skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a quite good experience with feedly. It's a firefox extension which integrates with google reader. The integration seems to have some bugs with new "shared items", other than that it's perfect.
Google Chart Tools lets you generate images for static charts, or create interactive charts using their javascript library: http://code.google.com/apis/charttools/index.html

Also, check out RGraph for HTML5 canvas graphs http://www.rgraph.net
You can make static-PNG charts with http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net or http://volnitsky.com/project/mplw
Because they are (mostly) web apps.
Regarding Facebook hook-ups -- I get a LOT of FB friend requests from people I haven't met who usually share a few mutual friends. This is how FB is used as a dating service, from my experience.

Also, some people create profiles specifically made for dating, where they post some pictures of themselves and basic facts. Of course this is a cheap maneuver -- they want to see someone's complete profile, while the other person only gets to see a "fake" one.
I had never heard of Thomas Crapper. That's one misconception that must live on...
:)

Yes, it's quite ironic. I'm not saying Austrian Economics is wrong, I don't know enough to make such a claim.

I'm just saying that for a complete beginner it's better to start with what is believed to be correct by most professionals in the field.

Then of course it's great to study Austrian Economics.

I think that starting with the general consensus among professionals is the way to go in any subject.
I know economics is heavily politcs influenced and politics can trump over truth, but still...

To think different first you have to know mainstream and if you see something wrong in it you can criticize.

Otherwise is just ignorance.
Flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/) has treated me fairly well, but a coworker swears by highcharts.
OK, not exactly the same thing, but for my money you can't beat the giant 3M sticky flip charts. Unlike a whiteboard or whiteboard-like thing, you can write on it, then stick it somewhere else… forever. You never have to experience the pain of erasing! They are very hardy, too; I rolled some up and took them on a transatlantic flight and stuck em up again at my new location.

Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiffariffic/4738936107/

I'm thinking at the new office, we'll go with the glass. I like cheap but I hate the fact that all cheap whiteboard alternatives (and cheap whiteboards) look filthy after a few months. At the Truphone office in London, practically every surface is glass or melamine, it's just one giant whiteboard - that's what I want.
Building a face-tracking robot with Python in an afternoon
Completely agree. The only issue I've run into with rackspace is that they are sometimes too proactive - they locked a subcontractor out of one of our development boxes a couple weeks ago because they didn't recognize the user.
SXSW: Web Dev *Advanced* Talks
My colleague who uses nano and kate exclusively is the best coder at the company. Lots of great writers used crappy typewriters or pencil or pen. Who cares?
I strongly recommend okcupid.com. In my opinion it is the best dating site, especially for hackers - they even let you A/B test your photos. I'm a complete introvert/nerd and I've used their site with a lot of success. It is by far the best overall user experience out of all of the various dating sites - and it's free.
Their blog is great, too: http://blog.okcupid.com
Actually they don't use FB-DIMM ram anymore http://www.apple.com/ca/macpro/specs.html

Seems that it has gone the way of rambus.
Joke aside, what's your alternative to cologne? Not eating fast food so your hormone disruptor quota isn't met?
I'm using essentially the same strategy. Basically I split feeds in two categories:

"Fresh" ones I either read on the spot, or mark-all-as-read. These are the ones I usually check frequently, and very quickly. And I don't have to feel bad about marking all as read :-)

"Evergreens" are ones I like to read entirely, but not necessarily now.

I'm using Google Reader, but these days mostly through the splendid Reeder on the iPhone (http://reederapp.com/).
Sit down and really write out your requirements.

Two things will emerge from that exercise: 1. there probably is in fact a reader out there that meets it, you just haven't found it yet or 2. your requirements require solving the AI-complete problem of perfectly determining what you are interested in.

Generally I find most people slot into #2. I am not kidding. I've been listening to this complaint for about 8 years now and every time I've worked with someone, it's one of the two above, and usually #2.

A third possibility is that you are just trying to read too much, period, if even an AI-complete filter would still leave you with too much. The suck may not lie with the software, it may in the requirements.
I've used okcupid for maybe a year and a half, and have gotten maybe two or three fraudulent messages,
You don't see the tremendous amount of selection bias in your sample?

Very quickly: people who need viagra don't like to talk about it, unlike drunken frat boys. The online market is targeting men who can't get it from their doctor because they don't have ED. That doesn't mean the vast majority of viagra users aren't suffering from ED, it just means that online ads are targeting a niche market.
dunno know about energy saving, but the effect looks cool.
>This current article discusses how someone was denied funding for human trials of stem cell therapy despite the fact that it cured T1D in animal models

Weissman is not "someone". He is one of the founding fathers of the stem cell field and has done amazing thing. He is a leader in the field and got really amazing results with animals. Sorry to say that but you sound like the first year student here.
Facebook most powerful use case was that of doing social research. You want to know who your future employee, classmate, brother-in-law, etc. is. It made all of us our own private investigators, and allowed us to make judgements from the comfort of our own homes. With a [rightfully] increased consciousness of privacy (the backlash of the consequences of all of this "research"), Facebook is going to be less and less useful for this task moving forward.

Now that I've got a year of undergrad left, I can safely say that my two uses of Facebook are Tetris and connecting with family. For Facebook to succeed, it needs to get better at intentional information sharing (writing on walls and messages do not encompass the ideal experience) as opposed to the passive information sharing that we've all used it for for so long.

I don't think it's possible for Facebook to pivot (and, basically, abandon a whole lot of work) to just being a way to share pictures, messages, and plans with friends and family (which, I believe, will be what people want moving forward).
A friend recently launched http://feedingo.com/ which basically tries to make the user experience as friendly as possible.

Pricing is the only problem, but after getting feedback he plans on trying to address that promptly (like $5/yr or something, for a non-free version)
What's wrong with the NSF starting that way? Are they not a significant source of funds for "basic science" research?

Even if you want to be cynical about this issue, haven't we been doing this long enough to know that research for military purposes often translates to advances in non-military applications?

EDIT: and don't get me wrong; I would love to see some shift in the way funds are allocated.
Completely with you on point 3. I know a lot of people who do one thing on Facebook: spy on people. Facebook singlehandedly turned "stalk" into a word for a socially acceptable activity. Every new feature that got added after "look at people's photos so they don't realize it, with better web design than myspace, and the assurance that you actually know your 'friends'" has been grumbled about in my social circle. Any product that preserves that essential capability while cutting out the BS has a shot. Honestly, I think explicitly billing yourself as a recreation of "the old facebook" is not only a good idea, but the best idea, from this standpoint.

Perhaps "Ye Olde Tome of Countenance: A Throwback to the Days When Facebook Didn't Suck - Click here to import your profile and photos"
Also number of people using Azure isn't the metric that's really interesting, a better metric would be something that shows how many server hours were bought in a way that you could compare with EC2.

I know Microsoft goes around university campuses trying to get students to use Azure for projects, and hand out a lot of test accounts in the process, inflating their numbers.
in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist.

In biology, reliable layers of abstraction do not exist. Period.

Biological technologies may arise with enough flexibility and processing power to deal with this situation. But situation itself won't change. Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction. Every bit of evidence we have points to the genetic code as being more akin spaghetti coded assembly language than to any human-comprehensible programming language. Why would the genetic "programming" system respect any layers of abstraction understandable by humans? Life's been chugging away with 4 billion years of "whatever works".

Roge J. Williams' work early in the 20th showed how in just about every single biochemical system in the body, something like 20+% of the population and that with these outliers not correlating, every person's biochemical system actually work in somewhat unique fashion. That is hard manage and control from an engineering perspective, to say the least. See http://www.amazon.com/Biochemical-Individuality-Roger-Willia...
Have you noticed that the author is a Libertarian?
(From examples of logical fallacies he quotes).
Google is trying to get 100% of the spreadsheet market with the goal of selling ads and maybe some corporate subscriptions.

If successful, they will destroy a vastly larger market (commercial spreadsheet software). Google would rather have 100% of a small pie than 0% of a big pie.

Similarly, Diabetes Cure, Inc would rather have 100% of the diabetes cure market than 0% of the insulin market, even if the latter market is bigger.
Yes, that plus using fragrances made with organic essential oils. Herbs and flowers have zillions of random chemicals in them too, of course, but at least they're well-vetted! Weleda and Burt's Bees both make good sprays, or you can make your own. I really like pine, cypress, bergamot, lime, lavender, sage and eucalyptus.
Now you see me, now you don’t, face detection scripts
Tetsu and myself were just posted to Hackaday for our famicam project. It's a face detection application written in Python using OpenCV. Every 15 minutes we snap a photo, detect the faces, and upload the results to twitter.
For those who don't use cologne, think about the fragrances used in deodorant, shampoos, or those crappy glade plugins the use in my apartment building hallway.
I recently launch http://www.gmbhnews.com as a mobile rss feed reader, give it a try and let me know if it solves your problem, all you need is a webkit broser for a better rendering.

For the desktop, you could try http://www.mcsquare.me , it should be fine as well.
If you haven't read the OKCupid's blog post, "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating," I highly recommend doing so. If you're contemplating online dating, that is.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-...

Interesting points:
* "you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com"

* the severe male/female imbalance ("sausage fest") leads to a "desperation feedback loop" where men spam more and more women, with fewer and fewer responses.

In my opinion, with the rise in social networking platforms, dating sites are dead or dying - at least for 'mainstream' use. Even OKCupid, I think, will be pointless as people learn to leverage Facebook for dating.
Dead simple: just tell what you want to, to whom you want to, and no one else. Just like you would with reasonable tools like e-mail, instant messaging, or physical interaction. Normal, ordinary social networking. Ironically, Facebook, doesn't let you do just that.

Now, you probably use the term "social networking" for something different from "interacting with people". If so, I'd like to know how you define social networking.
Wow, this is great. I love the quote "Scientists live in their own world and the rest of society puts them there."
I also have the sneaking suspicion some of the cool VM work will end up being there around the same time (that said, I really like the Queue and Thread objects in 2.6 for most purposes, despite all the complaints people make about the GIL).
get better at being ignorant
will multiple avatars be possible for multiple faces? this is most excellent work!
Indeed. I couldn't even find a paragraph hinting that
That they care or not is often irrelevant. People often don't even know about Facebook's privacy issues.
The only problem with this argument is that Windows and Office are both more popular than they've ever been and industry-wide, people are purchasing more desktop/laptop/notebook PCs per year than ever before. So if by "dead" you mean "more popular than ever" then I guess this argument holds water.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.
I think you just need to think about what you want, and think about what sources you read from. You say you have 68 sources in your feed, whereas I have ~100.

Personally, I like Google Reader, but I don't use that to read my RSS (just manage it). Instead, I use Google/ig. I have several different categories setup and I don't necessarily read everything. One of the categories I have setup is mRead (short for mark as read) and I don't really read those articles (often), but I still subscribe incase I see a headline that screams my name, or if I want to use Google Reader to do a search within my subscriptions for something specific.

If you have too much noise in your RSS versus signal, than you may want to double check what you've subscribed to and cut back, or add a "mRead" category of your own.
I agree. As an example, when I learned C++ I already knew the principles of object-oriented programming (from Smalltalk) so learning the OO parts of C++ was relatively easy for me.

Learning a new language, provided you already know the concepts the language uses, is mostly a matter of learning new syntax.
Looking at the study, these don't seem to be colognes for cologne's sake, but franchise exploitations.

What I mean is that most of these products are aimed at teenagers and rabid celebrity fans. To me, these aren't "average colognes."

Notably, there were also only 17 products in their study. That's hardly a representative sample of the market.

Despite all that, it's somewhat unsettling. I'm rather fond of cologne.
Did you actually read the bug report? Because that's not exactly what's happening.
Yeah, but installing it probably also violates anticircumvention provision of the DMCA (i.e. is criminal)

IANAL
I love Fever. Putting the high volume news sites as "sparks", and the high signal feeds that I like to read everything from as "kindling", gives a great way of seeing trending topics when you have the time, but without seeing a giant unread count in your list.

Well worth the one-time fee and setting it up on my Linode box.
Eh, by "cool VM work" sure - if you mean unladen-swallows JIT. Anything else has a year+ lag time for inclusion to be seriously considered.

Also, the funny thing with the GIL (even as the maintainer of multiprocessing) is that it's never bothered me. I've used hundreds of threads working with Queues/etc all the time. I actually don't use multiprocessing as much as I use plain old python threads.
Can't you save even more energy by using your PC's built-in power management to turn off the screen completely?
Eurozone travel: what if the single currency falls apart?
Perhaps "dead" is hyperbole and "past-its-prime" is more accurate. Microsoft is still huge, but its hegemony is starting to wane.
Dependency-Injection and JavaScript closures
I have a date lined up from OKCupid. One word of caution, but this goes for online dating in general. It's taken me 6 months to land a first date. In real life (err I guess offline) it's easier for me to land a date than it is online. So, I suggest using online dating to augment finding dates offline in a more traditional sense. It is far easier for people to be picky online than it is offline.
Facebook is certainly useful in facilitating dating with people you have already met irl, but I dont see it used for generating dates with people you have not already met.

Although I am curious if anybody has counter-experience on this :D
Almost, but not quite. An alternative also has to deliver guarantees. It has to be impossible for the potential alternative to be mean.

Fortunately for Facebook, that would mean that each user of this alternative has a personal server at home to run it. And with hurdles such as asymmetric DSL, dynamic IP, Firewalls, NAT routers, and plain ignorance (the internet is very young and few people actually know what it is yet), it will take time. Two decades at least.
Your comment comes off like a mix of appeal to authority with a touch of ad hominem. Do you disagree with what I've written? Is my failure to explain why 'this "someone" is a big deal' (which I felt was pretty well explained in the article itself) your primary concern?

In my other comments on this thread, you can see that I feel his work is important. So if you're concerned, as is implied in your language, about my respect for his work, you can rest assured.
I really like Reeder for the iPhone. Google Reader fluid app on the desktop and Reeder for the iPhone works great for me.
Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.
Different people use RSS in very different ways.
Jesse is a counter-example to this statement (but also, notably, apparently an anomaly.)

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/jesse.html

The second picture definitely has a higher awesome-factor than the first.
Their Boston, Our Boston
Glass Pendant Jewelry-Glass Bead Jewelry-Murano Glass Necklaces
The best collection of venetian glass, glass bead jewelry, glass jewelry, millefiori pendant, murano glass earrings, murano glass jewelry, murano glass necklaces, stained glass jewelry. Shop now!
Voluntary taxes
I would say it's important, although the base is of course also important by itself.

People in general rarely understand how science really works. It's glaring in journalism where often an article takes some non-reviewed research and cites it like it's an established truth, or in vague quotes like "some scientists believe X", where the scientist is actually in a domain not at all related to X. I also see a lot of people who cannot grasp how a given source may be more reliable than another one, even if both are written by "scientists". Things like the "evolution is just a theory" would also be less prevalent if people understood how science works.
Death by Gadget
A customer can opt out of all of this, or they can opt in — it depends on how creative we are in gathering their attention and wanting to keep them engaged."

Who would ever opt in to having ads served up on their smartphone's home screen? You buy a device for a few hundred dollars, and pay $70 a month for service, and you volunteer to have them eat into your phone's data cap and battery life to serve you ads? I think the folks at Microsoft have totally lost it.
Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook.

Instead of placing central control of our social graph with an organization that believes people are essentially targets on the great Advertising Dartboard of the future, you could distribute control of that graph.

Instead of logging into Facebook to connect to your friends, you'd simply have your "profile"--your web page or other net identity--and things like status updates, tweets (because this is also how you "kill" Twitter), likes, groups, friends, etc., would be handled by the protocol.

In short: you kill Facebook by building an open protocol that does the same thing.
silly - your computer is much more effective at managing its power usage than a bit of javascript copied to every website in the world (you want this to be effective, right?) is going to be.
Facebook's weakness is that it thinks it is an owner instead of just an enabler. So instead of just easily enabling you to keep track of your friends and your communication with them, FB thinks it owns all of this -- a crazy idea that any 12-year-old would reject.

The only reason they've gotten away with it is because legally they have some basis to work with, and socially they haven't annoyed their users.

FB will die when somebody launches a new browser that takes all of your social information and copies it to an open, secure, and non-proprietary format -- perhaps in addition to posting it on FB. This poses no pain for the user, yet allows others to participate in their social graph without having to use FB. It's also the thing FB fears the most.

Other than that, not much. As more and more people get sucked into FB by their friends, the service becomes more and more ingrained in the psyche of the users. Just guessing here, but I don't see product X coming out with a few new whizbang features and putting much of a dent in that.
I think it's not the RSS readers' fault. It's the whole reading on internet that sucks.

P.S. - http://goodnoows.com did look promising. Found on HN recently.
I'd also like to hear comparisons to other fitness trackers (nike+, fitbug, etc)
How To Stay Fit In The Office
What I've learned from Angel Investors.
Not even a pretense that this is in any way connected with HN.
This isn't about liking the drawings - this makes the important distinction to kids that being a scientist doesn't mean complete exclusion from society. If you read the "pre" pictures from a lot of the kids, their perception of scientists was that of the aloof, disconnected, and obsessive. A visit to the lab changed that - and that can only be a good thing.

No matter what, kids (nay, all humans) desire to fit in. You cannot successfully ask them to go down a career path if you're going to be a surefire misfit/loser the entire way.

The fact that they now perceive scientists as normal people with no-so-normal jobs (to quote from one of the kids) is great, and perceptions like this will serve the scientific community a lot better than that of the obsessive maniac.
You can mine extremely interesting questions out of almost any story about politics or religion, but that doesn't mean we should be posting political and religious stories on HN.