skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing to see here. Abstinence is a much more stress and discomfort than drinking, especially when you suddenly stop after years of a heavy daily consumption.
It is extremely difficult thing to change your habits because you will face a completely different, unfriendly (literally - you will lose most of your connections when you stop - no one need a stressed/depressed and sick neurotic) world, which you need to learn to comprehend and love again.
The same type, but more intensive struggle awaits you after a sudden withdraw from a dope addiction - the world will be alien to you.
The problem with a booze or dope isn't about chemistry or organic damages, it is all about losing a connection with reality and the shock and discomfort to rediscover it after withdrawal.
Abstinence is worse than drinking, every drunkard or doper will tell you. Even after years, if you can stay away from it, each day will be a new challenge, new struggle. And each regression will drop you back below the zero.
This is the thing that kills you faster than booze itself.

btw, the only way out which may work more or less is about getting your mind stimulated and busy - traveling to the different part of the world (India and Muslim countries are the best), some hobby or business. There are a lot of life-beaten people who are traveling - running away from their past and from themselves. Especially in India.
Got a link for bacon? I haven't come across that in the context of programming tools (except insofar as tasty fried pig products are generally beneficial to programmer productivity).
There's many cases where you might not want to create technical drawings but might want access to them.

I worked on a project years ago for the US Navy. At the time the average warship had something like 5 tons of paper documentation on board so they can do wartime repairs at sea if necessary. But 5-tons of paper docs are risky on a warship since they're combustable and easily destroyed.

Putting all these docs in digital form reduces the weight and risk (doesn't burn and easily replicated). Having that information available via an iPad, iPhone or other portable tablet device would be very handy, indeed.
My point has nothing to do with spammers or URL shorteners -- that was just an example. See above if you care to know my actual point.

But this is probably related. I think the anti-spam measures are probably going too far. I'm not a spammer. No site I've ever attempted to submit has been been a spam site, an ad site, or anything else self-serving. Yet my most recent attempts to submit have been stomped on, accusing me of "wasting my time" by attempting to spam HN.

Here's the most recent article I tried to post -- you judge whether I'm submitting spam sites: http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/8/29/startups-old-peopl...
As an architect, what would be really helpful is a great pdf viewer with enough speed and storage capacity to hold large sets of drawings (which can approach 50 to 100 megs). The way to do it, of course, is via a webapp so you don't have to locally store the data. Having autocad on an iphone is silly as it would be radically difficult to try to use a cad package with such a limited screen. But being able to mark up drawings on site - that is useful - with a red pencil and text, etc.
The kindle is the nicest reader, definitely.

But until there is a way to digitally loan a book to a friend, I'm never buying a kindle book again.
"Police" don't care about anything. Individual police officers care about guilt or innocence, or don't. Please don't commit the type error of ascribing an emotion to a group noun.
> I initially try to accomplish X in the simplest way possible by breaking it down into trivial steps. I know there is a famous programming quote that pertains to this process, but I can't find it right now

Maybe this is it?

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a strings of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity. -- The Tao of Programming
Fire escapes are underused except for when you need them the most.
And please don't forget, Autocad was originally written in Lisp :)
So, just so I follow, your proposal is to impoverish cabbies and drive the skill level of the average driver down as low as it can go while increasing the number of vehicles on the streets in a city where it already takes an hour to go a mile?

May that you never be in charge of taxi service.
IBM Names Itself Worst Company For Fixing Critical Software Security Bugs
Many modern televisions have D-SUB connectors; if you have a desktop that is near your TV, you can also get a second video card and simply connect it to your TV like any other monitor. Even if you only have DVI-out, you can convert losslessly from DVI to D-SUB with an inexpensive adapter.
The limited supply of taxi medallions is a good thing otherwise city streets would be clogged with taxis even more so than now.
Allow employees to take sick time as needed. You'll find that overall they will actually take less sick time than if it is regulated.
Perhaps it's because the heaviest drinkers spend many evenings safely at home passed out on the couch, while the abstainers are out incurring the normal risks of daily life.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned monofur yet. http://eurofurence.net/monofur.html

It's my favourite programming font because it's extremely readable but retails a little flare.
I like the game programming story about the black triangle to illustrate this point: http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html
I'm at work. Can someone at least tell me why I shouldn't click?
Either way that shows that the employee is not good, if a person can't handle to do his/her own tasks one by one that person should not be work as a developer. BTW generally assigned person decides how long will it take to finish a task (a task can't take longer than 4+ hours if it's needs to be split into smaller chunks)
That is a major pain, but the alternative — doing nothing — is an even worse use of your time. If you're fairly competent and resourceful, you're more likely to talk yourself out of doing something than you are to run into a dead end halfway through. And even if you do find that you truly can't finish, does that put you in a worse place than if you'd spent the time watching CSI?
HN Idea: HN alerts Att PG
Hey, how about having an alert system, say I'm interested in SEO etc, when a post is mentioned on HN with more than (threshold I set) points, I get an alert by email of it's presence...

How many Kama points do I get for this as a bonus and any chance of some shares :P
I haven't used it myself, but it was fun following the development of Harmony: http://get.harmonyapp.com/ - which does online site creation and hosting.
A Q&A with Simon Klose, Director of “The Pirate Bay — Away From Keyboard”
for the more adventurous there are also hydroponic window 'farms': http://www.windowfarms.org/
Quick nitpick: The Court that issued the judgment on the GPS case was the 9th circuit (not district). Otherwise, I do agree. The right to privacy is something that is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution. It only exists because it was read in by Justice Douglas as a side product of "penumbras and emanations" of the Bill of Rights. The balance between freedom and government protection has always been tenuous. After 9/11 we have certainly seen a tipping toward the latter. Only time will tell if this trend continues, but in a world in which technology can reveal even our naked bodies, I certainly hope not.
It's interesting. Are there any performance improvements?
I'm shocked they felt it necessary to mention that it's not worth your time to grow your own wheat. That's possibly the most obvious gardening suggestion ever.
He reverses the negative image used in press releases of the new airport body scanners, which basically shows a naked woman.
But do you do that high-level design in e.g. Solidworks? I don't have any experience with that side of the industry, I'm just curious and a bit surprised.
backscatter nudity
Thunderbird + the "Virtual Identity" addon lets you do that
I've been using it for about 8 months now and I have been nothing but impressed with these guys. It has proven very stable even from their earlier releases and very snappy.
because you should be working.
Not me, but the privacy trade-off is pretty good. :)
I missed absolute numbers.

Talk for example about false positives in airport security. An error rate of 'only 0.01%' looks pretty good at first. But if you put in the actual numbers, you see a very different image.

Airport Frankfurt had about 50 million passengers in 2009. An false positive rate of 0.01% would cause trouble for 5000 people. Each day about 13 people would be falsely accused.
We need a Hacker News Hall of Fame for comments like this. Succinct, polite, thorough, organized, and immensely helpful.
There are airport scanner photos of a naked woman.

This isn't really a 99% case is it? He's saying that someone making fun of a scanned persons genitalia is part of the 1% where it doesn't work. I would argue that 100% of the time this practice is demeaning. I think that using spy satellites on American Citizens (I'm Canadian) is a bad idea 99% of the time. It's the other way around. You're catching the bad guys maybe 1% of the time or less, not the other way around.

Where is even the 1% of crimes prevented by taking naked pictures of women and children? What is the benefit if the bomb won't be in underwear anymore, but an orifice.

"Sometimes the people in charge of tracking you have ulterior motives -- which are very easy to have when there's no warrant involved. That pesky 1%"

Yeah, my tracker is always calling me out when I'm off my diet.
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Just build it on top of the http://twitter.com/newsyc20 http://twitter.com/newsyc50 or http://twitter.com/newsyc100 twitter stream.
Basically it includes some screenshots of the supposed effectiveness of the Airport scanner... e.g. a nude woman, then has the images inverted. I didn't read the article too closely, I'm not sure that the author understands those images are from an image catalog that has nothing to do with the airport scanner, but have been misrepresented as being so. Can't provide citation, but saw that on an earlier article from HN about a month ago.
It's definitely faster, though I don't have any actual numbers (sorry about that). Developer performance has increased significantly though, since we we're no longer stuck in "step-state" hell.
Text-only Google cache

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=c...
I don't disagree with those examples, and I can't pretend to sympathize with a blind Japanese person reading Braille, for example.

I do think that Japanese is an extremely complex language, and ability to recognize characters and vocabulary are closely intertwined. Kanji is entrenched, but is it necessary? Probably not strictly speaking.
Unlikely Acad is heavily DirectX
What if you inverted the product idea and started with an online object repository that was presented as an API for search, retrieval and instantiation. You would include the basic design methods for parametric designs in your API, but you wouldn't be directly challenging AutoCAD's desktop business.
It seems like the missing piece these days is not the design tools, but the marketplace and the process of taking a design and validating and manufacturing it. If you could network a number of machine shops of varied capabilities and material specialties into a single point of contact for rapid assembly of completed designs with a marketplace for designers to sell their work, that could be a powerful combination.

There are already a few companies dabbling in this space http://www.shapeways.com/ being the one I'm most familiar with. The most interesting approach would be if you could find a market niche that had idle capacity and a need for creative custom solutions that was currently going unmet.
Also, for Windows/.NET: mdbg.exe is a .NET command-line debugger that can be helpful when there is a crash on a test or client system as it is portable. Also learn how to take a memory dump and analyze it with Windbg, it has saved me hours particularly when analyzing problems with complex applications like webapps running under IIS.

More in terms of tools: if you are tracking down a memory leak, get a memory profiler, don't guess blindly at what is leaking. What can be done in an hour of tracing rooted objects with windbg takes five minutes with a profiler. Likewise with performance profiling.
For blackberries, do what the hipsters call "foraging" or what folks when I was a kid called "picking them" from wild bushes. Cheap.

(Make sure you're not close to a road, garbage dump, etc. And they may not grow in your area. Void where prohibited.)

After going to the trouble of doing so, you might just prefer to spend the money for a little tub of them. Still, it's an option.
Or worse, somebody on site redlines an A0 drawing, the changes doesn't get back to the office and 18months later you are trying to fit an elevator into a shaft that is 2" too small in a finished sky scraper.
Because "Follow" on Twitter means just that ... follow this person's stream of messages.

What next?

"No" should mean "Yes", "Unsubscribe" should mean you're searching for Viagra, "Delete account" should mean just until next time you log in?

Oh wait.
Strong agreement. You learn a lot more by doing than by fantasizing about doing some day. You'll also get a lot more mileage out of your book (or web) learning with just a little practical experience. I guarantee you, within 2 weeks of hanging out your shingle you'll have a radically different, improved perspective on where your actual business challenges are. (The stupid, detail-oriented mechanics of business like "charge customers' credit cards" and "incorporate" and "do bookkeeping" paralyzed me for so long prior to actually starting. It turns out that these matter so much less than e.g. marketing it isn't even funny, for my business at least.)

My one suggestion: get a mentor. Plumb them for advice. Thomas has taught me more about consulting (beginning with "You know, you could do consulting.") in three minute chunks than I managed to learn in my entire life, even in six years while employed by businesses which did consulting.
Ask HN: Please review my Android game
My first Android app is done and in beta. Please try it on your Android device. Thanks!

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.mhillsystem.starxscape
The desk sucked, but it was college furniture. My new desk is a little better. :)
I think there's some explanation in biomechanics and different courses of blood flow, but even more than that, whiteboard allows you to share your findings and troubles with the colleagues which is probably why you needed whiteboard in the first place :)
Never mind my other reply, I hadn't seen your response above. I had a quick look at Rhino, I hadn't heard about it before. I'm a bit surprised that you work with the same tools as e.g. an industrial designer, although when I think of it I can understand, with the lack of expressiveness in the specialized packages and all.
How about shopify
Dealbreaker for me: Piwik cannot do page-specific stats.

Everything else was in Piwik's favor, but I'm going to have to use GA because of this one requirement.
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137928

It's just a really small rspec clone. Compact, expressive, gets the job done.
I don't get why those sites are invite only. I'm a total beginner concerning UX, and I'd like to learn, but I can't because the content of those sites is inaccessible for non-logged in users. What's the point ?
I share your aversion to debuggers. Everyone is different, and plenty of people like them - but I've always thought that they consume brain cycles that otherwise could be engaging with the code. That's why I like print(); it keeps my head in the code.
There are a number of programs, but most designers I know prefer Rhino (rhino3d.com) and the Grasshopper (grasshopper3d.com) plugin. Rhino is now adding Python (and OSX) support, but they still have a ways to go.
Reminds me of Hearst: "You furnish the images, I'll furnish the war!" He got images like this one of a woman being strip-searched NSFW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spaniards_search_women_189... which (he knew) was totally fabricated, and published them to rally pro-war sentiment.
If this site/app is entirely user-dependent on getting garage sales listings, I don't see it gaining much traction.

For Pittsburgh, there was one garage sale listed on GarageDollar. On Craigslist's Pittsburgh garage sale listing there are loads posted every day. The local newspaper's online classified ads listing for garage sales has even more.

Also, for me, there were no controls available on the embedded map. The scroll wheel on my mouse works to zoom in and out, but not terrible intuitive.
What A Double-Dip Recession Would Mean For Investors & Entrepreneurs
It's crazy; just about every web application in existence requires a login and this still isn't a solved problem. I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.
The keyboard isn't actually all that large. Those are 30 inch monitors. Total horizontal screen space is 4.25 feet.

The drawer was surprisingly comfortable as a wrist rest, too--but I tended to alternate between in the drawer and on the desk, depending on how much paper I was working with.
One of the most productive programming techniques that I have used (it's saved my ass) is to make sure that most of my code is unit tested. In the short-term you will feel like you're moving much slower. In the long term, it'll pay dividends.
A third-party cannot ship a flash plugin that supports Hulu. Not working 5% of the time causes nasty support issues.
Oh, but the flavor of wild, ripe blackberries is so much better then even the ones I can get at the farmers market. Along with tomatoes, they have the biggest difference in flavor home-grown vs bought. Also blackberries myst be the easiest thing in the world to grow (here in the bay area anyway). Getting rid of them when you are done might be another story...
i went through several pages of this blog and one thing really stands out to me: why are there so many webapps for tracking billable time? it seems like a problem that's been solved at least a hundred times.
I've used it for several months. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics as some have implied. However, it is useful for getting early feedback on your marketing spend. For example, if you turn on an expensive Google SEM campaign, you can start watching the visitors in real time. I've used this to find negative keywords and block them instantly, without waiting for Google Analytics reports to catch up.
How about "polluters" instead of "thief"?

I need to change the oil on my lawn mower. I could spend the 45 minutes it would take to get to an approved oil disposal facility--or I could just dump it in the strip of weeds next to my fence.

The latter will cause no measurable harm. Hell, it might even kill some of the weeds that I don't like there, but because of the way the ground slopes down as it approaches the fence I can't reasonably mow. Even if some of my oil makes it the 50 feet or so down to the ditch that carries rainwater runoff to (eventually) Puget Sound, it will be so dilute by then there will be no measurable harm.

So, is it OK for me to just dump my oil?

No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound.

The situation is similar with intellectual property. We've set up a public resource--the IP law framework--which gives intellectual goods certain legal attributes designed to make them behave similar to real property, so as to allow for the use of the same economic systems that we use for dealing with physical goods to be applied to intangible goods.

When an individual ignores that framework, he's behaving just like someone dumping oil on their weed patch. They cause no measurable harm, but if a lot of people did it, it would destroy a public resource.
Rapportive?
VLC's user interface sucks, which is why I use MPC. Anything to avoid WMP.

In particular, adjusting zoom, aspect ratio, clipping area etc. with MPC, with the numeric keypad, is completely trivial, but a major pain in the neck with VLC. (E.g. how do you zoom to 102%? To 94%? How do you crop the top 8 pixels, because there's fuzz from overscan there?)

And keyboard shortcuts! Alt-Enter is nice and simple to use with MPC. With VLC, F11 goes full screen but still leaves control gunk visible; Ctrl+H removes the gunk, but - believe it or not - also disables F11! In full screen (F11) and controls hidden with Ctrl+H, it's surprisingly awkward to get back out again. Yes, you can use the "other" full screen by double-clicking with the mouse, but at that point it's clear that it's already lost.
Since it's assumed that you already own the land in question, they're only looking at marginal cost of the tree itself. I don't see a problem with this.
Yep, that's another option. Where I live they are very rare and the ones that are there are small and not many berries per plant. Gathering then from your own garden is very quick. Certainly quicker than the extra time you spend in the shop for them. And the ones in the shop are usually not ripe enough for my tastes. I like them sweet not sour.

Also buying 3 kg for making jam costs you a fortune. You can buy a jar of blackberry jam for less than €1, but buying that amount of fresh blackberries easily costs €10.
But by people who design something. Using the verb is entirely appropriate.
To put XBox Gold into complete perspective, it's an update service and a matchmaking service which is being vastly overcharged for with no competition allowed.

It does absolutely nothing you can't get for free on PCs.

And you can't even have dedicated servers so when Bob the host's housemate starts downloading a torrent you all go into sllooowww mode before you all get kicked.

Gold, or no internet play.

It sucks.
Reviewer Falls Hard for KDE 4.5
Specific Goals in Writing a Jane Eyre Essay
A common writing assignment for literature coursework is the writing of the Jane Eyre essay. This essay will be based on the novel by Charlotte Bronte and in order to write an interesting essay, you need to know the novel in depth. This will enable you to select one of many areas to concentrate on in your essay.
I know AutoCAD is 2D, but can you imagine how awesome Autodesk Inventor or Solidworks on iPhone would be? They could make use of the Gyro to rotate the 3D model on screen. That way, if you modeled a building, you could put the camera 'inside' the building and look around just by moving and turning the device. You could completely visualize and walk through your house before building it
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They are undoubtedly amongst the best promotional tools today. That is why thousands of business employers as well as industrialists are nowadays inclining towards A4 folder printing at a very rapid pace.
FWIW, my parents were an actor / community theatre director and author / scriptwriter respectively. The nature of those kinds of work means that they were almost always at home.
Advocating the move from 'entrepreneur friendly' to 'structurally healthy'
To be honest, I don't think that's a big deal - 'false positives', whatever those might be in the case of backscatter machines, can be easily caught at the second stage - a pat-down. The bigger issue is blindly forcing everyone to effectively strip naked for the authorities before they are allowed to board a plane.
Besides supplemental uses on the current iOS devices, if there were to be an iMac with touch down the road, this would be a good first step getting ready for it.