skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, though mainly in a work context rather than becoming allergic to email or the web. I just worked in other areas for a couple of years - construction and cooking, to be specific.

The physicality was a nice change from sitting in a chair, and the work brought benefits of its own: improved skill at problem-solving and efficiency (the former more in construction, the latter more in cooking, but with elements present in both), improved people skills, a better work ethic and appreciation of safety (and by extension, responsibility to your colleagues) and better work-life balance - preparing or cleaning & putting away the tools of one's trade every day became a useful ritual that helped to define the border between personal and work time, something that might be difficult when you can do system administration via your phone.

Of course I made much less money, not least because I lacked commercial experience or special training. But I learned a great deal in the process, and of course the task-specific skills can save one a good deal of money - for many home-improvement jobs I don't need to hire a contractor, and even if I do want or need to, it's a lot easier to estimate the scope and likely cost of the work. To this end, I'd say choose a job that requires skills and will challenge you, even though you might find it more difficult to get your foot in the door (especially in a poor economy, where employers don't want to hire over-qualified people who may flee at the first opportunity). So while being a waiter might be challenging and might improve your ability to handle customers, you won't accumulate a whole lot of useful skills in most waiting jobs. But many other areas allow you to develop meta-skills that will be useful in any job as described above, and if you like the industry you might well see market opportunities for computers, should you decide to return to hacking at a later date.

Also, when you do you may well earn more money as long as your computer skills haven't atrophied. Many employers value diversity of experience if it brings a deeper perspective and if it was undertaken from self-development rather than out of necessity. I found I enjoyed other sorts of work besides the computer-based kind, and when I was recruited a couple of years later to a computer business again, I had to think hard about accepting. Unexpectedly, my would-be employer interpreted my hesitancy as a negotiating strategy and upped his offer by about 10% on the spot. Also, I didn't go back to the same old grind I had felt tired of before, but in a direction that employed some of my newly-acquired skills (more customer-facing and process-oriented) and continued to look for new areas of development - in my case that was learning about multimedia hardware which eventually took me into the entertainment field.
Well, the object proof is that there isn't even a vaporware "GNU Embedded SQL" project.

Unfortunately, there is probably a Rule 34 for these things. Apologies in advance.
As a career freelancer I find it difficult to find the time or motivation for open source work. I feel like most of the people who get involved in open source are probably doing it on the clock at the office, where the extra time spent perfecting free software is subsidized by a salary. But maybe I'm wrong?
Say what you want about the methods, motives, and spin of the people behind Wikileaks, but the fact is they release an incredible amount of credible primary sources. You can dismiss their spin, but you can't dismiss the hard facts they've uncovered.
I tried easy_install & pip, both failed. The installer from the PyGame web site is only for 10.5. Somebody should make a Homebrew recipe!
Sounds like a great opportunity for real reporters to dress up as fishermen to sneak out there and take some unique pictures. This kind of thing only stops the half-ass-reporters out there who will go home after running into the coast guard to complain and feel sorry about themselves.

boo hoo BP is trying to control the press coverage

Uh, yes, that's what a public company has to do: maximize shareholder value. Now do what real journalists are supposed to do do: break a couple of stupid rules, find a way to get out there, and take some damned pictures. What are they going to do? Shoot down your plane? Seriously.

I mean, what kind of journalist decides because the coastguard stopped you, you're going to sit back and write self-pitying articles like this? Grow some balls, just hide in a fishing boat for all I care, and take some damned pictures.

Then write another story of how badass you were nearly getting shot down by the BP Air Force. Reporters nowadays, sheesh.
thats the problem though, traditionally most of the time phones don't get major upgrades in their software. A few firmware fixes here and there maybe, but rarely do they get major updates like android. What benefit do HTC stand to gain in upgrading your old device to new versions of Android?

It may be a symptom of Googles quick development cycles, but its still a problem. It may be one Google cannot solve but this blog post to me didnt address that issue, rather it said this is what we think fragmentation is, look at all the things we do to fix it. But in reality, for me, the fragmentation is mostly about the varying versions of android around.

Perhaps if HTC were to charge you for the upgrade, in order for them to prioritize the development of it? Would you pay $50 for the upgrade if it meant it would happen in the next month as opposed to ages down the track?
Steve Jobs live from D8
Some companies acquire people for their talent. Few know what to do with that talent once they have it. Google is no exception. I wish Josh the best of luck. Wonder if he'll revive memepool?
The edition of Emerson around the house has in the preface a quotation from Harriet Martineau, roughly "The logicians score incessant triumphs over him, yet he is not vanquished."

It seems to me that Emerson was an outstanding journalist and writer on current events. As a thinker, though, he strikes me as too frequently vague and ready to make rhetoric cover for doubtful inferences.
I believe if the final destination of the tor communication had been https,
wikileaks could not have eavesdropped and read the documents. The article fails
to make that distinction when it says:

By necessity, however, the last node through which traffic passes has to
decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination.
Does the Constitution really protect a right to "academic freedom"?
Thanks for accepting late applications and for lettings us know the cycle's over. Maybe next time :)
Reminds me of Grape which I liked, even if it is still vaporware:

http://www.tayasui.com/Grape.html

The design concept:

http://www.tayasui.com/Grape_design.html
The talk on Go with Rob Pike was pretty interesting.
The BBC has a fairly good diagram of what's going on:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8651333.stm

A visualization of how big the spill is relative to others:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10198201.stm
Good point, I always forget that.
What the world needs is a giant repository of all music (legal, of course) and accessible by an API for streams and downloads.

Any access to the API would charge for the rights to play the song, of course, but it would be up to the retailer to decide how the song was paid for, whether it be web-song stream rights, subscription, download sales, ads etc. This would open up a whole new market for music sites without having to directly manage deals with music publishers - we the web entrepreneurs could focus on creative delivery instead of fearing / bargaining with labels.

This is a ludicrous pipe dream, obviously, based on how technologically frightened and fractured the music industry is today. But it would make the world a better place I think.
Yes, but how many people get to die with all of human civilization completely within their view?

These men would have had very little to no hope of a rescue, but they would have had plenty of air left to choose when they wanted to die. I can think of no more beautiful sight at death than your entire world and species.
Your iPad Is Not Ready for Flash but It’s Ready for Porn
Minority Report's UI designer points to the future of UI [TED Video]
Hot Girl Kim In-Ae looking good in a Calypso Royale shirt and jeans-Cute Girls
Believe it or not, the BBC has some of the best graphical representations of what has been happening over the past 40 days.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.stm

As a past resident of Louisiana (attended LSU and lived in New Orleans for 3 years) I can tell you that this catastrophe will economically be on-par with Hurricane Katrina. Many of us have no idea how important (and awesome!) our seafood industry is. Our best shrimp, crabs, and oysters all directly come from the area that this spill is impacting. All I can say is, this sucks.

With that said, reading the article leads me to believe that a good majority of reporters and people being turned away have been done so in good faith or simple mistakes. Let's not be mistaken - reporters can crowd an area and cause serious safety concerns for people who are working to contain the spill. And they can also irritate the crap out of workers who are more concerned with getting stuff done than answering lots of questions. Reporters will climb over themselves to get the latest scoop on a hop topic. And this is one.

On on the subject of TFR's (Temporary Flight Restrictions) as mentioned in the article - Only the FAA issues TFR's, and those are issued to protect operating aircraft in a specially designated zone from outside interference (read: mostly the media). There was a complete TFR issued for most of south east Louisiana just after Katrina so that air traffic was carefully controlled for rescue operations. This is no different, there is an enormous amount of aircraft that are working in this area and TFR's are common to protect the working aircraft from non-essential related aircraft.

I'm sure that BP has their corporate spin-doctors running at full steam, but I'm quite positive that there is no conspiracy to shut down access to the public regarding this tragedy.
Maybe someone should build a site to anonymously post photos on.
Because I see you wrote this, blister, don't spell stuff wrong in titles. That's my advice.
Ask HN: Where are the bar/coffee shop programmers go to in SF city?
I just arrived at SF for vacation today. I thought i ask HN readers in SF, where do you guys get your beer, coffee, food & hang out?
It's always nice to see Dave speaking knowledgeably on a topic which he knows nothing about.

You'll never see an interchangeable lens camera with a cell phone in it, simply because high quality lenses have big elements, which gather lots of light. As I am sure you will be surprised to hear, big pieces of glass result in big lenses.

Optics is, more or less, a solved problem. We hit hard physical limits long ago. You'll never see a compact full frame 35mm sensor digital camera. It just can't happen.

Can you imagine talking into a pro DSLR? Using it as a every day carry phone? The D700 masses 995 grams, and that's just the body! Add another 500 grams for the lens; is that something you're just going to slip into a pocket? How are you going to use it, by holding it to your head by the lens barrel, then terminating a call by pressing the shutter release?

It's generally a good idea in consumer electronics design to not make your users look like fools. Nokia forgot this when they made the N-Gage, to their detriment.

(And, of course, he misspells Lumix as Lunix. That's pretty funny, though, I'll give him that.)
Zen Coding and the Art of Rapid HTML Authoring
The other common complaint is that using plain strings for data access is inelegant, and not very javascript-y. It will face the same problem as other platforms, where developers end up writing ORM frameworks to map relational database tables (somewhat awkwardly) to objects.

IndexedDB feels closer to real javascript - it does all access through javascript methods. Writing storage wrapper libraries will be cleaner against this kind of API than concatenating strings of SQL.

And it does not preclude someone from writing an SQL implementation on top of it, if they desire. (Or something simpler. eg. http://thomasfrank.se/sqlike.html)
This is dated 31 May 2010 but flavour shifting (e->µ), evidence for neutrino mass, has been confirmed for some years. Indeed I did a mini-dissertation on the subject for my undergrad degree and the question was solved soon after, about 2000 IIRC, by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory group and later confirmed by others like Super-K in Japan.

The answer then, as I expect it to be now with this detail about the tau-neutrino is that neutrino mass is not considered to be enough to answer "dark matter" issues alone.

These headlines appear to originate with CERN as they are common to most stories I've seen but this is not the first evidence for neutrino mass nor the first evidence for flavour shifting (mixing).
Reworked Cheat Sheet
Can you point to some evidence that patents generally have had a useful role in our society, other than pharmaceuticals, which is the usual (and also incorrect) answer?
In Chrome on Mac, the techno Strongbad Email played perfectly fine, and my computer didn't burn me. I'd say it's a success, though still lots of room to grow I imagine.
maxwin, when you have your PHP/mySQL version make sure you let me know so's I can use it
Developer: iPad app store rejects 'widgets or their own desktops'
I don't know. Dying sucks no matter where it happens but once you come to terms with that I think it would be kind of neat. I can't imagine they didn't have some kind of suicide pill to avoid an unpleasant death (probably couldn't be a pill but some kind of syringe or something). So they wouldn't suffocate.

Assuming that's true I think drifting to sleep underneath the Earth in the same way people on earth drift to sleep underneath the moon would be pretty darn awesome.
I found this very useful for portraying the actual size of the spill: http://www.beowulfe.com/oil/
Writing a good job ad for a programmer
Ask HN: B2B Pricing Guides?
I'm currently investigating the idea of offering a very niche product to a very nice market; looking for pointers to pricing for this.

I am currently being trained on a best-of-breed software package by the company that owns and develops the product. They have customers globally, but are hamstrung by the fact that there aren't enough people available to support their product. Similarly, going "to the source" for training is extremely expensive (think six figures to get around a dozen people completely trained).

I think there's an opportunity to provide this training through online video courses to the existing customers of this product. Regardless of customizations they do, their staff will need to know how to use the product and potentially how to extend its functionality.

I am considering offering this as some form of subscription - either monthly, annually, or something in between. The customer is be able to give their staff streaming access to the videos from wherever (S3 hosted or something), and there can be an additional testing component to be sure that competency has been gained.

To me, the "obvious" comparisons are to both FTE trainer costs and to sending people to the developer for training.

I believe I can get access to the existing customer list for North America at least, probably globally (both directly and through selective use of Google), so reaching the right people isn't a big hurdle, it's the pricing and convincing. The potential customers have money - everyone uses their product.

Ideas? They're all appreciated.
Sources of angel funding for industries other than software?
Most of the VC active on the web are investors in software generally, and Internet startups specifically. It's also pretty easy to find green technology and resource scarcity investors. This hardly covers the entrepreneurial spectrum, however.

How do you find the angels and other VC who don't specialize in these niches? Specifically I'm looking for media angels specifically, but the question is applicable across many other industries as well. In my particular case, it's a product that an organization buys, as opposed to content monetized indirectly.

How might I go about finding such an angel? It'd be a very small investment ($50K max), which limits my options further as most angels are looking for $100K min, FWIS.
All in one gadgets are convenient but will never replace single-purpose devices for serious use.
Ask HN:Google adsense
Approxmately, How much uniques / page views required to make $1000 per month on google adwords?
Speaking from an education collaboration perspective, entering the market requires grass-roots adoption, high-touch support, non-trivial insight into how schools buy stuff, and patience. These characteristics may not be compatible with venture investment, especially if you can't draw a convincing line from zero to a hundred million dollar business. I'd guess the next big education success will fly in well under the Silicon Valley radar.
Of course, the blockade is actually being run by government and military entities. BP can't arrest journalists, but the Coast Guard can.
I had an archive server go down because of queued up requests to send data to S3. Good lesson for us, we need to handle these types of issues better on our end.
If Android's as "open" as people keep saying it is, is it possible for you to sell Android apps from your own site and let users download and install them without using an app store? I'd expect this to be possible if it's a truly open platform.
Kickstart A Social Web Application
Bachelor thesis which gives a cross section of current web practices when building social software.
Certainly I agree pro cameras won't have actual cellphones in them, but I'm pretty sure they will soon all have data modems that connect to the existing cellphone network. I think that was the point the article was trying to make.
| I am now with 6 open tabs in Firefox, one terminal with four tabs, a music player decoding an internet radio stream, an E-mail client and Emacs with two windows open and a Python process running in it.

Only two of those 'normal' activities consume cycles. Your CouchDB may be parallel, but that's not a typical desktop job.

The truths are a) most desktop use is over-covered by current, single or dual CPUs b) you can't convert all sequential apps to parallel, as earnestly as Intel and AMD might wish for it.

That is, until there are radical agents acting on your behalf, sussing out interesting things on the internet for you and whatever, but those would probably run in a cloud somewhere anyway. Of course this will be proved wrong in time but, I don't think that current desktop apps, /just written for parallel/, will ever use 50 cores.
It didn't occur to me earlier, but Lala actually has a few patents: http://www.google.com/patents?q=%22la+la+media%22&btnG=S...

Particularly, "Network Based Digital Rights Management System" (http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=esKwAAAAEBAJ&dq=%...) could be valuable for Apple.
You can distort the truth with facts, simply omit the facts you disagree with.
It varies too much by topic, site type, and where your visitors are coming from. I was once regularly making $1000 per ~10,000 pageviews on a certain type of site. At the same time, I was making $800 per month on another site doing ~200k pageviews.

Sadly I only make about $150 a month in all now, but I filled my boots and sold some of the sites.
Ah, there's definitely not an equation nor do I claim there to be an equation to VC investments. I'm just pointing out the very big discrepancy in the numbers.

Some more facts:

- Over the past three years there have been 165 private equity backed transactions within the education sector.
- Aggregate deal value of these investments based on data compiled by Berkery Noyes is in excess of $35 billion.
- Education was the source of 4 IPO's in the last 18 months

Also, regarding your point about strong cash flows and large profit margins not existing in education: that is a myth.

Two points from that same presentation:

- Across various education sectors EBIT margin ranges from 15%-40%.
- Negative working capital: many K-12 models for content and technology receive cash first and are transitioning to SaaS and subscription based, recurring revenue content models
I'm curious as to where the author got the "$100 million max" number. There has been significantly more than that invested in the industry. Four companies alone that I can think of have raised about $100MM alone (2tor, Global Scholar, Grockit, Smart.fm) and there have been dozens of smaller financings (and no doubt some bigger ones I'm omitting). Private equity guys have also been at work here funding companies like Grand Canyon and Bridgepoint (both of which IPOed and returned big #s).

I agree that education has been an under-invested in industry but question as to whether the amounts are low as are stated in the article.
He could have at least taken a picture of the ad...
Here's the actual TFR:

http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_0_2957.html

"Pilots requesting flights under this exception must contact the houma deepwater horizon incident air operations center at 985-493-7804 between the hours of 0600-1800 cst, a minimum of 24 hours prior to desired flight time. Operators should be prepared to provide precise details of their requested flight including: pilots name and contact information, company/organization, purpose of flight, type aircraft, callsign, ingress/egress points and times, Requested altitude and route of flight. Pilots will then be provided with additional instructions for obtaining final approval and beacon code assignment."
Kickstarter - Grassroots mapping the Gulf oil spill with balloons and kites: http://kck.st/cj3Anh
That also helps with the materials issue. The moon has a lot of metals that would be useful for such a mission.
Even point and shoots aren't really threatened by cell phone cameras - they cover two completely separate contexts. In fact, there are few use cases where the cell phone has really stolen the show from point and shoots.

Don't get me wrong, imaging capabilities on cell phones are important and useful - but IMHO they've largely carved out brand new use cases for themselves rather than stealing from other camera products.

I think Panasonic's positioning isn't too bad. They're saying "we're not your crappy, blurry cell phone camera. If you want memories that last, buy our stuff" - which seems like a wise enough stance to differentiate themselves. After all, the really cheap point and shoots do resemble cell phone cameras in terms of quality - being above that certainly helps.