skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "what about emergencies?" issue comes up quite a bit, I thought I'd share my perspective. Having been in a few actual life or death emergency situations in my personal life and formerly being a police dispatcher, I've been on both ends of this.

You don't need to be immediately reached by phone in these events unless you can actually do something about it. Calling 911 and attending to the emergency trumps calling me at unless I'm close enough to help, i.e. walking the dog, at the neighbor's house, etc. If I have to drive to get there, it's too far; call me after things have stabilized.

If it's a call to break bad news, the last thing you should be doing in the event of tragic news is hopping in a car a driving somewhere while you're an emotional wreck. Racing to the hospital in an attempt to get in "your last words" is dangerous and is not as fulfilling as you might hope. Live in such a way that you're at peace with everyone you care about and last words are not needed.

Also, in my own ability to cope with events, simply receiving news that someone died is the easiest. Being there and witnessing someone die is far harder (or visiting them every day in the hospital until they die...even if you aren't there when it happens), and the hardest for me was performing CPR on someone and the person dying anyways (it helped me to learn later from the autopsy that CPR was never going to help, but it's still traumatic to me in a way that the other events weren't).

In short, real emergencies happen too quickly for a call to non-emergency services to be of any help, worrying about those situations is a waste of your time, and it's possible if you're like me, that actually being there is worse than not being there. Business emergencies are a different beast though.
...and I hired a couple of keen consultants 3 years ago who were working on a startup "on the side" (of course it was my work that was on the side). It took them nine months of doing very little before they admitted they weren't going to get the job done. If you're going to consult "on the side" of your startup, hide the fact that you've got a startup from your potential clients. If you can complete outside work satisfactorily, as well as keep motivation for your startup, well, that's a sign you're a hard worker :)
Deflation is dangerous only for the entities that own large amounts of real estate/stocks. For normal people, deflation allows their buying power to increase. The government printing is akin to stealing from your labor right then and there.
They're moving in the right direction. Until now they didn't accept any countries outside of the US. Going from "none" to "some" is a big step towards "all".
http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+point%3F&...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+santa+claus+real%3F
Note that Wolfram Alpha does not deny being self-aware.
While I love the Russian language, it's hard to argue that it will benefit your career more than Mandarin.

By the way, don't assume that you can learn a language from college courses. All they'll do is introduce you to the iceberg. To actually learn, go to a place where the language is spoken.
Easier: install Rapportive.
Interesting stuff. Here's what I would do if I were you: I would try to get it popular in a smaller niche community. Try to find an existing community on the Internet that's currently looking for an alternative medium to communicate to what they currently have. There's always plenty of drama on the Internet so that shouldn't be to hard. Try to get them to use your site. This way, you could constantly have a number of users without achieving a critical mass. Later on, you can build on that by improvements and "marketing" and get more users.

TLDR: I think if you're clever, there's no reason your could not get traction later on even if it fails to be a ground-breaking success right after launch.
Should be "ESC k was originally...", right?
The author states it might be useful in guessing valid company email
addresses. Isn't it easier to create a CSV/Outlook compatible file
containing hundreds of generated addresses, and then ask Facebook to
find new friends for you. Plus, that will allow you to check many more
adresses before Facebook senses something silly and disables the login
form - which would happen if you use the login-form method.

Heck, this is perfectly possible with LinkedIn and twitter as well. I
don't understand what the fuss is.
Why do you feel OK taking advantage of a buy-one-get-one-free deal? These stores aren't stupid. They know people do this. They do a cost-benefit analysis on their return policies and decide that they're OK with this gaming because it is compensated in other areas. Their salespeople can tell prospective customers, "Hey, you're not committing to anything. If you don't 100% want to keep it, you can just bring it back with our awesome return policy." They do this knowing that most people won't even if they're not completely happy. The flip side is that we actually get to take them up on the offer.

On the other hand, I don't personally do this because I'd rather just work a little more and properly rent or buy. Seems like less work in the long run.
Military charity website goes back online
There's something about the possibility of it being real that makes it more compelling. With this video, the "real story" aspect was needed to raise it above the "meh" threshold to make it viral. People passing it around, knowing that it was the kind of thing that usually turns out to be a hoax, were engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief.

If something becomes boring when we face up to what we already believe about it, then I think there's something wrong with pretending it wasn't boring in the first place. If there was a shortage of mildly gratifying and amusing stuff on the internet, then I would condone any means for dealing with that shortage, but damn it, that is obviously not the case. There are enough mildly amusing novelty videos in the world that we don't need to give any of them this kind of crutch.

I may sound like the kind of hysterical religious nut who used to say that novels were lies, and therefore evil, because they were not literally true, but fiction is meant to be appreciated by people who know it is fiction. My standard is whether I have to cultivate a misconception about the provenance of something in order to enjoy it. The obvious weak point in my argument is that reading a novel arguably involves reading it as if it were true, and that the way we lie to ourselves when we pass around a "true" story that we know probably won't hold up is no different from the we lie to ourselves when reading a novel. That may be true. I think it's not.

Anyway, why should we care? Because this is exactly the form of most of the political propaganda passed around on the internet: birther theories, black helicopters, the stories about prison camps and impending roundups (recycled from the Clinton years for Obama,) and so on. I think a sizable proportion of people who pass them around know they're not true, and simply find them gratifying. Obviously they don't mind that a large number of people end up believing them. If we're going to criticize that as intellectually wrong, then we should meet the same intellectual standards. If we accept that it's intellectually fine, then we are left arguing that their means are acceptable, and they're just working for the wrong side, instead of working for the right side like us.
Did you use a PR firm to help place that article in the NYTimes? I'm looking for a good firm.
Thanks for mass downvoting all my comments, whoever you are.
New solar energy conversion process could revamp solar power production
Does this help with buzz updates? It bothers me that if I read buzz updates in gmail that they are still unread in google reader's "friends you follow" and vice versa.
I don't know that "marketing research" companies are not already generating databases from FB data like this
Looks interesting. What sort of market research have you done?
The way I see it, the "what about emergencies?" argument is not so much about someone in an emergency being able to reach you to ask for help or to inform you.

It's a matter of YOU having a phone to make an emergency call to 911 when/if you have the need.
No PR firm. We're just lucky that the CEO of our client used to be the head of Newsweek, so anything he does is a story.
I'm probably one of those rare individuals who doesn't value anonymity at all. In fact, I wish people were less anonymous (I'm slowly getting my wish as time goes on). I think if you're going to give your opinion, you shouldn't be afraid to own up to it. I don't pretend I'm so important that nefarious people, either from the public or private sectors, are going to use my personal information to do me harm.

I simply don't publish anything online on public websites that I don't want people to associate with me. That is to say I usually lack discretion, but that's who I am. If someone finds out I'm an atheist who drinks on the weekends and has reservations about the government and decides not to hire me because of it, I consider that a good thing. That's one less intolerant person I have to deal with on a professional basis.

I've not heard a compelling argument for hiding one's identity away. To me it just seems like paranoid delusions. If you're going to interact with a society moving increasingly online, you'd better be willing to come out of the shadows. If you aren't willing to, then just pull the plug.
The military would be fine with this arrangement.
"It's a new way to create content using visually appealing column and page-based layouts using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript."

Ah, that explains it then. Seriously, what is it?
Until two months ago, I had been cellphone-less for over a year. People around me knew this, and were often bothered by it, but most of them understood that it was my decision and that it didn't seriously impair me at working in the world. I was still very reachable by mail and MSN, as well as my home phone.
Knowing that I have absolute choice about when I'm reachable and that people know that I may not be reachable at some times was profoundly gratifying. What bothers me most about my cell phone is that people assume that I'll have it with me at all times, and that I'll pick it up if called. I haven't found a better way to kill this assumption than not having a phone.
The author states that this does not check a user's privacy settings, but as another participant in the thread points out[1], importing an address book to look for new contacts respects privacy settings (i.e. a 'new contact' will only show up if their privacy settings allow their profile to show up in search results).

[1]: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Aug/137
Um, it's easier than that. You can do this with the graph API. Although current (but undocumented) rate limits make it infeasible to do much with it.

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=josh@eventvue.com&ty....

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#search
I used to think shared space was a great alternative to car-centric streets but after reading David Hembrow's blog about bicycling in the Netherlands for a while it's clear that shared space is just a half-measure. If you want a society where people other than (mostly male) daredevils in their 20s and 30s can cycle then you need segregated biking facilities. Holland's percent of trips by bike (modal share) is around 30% (America is about 2%). It got there by having world-class segregated cycling facilities, not shared space.

David Hembrow on shared space: http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/11/shared-space.html

If you have the time check out John Pucher's "Cycling for Everyone: Lessons for Vancouver from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany": http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_video020.htm
Political decision by whom?
Barclays Capital to cut hundreds of jobs
Where did you find a tutor? Any recommendations of where to look?
How Black People Use Twitter
I'm a lover not a fighter.
I'd be interested to see the motorcycle accident/fatality rate controlled for rider demographics, using car accidents as the control. I bet the difference is much less than commonly indicated.

You should review the findings of the Hurt Report, the most comprehensive study of motorcycle safety to date (even though it's from the 70's):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_findings_in_the_Hurt_Re...

If you want to live: ride dirt bikes as a kid, attend a training course, stay sober, wear all the gear all the time (ATGATT!)

If you want to die: have a friend teach you how to ride in a parking lot, skip the helmet on short trips, drink one for the road, do not assume that everyone is trying to kill you all the time
Hmm, obviously you haven't written any serious http proxy/server that required to handle 10k+ of concurrent connections. Couple of thousands of sync connections is nothing in high performance servers.

There isn't much scheduling about coroutines, you wake up the coroutine on the event that it slept on (read/write/sleep), that's it. If you want to prioritize, you can do so, but with minimal advantage.

>Doing it efficiently is an art and the OS is a lot more efficient than you, even with all the context switching

At this point, I am pretty sure you don't understand context-switching and its implications, and you don't know how coroutines work.
I look for code over personality but I have learned that there are intolerable people who you just can't hire. Some people are literally crazy. They come in flavors of "don't touch my code", screaming rage fits, and crying emotional breakdowns.
I'd say simplifying wouldn't really work in today's world. e.g. enterprise software development: Things like calendar controls, auto-completing fields and sortable paginated tables - which are far more complex than what plain vanilla HTML offers - are client requirements these days.

Sure you can make nice games and distraction sites with the same technology, but then, that's what monitoring sotfware exists for (and like I mentioned in the other comment, I don't think technology solutions are particularly good to deal w/ distractions)
Not a graduate, but I met one of the founders of Postling at PR Camp last year and he spoke very highly of the program. It was a while ago, but I think he was saying that compared to YC there was more of a focus on business advice, and there were more contact hours with the mentors. I'm not sure to what extent that is true, but it certainly seems like a quality program that was run this way would be useful to some founders. Obviously different founders have different levels of experience and skills, so there probably isn't one best model, at least from the perspective of the founders.
<shake hands, nod heads, all is well>
Is there something like this for Chrome? It's the one thing I've missed making the switch from FF.
http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=P+%3D%3D+NP

The P vs NP is still an open problem :P
It's quite normal to be asked for money to something to eat, but in 20 years of saying, I'll buy you whatever you want to eat from this store, I've never been taken up on the offer.

Another thing (in London anyway) is to be asked for money to stay in a shelter overnight. Well the shelters are free, paid for by the local councils, and always have spare beds.

I think if anyone did ever say, I need the money to get high, I'd probably give it them, just because they'd be the first honest one...
Really? I've actually kinda grown to love it. What about it makes you dislike it so much?
What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a reader without any concept of an unread item count.

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf. Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list of things I haven't accomplished (and probably can't accomplish), a list that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been thinking so much about this stuff.)
Another feature I think would be really cool in a tool like this is that it could auto-discover which feeds you read often, even if you haven't subscribed to them. If it detects that you visit blog X often (either deliberately or from being redirected, tweets, etc.), it could recommend that you subscribe.
Me too, but I'm a fighter as well, so watch out ;-)

Another option would be a large firm that takes in cohorts onto a training programme a few times a year. I'm not normally a fan of "graduate programmes" but that might suit you.
Semi OT: Most of my browsing time is in Reader, and I got initially excited about this post since I thought what this was doing was something similar to Fever (http://feedafever.com/), but maybe more powerful.

What I really am looking for is a way to manage my Reader feeds so that links to similar sources (or similar stories) either get grouped or prioritized based on the number of shares a la Techmeme.

Here's the use case. When Google shut down Wave or when the EFF did their analysis of the Google/Verizon deal I had at least 20 feeds linking to the same story, which I didn't really need. I should be able to exclude my Tier 1 feeds so they don't get caught up in these rules (i.e., if Gruber talks about it I want to see it, no matter what). The rest of these stories get buried in a Folder similar to the Gmail spam folder (or label, more accurately); I don't see their unread count but they're there if I suspect I'm missing something.

Plus maybe a bonus option to exclude any stories based on productivity or 8-bit cupcakes.
Deflation allows personal buying power to increase holding income constant. Deflation is defined as a decrease in prices. You know what else counts as a price? The price of labor. I.e., wages. Average wages decreases under deflation, just like any other price. Deflation is not a magical money machine that makes us all richer.
Honda's selling new CVT-based automatics now, the spacey DN-01 and overkill-redesigned VFR1200. Very expensive and aimed at no discernable market (unlike the old Hondamatics you mentioned). I haven't seen a single one on the road yet.
Indeed but "economic rationality" is a narrow subset of rationality as a whole. And the lines I quoted above seemed to imply that charity is irrational, not just "economically irrational."
Sky wins trademark tiff with Skype
I'm a terrible writer.

I wrote a JS library that lays out text and images in pages and columns. Wrapped that into some decent UI for reading easily, and we're helping clients use that in order to create better digital publications.

Is that any better?
Right. That makes sense.

However, since this solution isn't spectacularly scalable, I'm not too worried.
Agreed. What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

You could try to improve this with ML or stasticial models, but I don't even think you'd have to get that sophisticated to make a big improvement.
A useful summary update is provided by Terry Tao here: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/update-on-deolalika...

There is also an interesting comment on the utility of such discussion here: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/update-on-deolalika...

Finally, a general overview with many links can be obtained here: http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Deolalik...
I actually have very similar thoughts on clojure versus racket. I admire both languges for different reasons, but if I were to pick one to get the job done it would be Clojure. I cry every time I see the idiomatic construct in any Scheme of converting a vector or string into a list just so you can do the normal core operations on it, and then converting it back to a vector or string, but this kind of code is quite common due to the design of almost every Lisp.

Another issue I have with racket, which the article touched on a little, is the overall lack of cohesion between different libraries and language features. I believe this is an unfortunate consequence of starting out with such a simple core language as all Scheme's do. Everything that is built has a different style to it and doesn't necessarily interoperate well with other parts of the language.

For example, structures are entirely orthogonal to objects and the class and interface system are entirely orthogonal to units, even though these two pairs of features can heavily overlap in their use cases.

When it comes down to it, if I want to get something done in Clojure I feel like I have a clear path as to how to go about it, but in Racket it seems much easier to get lost inside the language for the reasons mentioned in the article.
So, you mean that the locals can ignore traffic signs because they know the place? Like in "oh, yes, there's a speed limit, but it's useless, see, the street is safe enough, screw that". That could be actual quote, I've heard it so many times. And I guess it's much better to remove such sign and make the street actually look like it's not safe so you have to pay attention.

And of course, routine and automatization are a grave danger for any driver. Especially at the roads where the conditions are constantly changing. Traffic signs would just provide a false sense of security.
Ahh, well I carry a cellphone, but tend not to answer it. Whenever I've had the conversation, it was always about being reached, not making the 911 call.

(Edit: I guess you're personal behavior will probably dictate which conversation you have, reach-ability vs. emergency services).
A Good VC Story Gone Bad