skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is sort of like complaining that Safeway can't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's.

And in fact, Safeway doesn't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's. It's ice cream, not apples and oranges.

Apple is in a few markets where they serve a large majority of the market (music players being the obvious). There is probably room for Apple to improve on those products, but I suspect most rational people would not claim Apples products in those markets are as poorly made as most of Microsofts products. Effectively, it is not the unfair comparison you claim.
Soccer kick leads to new physics equation
Nope. I hate the new Futurama episodes.
Monkeys aren't donkeys! Stop messing with my head!
The sun probably isn't in focus.

I don't know what infinity is for a lens like that, but it's probably further away than LEO.
Labour recruiters 'trafficked Thai workers' to Hawaii
New York's Tech Start-Up Scene Comes of Age
I had a friend take the photos for the cost of film. Years later, we look at only a handful of photos anyway. No regrets. YMMV.
Think about it another way. If I _truly love_ someone it wouldn't matter to me what the financials are like. But the person that I would truly love would not be the a person that would take on a crippling amount of debt.
I mean, yeah. There's debt and then there's debt. But if you've got any chance at all of succeeding, you need to talk about this sooner rather than later.
Roger Penrose on Stephen Hawking's Grand Design
> Those who I have been with (counting 2 now) I would have moved the world for. I only left the first one because I didn't think she even cared I was there (and her actions didnt show it).

Something to think about, this might be controversial but I'm going to try to put it as well as I can because I think you'll be better off if you think about it - you said you'd have moved the world for a woman you were with, but it didn't even seem like she cared if you were there.

Those two things might be related. These days, much of the media and movies show women falling in love with men who are attentive, kind, loving, and affectionate with no strings attached, and even if she isn't good to him in the beginning he eventually wins her over. Purely dutiful and attendant sorts of men. However, this is a fairly new set of affairs - not long ago, women's expectations and judgments on a man were based on a mix of pragmatic considerations (politics, division of labor), shared values like religion and community, and the man accomplishing tangible things.

It's possible that if you expressed more external drive to change things in the outside world, and less pure devotion at all costs even when it's unreciprocated - that a woman in your life would love you more, serve you more, and actually feel happier being with you. Also, in such a state of affairs, you might be happier too.

Maybe I'm wrong! I don't know, it's just worth thinking about. I see a lot of people talking about preferences for certain things while actually choosing and being satisfied with something a little different.
"Handy" simply denotes a mobile telephone. While virtually all mobile telephones have technological features that wired telephones did not, it does not capture the difference between a basic mobile phone and a modern smartphone; the former is a phone that may do computer-like things while the latter is a pocket computer that also makes phone calls.

"Smartphone" may not be the best possible name, but it seems to communicate to most people "Android, iPhone or similar".
I'm not sure what his beef is with Microsoft Security Essentials, but I just tell my friends and family to get a Mac.

It's too tiring keeping up with antivirus offerings, and constantly needing to clean up after their messes.

I'd recommend Linux, to be honest, because it's a cheaper alternative. But because there's still no good way of using it without needing to open Terminal at some point - the Mac is, I suppose, a good compromise.
Tweetmeme’s Button Impressions Collapsed 20% After Twitter’s Button Launched
"iTunes, Winamp, Pandora, and YouTube"

Any love for Amarok?

(Also, why the need to ask for gender?)
I wonder why everyone writes out the function invocations to add each directory they're adding, rather than doing something like

(labels ((add-path (p)
(add-to-list 'load-path (path-join emacs-root p))))
(let ((paths '("foo" "bar")))
(mapc 'add-path paths)))

Is there an advantage to writing it out?
xrep/xreq really isn't well documented. I'm writing a learn by example series for ZeroMQ in Ruby, that already includes an XREP example. I'm planning on adding in XREQ this weekend.

http://github.com/andrewvc/learn-ruby-zeromq
I've written such a script to hit the website directly. That "API" is far flakier than the basic auth version.
Let's just say it: 3D TV is a joke.
A rather long post but the subject is spot on! I totally agree.
ASIAN SLAVE
Texas probes Google's search results
Next month -- October 16 -- is National Feral Cat Day:

http://www.alleycat.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=388

(If you feed strays without also pursuing trap/neuter/release you may be just multiplying the misery.)
Physics for Doofuses: Why Beds Exist
You should consider playing at Startupcraft :)
I wouldn't say everyone does that. I would just say that it is a artifact of the incremental nature of building a .emacs over many years, and isn't really worth refactoring.
Java IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ made VS look like a toy until very recent editions. No built-in refactoring support, limited configurability for keyboard shortcuts, minimal integration with external build tools and SCM systems -- it was horrible going back to C# development from Java when I was doing both in 2005-2006.
Ask HN: What happened to all the Lyrics sites?
Just today I noticed that a couple of high ranking lyrics sites are no longer showing lyrics! Does anyone have the inside scoop?

For example:

http://www.lyricsdownload.com/phoenix-if-it-s-not-with-you-lyrics.html

"SORRY. OUR MUSIC DISCUSSION AND DISCOVERY COMMUNITY FORUM SECTIONS ARE BY FEDERAL COURT ORDER NOT ACCESSIBLE TO GENERAL PUBLIC CURRENTLY

PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON AND WE HOPE TO BE ABLE TO OPEN ACCESS TO SITE IN NEAR FUTURE. THANKS AND HAVE GREAT DAY"

http://www.lyricsdir.com/phoenix-if-it-s-not-with-you-lyrics.html

" We are currently unable to show you the lyrics for If It's Not With You by Phoenix. "
Perl 6.
Funny application. More of these kinds would be nice :)
Yea somebody requested Amarok today. I'm going to start that soon. I have to setup a linux desktop first though in order to test it (if any Last.fm client developers are reading this, Like.fm uses an identical scrobbling API. You can email me at chris@like.fm if you'd like to help).

Do you think the gender is intrusive? At the moment I don't really do anything with gender except personalize pronouns (he/she) in emails. I know it seems a bit out of place... I guess I can make it optional. However I'm planning to do stats and analytics and gender would be useful in the future (like what girls listen to vs what boys listen to, etc).
I've read a bunch of Egan but not Diaspora -- I'll get to it eventually!

In both Permutation City and Schild's Ladder there are also situations where physical laws are in flux, and characters have to get out of the way of change.
Not to hijack this thread. But a contract/consulting gigs ask hn similar to this would be great !

I am myself interested in Chicago area/telecommute and something server/Linux/perl/ruby related.
> I had under $50k debt from my undergrad (international student, double the cost of tuition)

For some perspective, 1 year of undergrad at CMU this year (tuition + room and board) is now $50k.
I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover...

This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization...

Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.
We've released 34 versions of Rakudo. As well, I've had publicly available and working Perl 6 code since 2005.
you're saying I'm wrong because of some property about me rather than a weakness in my argument

I said that it is easier for lawyers to abuse, to which you replied that really you do not think so to which I asked if you are a lawyer. To which you replied no. At this point, I do not quite see what your argument is.

I am of possibly the sceptical opinion that a company like google who hardly cares to be customer friendly does not just decide to be friendly in some area which mostly affects their business, that being the policy with how they use the richness of data they gather. I will however concede. It is for the months and year coming to show their true motivations.
The sort of DRM the iPad is using is what the Silverlight player offers on the Mac desktop:

http://www.homemediamagazine.com/netflix/netflix-selects-new...
Why Startups Should Only Hire Good StarCraft Players
joseph, you have a good point about how large of a task migrating all service providers from Basic to OAuth is. And I have to give Twitter Support credit for their work helping developers along the migration.

But your argument still doesn't explain why Twitter's supported service still uses xAuth. Or Twitterrific (and they have a significant market share). What is blocking them from migrating from Basic to non-xAuth OAuth?
Upvoted -- I wanted to say something to that effect in my previous rant, except that I was a late adopter to Win2k, and all the pain I remember hearing about was pre-SP2 (which I didn't join until after).

Regardless, I fondly remember Windows 2000, though I also remember it as a MUCH more spartan system than 7 is, and 7 easily trounces it, in my humble opinion.
Unless the body passes by a big mass and gets accelerated in your direction. The last thing you need for the morale of the crew is to have your fellow shipmate splattered on your windshield.

The odds are low, but it's worth the care.
Soyuz Landing Module -- 360 deg panorama
You can use ubuntu without opening the terminal, and have been able to for a while, the problem with linux is not the terminal it is whether or not the hardware is supported and software people need is supported.
Quizlet.com (educational tools / study games) - San Francisco, CA

We're looking for:

-- Both front-end and backend engineers. PHP, MySQL, Javascript/Ajax, UI design/CSS, etc.

-- A smart marketing person passionate about web + education

We're a small, fast moving team and have a lot of traction (over 1 million registered users).

Email me at phil@quizlet.com if you're interested.

http://quizlet.com/
danhak, you make a good point. And I should have probably specifically mentioned that. Twitter Support has really been going the extra mile to help developers make the migration.
Is it faux pas to do this? If so, please let me know and I'll delete it, though.

I wrote a response to some of the comments on this page about the StarCraft tournament in the form of a post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1661616
My view is its similar to opening a laundromat across the street from an existing laundromat. Is it unethical? Wrong question. Would it piss you off if you owned the other laundromat? Yes. Golden Rule applies. On the internet any website is right across the street from any other.
that's neat! does it affect site load speed?
Jobless not the only ones hit by downturn
The simple reason is that the photo was imaged with a filter that admitted a wide band of spectrum ("continuum" or "white light").

The science images you see are with very narrow filters, which pass light of a very-very specific color. These filters are typically about 1nm wide, the range of visible light is hundreds of nm (380-750nm). The Sun emits a lot of photons, so it's no problem to filter them out.

Why do they look in these narrow bands? When you do so, you see only plasma at a certain temperature range -- by varying where the tiny passband is, you see different cross sections of heated plasma. This turns out to be very useful to understand the solar atmosphere and in particular the corona; the coronal heating problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona#Coronal_heating_problem) is the major unsolved problem in solar physics.

A good scientific explanation of the remote sensing problem is at:

http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html

The story of these bands is fascinating. See

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

and

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

As a teaser, before the quantization of spectra was known, it was considered impossible to ever know the chemical composition of the Sun. What are you going to do, land there and take a sample back to the lab?

Shortly thereafter, spectroscopy was understood and helium was discovered on the Sun (helium -- helios) before being isolated on Earth. The laugh was on the pundits, and now we know the composition of stars all over the galaxy.
Justin, 3v3 is like THE traditional Starcraft team battle. You need to have a 3v3 in the tourney, 4v4 makes the map too crowded and 2v2 means one of our co-founders can't play. C'mon man!!!! make it happen please
should it really cost $170k for a bachelor's degree in anything?
We have an IBM RS/6000 43P circa 1996 still running, doing production email services. No hardwaree problems at all!
Sorry, meant "from my limited observation it seems that everyone"... but what you suggest makes sense.
Forget productivity, I see it as humanity. I would rather be paid less an hour if it was made up with PTO days. Maybe don't make paid vacation mandatory but make it mandatory that employees can trade $ per hour for paid vacation. Or at the very least make it mandatory that employees are by law allowed to take up to 1 month off unpaid.

I think letting employees have some time off is a good thing for both the employee and society.
I had a CAD class in high school that was basically Duke Nukem 101. It was awesome:)
ClojureDocs - community powered documentation for/of Clojure
I have the same negative reaction to going to the mail box these days. With the exception of the odd expected delivery from amazon, nothing good comes from checking the mail.
Lyrics are Copyrighted. They've probably all been DCMAed away.
Six Apart's Vox shutting down Sept. 30
> Forcing them

It's not a good idea to force someone else to do something you think is good for them, because:

(a) they have a right to do what they want

(b) you could well be wrong

(c) and you would not like them forcing you to do things for your own good

In this case, the belief that "vacations increase productivity" is one of those comfortingly counterintuitive Gladwellian nostrums that collapses under close examination.

Counterintuitive: "But vacation means working less, so how could it mean more productivity? Ah, the vacation increases efficiency during working hours to such an extent that the integral of efficiency over time is greater!"

Collapsing under close examination: "Clearly increasing the vacation proportion p to 1.0 would push the working hours (1-p) to zero, reducing integrated efficiency to zero. Thus if an effect exists[1], it would have (at least one) local maximum between 0 < p < 1. And it is not obvious what side of this local maximum we are on, nor whether the location of that local maximum is constant from industry to industry & person to person.

Hence it is not at all obvious that forcibly increasing vacation time would raise the overall efficiency. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the claim holds in anything like the asserted generality."

QED

[1] To be precise, by postulating that an effect exists, we are stipulating that there exists a p' such that E(p') > E(0), as the efficiency is (supposed to be) greater at that p=p' than at p=0. We also note that no matter how large E(p), the integral of it over time at p = 1 is zero as there are no hours worked. These two observations mean that the integrated productivity is increasing at the beginning & decreasing at the end. The classic such smooth function is a parabola; there may be multiple wiggles depending on exactly how efficiency evolves with productivity.
You can probably pick up someone at the event for a 4v4.. already had teams sign up so can't change now!
Ever lower milk prices were driving a dairy farmer to desperate measures. Two years ago, he tried "Beethoven for Bovines" in his barn and milk production dropped 2%. Last year he signed up for "hex the herd" where Genuine Santa Barbara WitchesTM remotely hexed your herd for health and higher production. (The ad had said its hexes were the cause of California's improved milk production, but it didn't seem to work in Wisconsin.) So this year he drove to town to consult the ultimate power source: a theoretical physicist. The physicist listened to his problem, asked a few questions, and then said he'd take the assignment, and that it would take only a few hours to solve the problem. A few weeks later, the physicist phoned the farmer, "I've got the answer. The solution turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought and I'm presenting it at this afternoon's Theory Seminar". At the seminar the farmer finds a handful of people drinking tea and munching on cookies---none of whom looks like a farmer. As the talk begins the physicist approaches the blackboard and draws a big circle. "First, we assume a spherical cow..."

[Clemens: QH541.15.M34 1985]

- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/093570258X/
Certainly, but "God created it" is the ultimate wild-card explanation. It's identical to saying "because."

Not at all. It could be used that way by lazy and irresponsible thinkers, but that is not an inherent property of the explanation.

To return to my earlier analogy,

"You know, just because John could have written that letter is no reason to suppose he did. John could have done just about anything to your computer; if you're willing to invoke him as an explanation for whatever you find, you'll never learn anything about how computers work."

"Nonsense, I'm not saying John wrote the letter because I don't have any alternative explanation. I'm saying there's positive evidence he wrote it: Look, he signed it. Plus, he's my boyfriend, and this is how he writes, and this is the sort of thing he would do. Why make it complicated?"

We constantly deal with intelligent agents who have great power -- roommates who could do arbitrary things to our living areas, other human beings who can create nearly arbitrary literary output on our computers. And we are able to intelligently distinguish between what these beings can do and what they did do based on the available evidence: what they claim to do, their habits and tendencies and methods, what we know about natural laws.

Reasoning about what God did is no different. "God did it" is one of a number of competing explanations for any event, subject to evidence and revision just like any other explanation. There is no a priori reason attributing an event to divine intervention need be evidentially vacuous. The correct statement in the absence of evidence is not "God did it" but "I don't know."

(Note even my line of reasoning above followed this trail -- a God I already believe in claims to have created the universe, he seems to be capable and credible, and the natural evidence seems to back up the claim: the universe begun, and it looks pretty clearly designed. It even looks like his handiwork. So from my perspective, why make it complicated?)
How to organize your essay references
A proper essay reference is essential for obtaining a good essay marking. When you are writing an essay, you should always quote some bibliography. After doing a proper research, choose in each work you read some lines you could quote in your essay. f you must prepare a long essay, feel free to quote an entire paragraph. At the end of your essay, you should include a reference section.
I vote for phone. It just has a different definition now, in a generation or so nobody will even remember that it was originally something used solely for voice conversations.
> No. Any authentication situation where every end user needs to protect a secret shared among many end users is fundamentally broken. That's not the same as what you just said.

OK, I was imprecise in my language. You clarified what I meant.

> This problem absolutely does not require a PKI to solve.

How would you solve it for native apps? By "it" I mean enabling the API to be sure that user X submitted the request with app developer Y's real client. Without having the app developer sign something for every user downloading the client, or running a proxy.
PHP isn't low-level; it just makes you do everything yourself.
"Clone" doesn't sound bad to me coming from a programmer. Any programmer who is good enough to create an exact clone will find it psychologically impossible to do so. There's no way a programmer could complete a clone without thinking, "I can do better... they should have done it this way... it will be much better and more successful if I change this part."

Maybe I'm wrong, though, and I'm probably naive. Are there any software clones that aren't just inferior knock-offs, implemented by cheap labor hired by someone who never intended to match the quality of the original? I wouldn't count any product that beats the original in any meaningful way, such as better support for a certain language.
ITunes UI Excellence Distribution
It's obviously demand-based, but when I went through this a few years ago, the least experienced people we talked to were asking in the $2k range (this is in SF). Book 30 of those a year and you're grossing $60k. You have to work weekends and there are consultations and other stuff, but it still strikes me as a lucrative job if you can pull it off.

The wedding photographers have some clever ways to sell you more stuff too. Most of them want to retain the rights to the photos that you pay them to take, so they can sell prints to your guests or license them as stock art and stuff. I actually got into a shouting match with one photographer over that -- I insisted on treating the photos as works for hire under US copyright law. One guy had "his and her iPods" that he would load up with wedding pics at the end of the reception. The cost? $1000. Yeah, no thanks.
The soul of brevity, I am not ;) Glad you enjoyed it though.
Ping Users Top One Million in First 48 Hours
Hey pops, zerglings are so 1998.
This article almost solely focuses on how the new price point of $99 makes the AppleTV more attractive to existing iPad owners. What's missing is some argument about why iPad owners might buy an AppleTV.

To be honest, I don't see how the AppleTV complements the iPad at all. The new AppleTV is only for streaming content from the iTunes Store and from the Internet. If you want to rent and watch the same content on your iPad, you can do so directly without an AppleTV. If you want to watch the content on your TV, you need an AppleTV but not the iPad.
You have to understand that most people are used to PHP and

./configure --with-abc --with-xyz --with-123=/in/some/place --without-something-else --disable-module --without-this-thing --and-everything-is-inconsistent

and then debugging paths, dependencies, realizing after 20 minutes of compilation that they're actually missing a module, editing php.ini and calling the president.

It's cool that articles like these actually highlight how easy deployment can be with Node. Thanks DTrejo!
But still, in asking Google's servers about the URL, you are telling Google what site you wanted to visit.
Thanks, I meet most of the required skills on your list. Is the best way to get in touch the email address in your HN profile?
the new vevo iphone app is legal and free. YOu can make playlists and play/listen while driving. I was and still am doing this with youtube iphone app; any and all music u want to listen to is on youtube. Yet quality of Youtube not that great; Vevo on other hand great quality!
This is your man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VswBKrPuAQ