skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?

How many of you are out there in the USA? Honestly, not many. The vast majority of Americans drive to get their groceries and get their shopping done. I hate to say it - but you're a relatively rare edge case.

There's also the unsolved problem of overstock - and the smaller the store (physically) the worse it gets. In order to maintain selection, brick and mortar stores must stock a large range of items, many of which sell poorly. Maybe in your entire city 5 units would get sold in a given month - but if there are 30 stores in the city, each one would now have to hang onto a single unit, since you don't know when/where a customer would want it. A great deal of overstock ends up in landfills, and even the stuff that does not, it requires further transportation to consolidate, and then even more transportation to liquidate.

For an online store, since a single facility serves a much larger number of customers, overstock is improved by leaps and bounds (orders of magnitude, really). This results in less garbage waste due to not having to stock a lot of stuff that isn't expected to sell, and less transportation cost also.

> how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order

You're thinking about something like Amazon Tote:

http://tote.amazon.com/AmazonToteLearnMore

or Amazon Fresh - where non-grocery items can be included in your normal grocery run.
Why is page load time listed on that page? I thought I read recently that's a new thing google is doing?
Ford's 2011 Electric Focus Will Use LG Chem Batteries
Or in this case the 5th rev?
Dual-core Acer notebook, Gentoo, stumpwm, Emacs.
Slack and xmonad/dwm
Interesting point about Orkut. I wonder if there is a Google Dating in the works. It seems to fit their mission of organizing and helping people search-- one of the most important search tasks in most people's lives actually. It's also inherently a panda task since you have a clear, stated objective that you want to accomplish and then move on.
Maybe if someone has enough money to be safe and would be interested in investing with a high ratio, contact me :D
This has got to be computer generated, right?
I lived in Berkeley for a year. The main problem with Berkeley is that if you work in Silicon Valley, the commute truly sucks.
> there are a ton of interesting bands coming out of Brooklyn right now

Not to nitpick, but many of the bands "coming out of Brooklyn right now" are bands that moved there from elsewhere to try to ride the "Brooklyn band = good" wave. It's weird how arbitrary and amorphous these various scenes can be. If you can't find good music coming out of SF, you're probably not looking hard enough.

> Compared to that the whole art-car, techno, cyberpunkish thing in S.F. just seems so provincial and quaint.

It seems odd (and inaccurate) to sum an entire city's culture up with 3 indistinct generalizations.
He's currently answering (tons of) questions, in video form, from "the internet"... youtube comments, reddit, twitter, including other celebs (with shows)... EW, Ellen Degeneres, etc. They are pumping these out extremely quickly, and in large volume.

reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/entertainment/comments/cp190/the_old...

It's maybe the best guerilla/viral/web2.0 marketing job I've ever seen. It helps, greatly, that this guy, and his team, are apparently comedic geniuses.

e.g:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHrXKg2Fk5k
Yeah, who can possibly recognize a metaphor? Let's not waste the time of people hunting down real hot, nasty idea-idea action.
Google had hinted before this year that they would use speed. This article is from December, but perhaps there's something earlier: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/13/google-page-spe...

Still, Google said it will only affect 1% of searches.
Perl doesn't have one of these (afaict), perhaps because it would take up too many pages, but if you filter out just the Larry Wall quotes, you might get something close to this: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall (or maybe http://www.cpan.org/misc/lwall-quotes.txt.gz ).
Breaking news: users pay for services they use.

All kidding aside, if I were still active on reddit, I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee if I really loved the content. I used to spend a crapload of time on there before going cold-turkey, so at the peak of my usage, I would confidently say the site was worth at least a few bucks per month to me. Part of the reason is that I'm no longer a student and I've got disposable income. I wonder how many other people on the net also realize that their is a "cost" to their using the site, and that the cost is something they'd actually be willing to pay for.
In addition to being larger and harder to read data out of, as well as having far far lower yields, it uses easily several times more power to keep on than DRAM does.

Especially if you run it at speeds that would make it comparable to cache.
Apple has been doing this stuff for years. I bought a macbook pro two years ago and the dvd drive started failing withing the first 6 months. I took it into their store and got a run around and no replacement. There were third party forums with a lot of complaints, but most of the posts on Apple's support site disappeared pretty quickly.
GE Puts Up $200 Million in Power Grid Idea Challenge
I'm not a parent but would like to think that if I were I could be honest about any past substance abuse. I think this can go a long way into preventing a real crisis with the worst of illegal substances (the hard stuff). Anecdotally, I have a friend who nearly went off the deep end on abusing narcotics - he claims some of this was brought on by the lies he heard about the softer drugs being as equally bad as the harder stuff.
I'm surprised how much shit people carry.

I keep it limited to a wallet, which has my I'd two credit cards and cash.

My blackberry bold 9000

And my car key. Sometimes a lighter/cigarettes
I guess "FU money" applies to situations like this too!
> I had enough time to go to all of those things...

Sorry, maybe I'm taking you too literally here, but I find that hard to believe. You had time to attend every artistic event in SF, and you just weren't satisfied?
It's funny, I submitted this as "Ideas Having Sex: prosperity exceeds John Stuart Mill & Adam Smith expectations" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1434908 about a month ago and it got flagged and deaded. That was the full title from the original article which at least hints at the innovation and economics angle.
I agree. Lived close to the Inner Richmond (Laurel Heights), and I loved the neighborhood.
The starbucks at the Laurel Village is open 24hr, and always full! It is a very nice place if you want to hack at midnight, and get some caffeine.

You can also run all the way to the Marina/Chrissy fields if you are feeling for a long and hilly run, or just run to Golden Gate Park for a more flat one.
The only downside is the weather. Inner richmond gets some good amount of fog/wind (not as bad as outter richmond, or sunset), but still it is significant.

I moved to mountain view now, and I miss it :(
Artistic rendition of the history of nuclear explosions from 1945-1998
Why is there this level of cluelessness in an organization of such far-reaching influence? Don't these people know how to use Google?
The first chart that plots the number of fouls per team is misleading, considering half the teams represented only played a total of 3 games, while the other half advanced, several playing twice as many matches.

The second chart corrects for this by averaging it to Fouls per Game and adds the second data point of Goals per Game, making it a far more informative infographic, IMO.
I can't claim to know Google's actual procedures, but if you have a system with many thousands of candidate signals, and you train it to achieve certain 'quality' rankings via a largely automated process, it's possible that even the designers of the system would not know how every signal, in every combination, affects the rankings -- without researching very specific conjectures one at a time.

To wildly hypothesize, what if length-of-registration tends to indicate more-beloved results in most .COM domains, but has no impact on .ORG and .GOV domains, and actually indicates less-beloved results in .COM domains that consist of generic common words (those loved by professional domainers who then lengthen their registrations strategically)? A learning system could discover these conditional relationships over time -- but they'd resist easy explanation by a employee summarizing factors via informal channels.
Here are some of the things I discovered after hitting it, and watch others do the same:

1. Getting rich makes you more of who you really are. If you're a jerk underneath it all, you'll be a bigger jerk when you hit it big...and vice versa.

2. In terms of problems, you're squeezing on a balloon. It's easy to pay the bills, but a whole new set of problems and hassles will present themselves. It's just a new set of irritants. There's just as much pain, it just comes from different sources.

3. When you can have everything you want, you have to learn to control your appetites. You can't imagine how much crap you buy when you can afford everything. It's surprisingly hard for most people to control their spending once they hit it.

4. You'll turn into the First National Bank of Bill, but your loan standards will be lower...and few people will ever pay you back.

5. Old friendships will wither and some of them will die, no matter how hard you try to maintain them. Jealousy is one reason. Subtile changes in your own personality will be the other.

5. If your pals aren't all in the same boat, and similarly rich, you'll have no one to play with.

In short: Money is a tiger. You master it, or it masters you.
China is the one to watch right now. They're making massive investments in nuclear. Their CPR1000 reactor (based on 70's French reactors) is now cheaper to build than modern coal plants of the same size. They're working on doing the same cost-reduction for the more modern Westinghouse AP1000, and they're developing variants on the AP1000 which are the same size, don't cost much more, but produce 40% and 70% more power.

They're working with Russia to build some BN-800 liquid metal fast breeder reactors, a successor to the BN-600 and earlier BN-series reactors that Russia has been operating successfully for decades. They're also importing some Russian VVER-1000 light water reactors, apparently for variety.

They're building their first commercial pebble-bed modular reactors, and I believe they're working on how to incorporate thorium into the fuel mix. This isn't nearly as good as LFTRs, but it's nice to see.

They're doing some other nuclear things, but those are the big ones.
Ask HN: If you could start over, how would you do it?
If you were 20 years old today, what would you focus on learning?
Understanding and cleaning the pharma (spam) hack on Wordpress
Oh yeah, it's pure politic. People would demand benchmark and measurement to prove it's their reports causing the problem, and finger pointing your way.
It would be even awesomer if it were, given how good the generation would be:

http://i.imgur.com/i1xGS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/mv4HA.png
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzxnjIem6V0
San Juan, Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy. Similar mechanic for all of them, but sufficiently different to be fun in different contexts.
Good campaign, but not enough to offset Neal Stephenson's take on it:

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it:
homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice
and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing
their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't
you guys tell time?

:)
I didn't know you had a huge exit. Or are you talking about money you've made from being a semi-famous hacker now?

>(The reasons are more complicated but the result is I prefer my misery.)

Either way, that problem might be solved by a good Psychologist, that you probably should be able to afford. :-)
Feel free to ask me about that in six months. I'm always grateful for blog post topics.

It is intrinsically hard to attribute improvements in conversion rate to a single cause, except in an A/B test. It will be sensitive to changes in the traffic mix, seasonality, strategic decisions, etc etc.
The Importance of Being Earnest
thanks for the explanation :)
That's hilarious! I had an almost opposite experience: my girlfriend is a professor at a university in Seattle. She says that she decided I was worth being with when—a couple weeks after we started dating—I quit my soul-sucking job without a backup plan and with only a few months of living expenses in the bank.

Specifically, she says she thought it was: "bold," "courageous" and "optimistic." Personally, I thought it was a huge disaster waiting to happen, but better than sticking it out at a job I despised.
How to maximize your acquisition price with a dual-track strategy
Ubuntu/gnome on both a desktop and my macbook, with mac OSX as second option for some occasions (games, skyping)
>In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard.

Haha, so true. As a software engineer one might expect writing a book to be easy by comparison, but once you actually start working on it, you find that writing a good book is anything but.

Good analogy.
Everything good can and has been bad at some point in history.
Am I the only one waiting for Twitter to find a way to screw this up like how Facebook did with the BK Friend Sacrifice a couple of years ago?
Are you trying to say that you discovered thepiratebay?
I once read a fantastic interview with Douglas Adams back in the late 70s, after Hitchhikers Guide had become successful in the UK, but prior to its impending US release.

Both Adams and his interviewer knew that the author was about to come into A LOT of money, but he didn't have it yet. The interviewer asked how he expected his life to change and Douglas Adams said one of the most prescient things I've ever read:

"The only thing that money changes is the size of your bills."

For instance, my wife and I always talked about traveling more, but after selling my company, we continued to mainly talk about travel. It's just not something we do a lot, even though money isn't an issue. Meanwhile, I've got friends who managed to backpack around Asia and Europe all summer in college when they were totally broke.

Money doesn't change who you are or how you live all that much.
The addendum is key. It's somewhat harder to find examples of attempts to prosecute safe driving.

But then, trying to portray medicine as wildly unregulated should make anyone who's spent much time in or or worked in a hospital, regardless of political persuasion, laugh eir asses off.
No. As someone who both have experienced both NYC and Boston urban living, I can tell you that Boston is no better than NYC. Sure there are a lot more schools in Boston, it's only the arbitrary scale of judgement has changed but the intensity/consistency of judgement is still the same.

Whereas in NY, yuppie culture surrounds either the high-finance/media-fashion/hipster type, Boston's culture is more on academic/engineering/townie-pride. In some sense, I prefer NYC because at least everyone's honest and at least it's a meritocracy of superficiality. You either gotta make six figures or have the American Apparel attitude and look to be in the group. In Boston, it's more like "of course, we are a open & accepting people," but "oh? you don't go to grad school at Harvard/MIT/BU? You are involved in software/allied health professions and don't have the holier-than-thou attitude? You are not WASP or a white-washed minority and don't drink the vegan-hippie-liberal ethos?" Haven't lived in Seattle/Portland extensively but my own superficial judgment of these two cities while traveling there, is that the latent vegan-hippie-liberal superficiality is even more rampant there.
"EU agrees Iter fusion construction shortfall funds" hurts my brain. "EU member states agree on Iter funding shortfall" (the actual headline) is fine. Please keep original headlines/titles unless there is reason to change them.
MSpot Challenges Netflix with New Movie-Streaming App for iPad
I read it in Code Complete. I don't have a copy handy to track down the page though.
I like Old Spice's ads and marketing. Pretty much searched it out when I was at the shops but didn't really like the smell. </slight-offtopic>
Google: Cluster Computing and MapReduce course
Around here, I see a lot of instances where one sticker is "price/ounce", another "price/pound", and sometimes a third with "price/count" or "price/volume". I thought this was just due to inconsistent manufacturer standards; I didn't expect that it was intentional.
Try Vmware and storage kind of startups. Virtualization is huge.
Carcassonne (It's especially great now that an excellent iPhone app is out (carcassonneapp.com))
Improved user experience needed to save Symbian
No, but part of it? Yes.
Also, HN kills many threads with complaints about HN.

It's the prerogative and even duty of a forum proprietor to steer discussion in productive directions, given the goals of the forum. Proprietors aren't obligated to let a culture of complaint take hold, or provide a soapbox for all their implacable critics.

Sure, certain actions will appear to be -- or actually be -- heavy-handed and counterproductive. But some control is definitely better than none. It's a matter of choosing the right amount, while occasionally over- or under-shooting.

There are plenty of places to hear about the CR review, or bitch about Apple and its products -- Apple's own forums don't need to be one those places.
Tech-savvy people know that Google eliminates stop-words and uses stemming anyhow, although their algorithms for doing that aren't public, so ...

lose weight

... is a lot more efficient to write than ...

how can I lose weight

And while not yielding the same results, I think the first yields better results (in this case).

Then you start adding words for refinement ...

lose weight safe

See a pattern? ... It's a lot like adding tags, instead of formulating real phrases.
I'm pretty sure half of what makes these ads so awesome and popular with my friends is just how in touch Old Spice seems to be with the culture of their target audience. It's amazing to see a real corporation move like that.

"The tickets are now DIAMONDS!"

Perfect example. They hit a home run with that line, especially with their target audience.
How We Picked Our First Cloud Investment
I like the ads, but is there something specifically awesome about that line that I don't get?
It seems to me that people like the marketing without actually liking the product itself. Are there any sales numbers for Old Spice?
I saw a website that actually did have a captcha like this, but I do not remember which off-hand.

However, just like ever other proposed captcha replacement it has many issues. Someone should make a 'Your new captcha will not work because...' checklist like the one for email spam.

edit: http://theymakeapps.com/users/add is the example of a slider captcha I was remembering. It was previously discussed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479411.
Really? I live right off Castro st, in Mountain View, and I am in University Ave in PA every other day.
Once you spend a weekend on both places, you basically have seen it all.
The restaurants are reallyu nice (Castro St. Mountain View being cheaper and more authentic), but appart that there is not much going on.
It is very clean looking though, and if you have a family it is a good place. If you are single guy, you'd want to steer clear of them. There is not much going on excitement wise. I guess it is good, b/c you will get so bored that you will just work on your startup.
The weather is really nice though.

I lived in SF for 3.5 years, and I miss it. A lot more fun in general. There is never a boring moment.
Microsoft launches Azure private cloud in a box
My Trip to the SpeakerCave
I'm having trouble understanding.

Is it okay for people to talk about the issue, and to reference an article talking about how, no, it really does exist, or not?

Am I missing something here? Oversimplifying it?

Can you imagine the shitstorm if microsoft released a copy of windows that crashed every time you tried to use the sound feature, then refused that that was happening, then told people to just not use the sound, then banned any postings on their support forums which referenced an article confirming that it was, in fact, happening?
I just chatted with a friend at the agency working on this. They are writing the responses on the fly and the actor gets them in 2 takes.
The criticism to ars that I have is: Selling a rundown house is going to be an uphill battle, even if the plumbing is the most amazing in the city.

It could be as much as hiring more front-end developers and having those developers dictate how multitasking should work, etc.
The Claim: To Repel Mosquitoes, Use a House Fan
"Your" is the familiar form of "your" in the major English dialects spoken today, and there's no good reason to use a different one. Socrates did say it a long time ago, and "thy" has a long-ago flavor, but evoking the world of Shakespearean England (or modern-day pockets of Scotland) does not provide helpful context for a quote from Greece 2500 years ago.
Machine Learning & NLP
Boston is much worse. You've got academic assholes, finance assholes who are too racist to live in NYC, and townie assholes. There's a few interesting weirdos but they are all drunks.
Why can't we all just get along?  Because the laws of physics forbid it.
i'm sure they could get it done, but its much easier to get found out. better to have a simple method you don't rely on anyone else for.
Probably because the posts weren't related to tech support or there were already threads or a thread about the drive.

I don't really get the mentality. The users know what they are posting isn't tech support but do it anyway. You see the same thing on deal sites like slickdeals/fatwallet where someone posts in the hot deals forum and even says something like "this isn't a hot deal but I wanted to get the most people to see this..."

It also happens in Amazon product reviews. I don't want to read about how the 3rd party merchant you ordered from took 4 weeks to ship it to you when I am looking for product (not merchant) reviews. All the people who give 1-star reviews to books that aren't available in Kindle format to 'force' the publishers to release them are doing the same thing. It's a self-entitlement problem.
I think he missed the point on why kernel code are fast. Kernel code are fast not because it's written in C. It's fast because it doesn't do much. Most system calls into the kernel does very little; they just update some data structure and return. OS kernel is complicate because of its breadth and dependency and side effects. The call path of each call is actually fairly shallow.
The point of ads is to get you thinking about and talking about a product you wouldn't have otherwise. It's nice if they improve your perception of the product, but that's not as important as just getting yourself into people's heads. e.g., "there's no such thing as bad press"
So the author makes the supposition that Flash contributes to low ranking (in that the content is not indexed). Google most definitely crawls flash (in some fashion) at this point...

I'm curious, does anyone have any idea how that content ranks compared to good old fashioned mark-up? Is it 1:1? Is it harder to rank with flash content? I really have no idea.
nothing specifically awesome, it's just exactly in line with the sense of humor of my college friends, yet I don't think it'd fly with other people. qed, careful targeting.
Despite all of the conflicting research around the TP,
the one thing that I'm fairly sure of is that 100% of them watch the Fox News & Entertainment.