skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, you can patent things that may be implemented in the future at some point?

Sort of. Patents are supposed to include some detail about how the invention works -- I think the test might be "enough to allow someone skilled in the art to practice the invention", but I'm not entirely certain. Whatever the exact test is, the point remains that you can't just say "I patent perpetual motion" -- you have to explain how a perpetual motion machine works.

That said, you don't have to actually have implemented the invention. You could get a patent on a new design of nuclear fusion reactor without having ever built such a reactor, as long as you describe it in enough detail.
Paying taxes is patriotic.
Dropbox. Currently in trial and considering: Performable, SnapABug, SendGrid
emacs is to text editors what Dwarf Fortress is to video games.
They think they know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, those fools...
It's completely appropriate. This community is comprised of people with both technical skill and entrepreneurial ambition. Many will start, or already own or are part of, small S-Corporations or other small business entities. These tax increases, especially their implications for small businesses, are very relevant to this audience.
You should also consider http://SnapABug.com
Also has a nice chat feature (you can see what page the person is on)
You... you are a shrewd man. (or woman).

Still, the fact that it was already floating around I feel proves my point even more. If the disease ravaged us for hundreds of centuries before this cropped up, THEN it'd be pretty reasonable to say it's highly unlikely to develop again anytime soon.
Or with games that seem based on more mundane chores, the work bears fruit much faster than in real life. In Harvest Moon, I can milk all of my cows in less time than it takes me to wash a dinner plate in real life.
Common-law marriage is recognized in about three states, as I recall.
Bees with machine guns: Low-cost, distributed load-testing using EC2
If they're big impressive things I can see people's desire to brag coming into play.

As a disclaimer, I'm somewhat of a Luddite when it comes to this stuff so the fact that I'm not enthused should in no way count as a strike against it; I'm not a fan of foursquare et. al. but they seem to be going very well.
So exactly how is this propaganda? You can refute these taxes?
The salt stick was ineffective for me. I currently use Tom's deodorant instead.
"I would need to, very much, be conscious of playing the game and pretty much doing anything but presenting an unashamed and straightforward version of self-expression."

Bingo. You nailed it, and I can say that is the mindset you need.

I'm the same height. Similar build (actually a bit thinner). Yet younger. Friends say I'm anything but unattractive, yet the reality is I've always been single.

I took a crack at things a few months ago and rather than be straightforward, I use Hugh Gallagher's "Essay 3A" as inspiration for my profile. The entire thing was nothing short of a farce. I couldn't of taken it any less seriously aside from the fact that it was genuinely funny.

I received eighteen first contacts within the first week. This is nothing new. Usually I get annoyed, put up something ridiculous, and in come the results. Or if I do contact someone, I write something incredibly brief or incredibly goofy and then start to get replies.

Did any of them pan out this time? No. Ultimately it resulted in three different dates all of which went bad enough to turn me off of dating for another year. However my point is women don't care for straight-forwardness. At all.
Ah, but does it have a vagina? No? Then your SO is not quite obsolete yet.
A matchmaking amusement park is also called a bar.
I guess I was trying to convey the fact that there are a lot of big discoveries waiting to be found. People seem to not put enough emphasis in research and education in the US. The Hubble vs Super Collider debate many years ago. Nasa is always underfunded, IMO. Seems like there is so much more we could do.
> If you have attitude that you're not going to make any changes to yourself in order to land women, than you're not going to land women.

I know! Such would be the definition of insanity and all that. That's why my future plans involve making the best of the strengths and weaknesses I have and who I am, who is someone who refuses to strive to be anybody but the person of my dreams. Women don't like me and I'll live.

> Women don't want direct and straightforward. They want charm, mystery, excitement.

I know that too. I've read the SS literature and heard Ross Jeffries tapes. The shit works. I don't like people who use it and it's not for me. Bullshit I can detect disgusts me, in both genders. I know the arguments quite well and I know human nature quite well. When you're learning a foreign language, you don't say "Speaking French isn't me" you make the sounds that seem weird at first. However, feeling like I need to spend my whole life making all my conversations with women crafted according to some stupid shit I don't actually feel isn't worth it for me. Yes I'm bitter, and I don't even rant all the time, just in this thread:)

> you need to develop both the personal rapport and shared interests, but also the romantic game/charm that makes her tingle for you.

Yes I know. But I say no to this, and the anger at the fact that the person of my dreams isn't good enough for a woman will drive me to more success, on my own terms.
How is it a racket if he entered into the marriage contract of his own volition?

It may be a rigged game but he played it voluntarily.
Excellent interview. Yes, he mostly ignores the people who've had success, but I don't think it really detracts much from the overall point. I've had some success with online dating but I agree that it's generally an unsatisfying experience much the way he describes it. (3-6 hours of work per cup of coffee pretty much nails it).

The points about sharing experience are accurate, except that I would focus in particular on shared experiences with multiple people at once. A big weakness in online dating is that it's tends to be a series of one-on-one interactions. Unless one of you is really good at seducing strangers, and does it right away, it's going to be hard to sustain those one-on-one interactions long enough to turn into a relationship.

At least one person has to take the step to integrate into the other's social network, and it has to happen quickly, or else it's not likely to go anywhere. The way offline dating tends to work is that you meet someone in a social situation. You interact with them for a few moments at a time, with frequent breaks while you each socialize with other people. You have opportunities to observe the person discreetly as well as interact with them. You send each other signals and at some point you find some privacy and get more serious.

A dating site that encouraged that sort of thing might be more successful. (okcupid tries to encourage a variety of behaviors but ultimately their design still winds up facilitating the one-on-one chat -> date paradigm)
Here is a presentation I did on the fundamentals behind good design: http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-...
You can't tell whether or not something is using "threads" or not just by looking at it. Javascript is a fairly standard Algol language with a modestly unusual object model, and if all you know is other Algol languages you may not realize what is possible. There are numerous languages where you can write the equivalent of:

function do_something():
socket = wait_for_a_socket()
data = read_everything_from_socket(socket)
process_data_long_and_hard_with_lots_of_io(data)
write_to_disk(data)
return_result(socket, data)

Where, as my function names imply, further code may be called that does things like talk to databases, or wait for other data, or any amount of other I/O, and you may not have to write a single asynchronous callback. Why? Because unwrapping code into continuations and managing them in the runtime is a trivial compiler transformation when you design your language to work like that from day one. Like Erlang, or, in this case, Clojure.

The fact that Node.js requires you to manually shatter your code into teensy-weensy little fragments and manually wire it back together is a hack which should not be mistaken for a feature. Javascript requires you to do that, because it's an Algol language and just doesn't work any other way. If that's what you love doing, great, but that's an awful lot of time and effort spent on writing plumbing (and debugging plumbing, and debugging nontrivial asynchronous plumbing in a mutable language isn't in the worst tier of programming tasks in the world, but it's solidly in the second...) that you could have been spending on writing code that actually solves customer problems.

(I am aware of the libraries that pretend to help this. They are a joke compared to working in a language that actually supports this. I can call functions and send messages and read files and read from databases and write functions to abstract all this and I don't spend one second wondering how I'm going to wire all the pieces together at runtime. No amount of code slathered over Javascript can match that, short of an entirely new language that compiles into Javascript. (Which is inevitable. And it will be hailed as a brilliant breakthrough.) All of the libraries I was pointed to last time I brought this up use the exact same obvious hack, which helps with the case of stringing a handful of teensy-weensy fragments of code onto a single string but can't handle anything more.)
JavaScript is typically implemented with a JIT compiler, just like Java or C#. Python, Ruby, and Lua use virtual machines (like Java used to be).
How to Buy Used and Discount Books Online
I now concur (at last, ;-)!)
I hadn't heard of this. Aren't many paints' pigmenting these days based on TiO2? Would sanding painted surfaces pose a risk?
Actually, yes.

Many marriages are entered into by two parties with the agreement that one party will be the primary caretaker of the children (home-maker), which is a profession that is unpaid. The other party will work outside the home and provide money for the family. In that case, the years of work that the home-maker has put in should be recognized as valid work, and in the event of a break-up of the marriage, the home-maker should continue to receive monetary support from the other party, as they (often) have no viable other professional skills. This needs to be enforceable in court in the interest of people whose profession is home-maker.

This is also why gay marriage (and gay divorce) should be legally codified like straight marriage is. People need legal recourse to persist their own standards of living.

If someone entering into a marriage does not want to take on the lifetime of responsibility of providing for the person who is promising to take on the role of home-maker in their household, perhaps they shouldn't enter into a marriage.
FYI, yes, there were issues with pricing. All I can say is that Microsoft did the technical development of the phone but another company had a say of the pricing, especially the data plan...
As superficial as some attributes may be, you don't ultimately decide who you're physically attracted to.

I think "superficial" is an arbitrary distinction anyway. Who is to say that intelligence is a more worthy attribute than physical attractiveness?
The Clojure debugging stuff at about 12:00 into the screencast is a really nice piece of information.
I cannot disagree enough.

There are plenty of JavaScript compilers that each have their own incompatible module systems. Adding another will only exacerbate what is already a major problem. JavaScript needs modules in the language to prevent fragmentation into what are effectively different source languages.
First Impressions on NIXTY.com
Do we really need more ways to assign meaningless points to actions?
Clearly, getting signups is the biggest challenge.

But there's no way to collect without engaging in some promotion: placing the Flattr button where it's visible and talking it up.

And the first wave of signups won't be sites that have the subscriber-pull to add their own paywalls. It's the (much larger) group whose only current option is advertising. These sites have a more simple calculus: can't possibly hurt, might help, might create some warm fuzzies if they like the concept.

It's after that group signs up -- spreads the knowledge -- that nudges to signup could be deployed. These probably aren't paywalls; they're more likely payspeedbumps.

Contenture had a weak name, weak explanatory copy ("freemium for the masses"?), and weak marketing/PR. Its automatic subscription-divvying process would tend more to reward collecting without promoting. And, they quit fairly early.

The key for any such system to work is awareness, adoption, and critical mass -- so it's not reasonable to take the example of a different, nearly-stillborn alternative and suggest it reflects negatively on another variant that's already acheived more attention.
At Airbnb we're using Amazon AWS (EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, Cloudfront), Dropbox, Cloudkick, Pingdom, Twilio, Clickatell, ZenDesk, RingCentral, BrainTree, MaxMind, MailChimp ...

and more I can't think of right now :)
I'm using an iPhone. Not on the Kin team, though. Android phones are pretty common too, along with some RIMs. I'd say it probably looks like a typical gathering of techies. There are even some Windows 7s floating around ;)
Did NVIDIA cripple its CPU gaming physics library to spite Intel?
Ask HN: Where can I find a kick ass coffee mug.
Like many people, I use and rely on my coffee mug everyday. It sits on my desk all day long and provides essential liquid goodness. But the mug is bland. For such an essential piece of equipment it would be nice to have something to be proud of. Where can I find a really kick ass coffee mug?
NVidia PCI Graphics Card EVGA 9600GT [ PCI Graphics Card ]
How is it not a poor ROI?
My experience of "real world" dating has been: 1) Social or physical activities that I enjoy regardless of how many dates I get 2) Meeting/knowing/connecting with people within those activities 3) Flirting with some of those people, which naturally progresses to something more.

It beats wasting 5 hours surfing the web looking for dates.
Arrington Gets an Anybot
Do you enjoy any sort of recreation, horsing around, pulling pranks, play acting, telling stories, fantasizing, scheming, etc? Or is your life 100% droll and serious?

Do you have other interests besides programming - travel, books, movies, anything?

You don't have to be a Jersey Shore-like, brainless, bullsh*tter to get girls. I think there is a difference between doing the Ross Jeffries act and spicing up topics you genuinely like with a little bit of excitement.
Many of these theories fall back to one root cause--universities can't scale to meet the demand for university education. Consider: adjust faculty are the result of a supply/demand mismatch between Ph.D's and professorships; competition for tenure (or even adjunct positions) makes course evaluations more important to game, and thus grade inflation and smaller assignments became the expectation; this same competition makes it even more important to publish; undergraduate enrollment has outpaced scholarship availability requiring more students to work. This covers four out of eight causes (even five, if you consider "grades becoming less important than activities" to be a consequence of grade inflation).
I'm already stressing about what to talk about.
The Huffington Post post?
My first recommendation is to try creating social situations yourself. Instead of spending time in the gym working on your bench press, plan a bike trip or a hike and invite friends. Have dinner parties at your house. Basically: create an environment that a woman would like anyway, whether you were there or not, and invite her into it.

That being said, if you are in the Boston area and are interested in getting back into classical singing and opera I can probably help out.
Using the same controller to handle a singular and a plural route
I'm working on a rails app and using singular routes. However the controller name for the singular resource is plural. Eg map.resource activity_report expectes the activity_reports_controller. The explanation given in the rails 3 guide is: "... you might want to use the same controller for a singular route and a plural route..." That is a reasonable explanation, but what is the use case for using the same controller to handle a singular route and a plural route?
It's important to recognize that these "tax hikes" come from expiring legislation that temporarily cut the marginal tax rate for many. That these tax cuts have existed without commensurate cuts in government spending and in fact corresponded with enormous amounts of additional spending (primarily for two wars and a Medicare prescription drug benefit), have resulted in a nearly 7.5 trillion dollar increase in the national debt by September, 2009.

I'm not an economist, so I can't say for certain what the correct course of action here should be. But the effective result of these "tax hikes" is to return the marginal income tax rates to what they were a decade ago.
Poker is a game of skill which has a chance component.
The basic technique they are using, to generate a Fourier transform and distinctive signature from a segment of music, and look it up in a hash, is completely obvious. It should not be patentable. The gory details of their algorithm might be patent worthy (although I don't like patents at all). But Roy did not use their algorithm, he invented something similar. Greedy trolls, hate.

It might be a nice idea to integrate music identification with CDDB I think.

Google has a similar system that they are using to prevent the use of copyright music in youtube clips (and they also have patents for their method). I suppose many other systems exist to do the same things. Roy should publish his code. Death to trolls.
99 cents seems like a fair price to watch an ad-free episode of something. The old $1.99 price always seemed excessive, and I've never paid it for anything except Mad Men (I buy a season pass for thirty bucks and it saves me an entire year's cable subscription...)
DIY Head Mounted Display done well
Oh, come on. Elon is one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs of our generation and it /is/ news that he's been run through the wringer by Justine. This has to be distracting from companies that are aiming to do truly great things... solar energy, electric cars, privatized space flight. So I'm OK with a little solidarity here, and allowing him to clear his name before a pretty appropriate audience, given the technologies he's involved in and has been involved in.
No disrespect intended -- I don't entirely disagree with you -- but:

> Nothing that makes me a better programmer...

Practice.

> ...nothing that makes me a better entrepreneur...

Tenacity.

> ...something that satisfies my intellectual curiosity...

Books.

HN is simply not the very best source for any of those things you listed. I don't think reading any amount of blogs will improve your programming ability or entrepreneurship as much as simply practicing, or (maybe) reading a good ol' fashioned book on the subject.
Agree completely.

The question (probably similar to patents,) is: How can we protect the spirit of why this law is in place (to recognize the contribution of those who may not be directly compensated and give them their appropriate share), without letting people completely exploit and abuse it.

Looked at it that way, its an extremely hard problem with a myriad of economic and social issues along with a bunch of vested interests. Sigh...
Those are smallish problems. At first, you're only getting signups and payclicks from the very generous and conscientious -- early adopters. But that starts the process of making a larger group aware of the mechanism.

At some point, you throw some switches that give those early adopters some other slight benefits -- single-page articles, skipped interstitials, early-access. That nudges a slightly larger, more self-interested group to signup.

Any ad-supported site already has disincentives to outlink -- the reader leaves! Other sites will get the impressions! But they still do outlink, because ultimately audiences value usefully-outlinked content.

But also, every Flattr site is an advertisement for the network. When 99.99% of your visitors are not yet Flattrers, your top goal is to increase signups, not slice a small pie even more finely. Sending people to other Flattr sites best achieves awareness/subscription growth.

And, if that became a real problem, the Flattr central command could incentivize in-network linking with partial backpropagation of Flattr shares.
The secret of photographing experimental equipment is that anything can be made to look far more exciting with coloured lights. That equipment viewed under ordinary lab lighting would look incredibly dull.
Even the games with exciting tasks deliver rewards way faster than real life, in Diablo II [1] I'd have cleansed the Den of Evil, gained two levels and been given a bonus skill in less time than it would take me to make a salad in reality.

[1] Dammit I'm showing my age
There's something there, edit your profile and change showdead to yes.

It probably got flagged as spam due to the spammy name of the URL.
My girlfriend has been an amazing source of support while I've been working on my business. I won't say I couldn't've done it without her, but it would certainly be less fun and a bit more challenging.
I am going to Ho Chi Minh city next week, too! Talk about synchronicity!
This is a duplicate - it was posted a day ago here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732 which got fewer upvotes and no comments. This kind of thing actually discourages posts; the randomness of whether it will be noticed and of reinforcement (karma).
My most interesting goal right now is to try to make the time to start moving off of Microsoft development technology. I like C#, but ASP.NET annoys me and the whole platform feels like a massive dead end unless I want to work on boring corporate stuff.

My primary roadblock there is trying to decide what tech I want to pick up. Ruby and Rails are appealing, Python looks interesting, and I wonder if I shouldn't be looking at some new stuff like Clojure or node.js as well. I also wonder if I shouldn't get into some of the evented frameworks like Tornado or EventMachine. This has always been my problem -- I'm interested in too many aspects of technology and there's just no time to pursue them all.

My secondary roadblock, once I decide on a tech, is getting some good documentation and perhaps some mentoring on it. Some of those frameworks seem to be pretty lacking in good documentation and examples.
Tell HN: HN is now blocked by UAE proxy
I noticed yesterday that HN is now blocked by Etisalat, one of the United Arab Emirates' two telecom companies. Their proxy server displays a page like this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Block_etisalat_3.jpg

Sites usually get blocked because a customer complained to Etisalat about their content, or because they were arbitrarily added to the SmartFilter database. I think it's the latter in this case.

I will follow up with Etisalat and let you know if I make any progress...
Ask HN: To use an email import in sign up or not to use an email import? 
It seems pretty commonplace now for signups to go something like this:<p>Step 1 Sign up and verify you are not a robot --><p>Step 2 Connect and invite friends through an email import program --><p>Step 3 splash page or call to action to start using the site.<p>It seems like if the big guys are doing this, then there is likely a lot of data to suggest it works. Additionally, the book - the Viral Loop -- seems to suggest this is a critical piece to viral growth. The question then becomes, is there a wrong time to implement this functionality in a site's development? i.e., is this something you should launch once you have a fairly significant userbase?<p>Any experience experimenting w/this?