skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree with invention and creativity and a role of a problem in motivating the two -- I can't, really, having ended up writing a couple of odes to it on HN in the past.

However, I prefer my necessities not to involve potential humanitarian catastrophes. The steam engine, the rapid advancement of powered flight technology, and Google were all created in response to a need, but none of these needs were of the "young people will starve and old people will be left desolate if we don't come up with something" variety.

We're not short on need for cheaper energy right now; I don't think we ever were. (More efficient agriculture is a slightly more complex subject due to political reasons.) Maybe someday we will be at a point where we can safely adopt a policy of encouraging lots of children, but right now it seems a little irresponsible.
In naming your emergency contact entry (or entries), use the prefix ICE (In Case of Emergency); first responders supposedly look for that.

EXAMPLE: "ICE - Spouse - Jane Doe"

(See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07...)

EDIT: I've put some basic emergency info about myself into my ICE entry -- my name, blood type, etc.
Great post about Saas ...
Needlebase demo video
Wait - I see two buttons on all Tumblr sites: one that says "+ Follow" and one that says "Join Tumblr". Is this something that I'm in a bucket test on or does it go away if you're logged or something?
I doubt that a single iPhone design will work on AT&T and Verizon any time soon. AT&T would need GSM+UMTS+LTE while Verizon would need CDMA2000+LTE. An omni-protocol super-chipset is possible but unlikely.
Not sure what you are really asking. In practice, stuff that I buy online that does not result in a physical object turning up at my door are (in no particular order):

1. eBooks

2. iPhone apps/audiobooks

3. Freemium subscriptions

4. "Donate" buttons

Now if you are saying "here's $20, do something with it that you wouldn't do with your own money", I have no idea what I would do with it.
How to avoid working for a douchebag
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529615
A month of private SVN storage
A wordpress theme, or extend my last.fm subscription.
I think you missed the humor in that post entirely.
Wow thats impressive then... I was almost sure it would include those.

I think the books that are free in the US are just almost free in Europe, via whispernet at least.
:D That's how I read it first, but the second and third sentences likely refer to Coke as an organization, not his friends at Coke. (Or, at least that's how I would spin it if I'm wrong.)
This advice won't be very helpful if your phone requires a PIN to unlock. Consider changing your wallpaper to contain emergency information (i.e. http://atmac.org/put-emergency-information-on-your-iphone-wa... for iPhone) in this case.
PerfectPC: A new start-up endeavor
A computer for humans with a life outside of computing.
FTA:

"The Kindle sales figure does not include free Kindle books, of which there are 1.8 million originally published before 1923 available for downloading."
Here's how to value past work.

Imagine that you are sitting in a coffee shop with your biz person. Someone walks up, shows you a prototype and offers to sell it and the idea. For the sake of argument, said someone is selling exactly what the biz person claims is so valuable.

How much will you pay for it? How much will your biz person pay for it?

That's when you find out that the biz person feels that their contribution going forward is significantly more than yours.
Blekko Review
Does this mean we can go back to awesome 70s wood grain electronics?
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

I check it every so often to see if I'm hitting any of them too hard. Great gut check tool.
A Content Experiment
Without profiling it I'd guess it's memoizing the function that does the disk i/o that makes the biggest difference.
it won't hurt them. the provisioning system isn't the expensive part of becoming a 'cloud' provider.
A new product in beta, will love to get your feedbacks.
Here's an example of the kind of sloppiness which this judge, and with some luck, others like him across the country, is fighting against.

"Countrywide goes Kafka" http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/07/countrywide-goes-kafka-...
"SCI" (Secured Compartmentalized Information) is a separate clearance for some specific set of information. For instance, since my dad worked with tactical nukes in the Marine Corps, he had a Top Secret clearance with SCI authorization from the Atomic Energy Commission. So he was cleared to access any information classified Top Secret as well as any information protected by the AEC on a need-to-know basis.

Arbitrarily high levels of clearance can probably be implemented as separate SCI authorizations.
Exactly... just so that everyone can comment on it. I think it is a great way to get feedback and to share with others.
There's no problem with having a house style, of course, but it's obnoxious to claim that following one particular stylebook makes one a "better writer". Particularly obnoxious in the linked article are the claims that "the removal of all adverbs from any technical writing will be a net positive," and likewise for "the removal of the passive voice".

Adverbs are indispensable to good writing, technical or otherwise. Notwithstanding the claims of a variety of self-proclaimed experts, no good writer will omit adverbs, and no writer can successfully omit all adverbs without at the very least sounding incredibly choppy and awkward. The author of the linked article included quite a few; even just counting those adverbs that end in "-ly", I found ten (fortunately
mechanically
really
genuinely
personally
frequently
unfortunately
solely
rightfully
technically), and there was even an adverb ("so") right there in the sentence where he was condemning adverbs!

As for the passive, the author acknowledges the difficulty of avoiding them, but claims that their removal is still an improvement, though without explaining why. In fact, it makes the writing seem rather choppy (as if the author had to spend too much time paralysed by a set of rules to follow to actually be able to make the text flow). And despite apparently putting in a great deal of effort to avoid them, the author still included at least two that I found in a quick reread: "drawn for them" in the "beholder words" section, and "accepted for publication" right at the bottom. In both cases, the result is perfectly readable, not at all fuzzy, and entirely unremarkable---which shoots a rather gaping hole in the argument that there is anything wrong with a passive voice.

I feel sorry for his grad students, and only hope that when they come out the other end, they will sensibly discard the silly mandates of their advisor, rather than perpetuating the myths....
To summarize: because they don't want to pay what the vendor says it costs.
"That sort of sucks. Further, it makes some functions, like euclidean, hopelessly non-general, since euclidean now has to know what function to call to get a frequency [3]."

No. You can just pass in the appropriate, memoized frequency function to call. In the new code, that just means that "freq" would be an additional argument to euclidean, instead of a globally defined function.
Query html tables with SQL (using R)
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ I feel bad for getting the ebook with a "getting real filetype:pdf" google query just today.
So this explains Palantir's massive funding [1]. Even in a normal environment what they do is lucrative, but in a current state of affairs this must be a gold mine.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies
Likely something from iTunes. Either music or an iPad app.
No, that's why I asked. You were stating something in direct contradiction with the article, and (going purely on prior) you probably haven't actually used a WP7 phone, so the implication was that you had more than opinion behind your comment.
I rarely downvote a comment, but when I do it's usually because of some glaring fallacy or misstatement of fact.

I would be fine with votes being open to the votee or even public.
Hosting, github or domain.
You could do something like my father, who's an avid cyclist, does and put your emergency contact information, DOB, blood type and all that on your helmet. I'd think this would go doubly for anyone on a motorcycle as you'll end in an accident eventually.
Coke is acting out of fear of future liability. Coke is fearing that someday HFCS will be proven to be materially more damaging than sugar, and when that day arrives the US Surgeon General will be pointing at the Honest Kids label as proof that Coke knew something was bad about HFCS but still continues using it in its other products.
> Every cofounder should get equity based on the question "What is this idea worth without this person?". If you could hire any skilled programmer to replace the technical cofounder, then they shouldn't get a large amount of equity. If they are bringing domain knowledge, specific experience or an uncommon level of expertise, then they should get a lot of equity.

And the same applies to non-technical co-founders.

Combine this with the "how much would you pay to buy" answer wrt valuing the "idea", prototype/power-point, or other past work, and the equity division is "done".
It would be more interesting to compare the cost along with the total bandwidth. It's very expensive to fuel a 747 for a trans-Atlantic flight, but the information density should be high enough to make the cost comparison interesting.
Of course, there's always the possibility that this is basic factual reporting, and not a joke.

This is a real issue at larger tech companies who must interface with older, established players. Even back at Dell in the early 1990s there was some friction between sales/marketing managers and engineers, with the former arguing that the latter should dress a little sharper in case they inadvertently got on an elevator with a customer.
Same goes for the sugar version of Dr. Pepper.

The sugar versions are smoother.
Bicycle fuel for the commute: a week's worth of healthy lunches. I'm living on high-sodium crap until payday.
What baffles me is that when I walk around New York, I don't see a single Android, Nexus One, etc. ad.

But I do see iPad ads. I see iPhone ads. I see iPod ads. Often.

Since Google's business is advertising, I am amused.
(delayed, but) whups, my mistake. Read that wrong.
The (current) last update of TeX is from March 2008. The idea is that it is stable, not abandoned.
I'd just put it in the bank to pay for the last 10 minutes I spent reading this thread and thinking about what I would spend only $20 on.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're asking. The way it works now is: each document is read and summarized into a bunch of word frequencies, once. It looks like each is being read many times, but since I'm memoizing, it only happens once. Is that helpful or are you suggesting something else?
Because it's too easy without risk.

Oh my, I'm happy you can't get less than -4!

Sent from m'y new iPad.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529931
Phones break, especially when you crash into them with cars (which might be how you get hurt, too.) Medical bracelets and dog tags are somewhat more durable.

http://www.dogtagsonline.com/

http://www.americanmedical-id.com/
Corporate customers can side load apps on iOs now.

Company handsets no longer make up 99% of smartphone, if at all they ever did.
Slashtags are a neat idea, can't wait to try it out.
Right. That's what I said in the footnote, [3].
If it has to be online, I would order some intelligentsia coffee. If not online, I would go to my local cafe and... buy some coffee.

Yes, I am an addict.
Actually, no, there is no restriction that's keeping us from an S-Corp. What advantages would an S-Corp give us over an LLC?
Jtube  The Great Dictator
What's the point of mentioning the make of her phone? Would you have been less able to contact her husband using a Samsung?
Multiuser Sketchpad by Mr.Doob

http://mrdoob.com/projects/multiuserpad/

http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/701
Slightly outdated textbooks, or (if online product/service only) 250 pages of documents from PACER.
The Tumblr blog owner can choose to show that or not
What happens if the web page's structure changes? Something as simple as a table on a Wikipedia page that is over lower down the page?
I added this because I was inspired by his tale. His drive and determination let him rule one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen when he was not even 30.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.
I'd donate it to Aaron Diaz, in thanks for his work on http://dresdencodak.com.
What You'll Wish You'd Known: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Lies We Tell Kids: http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html
As dctoedt mentioned, creating an ICE entry is a great first step. But it is unfortunate how few people actually take the time, and it's not a complete solution.

If anyone is willing, I would love to get even more survey results regarding my soon-to-launch emergency contact service (Still working on the UI/UX and very close to the MVP). Wrt creating an ICE entry, I'm seeing less than 30% in the survey have done so.

The survey link is http://bit.ly/MyECInfoSurvey

Please feel free to pass the link along to friends and family.

Cheers,
Shawn

Ps, since this is HN after all, MyEC Info is a bootstrapped, single-founder startup. If this is a topic you are passionate about please feel free to contact me.
To summarize (correctly) for this situation: because one-license-per-machine only makes sense for operating systems. What about the more normal situation where person A has computers X, Y, and Z? (and phone Q and iPad M and iPod V and PDA W and PocketPC T)

This use of piracy honestly makes perfect sense to me. One license per user is perfectly understandable, if impossible to accurately enforce, and expands to future developments in hardware. One license per device does not: define "device" in a world which has emulation / virtualization / clusters.
>Oh my, I'm happy you can't get less than -4!

You can, it just doesn't display past that.
Sure, take a look at FastSpring.com FastSpring hosts your (PDF or other type) files at no extra cost as part of the payment processing, merchandising and fulfillment e-commerce service. Amazon S3 is the technology employed for file hosting by FastSpring.
I've been thinking for a while a crowd-ranked list like this is needed. Great to see it happen.

The product looks cool, except the Twitter/Facebook auth is also not working for me so I can't add anything.
I worked at a company that I shall not name that had a shirt / tie / coat dress code. They even had a dress code committee. The excuse was that we might bump into a client. The joke was that if a client was ever in our area, it would have been a violation of policy and federal law. They probably wouldn't care how I was dressed when I called security.
Thats specious, you really have to know what you're proxying, and squid and varnish supposedly get much less throughput. (Google around http://deserialized.com/reverse-proxy-performance-varnish-vs... ) "Moving bits" in memory is not a measure of anything.
Maybe you are right. OP's post seems to be flame bait, but raises some interesting questions. As I said, these are loong discussions, better to be left for a meeting on a rainy day in a small Viennaise cafe, over pastries and hot tea. However, let me say this much:

Every European country has prejudices about the other ones, and, of course, about the US. These are not well-known in the US, who tend to lump Europeans together (was IKEA from Sweden or Norway?) except for some simplistic stereotypes, i.e. Paris is the city of love, Germans make great cars, you can smoke pot in Netherlands, etc. etc. It's like the Chinese denoting all Europe as "Westerners". My favorite stereotype quote comes from Shibumi by Trevenian:

"But even I am forced to admit that they [the French] are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the American neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese."

The interesting thing is that there's always some truth in stereotypes. The thinking man's job is to find the percentage of truth.

P.S. Kieslowski's *White" is a movie that I like, that addresses some of the issues of living in France (and being married to a French woman)
i've tried the beta. seems stable so far, and it definitely helps taking the load off my own system.
Why Nerds Are Unpopular. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Especially this part:

"Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates."
I'd guess that cost is also an issue. The Canadian market is a tenth the size of the US but is spread out across the entire continent. One of my startups ships kids books. We pay $8 to ship from Toronto to Vancouver using Canada Post and that's with a large volume discount, but if I want to ship to the US using USPS from our New York distribution center, I pay $2.30 to anywhere in the lower 48. Also, the US deliveries take no more than 3 days, while Canada Post takes up to 5 business days - and that's expedited.

Having said all that, why bother setting up the logistics required to ship DVDs when you can just stream them to a population that is heavily wired and internet literate.
Man, taucloud is at least two times cooler than this.
Uber Efficient: A tiny apartment with 24 rooms | Yahoo Green
Quantum Time Machine Solves Grandfather Paradox
Dogtags and bracelets aren't a bad idea at all, but a lot of people won't wear them.

A cell-phone ICE entry can be a big help in situations not involving a violent impact, such as heart attacks, strokes, seizures, etc.

Granting that there's no perfect solution, any inexpensive emergency-prep measure you can take is better than nothing.
Please tell me what Froyo does the iOS4 doesn't. I switched from a 3gs to an N1 and the primitive nature of android is apparent at every corner.

Browser runs like crap. Try loading a page with a bunch of graphics and text. It will run like a flip book cartoon.

The music player is laughable. It doesn't even match up to an ipod classic.

The exchange syncing does not work correctly, especially calendar syncing.

And a laundry list of other 'features' which exist in Android but are woefully inadequate.

I would switch back to an iPhone in a heartbeat if it wasn't on ATT.
I've always wondered why everyone can't drive on the same side of the road? That would make automobile production much more efficient. Is there a certain reason England decided against driving on the left side of the road?
They sold 135.000 devices in the first 74 days. Maybe now they are at ~200.000.
The first draft had had "had had".
How much do you think you should charge?

Factors to consider:

1. How long will it take?

2. What would you consider a reasonable hourly rate?

3. What alternatives do people have? How much do they cost?

4. How much are people charging for this on Craigslist/gigs?

5. What's your gut feeling on how much this is worth?

I would recommend erring on the side of asking too much. It is easy to underestimate the market value of skills.

The hourly rate and hour estimate is to put a lower bound on how much you should charge -- not an upper bound.
Ooh, thanks! that looks like it might solve my problem.
I hope your Texas remark is a joke I'm just not getting because of the textual medium. The US is the 10th largest producer of sugar and Texas is one of four US states known for growing sugar cane.
20 lottery tickets.
Get Ready to Slash the Web (Marksonland)
"Oh, and Sorenson, I know that when I bought your software I ‘agreed’ to these terms in the EULA. No need to throw it in my face when I am inquiring about them with your customer support."

He kind of has a point there.
If blekko sees its shadow, 6 more weeks of beta
[slides] Tips from a retired facebook developer
Another idea, this one a bit more serious:

Solve the non-programming programmer problem. More specifically, solve the problem of obscenely padded CVs swamping the HR department with the result that incompetent candidates fill the interview spaces.

How? Codility.com already made a start on this with online coding tests. But the way it's structured, it'd likely come after the time-consuming resumé inspection. Could there not be a site that handles job listings, applications, AND coding tests? Like the employer posts the job and the site provides an appropriate test. Applicants can send their CV to the employer after they've sat the test.

The cost-saving of not reading all those useless CVs and conducting fruitless interviews should add up to quite a bit for most businesses. I suppose one of the harder implementation challenges would be how to cook up lots of appropriate tests.
Zoho & Pandora
I liked the idea of "unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy".

This is a great differentiator from Google. Google can copy features like slashtags easier, but I can't imagine a large company known for its secrecy suddenly exposing their algorithms.
This is just for hardcovers - not paperbacks. Outside of textbooks, we have very few hardcovers in our house.
This totally solves the problem I asked about a month ago. Thanks! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453143
The free x264 codec didn't have enough settings? Handbrake isn't simple enough? So you paid $600? Really? Why?
The man in the high castle and Ubik by Philip K. Dick. They're next on my wishlist and I've already spent my book budget for this month.

If that's not an option I'd donate it to the development of Mongrel2.
"Bus drivers have also protested that their doors will now open on the wrong side, in the middle of the road."

OK that is a good point .. Good luck to them !
We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.
All you need is a source of truly random numbers.

Make a pad from those numbers, make an exact duplicate of it, give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission and keep one at home base. Now you two can communicate over a guaranteed secure channel (provided you don't reuse the pad).
Ideas for FUSE implementation
Hi,

I recently saw the following article here at HN: http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/07/building-filesystems-the-way-you-build-web-apps/ and I thought that hacking on this (FUSE) is probably a good way for me to learn more python (using the python-fuse binding).

What I can't come up though is an idea of a good implementation for this. Does anyone have good ideas on an implementation?
Google could combine its search engine with its app engine to allow third party developers to implement custom searches.

Third party developers could even get paid via ads that appear whenever their algorithms are used in the search results.
The mother of all Rooseveltian big sticks.
Sweden switched at 6 AM after banning nearly all traffic between 1 AM and 6 AM.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H
Dagen H: The day Sweden switched to the right hand side of the road
The Way of the Dodo — How to Sell 10,000 iPad Cases at $60 Each
Apple's corporate side-load program requires you to prove that you have 250 employees. Running a local service company with 120 employees? Sorry, you're too small to qualify for side-loading. Build your custom competitive advantage apps and load them into the iTunes store for everyone or go without.