skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't the platinum all cars have in the exhaust (catalytic converter) take care of the carbon monoxide from this two stroke engine?
It seems to me that a lot of the comments on here are written by folks who didn't bother reading the whole article. True, the stuff about Stendhal gets pretty thick at times---I had to skim over some of it---but it's worth it in the end.

There's something ironic about this. The thesis of the essay is along the lines of: love is a very hard road, but worth it in the end. But it is presented in such a fashion that only folks who are persistent will follow it (the essay itself) to the end.
I think we all are ignoring the other side of the coin:

There are lots of girls who want to have uncompromising sex but that are tied by the gossip of their own female friends, by the gossip of the 'righteous' men around them, and by the double standards of society in general.

Those girls deserve to have fun if they want, and not being discriminated against. 'Pickup' artists just fulfill the need, that's why their method works.
Ask HN: How many of you are actively using scrum/agile methods?
To me it seems like scrum/agile methods are things only used in bigger companies where productivity/motivation of employees might be a big issue - even the quality of the employees. Every time I hear those terms I just get a shiver all over my body, but you still hear them used quite a lot in the software business.

I've never heard of anybody talking about those things in the startup world to any extent. Are those methods useful in the startup context? Do any of you guys actually use them?
You might be interested in checking out the page -
http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Sounds a lot like what you're doing.. I'm not sure if others know about it already - I think I stumbled upon it by accident.
I tried two different posts I wrote (in fact, the entire contents of my rebooted blog, since RSI has kept me down lately), as well as one half-written post, and apparently they all appeared to be Dan Brown works.

I'm not quite sure what to think of that, but at least it was reasonably consistent for me.
Yeah, although IDEO have moved into a company that do more design research than product design (they still do a lot but it't not their focus)

But yes the ability to create design discussion around a common goal rather than peoples opinion is the Holy Grail of successful design.
Open source bioinformatics software from Microsoft Research
Personally, if I was looking for a job and scrum/agile was mentioned in an ad, it would be enough for me to not even consider the posting.
Ask HN: Anyone going to the Ruby Midwest Conference this weekend?
The Ruby Midwest conference (http://rubymidwest.com) is this weekend (July 16th and 17th) here in Kansas City, MO and my employer is sending myself and another developer on our team. I was just wondering if any of my fellow HNers would be attending?
What I find very interesting is the rise in occurrences of this behaviour after the media announcement.

Is this an example of some sort of mass hysteria or did everyone just blame the car for any small thing? Or were they looking for legal settlement money?
Right - they updated their code ages ago, and IIRC they sent out an email explaining the problem and encouraging people to put the new code in.
Bing continues to gain market share, will focus on mobile
Admittedly, this is part flamebait, but I think I make some pretty reasonable assertions.
Ask HN: Ok, I have found a Niche... or have I?
I think I have found a niche, but before I get too excited and run off, plan it all out, and code for the next 12 months...

HN: How can I make sure I am not mistaking and insure this idea is a hidden gem?
Personally, my distaste for PHP centers around the fact that there are so many developers pumping out crappy PHP code for $20 / hr.

I don't need to compete in a race to the bottom.
/bow to the last sentence :)
That's exactly why I created http://www.hackerblogs.com if you check HN frontpage right now, there are zero posts by hackers, all come from PR blogs like techcrunch, readwriteweb, thenextweb, etc.

I highly recommend you giving it a try, it is still growing and I hope someday it may become the new source of real hacker news.

* I dare you to find an article like "Flipping arrows in coBurger King" on the news sites right now.
Our commitment to the digital humanities
The explosion you speak of is sites making better use of JavaScript, a movement that took off with the launch of gmail in 2004. Paul Buchheit talks about the thinking and communication that created gmail. He doesn't mention MVC; he talks a lot about rapid prototyping. He shares some of his then-current thinking in the form of a single 600-line source file. Read the post: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-...

EDIT: HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444615
I'm working on a design in the same ballpark as this, and I found that NASA has something similar as well (if not a bit more mechanically complicated than my design); I couldn't find a nice overview but I did find a couple of links to PDF's describing the test and analysis of their sterling-powered linear-alternator design:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1994001...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1992002...

...and a bit of an overview on the sunpower site (partner)
http://www.sunpower.com/lib/sitefiles/pdf/publications/Doc00...
Depends. Do you intend to build a content based site, an application or something else entirely?
Curiosity Mars rover in construction
Would it make sense for the victims to form an interest group? I guess the way then would have to be for the insurance company getting tired of it and putting pressure on the hospitals to change things.
What's interesting to me is that at least in the UK there's been a noticeable shift in the anti-piracy message.

Most telling is the anti-piracy ads in cinemas. (EDIT: I realize RIAA deals with music recordings only, and that it's the same for their UK counterpart; the ads used to be pretty much the same and the shift has been much more dramatic for movies)

A year or so ago in the UK the cinema's were full of "if you pirate you support organized crime and terrorism and you're pretty much satan" messages with ominous music and threats about how you'd get thrown out and more if you dared bring out any kind of recording device.

Now it's "thank you dear, nice customer for coming and paying to see the movie and helping us make more instead of pirating"... It's almost creepy what a turnaround it's been.

Maybe my long tradition of raising my finger at the old ads had an effect, or maybe some execs have finally realized that antagonizing your paying customers isn't as smart as it seemed to them at first.
Google Pregel Graph Processing
Because teaching and programming are both subsets of instruction.
This is actually the only reason preventing our business from using MS Adcenter. We all use Firefox or Chrome, and I'm on OSX and don't really wish to boot into Virtualbox just to spend my money
Can you find a way to reduce the 12 months to 2 months and front load the first 2 weeks doing some mockups to show 1-3 potential customers?
I voted you up because I agree that the terminology being used is silly and that dividing people (especially children!) into one of two categories is "reductionist" in a bad way.

However, the less silly version of the point is valid and non-trivial, even if not in need of new technical categories.

People who think that talent or ability is basically innate are wrong and hindered by this fact. People who think that it's basically acquired by effort and time are right and are helped by this fact.

I also think it's valid to point out that smarter people often suffer more from having the wrong view on this issue. This isn't necessarily their fault, I think there are institutional causes for this. For example, American public schools seem to be structured to make it likely that smart students absorb lazy habits. Smart kids observe that they can get top marks pretty much effortlessly and never develop a work ethic.
Sure; but it certainly depends upon the frequency of use of each instance etc. But in general, shorter code is a good choice of optimization
could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it?

And then people left?
I'll share some experience with your from cornify.com, which had the same effect and still goes strong 1.5 years later (this year invitation to ROFLCON, SXSW people's choice award, installed in 550000 web pages...). This is my experience with a project that's different from yours, so I hope it will help with your specific situation.

The main thing you need to achieve is to make your site about a bigger theme. This feature will remain the core, but you need to be associated with something bigger. With Cornify, it's always been about happiness. Unicorns and rainbows are (almost) second to that, which gives me much more room to work with. Make your site about famous writers, becoming a better writer, or something like that. Use imagery that matches the theme.

The second big thing is to make your tool deep, while keeping it simple. People know it for this one thing and the one thing only. Make it so you can find something new every time you use it, make it smart so it learns with the number of times you use it. Surprise people. Tweak, tweak, tweak.

Third recommendation is to build a voice and talk to people. Get Twitter and Facebook accounts. Decide on how you want to relate to people and what they should get out of being interested in you. I've gotten so many "Oh, I can't believe Cornify is on Twitter" comments, it shows that you care about the site. A brand would also be a big help. Maybe you can look into using imagery of famous writers.

Find a way that people can create things on your site. With Cornify, people really like the photo uploader. Find something that people can create on your site and then share. This keeps people coming back.

Most importantly, keep things fun. This is not serious business, this is a meme. If things stop being fun or get cluttered with ads, people will not take your serious and won't come back. Be very careful about monetizing. A meme that people like is an incredibly thing to have in your resume and a great talking point. I worked on projects for MTV, Nintendo, EA, etc, but people get way more excited when they find out I created Cornify. This is a meme and you may be more proud of other things you have done, but in terms of public recognition, you should take this very serious.

And congratulations. It's very exciting to see a project blow up like this. Hope you have a great time with it.
It would be more along the lines of a Web Portal/Service. There are a few major players, but only a few - and only one good one. I cannot seem to find many other companies like it.
Cat5 to replace HDMI later next year?
This is good enough to make me consider using it even with the browser compatibility issues involved
Can you segment your target audience to a small subset and run an experiment there? The segment must represent as much as possible your target audience. Building a prototype shouldn't be that difficult or time consuming. This way you can have some data that might be used later on as marketing material for extra funding.
The guy should try to convince me that PHP is bad.

It goes both ways: he has tried to do certain things with PHP and made his life miserable; you've done certain things with PHP that made your life easier.

Telling each other which is which will let the one know what to avoid and the other one what's he doing wrong.

Anyway, it's about time we started thinking and being more mature than 'my language is better than yours'. Which is why I hate all similar postings and articles which aim to enlighten me On the Amazing Features Of Language X (or the opposite).
Thanks Colin, I just added this to the feed list for http://planethn.com :)
It was completely inconsistent for me. I tried 4 posts and got 4 different results. I tried 2 different parts of the same post and got different results.

I suspect the webapp is just suggesting random writers.

Also, NLP classification is a hard problem. I don't think doing it reliably over a weekend is possible. I think that had OP done any good work on NLP, he would have discussed it. I am more inclined to think the app is just giving random results.
"Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before".... I dropped my macbook plans
"Artificial Intelligence" Gains Fans Among Investors
http://icanhascheezburger.com/

http://www.hotornot.com/
It certainly made me reevaluate my thinking on the two languages and problem domains. The only small bit I'd disagree with is that Ruby is only used for websites, but I'll hardly create a fuss over that.

If people are looking to poke at you, they'll do it, but otherwise, I'd say, yeah, it's a reasonable observation/opinion.
> Someone in this thread said "I have FU money for a year", which makes absolutely no sense.

It might make sense after all, I can think of several situations in which that is perfectly valid.

For instance, if you have only a year left to live (an extraordinary amount of people die every year, fully 1.6% of those alive today will not be alive next year).

The younger you are the more money you'll need to last you 'forever' (or at least, until that guy with the hoodie and the scythe shows up). I'm 45 so if you're considerably younger than I am you'll probably need more of it. But having 'FU' money for a decade in your prime and then having to go back to work when you're say 55 is probably a lot better than the reverse, retiring at 65 when you're older and physically less capable seems like the wrong way around to me. Get some mileage out of your life while you can enjoy it to the fullest.
This would still support the specific claim that "Pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates." It would not, however, support the claim that pirates spend more money on music than they would if piracy were not available as an option. As they say, correlation does not equal causation.
The Legal Risks And Dangers Of $99 Logo Stores
Analyst: iPhone 4 recall would cost $1.5 billion
Great point about the difference between Uk and us business. I would love to see how Mike Faith did if he tried the headsets business in the Uk.
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I use Java, Groovy and Scala on a daily basis and the only thing I dislike about Scala is the fact that they seem to have chosen to be as unfamiliar as possible to the average Java programmer. It often feels like "although we could have designed it in a way so that it is familiar to you, we chose something different although it means the same thing".

Whereas Groovy tries to decorate existing Java classes and add some nice functional abstractions on top of them, Scala very often tries to enforce its own way of thinking or renaming identical concepts in a different way.

Groovy is much easier to adopt in my mind because of that. You can gradually adopt Groovy and groovify your code as you progress your skills with the language. In contrast to that, learning Scala is harder, because it often requires a complete mental shift.
Speaking as someone who would have cut off their little finger for one of these courses if I'd known about them at 17, WTF?

frail and insecure 17-year olds who need professional help.

Psychologists and other like personnel are as expensive or more, and if the problem you're trying to solve is "I can't get a relationship/laid" I would go for the PUA over the psychologist. The psychologist might try to help, but he wouldn't be a domain expert, and he might try to convert the client and convince them they have other, deeper problems when that is irrelevant to them.

All that said, taking a dead end bar or waiting job and/or getting horribly drunk regularly will also work for the majority of people.
It says I write like James Joyce. You sure know how to pump up my ego! There must be money in that.
It's just as secure as any other language you can write insecure code in (i.e. all of them).

That may be true; I've only developed two half-serious projects in PHP a while back. But given the amount of XSS and injection vulnerabilities we're seeing daily, I think that something is wrong with those web development guys. PHP is admittedly a widely used tool and I can't help but wonder: "Could it be just the language? Is there a possibility things would be better if PHP was abandoned?". Of course things would improve if we educated all PHP developers on the security implications of whatever it is they're programming. But so many years of coding have shown it's infeasible (for any language).
Researcher cracks 'secret' code in U.S. Cyber Command logo
I don't know, but I imagine the resources they needed to commit to it were pretty hefty.
Ask HN: Nontechnical first employee?
Hi HN, we've got an early stage, consumer-facing web startup, with all technical founders. We're still a number of months off from having a beta of some sort. We're considering bringing in someone to handle some of the non-technical parts of the business – researching our competitors, doing market research, finding good business models, etc. – but we've gotten advice that this sort of hire is nonstandard at this stage, and that we should only bring someone on once we've got a product and we're growing. In the meantime, we should just make the product and do the research ourselves. On the other hand, our potential hire is excited about our business, and willing to work for cheap.

What are your thoughts HN? Have any of you hired a non-technical employee in your early stages?
I have my hand at this now with http://www.algxchange.com - its really cool, but training is a nightmare. I have 4 situations that required training, and an actual decision model that needed training on what situation model to use.

So many factors, Bear market, Bull market, etc...
I wonder if Twitter, Scribd, Hulu, Friends for Sale would agree.

I agree that .Net projects do tend to differ from Ruby projects. But I'm not willing to be as definitive as the author by saying "Ruby and .Net Developers Solve Two Different Kinds of Problems". That's too black and white for me.

Also, the fact that there are IDE's for Ruby (RubyMine and Netbeans) shows that there is becoming more of a desire / need for an IDE in the Ruby world. Even the good old standard of using TextMate mixed with a zillion plugins / macros shows a need.

Getting back to the point of the tweep's original question though; If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right.
As to aircraft diesels, USSR had a few bombers in its fleet equipped with diesels (TB-7). Some of them actually took bombing raids over Germany in autumn of 1941.
Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, phpbb, vbulletin, invision power board::
Together they are 99% of online communities + personal websites. If you want to use any of them. Then it is php.

I may not particularly like PHP, but to deliver projects in reasonable time, you may have to leverage PHP
NYC Show and Tell for Hackers (Hack and Tell Meetup)
I've just found out that there's a supposedly very good bakery nearby. But I don't know how geosay works, and if I should thank geosay or foursquare.
It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground.

Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features.

So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase.

To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever.
I think the larger misconception he has is that Ruby developers solve the same kinds of problems as .Net developers. They don’t. Not even kinda.... In general, Ruby developers create small to medium size websites ... On the other hand, .Net developers create a lot of large scale enterprise applications.

OK, so what are some of the .NET enterprise applications that are too complex to be built in Ruby - or at least are better built in .NET?
as someone building a location based service, why not just store the lat/long in a table column and query for < >? Is it that much more efficient to use a specialized product?
I suspect a lot of Toyotas problems have to do with the standards in their overseas factories not living up to those on Japan
My father has driven toyotas for 30 years without a single breakdown. I have had 2, I had trouble with one of them.
It had a sticky accelerator (which I never considered serious as it only ever happened at the start of a journey), the wipers stopped working one rainy day, the driver seat adjustment lever gave up with the seat stuck in reclined and one time the brake pads stuck to the cylinder when the car had wasn't driven for a month.
Interestingly it was the only one of the lot that sported a "Made in Britain" sticker.
If you are looking for something that is 100% programming then http://news.usethesource.com/news is a good choice. It is built on the same platform as HN

Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with the amazing peeps at usethesource
I don't know...IE9 isn't close to being released is it?
What's the amount of money being spent in that niche?
User satisfaction includes all of the relevant issues for a person, and in this test they were testing reading, so eye strain would matter to people.

People absolutely buy the iPad to read books. It may not be the only thing they do with it-since it is a multi function device. However reading books is a very large component of the purchase for everyone that I know that has bought one.

My graduate program just bought 65 iPads for the incoming class to read their books and PDFs. They bought those based on user feedback that people hate reading on the tablet and don't like hauling around forty seven pounds of dead trees. The majority user request was to load the reading on an iPad.
You check by doing research. I've had a few ideas I thought were gems, then after some research I found a small number of companies doing similar things. This in itself is not a bad thing.

If no one else is doing this ask yourself why? Is it because there is no money/profits in it? Or is it truly a unique idea that you can make profitable.

The best is when there is one or two companies that doing things that are similar. That means there's a market for what you want. Through your spin on it.
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This will not result in less piracy

How so? Data point: I don't pirate music, partly because I'm paranoid about getting sued by the RIAA. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

frequently-pirated music makes more money than less-pirated music.

Yes, popular music makes more money than unpopular music. Duh.

pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates

Which, even if true, is not a demonstration of "pirates spend more money on music than they would if they weren't pirates".

I am extremely skeptical of the idea that piracy helps the music industry. It smells strongly of the kind of thing that people believe in order to justify their own actions, rather than the kind of thing that people believe because it's likely to be true.

If you're still pirating music in 2010, and the track you're pirating is available on the Apple Store for 99 cents, then you're just being a cheap bastard.