skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go to ebay and just watch how those items with a solid white background and at least somewhat professional photographed, as opposed to the crappy cell-phone shot pictures of items. Better picture=more money.
Should governments take any steps to boost exports?
I am reminded of Steve Pavlina's article "Go for a Presence Walk". I have submitted it here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592732

He takes walks with 100% attention to the immediate sensual inputs. It's basically a kind of meditation.
Yup, I got that wrong. I was overplaying it for rhetorical effect anyway :-)
SEO for games, social or otherwise, is almost always going to be challenging. Any idiot could rank the official Zynga site for Farmville or practically any query with "Farmville" in it. That doesn't really help, though.

1) To the extent that someone is actually searching for Farmville, it is because their business/media juggernaut already has succeeded in reaching that person. Everything after that is about filling transactional intent, which is much less complicated since Zynga has and always will have a total lock on transactions with their brand.

2) Game companies have a lot of difficulty getting non-branded queries to work as a distribution channel. Really, what would you type in to find Farmville prior to finding Farmville. "online farming game"? That's probably near the head of the distribution, and if you rank #1 for it that will get you a few dozen signups a month. That won't move the needle for Zynga. You also probably couldn't scale your way to meaningful numbers through X,000 pieces of content with each one converting a handful of people. So you either go with industrial scale generation and become Demand Media, or you go with the much surer viral/paid ad channels.

SEO is really, really good at answering specific needs your prospective customers know they have (Demand Media really, really gets this at a fundamental level). Games typically don't work like that, transactional/navigational queries aside.

Of possible note: there are quite a few publishers cashing in on Zynga's lackluster SEO efforts by creating pages responsive to queries like [farmville strategies], [farmville crops], and the like. Those get decent volume but wouldn't result in new account creation. Monetization seems to be a mix of affiliate products and generic backfill AdSense like, e.g., Evony.
I've heard conflicting reports of reception and/or speed with Clear. Clear apparently isn't good for things like gaming (horrible latency) and/or large file transfers.
Yes. No. Yes - I am not that important.
I don't know, because the couch potatoes are usually the ones delivering the "too much time" proclamation.
sometimes, but sometimes not. think twitter, foursquare and the similar: phenomenal idea but horrible execution.
Too much information? Given the muddy waters moot swims in, I'd say it was nothing unexpected, and less then feared.

Much more interesting is that he didn't provide the IP address... but the FBI requested activity logs for that particular IP. Wonder how they got to know it?
I was rather surprised to see that (that subset of) women outnumbered men in terms of sexual activity. I wonder what their overall trends are like.
Well, to be fair, he didn't actually publish it. Especially not in the conventional meaning of scientific publishing.
Agreed. I would be pissed at whoever publicized a draft I had sent in a private email.
We recently moved from a family of iPhones to a Droid and Droid Incredible. I can't believe we didn't make the move sooner, although I suppose the Incredible isn't old enough to have made it much sooner. Regardless, for those not wanting as large of a phone, check out the Droid 2, due out imminently:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/see-what-droid-does-...
I don't disagree with you, but surely the interesting thing is that there is acknowledgment in essentially mainstream media that there could be Life After Google. I think about three years ago that notion was almost inconceivable for a lot of people.
I agree with your tethering comment, but FWIW there are a handful of tethering apps you can get without rooting Android that allow any user to tether for free.
this is not always possible. most ask for and press to know your current salary
Thanks! We're working on getting attachments working by next week. I've heard that others have problems with Tender too — hopefully we'll be able to fix those.
Talk about burying the lede! iPhone users have more sex.

Has OkCupid done any investigations of relationship pseudoscience/superstition (astrology, biorhythms, etc.) using their data?
Seriously. I have a job I never imagined having, it pays my bills but is killing my soul. I can't wait for people to start hiring again, I will leave in a heartbeat. It's not the money, it's about doing something fulfilling.
TwitZip: The startup that created Twitter accounts for nearly all U.S. ZIP Codes
The is very true, a friend of mine is an accountant and early on in his career changed jobs every year for four years. In that time he doubled his salary. I also managed to bump my salary 30% by quitting a company and coming back a year later.
Not a bad idea — one of the things we wanted to limit to higher accounts was whitelabeling. Re: no free plan: I don't know if this would work - won't people want to try it longer, and wouldn't a free plan work towards our favor in word-of-mouth?
> Using a flash properly can and does lead to a better photograph, but it takes a lot of practice.

I recognize that my P&S camera isn't fast enough to take pictures in low light without the flash, but are there other situations where I should be using a flash?

Generally, using a flash makes my pictures look "cheap" (better than blurry, I suppose). Even when there is strong backlighting and I need to use the flash to balance it out, it still looks wrong.

Much to my wife's consternation, I usually tend to push the no-flash as much as possible (I've missed quick-moving children and other shots because of this). I suppose if I used the flash I would have actually captured the moment, but I don't think I've really seen a picture I've taken with the flash that I've found to be remarkable looking.
Specialized lawyer or tax advice sounds about right to me, especially if you can get a well-credentialed individual.

As Patio pointed out, regulated activities are another possible option.

Anything with a high barrier of entry and information-based.
That's an interesting idea, though I don't know if it would be the best or easiest way to structure it. Thanks, though!
The article links to this article (via the ninja picture):

http://mettadore.com/ruby/so-you-want-to-hire-a-ninja-do-you...

Which seems to do a much better job of addressing the point.
Definitely helped me to refine my beliefs a bit; finally got by unscathed: TFFFFTFFTTFFFFFFF
Latest Mac dev, 6.0.472.25 dev - with Don't Break the Chain, Concentrate, website screenshot thing, Evernote, and User-Agent spoofer (which doesn't work.)
Ask HN: Standing workstations
To anyone with experience using a standing desk on a daily basis: do you recommend using a treadmill or simply standing in place? How did you go about making your workstation, or if you bought it, what did you buy and can you recommend it to others?
Yahoo Mail (leanneksanchez)
"100% attention to the immediate sensual inputs"! that's the geekiest description of meditation that i have ever heard. in other words: awesome.

walking meditation what it is usually called, but i love the term "presence walk".
All I use it for is non-wikipedia search and maps, which I don't use all too often anyway.
I can download 175 MB or 4 GB bittorrent downloads just fine. It's getting things uploaded which takes a little persistence.

Latency is horrible. I consider this a plus -- no temptation.
"Password hashing scheme" refers exclusively to the algorithm used to transform a plaintext password into a ciphertext value (whether it's a hash or derived-key).

The rest of your library is the part you want to spend your effort on. Make it easy to use, make it flexible, put in some great features like a user admin panel. That stuff is the domain of the webapp library builder. Just trust the crypto part to the cryptographers, and use bcrypt/scrypt.
I read that as well (can't recall where).

Here is one reference I did find:
http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/DEA3250notes/sitting.html
I think the question "Can you even stop using it?" is closer to "Do you even have that choice anymore?" rather than "Can you avoid going to Google branded websites?". There are so many services either owned or somehow connected to Google that it would take some level of expertise to completely avoid sending at least some of your data to Google.

From Doubleclick to Google Analytics to reCAPTCHA, you can encounter Google without ever bringing up google.com or YouTube.
How to get a job at Twitter: a Flavorpill guide
Google is actually in a unique situation where everyday users could continue to take advantage of free services and cost Google bandwidth/electricity while completely ignoring ads.
Tethering is also built into Froyo, which I've been happily using since May.

Also, "no cellular data while you're in a call" is a CDMA vs GSM issue, not an Android/iOS/Blackberry issue.
The problem is that the FCC tried to just dictate net neutrality, carriers took it to court, and the court said that the FCC had overstepped its authority. So the FCC wants to get the authority to impose whatever rules it wants, but doesn't have it yet. The Google-Verizon deal could preempt legislative efforts to give the FCC that broad authority, and instead prompt efforts to get something like this deal either embedded in legislation or agreed to voluntarily by the major players.

See http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/07/business/la-fi-fcc-c... for confirmation of the FCC's position.
Ask HN: what is the best perl book?
I need to relearn Perl after not doing it for about 10 years. What is the best book these days?
Hey Matt, thanks for the advice. Some of this stuff, I've done, and some I'm still working on. As for me, I'm a former management consultant, my experience was primarily in strategy, operations and sales/marketing. For the last year I've been consulting and advising startups bringing some of things I learned over the last five years to help out. Those projects have ranged from building pricing/marketing strategy, customer segmenting, product differentiation, etc. - basically everything non-technical from UI to customer service.

I have talked to potential customers either friends, friends-of-friends, or random people over the weekend and with an app price of around five bucks, the first 30-40 have been interested. That didn't cost me anything except time at an event I would have went to anyway. That may work for initial sales, launch or testing, but that isn't longterm. For that I've put together a list of vendors and 3rd parties that I can reach out to when we have a better mockup (most of whom I know are already looking for this) about advertising, publicity etc. Long term I think its more about getting in front of the right people and less about ad-word buys or marketing.

I had read that post, and put quite a bit of work into testing the idea to be sure it wasn't just solving a personal itch and you're totally right that work didn't come through in my initial post, thanks.
My favorite is juggling. I learned how recently after someone on HN posted a link to a Youtube video. At first I found it required a lot of concentration, but now it just takes my mind off coding for a few minutes during a break and it gives my wrists a little stretch away from the keyboard.
I rather wish there were a legal version of HN, for stories like this which are interesting to only a subset of readers. I suppose one could comment on the article page, but per-page commenting doesn't foster persistent discussion communities (hence the comment sewer on most newspaper websites).
It would be interesting to see if a similar curve exists for movies depicting sex (not necessarily nudity).
Wow, I got it totally wrong. When I read this in my RSS, I read "firms" instead of films and I was wondering what all these businesses were doing portraying killing.

Then when I read the title correctly on HN, I remembered the graph going downward and thought it was weird that films were showing less killing. I clicked through and was surprised to see that the x-axis was descending chronological order.

So now that I finally get the graph, let me throw out a WAG: with the end of the military draft, the almost complete departure of workers from agriculture, and increasing safety in society, violence of any form and especially death is not a real part of most peoples' lives. It is therefore fair game for fantasy and storytelling because there is little negative emotional experience attached to it, but there is a high degree of novelty.
Can similar percentages be calculated for cursing, sex, blasphemy, atomic-mutated monsters? (At least one of those probably peaked in the late 50s.)
We made a decision to use an email platform and abandon a helpdesk solution in order for us to respond to issues quicker and more efficiently, which provided our customers with a better customer service.
Thanks! Yeah... I'll try to move things around to get it to work.
We Live in a Jungle of Artificial Intelligence that will Spawn Sentience
1st amendment protection for blogs doesn't cover death threats...we hope.
It is sad for the author, but not because he will join that list - he is not. He is going to join the much less famous list of people who attempted to prove a very difficult problem, did so in a professional way, and while they ultimately failed they did advance science.

And whomever leaked that is going to end up on the shitlist of an entire community of researchers.
You can get your data exported from most Google services. There are instructions here: http://www.dataliberation.org/

The problem is importing this data into some other service.
Which helpdesk did you use that didn't really work out?
Virtualization and over-subscription: breaking the 100% utilization barrier
They don't necessarily agree with each other, though, so I'm not so sure how "authoritative" individual blog comments are (see e.g. Bradfield's followup to Jutla -- "And I don’t understand your comment about it not being known whether mu-calculus has a hierarchy of expressibility in alternation. It’s 15 years since I (and independently Lenzi) proved that it did!")
The talk about "hyper local" and relate it to the 5 digit zip which can still encompass thousands of people. Hyper local to me would be if the went to the 9 digit zip, which would be basically a city block, or apartment building/complex. Of course if they went to the 11 digit number in the postnet bar code (9 digit zip + 2 digit delivery point) that might be going too far, essentially each individual house or apartment.
Of course, there are. The question though is whether there is enough of a correlation with third variables to lead one to believe 'possessing iphone' = 'possessing more sex partners' is likely not causal? As GP and other commenters point out, there are enough.
It's odd, because that hasn't been my experience with Android at all. I've got a Droid (not X, not 2, just the original), and the only times I've never needed to shut it down. In fact, the only times it's been off have been from me forgetting to charge it. Last I checked, my uptime was 550+ hours with no sluggishness at all.
How can the little guy in his garage out innovate a Skype or Pandora and then bring his wireless Internet service to the masses?

I can't believe that so many people have so little perspective. By far the most important tier in the proposal is called "the Internet". If history is any indication, "the little guy" is guaranteed to out innovate, time and time again. And as a result the service people will care about most will be called "the Internet".

Sure, Verizon is free to prioritize traffic so that telephone calls don't get dropped and people's TV works even when a DoS attack is going on. But neither Verizon nor any other provider can afford to make the internet suck, and as long as it doesn't suck the guy in the garage is free to deliver what we haven't dreamed of yet.

Don't forget, we've seen the tiered internet before. It is what broad access started with in the mid-90s where services like AOL and Juno had their nice little walled gardens and, on the side, offered access to the big scary internet. And guess what? The walled gardens weren't attractive to consumers then, and won't be now.

So if the utilities go along with this agreement then breathe a big sigh of relief, and get on with your lives. Because it gives them all the rope to hang themselves trying to do what won't work, and give you the guaranteed free space to innovate to your heart's content.
ah ok that probably explains it. I was viewing this on my phone, thought this was referring to the main article.
I think you and I have different definitions of "extremely simple".
With the iPhone, I felt the need to tether because
surfing the web is so clunky.

Can you elaborate?
Does anyone else see a trend in this migration to async style programming? I've been working on a similar issue for a while now involving a similarity search engine with nested state machines.

I can't quite tell if my perception of this trend is skewed by my current perspective or if there are more people exploring this model of programming. IMHO, some things get much harder to reason about without some good tools.
hahaha, that's hilarious.

1) It doesn't solve the problem at all as the drunks don't even notice the deterrent
2) If the drunks were aware enough to notice, they could simply pee at an angle to avoid backsplash - but I imagine they'd be too drunk to think of that simple solution
Interesting.

Seems this depends on path-dependent types (x.T in the example) ?

Do you think it's possible to fix the type system to avoid this without throwing away large parts of it?

Is there are a relevant scala trac ticket?
Here's the problem: to non-programmers programming is magic. How does a non-programmer hire a programmer? How do they manage a programming project?

The answer tends to be that they don't, they get lucky or they get unlucky. They don't have any protections from getting taken to the cleaners. From spending $10 million on a VBA + Access abomination that's far more trouble than it's worth. But they may be so unsophisticated when it comes to software that they don't know they've been taken for a ride until years later.

Compare that to, say, construction of a new bank building. A bank president knows that if they spend $X million they'll get a new building, with high probability. There may be some problems along the way but they for sure won't end up spending $X million on nothing, or on a cardboard box with a "BANK" sign written in crayon on the side. It's understandable that they might be a bit leery of dipping their feet in the IT waters.
> someone who made a living from his python book

The full text of Dive into Python is available online, for free. And he refuses to update it, so I wouldn't say this guy's living depends on that book.

Let. It. Go.

Is Zed replying to every single thread about your work? Not that I've seen.
I've skimmed the paper, but it's way over my head. It would take me years of study to understand everything in this paper.

(I'm confident that I could do so if I wanted to -- but my expertise lies in entirely different directions.)
Genius UI - 1-800-Got-Junk Cost Estimator
When I wanted to try a standup desk, I just took my regular desk and jacked it up. I used 5-gallon plastic buckets attached to some wood, but you could use anything really.

This way, I got to feel out a standup desk for no cost, and got to experiment with different heights and configurations before I invested in one. For example, I initially thought I'd want to get a tall stool for the times I was tired of standing. After a few days with my standup desk, it never even occurred to me to sit.

Once I knew I loved a standup desk, and knew what height I wanted, I found the Ikea UTBY desk to be just right and super cheap: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S49843462
I wondered whether that was the value prop, because 80% of that stuff you get "for free" with Slicehost and Linode. Backups, maybe?
Designing for the Mind
I blame motoblur lol.
The only time I've rebooted my nexus one has been for updates.
How is the Incredible? I'm about to get one on Friday when my $50 credit comes in.
I got this reaction from a few people after the Tau Manifesto came out (http://tauday.com/). The thing is, I don't have too much time on my hands; taking a week off to write and launch the Tau Manifesto was expensive. And yet, it's clearly the awesomest thing I've ever done, and I haven't regretted it for a nanosecond.

P.S. I also, from time to time, enjoy watching TV. Don't judge. ;-)
That would go under bug fixes. But you could help us by filing tickets on trak. The general issue (type volatility) is well known, but you have discovered a loophole which wasn't.
Oh, it actually is JavaScript.

But I still don't understand why it should be plain HTML?
Amazon Is Said to Look at Hardware Beyond Kindle
Sorry, I'm writing very badly today. We didn't post an ad for Chicago, even though we're actively hiring there, because we feel like we have pretty good candidate outreach in Chicago already; that, and we wanted to see how Github job ads did.
su echo x.x.x.x google.com >> /etc/hosts

where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the non-Google search engine you wish to use. ie. ping http://www.gigablast.com/
I can only speak of myself, but I don't feel that stop using Google's products would be that hard. I have already two other e-mail accounts which I use in different context, and I actually use different clients for each (pine and mutt via ssh, and gmail's web-interface for gmail). Bing maps is already better in some places than Google's, so I use them both. I'm not liking Google's new image search at all, and I'm beginning to think if I should begin to use Bing's, as it has provided more accurate results (in the cases I have tried it), and has better UI (imho). The list goes on...

The most problematic thing to replace would atm be Android. Nokia's offerings aren't quite there yet, Apple would require bit different mindset, and Windows Mobile is...well Windows Mobile. But I'm not sure if it would be that bad to step back to bit dumber phones (meaning mainly Symbian here). Although I haven't even tried any Android device, so maybe it has something amazing what I haven't realized.
As far as I know the FBI didn't catch Eichmann in Argentina at all--the Mossad did.
Can one language be better than another?
I'm a nearly broke developer/entrepreneur and felt like venting
I have actually seen some rather amazing spreadsheets before, but I think of their creators less as ninjas and more as... perhaps mad scientists?
While I usually enjoy articles from okcupid, I found this one pretty disappointing, especially given I've seen good statistical analysis from them in the past.

This is just a series of classic correlation versus causation mistakes. Even beyond the purely statistical view of the issues here, it is clear to anyone with some basic knowledge of photography that most of their conclusions are flawed.

Hopefully they'll correct some of the wording to remove logical implication or just do a better job next time.
Ask HN: When did you realize your passion for programming?
I'm wondering because it seems to have a considerable barrier to entry, at least compared to other less intellectually rigorous fields.

So what was the turning point that made you realize that you had a passion for the hacker lifestyle? Or was there no distinct point in time, just a gradual increase of interest?