.1%, food spending missing from list? (Or did I miss it?)

4. Riverside CA: Obesity rate 30.8%, food spending $5675 (below average)

5. Detroit MI: Obesity rate 30.1%, food spending $2246 (dead last)

And rounding out the top ten we have a bunch of poorish Southern cities plus San Diego. I didn't bother to look them all up but San Diego has a surprising-to-me-ly small food spending.

OK, so I suppose there's a tendency towards the fattest cities being among the lowest-spending, with Birmingham being a slight outlier. I suspect what we're seeing is just the well-known "poor people are fatter" phenomenon, but complicated by a bunch of factors such as race, age distribution (few old people are fat) and local cuisine (southern and Mexican cuisine are particularly fattening).

I'll repeat what I always say though: poor people aren't fat because they're poor, they're fat for the same reason they're poor -- they're not too bright, have poor impulse control, don't plan ahead, and so forth.
As someone who has worked at several small companies and a pseudo-startup, and who is tired of the lack of consistency, I would like to hear your story.
You are right I should have been more specific insurance companies profit by denying you access to life saving treatments, doctors, et al, profit from giving you life saving treatments. Clearly those are exactly the same thing and you are completely correct. Clearly.
I don't think they are anything like what IM used to be.
Your friend might be wasting a lot of effort (apart from his personal learning experience), as Phil Bagwell is working on Scala's collection library.
Minor technical gripe, there's an annoying audio hiss, but the information is great.
How reporters rooted for GM over the period of its long decline
Seriously, The whole post is just a sarcastic joke. He even says so in the first comment. How could you guys miss that?
Why don't people patent their Twitter apps then? It may take three years before you get it approved, but once it's in you can sue Twitter into oblivion for stealing your idea, right?
Skype Vs. Google Talk: Webcam Speeds
"He backed up those assertions with an HP-sponsored Qualitylogic study showing that its cartridges last longer than refilled ink cartridges (no study of cost per page, however) and an HP focus group of 17 people, half of whom Brown says were unhappy with "bargain ink.""

Not a statistician. But it seems that if half the participants were unhappy with the bargain ink (and in such a small sample, no less), people were just as likely to like the bargain ink better? In which case, given that these were likely joe schmoes off the street (instead of, say, doing a highly technical analysis of the quality and durability of the final print - the other study only says the cartridges last longer), the study was essentially meaningless, and they're adding spin?
As an example, the presence of an image on Google Images is exactly how the Vancouver Olympics gained a fifth mascot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7187...
I'll take a stab at it.
Two that are made up words

playerlytics.com

gamerlytics.com

Since you are like Business intelligence but for gaming maybe?

gamerintelligence.com
As someone who has created many puzzle-hunts and participated in some, I really hope that the article is abbreviated because if they went from FFT to Wikipedia article in that few steps they are a truly amazing team (and I would feel bad).

Then again, it is DEFCON CTF they're trying to get into, so it does require some amazing problem-solving skills.
Anyone here actually live in Boise? They make it sound nice, but it really wasn't on my list...
the article could use a little more context/backstory too...
+1, I have been printing for months with an "empty" Brother cartridge. Just stick on a little tape on the side of the cartridge to block the laserbeam that "measures" the ink, that way you can leave it in.

Crooks!
Just out of curiosity, how do you "clearly" detect measles?
bitcounter
Why Incorporate in Delaware?
I had submitted this as "Instant Messaging losing ground to Social Networking", which is what the article seems to say (attributing it to Paul Armstrong of PR firm Kindred).

And it does seem to match to real-world anecdotal observation :) - and people only do have so much time and attention span, after all.
Given the price of the engineer sitting on that seat, that remains reasonable.
Seriously? Seriously? It's 2010, and we're still having this religious debate? Pick an editor that works for you. Learn it. Use it. Done. NB I'm a heretic, I use both vi and emacs.
Yeah, but in Java, you need four kinds of punctuation right off the blocks.
Teething Troubles: Assigning blame for pagefaults
IMO watching the Super Bowl is time well spent...
what % is that of March Madness?
Spindle Law – Crowd-Sourced Legal Research
It seems odd that there's no way to remove the rockets. You wouldn't do maintenance on a loaded gun.
For context to "outsiders": Bagwell wrote the papers that the Clojure datastructures are based on.
Really? I wasn't quite sure what they meant by injecting ads into the timeline. I thought it meant what the free version of Echofon does, IIRC, which is take a friends_timeline and display it with ads in between, rather than something that add advertisements to a user's statuses.
Seth Godin on how business plans should look today
I noticed recent distributions (last couple years) deploy a crippled form of vim, halfway between vi and vim. You still have to "sudo apt-get install vim" to get something that is nice.
Got my HP Laserjet (CP1518) cartridges to last literally 2x as long by setting the manual override. The printer will complain for months that it's out of ink, all the while printing beautifully.
How many of those things impact productivity during work hours?
check out what is available on nxdom.com. Try some prefixes & suffixes etc. that fit and maybe a name will find you

fwiw, I like gamerlytics.com

edit: this assumes you are looking for a new URL
"Medicinal marijuana retailing"? Now, there's a business!
cubes,

Yeah, sorry about that, it is actually my laptop fan. I've fixed it in subsequent episodes of the podcast, but this was already recorded.
Toshiba using Senseg haptic feedback for ereaders & cellphones
>I'll repeat what I always say though: poor people aren't fat because they're poor, they're fat for the same reason they're poor -- they're not too bright, have poor impulse control, don't plan ahead, and so forth.

Evidence? Not saying it's necessarily false, but I can't help but notice that healthy food is much, much more expensive than food that's bad for you. Calorie-wise, eating food packed with high fructose corn syrup is probably one of the cheapest ways to eat. You end up spending way more (I know because I do) buying vegetables, lean meats, dairy, etc.
No mention of the privacy aspect though! Shame

I wonder if that is interesting - or simply an oversight.

EDIT: they've edited it in since I read the story... (just checked the original tab I opened)
low, as in brow.

take this shit somewhere else
Hmm in a work setting I seem to use IM all the time without a drop. But when I think about it I guess in my personal time my IM volume has declined.
New Intel ULV processors still a bad fit for MacBook Air
> I'll repeat what I always say though: poor people aren't fat because they're poor, they're fat for the same reason they're poor -- they're not too bright, have poor impulse control, don't plan ahead, and so forth.

And if a wealthy person is fat is it because they're big-boned?

My theory is, farther up the social ladder, people become more "lifestyle conscious" -- it's hard to give a shit about that stuff when you're poor. The decision to lead a healthier lifestyle is often justified by health benefits, but the internal calculus is based on a desire to fit in and conform to social norms.

This matches my own life experience: When I was poor, I didn't give a damn about what I ate or whether I exercised. I got fat. As soon as I started making real money, I started paying more attention to these things, because everyone around me felt they were important and this rubbed off on me, and now I'm back to a healthy weight and not eating junk from a bodega.
It's good to remember that Battelle runs an AdSense competitor. Especially considering that Google disputes this claim of his.
No, but I would guess this hybrid drive isn't 50% better than a regular old 500GB hard drive even though it's 150% the price. Value-wise, HDD > HDD-SSD > SSD.
It's been pretty much replaced by SMS in my life. There are a few exceptions (Girlfriend, a few friends who aren't likely to waste my time, my mom) who have my gChat user name, but it's all SMS now.
I'd say Tweeting/updates are to IM as IM is to email.

(the article actually touches on those differences at the end)
Of course HP and other printing companies are trying to make money by any means necessary, that is how companies stay alive. But what I find interesting is that by making printing prohibitively expensive, they are rewarding paperless information consumption. This ironically aligns their profit motive with other motives for saving paper like reducing deforestation.