skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This doc is worth watching http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/if-drugs-were-legal/ (the version on torrents has an after-movie discussion panel). It takes a shot on predicting the pros and cons of drug legalization, with fictional scenarios (including commercially developed recreational drugs you wrote about) and comments.
Apparently, you like to write your own low-level stuff, and that's okay. But in my experience in Django there is very rarely any need for that.
reminds me of Minds of Our Own
http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html
At least it seems to me that Droid X has similar problems:

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=droid%20x&gbv=2...
I think the implication is that we're (possibly alone) among the first crop of life to spring up since this hypothetical galactic holocaust.
Criminal gangs make good money selling tobacco and alcohol, which are legal basically everywhere. Sure not as much as illegal drugs, but still good money. Claiming legalization will destroy the illegal drug trade is just as naive as believing legalization will have no effect.
Dieter Rams: ten principles of good design
I guess I fit into the "squatter" category here so I can possibly offer some advice from that side. I receive about an email a week asking if I want to sell xyz domain. They nearly never offer a price and I end up going back to them and saying that it is for sale, I haven't really thought about the price blah blah blah, but I paid a bit for the domain - make me an offer. And they tend not to come back.

My advice would firstly be to not use a hacked name for a business orientated product. Some comments here imply that your clients will be tech savvy - well in my experience the guy that is going to sign off the bill probably is not, and being too clever with a name wont help you there - stick to a simple .com name.

Secondly use a thesaurus and try and find different words for "project" and "name" that you might be able to string together and pay $9 for rather than buying off someone else. Whilst lots of domains are taken there are still billions of combinations available.

Thirdly, without going too obscure, see if you can find a 5-7 letter pronounceable generic domain. Know any kids, ask them to spell the word you come up with, that is always a good test. http://domaintyper.com/ has a list of "web 2.0" names it generates, sometimes some good ones (generally not, but worth a click). Last time I did this exercise for my business I came up with about 30 usable names.

If you do want the squatted name, try sending an email directly to the person along the lines of "Hi, I have an idea for a small business and the domain name registered to you xyz.com would be quite a nice match. It is only in the early stages, I'm a student blah blah so have little budget and was wondering if you'd be interested in selling the domain for $200". If it was me I might come back to you wanting $400, but unlikely I'd ask for $1,000 or 10K unless it was really valuable, and if it is 11 characters it probably isn't. You've set the expectations of what you can afford and that is a good place to start. Bare in mind you can get a readable 4 letter domain for under $1,000 so don't go too high.
Whoa, i just checked your profile and you work / founded a business in a legal services field.

Not being funny, but i' surprised you're asking HN.
Amateurs. Canada set up a national gun registry database for a mere $710 million US. That's just the cost of the computer system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/02/13/gunregistry_rdi04021...

This is one of the few times I agree 100% with conservatives. The very concept of the database is dubious, and the implementation is almost a paradigmatic example of waste. It amazes me that this is not a bigger scandal than it is in Canada.
Download Powerpoint Diagrams
Our PowerPoint diagrams section include more than 1000 pre-designed diagrams for PowerPoint organized into 9 categories. Find the diagram you need, download it, and use it in your own PowerPoint presentation.
It is quite cool. A very good friend of mine just landed a job with the Bing team. He is super excited about the work they are doing.
Google: Is it trustworthy?
While I agree a sales website would be useful, it can often be a lot of wasted effort. Startups can pivot significantly before they launch, and building up a sales website before you launch could be wasted effort if you end up targeting a different audience.

Still, once a startup is reasonably sure that they're sticking with their plan, no reason not to get one out there ASAP.
£35 million to provide a great deal of useful information on starting and running a business, and how to navigate the required government bureaucracy? Well, it's not cheap, but things that are worth having rarely are.

Of course, we could make things simpler so such an explanation is not required and everyone could just read the statutes, but given the world we live in, it's not so expensive for the useful information it contains. If I drill-down randomly, I get to "Taxes, returns & payroll > PAYE for employers > PAYE if your business closes or changes > If you no longer employ anyone and don't plan to do so again." That's pretty specific and useful. There are 10-20 categories per level, and 4 levels, and >100 words per article, giving a total of at least one million words of well categorised, useful business advice and information.

£35 a word all-in? Sure, it sounds pricey. Poor value for money? Then you have to make an argument that the website doesn't provide that much value.
Teen Love Triangle At Center Of New “Twilight” « Film Production Investments
I can't point out a specific reason, but for me the front-page has a bit of a "sedo-parking" look to it. Maybe it's the top-menu and the logo, I'm not sure. Sorry for being so vague, but this was my first thought when I clicked the link.
I'm wondering how useful Business Link is for startups. Any UK founders care to share?
StackOverFlow: Why is Github more popular than Gitorious?
Human history has shown that just dropping technological advancement on human cultures leads to trouble. If their culture is one of tribal warfare rather than modern civilization, there's a very good chance that all your aid will just be used to support their efforts to kill the other guy.

It could be that to aliens, our planet's shared culture is still too close to tribal warfare for them to be comfortable raising us to their level. It wouldn't be quite the same as the Prime Directive as a motive, but it would have the same effect in a lot of situations.
I've heard of things not too far from this in Big Non-Techie Corporate America as well, and universities also (both public and private). Seems to be some function of large-budget organizations buying things they don't understand. There are entire consulting companies that seem to specialize in building these super-expensive Enterprise Portals for large organizations. (I have no idea how you break into that business.)
a coder who is currently being 'forced' to write marginally better code in Python than he would in PHP because of the language constructs, or a coder who understands good code design and knows how to apply it?

That's an esoteric question.

A good coder wouldn't choose PHP in first place, unless there are pressing reasons (i.e. a legacy code-base).

Consequently you can speed up your hiring process simply by weeding out candidates who propose to use PHP.
Your experience of Business Link and what it can offer you is largely down to the postcode that you live in. In the good old days of the 90's and 00's the Government would throw resources at an area based on some criteria it had set. Year on year, postcode by postcode this would change.
... well yes because of the market distortion that the taxes on them produce. The only reason people smuggle them are to evade taxes. If you're going to legalize and then tax it so high that it will still cost the same as before the legalization, of course the negative side effects will continue to exist.
this has absolutely nothing to do with ubuntu.
ubuntu != gnu/linux.
The beauty of Dropbox is the "it just works" feeling. You put things in a folder, it's synced to all other computers, plus the web. It really is simple in the best sense of the word.

Having said that, the latest beta does allow you to choose to only sync some of the folders. So you can, for example, install Dropbox on your work computer, and choose not to sync your mp3s to it, etc. This should solve a lot of the use cases you have.

The only thing really missing, for me, is the ability to exclude specific files/folders from the Dropbox folder (like, for example, per-computer configuration files). I assume they'll allow that at some point, but for now I have to work my way around it. Still worth it though!
Ask HN:Who is hiring in Germany?
Hi. I am a programmer with around 3 years of experience in C and Linux in the telecommunications domain. I have also dabbled a little bit with python and django for my pet projects. I was born in Germany and moved to India when I was 5 years old. I did my schooling and bachelors in India and have been working here for the past 3 years. I have always been fascinated with the country of my birth, and hoped to go back and live there for a few years to get to know the culture first hand. I have also tried to pick up some German during the past year. Very interested to know if any HN'ers are aware of any openings there.

Thanks.
Pelleve Treatment For Eye Wrinkles And Forehead Wrinkles 
Dr. Amiya Prasad now offers his clients PELLEVE SKIN TIGHTENING.
PELLEVE can be used for the eye area.Pellevé is a new innovation for smoother tighter skin to treat facial wrinkles without surgery. Pellevé is FDA-approved for the non-invasive cosmetic correction of mild to moderate facial wrinkles for certain skin types.
LOL

'No true scotsman...'

FWIW my hiring process rarely includes a request that candidates propose the language that they will perform their work in.

(oh, and its not an esoteric question. It is a deeply practical one. I desperately want to hire good, pragmatic coders, not people who are only capable of writing good code if they are in an environment that makes it easy)
Editable Datagrid for Ruby on Rails Built with dhtmlxGrid
This tutorial shows how to display tabular data in Ruby on Rails environment within editable datagrid, using dhtmlxGrid. In the end you’ll receive a datagrid with in-line editing, sorting, and filtering, which loads its data from server and saves it back to the database using Ruby on Rails.
Our water is much more accessible than the interior of Neptune. Even for a species with relativistic technology, I doubt delving into a gas giant will be completely trivial (kind of like the bottom of the sea is still a very inhospitable place for us).
Government spends thousands on car maintenance iPhone application
Maybe it was so long ago, "we" (meaning life on Earth) weren't considered "competition."
> You've built a web prototype of a product, which means you had some idea of what the product should do, and what business problem it should solve, and who it should be useful to.

Right. Only that it's a bare-minimum prototype, built just to gauge customers' reactions and incorporate their input.

> Presumably, in doing that, you relied on the input of some target customers to help you understand their business. Right?

Of course. But the input given until now has been purely based on conversations I had before the prototype (for lack of a better word?) was built.

I'd like to see the reaction of someone that I have zero connections with, so that I don't get a biased (towards me) review. There's still much work to be done, but I'm wondering what the best way is to go out there, and tease them into eventually using the product, once it's set for release.
how tough was it to get a regular job? Was the company apprehensive about hiring somebody who left a good gig earlier to take the startup route?
Google Image search is unfortunately not real-time. This is not the first time someone has noticed. Google was accused of censoring the Abu-Ghraib images, because several weeks after the event, the photos could not be found on Google Images. Google replied:

In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=10747654&sid=128...

Then they were accused of censoring a picture of Egyptian striker Mohammad Aboutrika's goal celebration where he revealed a T-shirt with the message "Sympathize with Gaza". Matt Cutts had to write a blog entry debunking this claim.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/debunking-a-misconception-plus...
It sounded like he charged it fully overnight the day before. So when he was checking, it was on the second day after charging.
Ok, at the risk of sounding naive, my product is pretty much disruptive. There isn't a similar product yet in the market (I'm not in the US) - hence, I feel I almost have to go out there to create the need/demand before I can sell them on the deal.

That's why I'd like to plan my first move accordingly. I think it's the most crucial move I'll make!
It would be great to have a google maps of location of hacker news members world wide, so that we could engage in local communities
Agree 100% - the layers of DRM detract from what makes Steam's DRM tolerable - the user experience. Particularly games like GTA when they require a login. Global logins with Steam are one of the best bits.
My Responsive, HTML5 and typekit-ed tumblr
Scroogle is down again
It's like web design buzzword bingo.
Of course not. The skills and infrastructure needed to run criminal organization are vastly different from those to run a business in a regular market. Apart from that, I don't see the problem with former drug lords turning into 'regular' companies, as long as they stick to the rules of the 'regular' market, which they'll have to if they want to succeed. It's not like Proctor & Gamble goes around beating people up to maintain their edge in the diaper business.

Secondly, it will of course not solve all violence. But it will at least solve the assassinations (and the collateral damage that comes with it) that directly stem from doing business in a lawless world (there is no way to enforce contracts in the underground except by violence and reputation) and it will take away much of the necessity to commit petty crime by small time criminal junkies.

Depending on which country you look at, 20 to 60+ % of prison populations across the world are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Are you honestly going to argue that all of those people will switch to robbing banks or other violent crimes when drugs are legalized? There are basically three ways to illegally make money nowadays: drugs, violent crimes (including property crimes which may not be 'violent' in the standard definition such as night-time burglary) and fraud (white collar but also smuggling cigarettes etc.) Many of the people who are now in the drug business will simply not have the opportunity to switch into a different field even if they wanted to!

And yes I did read Freakonomics, I don't know what your point is there. While an entertaining read, a quote from a single guy who may or may not be the 'drug lord' he's claiming hardly makes for a convincing argument to defend current drug policy on. It's quite obvious that 'solving' poverty (whatever that may mean, considering that 'poverty' is such an ill-defined concept) is a good way to eliminate crime. It's not something that can be reached with policy though, at least not in the near term. Drug policy is much more contained and within reach of the legislature (by definition even), if it weren't for all the people who oppose drugs on ideological and/or mis-informed factual grounds.
Not very, in my experience. Although they were very helpful on exporting goods, every other question I had was either answered incorrectly (!) or met with 'we can't give legal/accounting advice' - which is understandable but I did tell them my questions beforehand so they could have avoided a wasted meeting.

They then tried to persuade me to use a particular SEO company - so I left.
> and it was at my urging that the Banquet library (a common interface to all template systems) was discarded

Buffet.
According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/gov_websites/
A method that worked for me but might not work for all. We had a friend in a graphic arts program at the local university. We asked him if he wanted to do our logo for a project.
Do you honestly believe that the government would legalize drugs and then not use the opportunity to increase their budget by heavily taxing them? In fact one of the main argument I keep hearing for legalization is that it will bring in all kinds of tax revenue.
Of course he could be.

I don't envy the position of any non-technical person that has to make key technical decisions on a technical project.

Ultimately it takes a good developer to spot a good developer, so a non-technical person seeking to build a "robust web application" starts at a huge disadvantage.

Without understanding the pros and cons of each language choice, all he can do is gamble on finding a smarter person than himself that he can trust. I'm advocating he choose the anti-PHP guy, slightly tongue-in-cheek, because given the limited amount of information presented, that choice gives him the best odds.

Being in the position of having to make such a bet is less than desirable, but given his lack of technical knowledge, what else would you have him do?
A sales website doesn't have to be complicated at all. A simple website with traffic driven to it with advertising, blogging or other marketing can help validate the existence of a market before you've invested a lot of effort in engineering.

I'm doing this with a placeholder site at http://codeboff.in/ and a blog that drives traffic to the site (and private beta list) at http://blog.codeboff.in/

(I hope sharing these links will not be treated as spamming in the context of this discussion)

I went with the more time-consuming blogging approach instead of the traditional and quick advertising pilot because I'm bootstrapping this from India and web ads are more expensive to me by 6x to 8x (or whatever the purchasing parity difference is) and I can't justify that expense, especially in the light of my previous startup ideas which in retrospect have been more or less cuckoo.

I agree that startups do pivot before launch. I think you have to agree to take that risk against the market research advantage you're getting. It might help to keep the blurb on the sales website on the vague side to absorb minor pivoting.

edit: Spun off in the middle. What I was trying to say was that interest in the blog justifies the much greater investment in engineering that's going into my startup.

Without that interest, making up my mind about the idea would have been pointless.
"No, you are getting all worked up. Calm down. You are most likely in an area which drains your battery faster"
The Biocep R Project Brings Open Science to the Cloud
BS. Can PHP do this?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html

(In fact the latest version of PHP (5.3) can, but for years PHP has been lacking this, so the point stands.)

No amount of "good code design" can work around core features that are missing from a language.

The argument that all languages are more or less equal is as nonsensical as saying all cars are more or less equal, or all guns are more or less equal -- it ignores the tremendous advantage that using good tools can provide.
sorry didn't know it was a dupe.
I found your reply interesting too.

I didn't really expect the author's jokey explanation of deconstruction to be technically accurate, and I can understand why it would irritate people in the field.

I'd be more interested to hear what you think of his other arguments, and the comments quoted by Chomsky in this thread.

In particular charges of obscurantism, intellectually-vain tail-chasing, being 'epistemologically challenged', his metaphors of 'genetic drift' and 'peacock feathers' where academic communities evolve to fill the vacuum with linguistic puffery, jargon and self-referential bullshit in the absence of any clearly-stated objective or externally-imposed goals and success criteria.

Admittedly critical theory is far from the only academic discipline to be subject to these accusations. And maybe you'd argue that in this case the accusations aren't valid.

But, you'd have to admit that, by virtue of their epistemic outlook and the criterea they have available by which to assess research, some disciplines are inevitably going to be more susceptible to these phenomena than others, and hence need to work harder to combat them.
Why? Their image search isn't any better:

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iphone+4&FORM=BIFD
I'm happy to accept this as the correct explanation, and I'm in no hurry to assign petty motives to Google over this, but in your last link, Matt Cutts says "it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot." And by "a few days," he appears to literally mean less than a week.

But it's been almost a full month since the WWDC keynote, and nearly two weeks since customers have been posting a barrage of iPhone 4 pictures to the web. So I'm doubtful that Google Images' delayed refresh rate is a sufficient explanation.

Edit: In response to your reply below, you might be right. I've only tried a few searches, but images of major events from the past month seem hard to come by. A search for 'Galaxy S' does give some results from within the past month (the first result was from June 23), as does a search for 'Kindle graphite' (July 2), but presumably refreshes aren't comprehensive. Still, a month-long refresh rate is really surprising. If you need to find images from a recent event, Google Image search may be practically useless.
There's no mention he was professional though.

EDIT: "When he was 20 years old, he was called to join the Japanese army."

He was in fact a conscript.
It is, though, kind of fun.
My spouse used to work as a lawyer in the Civil Service - I was highly amused to discover that when she brought work home it was carefully tied up in yards of real red tape.
Apartamentos Ibiza El Divino
El Divino Ibiza Apartamentos Ibiza best location | Av del Ocho de Agosto 2, 07800 Ibiza, Spain - 971 310 135 - 618 699 325 (Mobile)
University of Reddit: Genetic Algoritms (free 8 week course)
i agree with your point, but you can have a one person S corp...
The site itself isn't bad, there's a fair amount of decent advice on there, although nothing that isn't really available elsewhere.
Seekh Kababs Recipe
I can't find any pictures of the World Cup matches, despite it having started on June 11. All I see is stock photography. In fact, I can't find pictures of any event that has occurred in the past month.

Seems like the index is in fact out of date and Matt Cutts is overestimating the indexing speed of Google Images. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photos, it took around 1 month for the images to appear.
> I honestly wish I had the time to give it the explanation it deserves. (In addition to having 4 kids and my second start-up, I'm in the middle of a M.A. in Buddhist Studies, and have a paper due shortly, so when I said "I don't have time to fully explain", I really meant it.)

Congrats on the family, business, and studies - that is a pretty full plate. I do appreciate you taking the time - a very important step in learning about something is knowing enough to ask the first couple intelligent questions to someone of the discipline. Cheers for that.
Google translate suggests that this means:
"How exposed enchanted charm? - Shame"

Flagged.
My favorite bit:

"The evening progressed pretty normally from there...with me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife."

He seems to be have far more interesting normal nights out than me.