skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually it's tied to the crisis at NASA, and to a larger extent the country. I don't know why people are afraid of confronting an issue like this. It's as if by ignoring it and saying our institutions are ok, things will work themselves out on their own. No.
Ah, yeh; one advantage to living in the UK is that the iPhone is on alternative networks.

If I were in the states I expect I would be on Android already!
Sounds like a decent idea to me. Virtual research assistants work in a lot of areas, and I don't see why this should be an exception. I could imagine myself finding your services useful in the future. Some thoughts:

(1) If you're doing a lot of smallish jobs for people, the setting up of each job could add to quite a lot of your work time.

(2) (1) suggests you'll need to bill high per-hour to cover for the time you'll spend setting up, or try to do fewer, longer jobs (or ongoing series of jobs with the same clients). Another advantage of doing more work for the same person is that you will spend less time getting up to speed in a new area.

(3) This leads me to think the best way for you to structure it would be to take on a small number of clients, each of whom is likely to give you work fairly regularly. Not quite one-off, not quite employee. Freelance intelligence-gathering etc.

(4) Think about who exactly will be your clients. Academics, probably not. They have full time research assistants, if for no other reason than that's how departmental finances work most of the time. Large companies, probably not - they probably have interns and other such cheap sources of work-time. I think the one-man/small startup scene might be your market. Think of Patrick McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator - patio11 on HN) - he developed a relationship with a woman somewhere to write his bingo cards, simply because it's a better use of his time to pay her to do it. And he can trust her to do it consistently well - so it's like I said, not an employee, but not one-off work either (i.e. he will go to her, not look around for anyone).

(5) Perhaps you could frame your services in terms of competitor analysis ("Write me a report on all companies working on group microblogging"), which can range from business details to technical implementations, and so on; and also, as you suggest, possible relevant architectures for a project or feature a client may be interested in.

It might be hard to pull it off, but I think it could be useful to some people / teams. My somewhat HN-intoxicated suggestion would be to write up some example reports, whip up a website, and come back and offer your services. You might be worth the money to some very busy small teams.
Sapir-Whorf, is that you? :-)
I just got downvoting at around 200 karma.
Completely agree with you, need more role models in that area. My point was that, the fact that her appearance was predominantly pushed on her personal web page, may send the wrong message, i.e. you have to be intelligent and beautiful/sexy or something to be featured in NYT, not that there's anything wrong with a beautiful entrepreneur woman, but that shouldn't be the first thing that is pushed on you.

There are awesome hacker role models, such as Leah Buechley, that can be covered. HN recently had an excellent discussion on exactly this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1430281
Apparently BP sold the rights to their name to local gas stations, thus boycotting them really does nothing to hurt BP.
LOL, I've collected that much karma in less than a year. Given 12 years, God knows where I'll go!

Seriously, I'd like to think that your comment was a joke. Because if a company cannot learn from foot soldiers in the domain and gets cocky, stagnation and eventually death is close at hand. I hope Google is not at that point (like Microsoft)
And not just clever, witty, and progressive, but an honorable man, repaying very large debts even when not legally required:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain#Financial_troubles
Fast Loans No Credit Check, No Fax No Worry About Your Bad Credit
His wife posted on Twitter some time ago that _why is doing fine and yes, he's alive.
Regarding this one: "Pretending your faults don't exist."

Having seen quite a few pitches myself, one good thing you can do is point out your major flaws/obstacles before you're asked about them (assuming they don't clearly spell out your impending demise).

This may seem a little counterintuitive, but it lets you present the issue in a better light and explain how you're going to fix it, instead of having the investor feel like they've discovered a glaring weakness that you were trying to brush under the table. I believe lawyers use a similar technique.

One caveat to this: I'm a blogger/reporter, so investors may have a different perspective. But I'm guessing it holds true for them too.
The biggest thing that makes a difference for me is the simple existence of file browsers. With a browser like ES File Explorer, I can e.g. copy music, movies etc. from my NAS across wifi without having to plug my device in. I can zip folders up and unzip them, and applications don't act as silos for their specific data, and nor does data need to be shoe-horned into flat, generic categories - music, photos, movies.

The file browser makes all the difference in perception. It feels like the difference between a classic iPod and a PC. One is a toy, the other a tool.

The combination of notifications and multitasking: for example, when I get an email, I can pull down the bar and see its title. If I need to deal with it, I can tap on it and reply, then press the back button and I'm sent back to where I came from, rather than having to go to a home screen, etc.

And I really like the widgets. The Google calendar widget shows my upcoming appointments, and it's on the center home screen. The AutoRotate OnOff widget hugely improves usability if you're e.g. in bed: you can disable auto-rotation in web pages. Actually, I think auto-rotation should be disabled by default, as it's almost never useful - always more of a gimmick than a feature. But you have to jailbreak the iPhone to disable auto-rotation.

The navigation, tethering etc. are all just gravy. I've had tethering for a long time on my ancient K800i, both over USB and bluetooth, and it's always handy for airports and hotels abroad.

That's another thing: cost. I use a UK O2 pay as you go sim, and spend about 11 GBP per month - 8 of that, IIRC, is for internet usage. But when I'm abroad, I use my Irish Vodafone sim and relegate the O2 to my K800i. The Vodafone sim works in the US and all across Europe, and costs me 0.99 EUR/day for 50MB/day. That's enough to cover my casual daily Google Maps and browsing usage when I'm travelling, so I'm never without internet access wherever I am, whether it's Albania or California.
Understanding procrastination and how to achieve our goals
Ask HN: Young startups attending Techcrunch conference?
It seems 2 years ago (techcrunch40) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=298565
it was worth it. Now, Techcrunch Disrupt May 010 winner Soluto is a not an example of young startup.

If you do not have user traction or are still working on the MVP at the moment of the application, is there any chance to get selected?

Anecdotes, stories to share on those type of conferences? Would you recommend it? if yes How to apply successfully to participate to Startup Battlefield?

Any other conferences worth the money and the time attending?
We’ve packaged all of the free software…what now?
What is the reason they're restricting this to wifi? Would the quality be to low on a 3g network? The only mobile video call I used probably over 5 years ago used a 3g(I assume, definitely not wifi) connection, sure the quality wasn't amazing, but would this still be an issue in built up areas?
Statistically, 4 in 10 people who say "I do" will be proved wrong eventually, but nobody ever considers for a minute that it will be them. Everyone thinks that they are special, that they will beat the odds, that the rules of probability do not apply to them.

If 40% of mortgages ended in default, it would be a national emergency, but for some reason we accept that close to half of marriages end in divorce. The vows of marriage clearly fail to reflect how people actually decide to live their lives. In that sense, marriage is an outmoded institution, one I feel is in urgent need of revision.

We have to accept as a society that while the majority of us say we want to pair for life, a very large proportion of us actually do not want that. The cultural fallout of these dashed hopes and broken promises is truly toxic. We are collectively living in denial. We are telling children that mummy and daddy will be together forever, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We need to be more honest and rational, to ourselves and to others.

Fifty years ago, divorce was rare. A hundred years ago, it was unheard of. At some point in the near future, divorce will be the most likely end of a marriage. The costs to society are clearly enormous and we urgently need to revise the legal nature of marriage to better reflect the practical reality. I do not oppose marriage; I oppose an outmoded version of marriage that enshrines self-deception and the deception of others into law.

Our cultural and legal concept of marriage is very specific and is in no way definitive. In many parts of the Islamic world, marriage can legally be of a fixed length, with exit terms prearranged. This to me seems far more rational, in preserving the true purpose of marriage (the protection of patrilineage) while allowing for more long-term flexibility and reducing the costs of divorce to near-zero.
> because they were entirely blood-thirsty savages.

>[I found] his portrayal of the Mohicans to be very interesting as contrasted to the European characters in the book.

I don't see why this makes him a jackass. You can enjoy a story without it being accurate. I haven't met any Mohicans, but I am generally skeptical of "noble savage" stereotypes.
Heh, I didn't check out her site. It sounds obnoxious. (And I see from your other HN comments, we share a distaste for another cheeseball who flaunts his/her appearance, w/multiple "in action" shots all over his/her website, who I won't give further attention by typing his/her name :D).

But I'm simply objecting to you using the word discrimination, and suggesting an average looking guy would not get this piece written. I even covered the "citation please" angle (not that you said that, but so many people on HN abuse that construct as a way to discredit pretty reasonable ideas, without having to provide a citation themselves.)

I'll take your word that she's pushing her appearance, just not that it's responsible for her coverage.

And my "proposed study" tone was maybe too snarky, I apologize. (I try to avoid that), I just had to give you a hard time about using "discrimination" and "average looking guys" in the same posit. Are we on the same site, seeing the same stories that make the front page?! (Said in friendly tone, poking as much as fun at myself for reading, as HN for posting 99% of its content about/by average looking guys, usually comparing Android + iPhone.)
btw, editline is a BSD licensed readline replacement:
http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/
should I develop apps for Yahoo Pulse?
The truly amazing thing is that his words are still relevant today. Isn't it funny how everything is like a spiral? Even though things do move forward the circular motion is a near constant of life.

People keep on talking about the good old days, while deep inside they are afraid that there might not have been any good old days. Perhaps the emotions and struggles that are part and parcel of our existence are identical to those of people long gone. Stripped of all details it looks like to me that we just keep on repeating the same thing over and over again.

That observation aside the more fascinating question is why? Why do we let history repeat itself in torturous detail? Why do we forget the lessons of our past?
This works predates Rails 3 by about 2 or 3 years. I would bet it indirectly influenced AR3, and I know it has influenced DataMapper (which I maintain).

One major difference with Ambition is that you're writing the queries in the same code you would when using the normal Enumerable API. IMHO from an interface pov, it's better than any Ruby ORM has provided (or would ever be able to). However, the (big) downside is that it requires ParseTree, which only works on Ruby 1.8. It's also a bit fragile, since if you use code the underlying parser doesn't understand you'll get weird runtime errors.

I created an Ambition-like interface to DataMapper early last year, which uses a similar approach:

http://github.com/dkubb/dm-ambition/

The main difference (aside from working with DataMapper) is that when the underlying collection is already lazy loaded the block provided is evaluated for each record using the normal Enumerable methods. I believe the Ambition project has a few constructs that make this impossible, but in dm-ambition I set this as a requirement from the start.
Girlfreind you say... How many calls until FaceTime becomes crotch time. I put the over/under at 3.
Clear your NYTimes cookies.
This ties in to an amazingly important (and rare) personal characteristic: self-awareness. Being able to honestly identify your own strengths and weaknesses is the only way to systematically build the former and eliminate the latter.

In my experience, few people are able to assess themselves effectively; it's too easy to slide in one of two directions: avoidance or neurosis. But as the saying goes: the unexamined life is not worth living.
@Louis, you'll be back :)
Elon Musk: “Why Owen Thomas Is Silicon Valley’s Jayson Blair”
Reminds me of thomasfuchs recent tweet: "Back on my iPhone. iPhone vs Android is like a luxury car with driver vs. a race car with the pit crew gone missing."
How telling people the facts may not cause them to change what they believe
Go Into Sales
Actually, check the time stamps. Wikileaks disputed the first 8, but not this one. No word from Wikileaks on this so far.
I got rid of my Nexus One (I'm on AT&T and so didn't have 3G, which blew), and as soon as 2.2 came out I started regretting it. My next phone is going to be Android. I'd say that Android is already ahead of iOS and when 3.0 comes out it won't even be close anymore.
Spoliers

Draper isn't really sociopathic, you'd notice he's a lot more relaxed when he is with the original mrs.draper, and pretty much any sort of flashback sequence before his current job and marital situation. He is constantly living a lie and must put up a conscious pretense. He feels very guilty about what he done, and as a result he is constantly tense and always having few words and choosing them carefully.
I agree with you, "discrimination" was perhaps too strong, a subliminal preferance, perhaps?

BTW, this is by far the best/nicest response I got to one of my comments.
I've always used Skype for that.
GAGA-1
At KAF in Afghanistan, a friend of mine was able to sign up for non-firewalled, civilian run, wireless internet access for ~$150/month. It was slow, and used a satellite for uplink. But it was good enough that he could use Skype to have video conversations with his wife.
"I admit this naming convention is more for the massive nerd factor than practicality."

Epic.
His comedy remains hilarious. Most of my exposure is through The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. It's highly readable, and in what I find to be a pretty rare thing in old writing, the characters all feel like they were created yesterday, not ages ago.
You're citing an article from 1982?

There's been a massive amount experimental work done since the mid 1990s.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=+Experimental+...
iPod touch?
> The bank is a condition of tilted wings, and the turn is the change in direction that results. The connection between the two is inexorable: the airplane must bank to turn, and when it is banked, it must turn.

This is only true if the rudder is not being used. It is possible to turn a plane without banking it, and to bank a plane without turning it using the rudder. The former maneuver is called a skidding turn, and the latter is called a slip.
I've tried, briefly, to firm-up the idea in "Sapir-Whorf meets coding theory" http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/10/8848/5161
Proving A Proof Is A Proof
Seconded. Writing the card game 'war' might be a fun challenge:
http://docs.racket-lang.org/cards/index.html
Wow, somehow this was the first time I learned that...but then again, Mercurial has never really been on my radar screen as a tool to use. Of course, with your VCS, you get better network effects by picking one that other projects in your language use, not what the VCS is written in. So I guess it's unsurprising.

But now I want to go read through the Mercurial source as I've been curious about VCS internals, but my C-fu is very weak, and attempting to read through the Git source is quite a chore for me.
Amen. I would say this article goes a fair bit towards explaining our lack of creativity. Newsweek? Fuck it. Read Unte Reader. At least you'll get a breadth of writing styles and topics. Creativity measuring is part of the problem, just ask why the lucky stiff, everybody's favorite accidental professor.
At times I think in ways harder to define than just pictures. I see things somehow and yet I cannot explain them in words. I can just feel the relationships between concepts and see how they fit together, but I cannot express it.

The truth is that we all think in an undefinable mental language and our common language is an abstraction of that layer. I remember this interesting experiment that I read about in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.

Someone decided to test if we truly think in language or not. So they took a letter and rotated it. They then asked the subject if it was a mirror image of the original or the original itself. Interestingly they found that the further they rotated the longer it took for people to decode it. Now if people though in terms of language then the opposite would have been true. 180º would have been the easiest since it was just a matter of making the thing go up to the to and drag the feet of the letter down to the ground, but it took longer than 45º. Interesting. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation)

Something quirky about me is that I am a bit dyslexic so it might have forced me to be more aware of this process than most people. Just like what your linguistic environment did to you.

Does anyone else here share my experience?
This sounds exactly right to me, and indeed a lot of my engineering friends who decided they wanted to start companies have sought out sales roles as practice.

An obvious way to transition from engineering to sales is via the "sales engineering" role at enterprise software companies, which, for complicated products, is the tech guy who tag-teams with the account manager and does the product pitching. SE pays about 80% of what high-end dev pays (and nothing resembling what sales account management can pay) and comes with virtually no execution risk.

The downside of SE is that it's a tar pit --- you'll never transition from SE to sales in the same company --- and after doing it for a few months you'll quickly learn an important but disheartening lesson: that a rock-solid technical pitch and a rapport with your target market is only 10% of the sales execution mix, and the other 90% is black magic --- a good chunk of which involves being shameless and irritating.

Then again, being shameless and irritating may be part of What It Takes to make a startup break through.
I did this back in 1995. I still remember the first three hosts: mercury, carbon, helium ...
R-trees – adapting out-of-core techniques to modern memory architectures
Whether this author had a point I will never know because article is rather poorly written. To support virtues of "focused thought" the article starts stating that some unspecified "researchers" "discovered" something. Citations, or it didn't happen. Such claims must be falsifiable or dropped.

Then it posits a question "how to practice focused thought" and the first suggestion is "I like practicing focused thought by writing before starting work". That's a uselessly self-referential recommendation. Why even bother posting something that can't be used under a question that presumes a practical, usable answer?
I keep a landline phone because I've never had a dropped call with one and rarely if ever had less than perfect audio quality.
green tea has caffine in it
All of those things can and will be signified by numbers in the upper right hand corner of the icon (e.g. a (2) in the upper right corner of Mail). The SMS will also spawn a notification, but if you don't read it it will become a number in the upper right.
Very accurate - I think this is a must read for anyone embarking on a new startup.

I see a lot of these issues all the time, but sifting these out and articulating them this concisely is very difficult.

I can also see these issues created the biggest challenges in previous projects I have worked on.
Short summary: instead of relying on initialization to a known value, ignore the initial values of the array and rely instead on a consistency constraint (data may be random, but won't be random and satisfy the constraint) that you can set and check. A neat trick you can probably use in other places as well.
The beauty of android is that anyone can write an app to change the dialer or SMS service as they see fit.

The downside of android is that everyone has written said app, and it probably sucks.
I have an analogous problem. I cannot spell words which are spelled differently than the way they are pronounced like resteraunt and other stuff like that. I also have weird quirks with numbers and somehow calculation takes me a long time and I tend to make idiotic mistakes unless I am 100% in the moment (we all do, but these mistakes are different from what other people make. It's the same pattern over and over again).

I think that you might have some degree of dyslexia and other co-morbidities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Comorbidities).

Have you ever gotten it checked? An accurate diagnosis can go a long way in formulating a response and finding a solution to this.

I can't even begin to imagine how bad it must be for you, but I do know that if you work at it with some professional help then it will improve in subtle ways. Miracles won't happen due to age, but you will be the richer for it.

Take care.
Sure those rendering errors are the sites CSS fault? Pretty sure Safari for iPad uses the same webkit as Desktop.

Hover for a touch device?
Along the same tangent, Eigen has pretty much the nicest API for matrix math, in C++. Additionally, it is totally template based, and allegedly compiles to some highly optimized code. Even without that, it's a huge step up from the likes of GSL or clapack.
I like Carlin but this rant is way too cynical for me. I live by the maxim to keep at all costs my positive outlook on life and never, ever let the bastards grind you down.
Back then Wilhelm knew that to get his operation off the ground in Iowa, he had to make a splash, so he attacked the big guy, Kodak. Actually Kodak's films were largely state of the art when they came out, which of course is not nearly as good as everyone's films and papers are today. Many imaging researchers question Wilhelm's methods (he won't let anybody in his laboratory) and he made totally wrong predictions about Epson ink jet prints when they first came out (he overlooked ozone effects). He also overweights the effects of light on image lifetime when over 95% of prints are stored most of the time in the dark, where thermal effects are the actors. None the less, his ratings can be useful if read cautiously. He currently has given a "Best in Class" permanence rating to Kodak's ESP ink jet prints, which when you consider the low cost of Kodak's ink jet catridges (compared to HP, Lexmark, Epson and the rest) makes this a good choice.