skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To use a non-hypothetical example, right now I'm watching a series:

Title: Dexter.
Description: A likable Miami police forensics expert moonlights as a serial killer of criminals who he believes have escaped justice.

The exact episode also has those attributes:

Title: My Bad.
Description: In the aftermath of last season's chilling finale, Rita's death has left Dexter feeling responsible, possibly even...guilty. Unable to deal with the trauma, Dexter makes a drastic decision that will impact everyone around him. Quinn stirs up trouble at the station when he notes that Rita's murder, which is being pinned on the Trinity Killer, doesn't fit his normal murder profile. Things get even more heated when Quinn suggests to LaGuerta that they look at the husband: Dexter Morgan. Meanwhile, Quinn offers Debra much needed support, causing her to see Quinn in a new light.

----

Simply put, titles and descriptions are not the same thing. It seems silly to me that somebody would advocate that they should be treated as the same thing just because there is overlap when the content is a 15 second video of a cat.
1. This is lame. When the traffic/readers start coming, they will comment/want to comment.

2. To keep the window to have a scroll bar the size of a chickpea

3. I don't know Posterous enough. Usually, you read Post A tagged with tag A', click on A' and you can read more posts tagged with A'

4. It's ok. Cool, even

5. Even with broadband, it took a while to open the blog. Cut down the number of entries. If you want someone to know who you are, you need to get visits, somehow. If you offer interesting content but noone reads it, you have failed!

Once you realise that, the rest does not require that much time. For example, if you use to read other people's blogs, just drop a comment in interesting posts, with a link back to your latest post (your comment - greetings - who you are and a link to your latest post, labeled as such). This way, you spread the word of what you talk about without requiring any more time than starting a conversation in some topic that did interest you. Maybe you even had a post (HN comment) related to the post you read, fine, link to it, saying so.

Your blog looks too disorganized. Untagged posts make for "non index stuff". If I want to read more about your ideas on startups I have no real way to do that. You could also add some 'personal' information in your posterous profile: who you are and what you do are fundamental.

Cheers,

Ruben
Latest at my blog: 4 Reasons Why Pacman Is a Metaphor for Blogging (http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/09/4-reasons-why-pacman-is-m...)

Just as a sample ;)
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When your cellphone get a static IP instead of a dynamic one your cellphone should be able to save up to 50% energy.

http://www.usipv6.com/what_is_ipv6.php

"IPv6 is compatible with 3G wireless (near) broadband and has other features that support greater mobility. There will be two billion mobile phones by 2006 and (at least) two addresses are required per mobile phone, so just enabling every mobile phone will require more IP addresses than are left with IPv4. Static addresses can also double battery life by not wasting power by checking whether a call is completed so the carrier can grab back the dynamic IP address, which wastes a great deal of power."
I quick review of your "blog" makes it pretty clear that (as you yourself admit) you are just posting stuff. Why would anyone re-visit when they would have no idea if anything of interest to them will ever be posted?

I think you need to decide upon an audience and "talk" to them - they may not come but I think that is how all successful bloggers get started.

How about taking another look at the guy you met on your second working gig? You were impressed with what he was doing and felt inspired. I am certain there would be an audience for anyone writing for others aspiring to being just that guy. There is philosophy, technique and a way of looking at the world to be explored in detail aplenty. Links from HN will bring the traffic to reward your efforts.
Articles like this only make me grumpy. I tried this game last year, but I gave up on it in disgust for being too hard. And now the developer is telling me that he made it easier than it could have been? Bah humbug!

Still, these details may explain why games like this are dime-a-dozen now. This one gave people the confidence to make their own, not realizing the details sweated by the original developer. Hence, all the knockoffs (especially on iOS) play worse; which initially surprised me, but now makes sense in retrospect.
So this guy's upset that his marketing spam for his first book was blocked by Facebook, eh?

Shocker.
Well, for most of my projects I end up beating a framework into submission to make it do what I want. Using something like Drupal for those projects (I have) would accomplish only one thing: drive me insane.
"The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star "

How is the gravity about the same as earths if the planet does not spin, or is the planet spinning at the same rate that it is revolving around it's star, like the moon. So I guess gravity does not just come from the centripetal force. Are there any other forces that contribute to planetary gravity? If not the planetary year should be very small.

...rambling
A thousand years, yes fine (this is ~ 10 x human lifetime) But to get anywhere in that time you're still going to have to get to some non-infinitesimal fraction of light-speed. Anything less than this you're looking at 10k, 100k, a million years to get to even the closest stars.

I could imagine the feasibility of a multi-generational ship lasting 100 - 1000 years, but not longer. Just think of mechanical and materials fatigue. I doubt anything could be built which would last any longer (if that long).
There have been a number of proposals for geo-engineering to solve global warming. The problem with most of them is that they involve filling the atmosphere with something to reflect IR, and the consequences of that are unknown.

There was an article I read a while ago that speculated a low lying country could unilaterally decide to do geoengineering, and it's not clear how other countries would respond.
Ask HN: review my RSS agregator
Hi All

I've started RSS agregator http://www.czytnik-newsow.pl. It's mainly for polish channels (with few english as well) but I would be grateful for some comments howto improve it.

Thanks,
Waso
Good points all. You need to show respect for your audience by ensuring that a visit to your blog is a pleasant one.
I looked at the wording after I posted the comment, and wondered if it would offend anyone.

It wasn't meant as an ageist statement, but I think it's a safe bet that the majority of older people (hackers aside) are late adopters. His own son told him "If you're on Facebook, it's over."
Check out the equation towards the bottom of

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

which gives a timescale for how long it takes for a body to become tidally locked to the body it orbits. I haven't plugged in the numbers for this planet, but I'm gonna assume it winds up being much shorter than the age of the star.
Most of what happens should be in your mind, your thoughts. This planet should be something you think about. Discoveries like this change our understanding of what our galaxy is like, of the prospects of other life out there, and of who we are here on Earth.

Hundreds of planets like Gliese 581g will probably be found in the next three years. As we slowly build more and bigger telescopes, we'll gain more and more information about them. This is a process that takes decades.

So don't expect "something to happen" tomorrow because of this discovery. Something should happen in your mind immediately, but the real and physical repercussions of this discovery are slow and expensive.

If you want them to speed up, you should lobby your government to increase their funding, or perhaps donate to some of these projects yourself :)
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OTOH, it kind of goes to Hickson's point that describing frames of movies to the blind is not very useful when the frame is only there to give a hint of what the movie looks like. Do I really care that Casablanca contains a shot with "a man standing next to another man looking at two other men with people in the background" or some such?
Yours are also very good points. You don't need to talk to a particular audience... but keep in mind there is an audience. It may be just "you" or someone with your same tastes. Some day they will come (and hanging in HN brings a lot of traffic, interactions, good comments and all this, the community here loves part of what I write, but it is the part I may be more proud of).
Sabotage: postdoc fiddles with graduate student's cells
If product x has a backdoor, this backdoor will also be used by bad people. It can also be cracked and there will always be product y without a backdoor. Don't the legislators see this? Or are criminals statistically really that lazy that they will still use mobile phones even though they are compromised.

According to "The Wire" they often even put extra layers of encryption security, anyway. Such behavior would make that legislation even more useless, as it would indeed only target the innocent that don't take extra precautions.
Wait, but didn't I specifically say I was referring to a body without a spherically symmetric mass distribution? Maybe I'm incorrect in my understanding of symmetric, but I was definitely referring to a non-symmetric case in my text.
No, you aren't. In OCaml, you can use mutable references, they're just not the default. Erlang has process dictionaries. Etc.

Haskell is unusually strict in that regard, turning what is normally a design option into an all-or-nothing situation.

Edit: I know there are a few ways around it via monads, but the culture surrounding Haskell seems quite a bit more likely to treat state/purity as an all-or-nothing issue than the others'. Maybe I'm making inaccurate assumptions about Haskell based on the loudest members of its community, though.
Alternate hypothesis: personality is highly heritable. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&v...
I do all my reading from the Kindle App on the iPad, which does not allow in-app purchasing of books. So that's where I grabbed my workflow from. I do understand it's easier if buying from an actual Kindle device.
It does not. For a typical cable you will have the two wires inside: "hot" wire and "neautral". To connect switches you would use the same two-wired cable, only hot and neautral wires would change their roles depending how the switches are set.
I thought of many attempts. They grow rapidly into mass slaugher. Forcing a particular religion onto people, forcing people to fund great mausoleums to the glory of their leaders, autocracy done in the name of socialism, "super-races" states from Sparta forward.

In fairness, I did think of one that could qualify, the vaccination of Polio.
You can export the data to the USA as long as 1) the receiver is registered with one of the Data Protection Agencies in Europe or 2) as signed the model contract or 3) has signed up to the safe harbour. It is well worth looking through http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/docs/internatio...
Any examples you care to share?
Let the Apple TV hacking begin
Depends on your definition of "pretty good living". Anyway, I would not count on it.

Jason Rohrer [1], programmer and indie games developer, author of recent award-winning Sleep is Death [2], manages to get by on around $10K/year. From what I hear, lifestyle this can support in the USA is frugal to the extreme.

[1] Jason Rohrer homepage: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer

[2] Sleep Is Death http://www.sleepisdeath.net/
That's not what I understand the article to say. I think it says:

1) Cosmos magazine were collecting messages to be sent to Gliese.

2) They found a signal, but it doesn't say which object the signal came from, and they haven't found the same signal since.
8 Faces - Typography Magazine by Elliot Jay Stocks
The way I see it is that the article simplifies by just saying "lamp" for the lamp and mains, because the only relevant part to the article is the switching part. For it to be the Carter system, the mains live (hot) and neutral have to be connected to a pair of wires in the switching part.

I think the article does not mention the mains details because the neutral wiring never even enters the switch, as in the switch on the wall which he unscrewed as a child. Perhaps the diagrams would have been a bit better if the bottom part was

+---Lamp----Mains---+

instead of just

+---Lamp------------+
That line of questioning may sound offensive but, I think, Ian is trying to separate what the user "want" and what the user "need."
I do almost all of my code editing in regular text editors, Vi or Notepad, usually. 4 spaces is impossible for me.

Why do you feel that 4 spaces is better than 5, which is usually the number of spaces represented by \t?
This is the sort of thing that we get told will make my job easier.

Take from the horse mouth; complete crap.

Which is why you probably won't find anyone in the security or forensics business that thinks this is a good solution.

One of my trainers told me something to me when I first started working on LE cases. He pointed out that catching criminals can only be made so easy before it becomes detrimental. And that point is either when the tools can be used by anyone (i.e. not specialist investigators) or when the tools begin to facilitate crime.
Overcoming someone that spends 3x as much as you isn't as hard as you might think. Especially if they aren't spending that money wisely.
I don't know what this has to do with any part of the actual discussion we're having, so I'm not going to bother engaging it. The houses most people in my neighborhood --- actually, in Chicago in general --- seem to live in will last longer than their lifetime, so the "disposability" of our houses isn't a factor in housing costs.
Shouldn't the alt text also name the characters visible on the photo?
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This is Beta I know but; same sentence translated from English to Latin does not translate back to the same English:

Believers of a religion perceive their religion as true knowledge --> Credentes religio religionis sentiunt verae --> Those who give the religion of the true religion, they feel it
Hey Marc!
I'd have to look over the book again to give you valid feedback, it's been a while since I looked at it.

It definitely pointed me in the right direction though so I appreciate that!
Blogging, much like commenting, is a form of communication. For that to work, it needs two parties: the one communicating, and the one being communicated to (more advanced viewpoint: blogging is a dialogue... but let's skip that bit for now).

Who are you writing for? Figure that out, and then the rest will make more sense. Everything you do on your blog you should do for that ideal (or concrete) reader. Your own desires should generally come a distant second. It's all about the readers.

Another tip: Just as making a product "for anyone" is a deadly mistake, making a blog "for anyone" is also fatal. If your blog isn't written for anyone in particular, it isn't interesting to anyone in particular.
A manned trip to Mars is estimated at ~$50 billion. Assume that NASA goes twice over budget and it costs $100 billion.

That's cheap! Any modern developed country could send a crew to Mars in 10 years. However, nobody has done it because nobody has devoted the resources to that cause.

The bank bailouts were around $700 billion, for comparison.

Space travel is cheap compared to the rest of what we do.
Nice link, thanks.

The browser suck hard (from google news is impossible to open any link because "oepning multiple windows is not supported."), but the "Article Mode" is really good.
I generally agree with you, but concerning an issue like global warming specifically, you are wrong.

For issues like global warming/pollution, it doesn't help to separate. If the US pollutes less and China picks up the slack, the earth will be just as warm (including the US). Separation is a great solution to some problems, but it doesn't solve the problem of how to pay for global public goods (it deals with local ones nicely, however).
Hyperbolic Discounting [behavioral economics]
Sharia allows the accused to defend himself

Herself, not so much.
You are lost in a twisty maze of Perl generating Javascript.
That's basically how almost all games work tho (with a handful of exceptions) - most people eventually get tired of playing the same game and move on to something else.
Tesla Wardenclyffe Project
I'm not sure you're going to get anywhere with blogging if you're only willing to expend minimal effort on it. It's like anything else.

Some bloggers say that everyone should blog, and exhort them to do so. The truth is not everyone needs to blog, just like not everyone needs to run marathons or excel at cooking.

I do find having a "best of" collection of your HN contributions valuable. But that's not blogging.
If you don't have time to actually write blog posts, why are you attempting to write a blog?
I actually have a foldable cedar chair I sit on in the shower.
But my point is that the safest thing for most end-devices is NOT to be directly addressable from the wider internet. Any network admin will tell you that so it'll be interesting to see how that unfolds in the IPv6 world (if it ever unfolds).
Changing everyones genes so we are all a lot more tolerant of each other and so bigotry is wiped out.

Also we need much, much faster transportation, like trains that can travel around the world in 3-4 hours. This way we can see our "neighbors" much more often and no longer have a sub-concious fear of the unknown.
The length of time is almost beside the point. If one (long-term) goal is to put our eggs (so to speak) in a basket other than that of our sun, then there aren't a lot of alternatives. Other stars are simply very far away.

Ideally we'd be trying a mixture of probes and generational ships, while also experimenting with Moon and Mars bases.
Note that this is not a question of providing an alt text for e.g. an image of a movie poster on IMDB.

The 'poster' in this case is specifically a single image preview for a video shown before the video starts playing. According to the spec "typically one of the first non-blank frames".

It can be compared with e.g. a low resolution preview of a high-resolution image, as was used in the early days of the web. It is definitely not obvious that it would make sense to have an alternative text specifically for the lo-res preview as distinct from the alt text for the image itself.

Note that the video element already support an alternative text description - its just the single-frame preview which doesn't support a separate text.

I think Ians questioning of this feature is completely valid.
>But to require it when it's the same as the title seems silly to me.

Isn't the problem there that one doesn't know it is the same. Requiring a description of the poster image, which can be blank as for alt-attributes of non-content images, means that it clearer when the author has simply chosen not to bother attempting to be accessible as opposed to the poster having no useful content beyond the title.
Calls him an asshole, makes him a billionaire
Can we get a filter that lops "Amazing" off the beginning of all headlines?
"If homicide, suicide or resigining the job is not an option, how would you solve it?"

I would create an n-ary tree (n is arbitrary, maybe 100) from coworkers. The 'leafs' would produce an array of ten numbers based on the blogs assigned to them. Then each node in the tree would take n arrays and sum them up into one array, until me, the root have the final array of ten numbers.

First: this is much simpler than what is described in the blog. Second: the 'grouper' in his example is totally a bottleneck. (And in fact the reducers are also bottlenecks in his case. While my system scales practically to infinity.)
Unfortunately the SEO industry will make this a pain for all of us just like they did with stuffing image alt text in the early 2000's.
I think it probably sounded that way due to the editorializing of the headline. If instead it had read "Editor of HTML5 tries hard to gain a better understanding of potential use cases facing people with disabilities" you might have read it differently.
This will make adding placeholder text to UI mockups significantly more fun.
hey , i just want to say the gui of your application is looking great and it is fast!
how did you do that ?
Just remind your clients that your code sucks less than your competitors.
The only objection I can think of is that the poster can be intended to convey meaning. If this meaning is entirely lost without an alt text, then the lack of an alt text for the poster is an oversight.
A discussion I had with a German couple in Verona while I was on vacation suggested that German companies don't generally give sick days and that the mandated vacation time had to be used for sick days. Was what I heard correct?

As a comparison, the American company I work for (in Canada) provides a default of two weeks vacation with two weeks PEL (Personal Emergency Leave) that can be used for doctors' appointments, etc. That's twenty days, although only ten of them can be used for vacations.

I realize that not every company in America provides sick days, but that's IMO a different issue.
I get some friend requests from people I don't know. It's no biggie... I just let the request sit there unanswered. I suppose maybe they were authors and I should consider sending them a message, but I really only want a certain type of person on my FB, namely work and school friends. Not family, and not strangers. Anyway, there's no way I'd consider the author's behaviour "abusive," I mean get a grip. A level of faux-sensitivity seems to come into play with internet users.
I think the use of some of these strategies mentioned are what should be best practice. Code coverage checkers and code analysis tools, most specifically.
For making PDFs readable: from the aA menu while looking at a PDF increase the contrast to maximum and then rotate it into landscape view. Hold your Kindle sideways and now the PDFs are readable.

It's not perfect, but I have found that I'd rather read vendor documentation like this on the Kindle than on the harsh black/white of my monitor.

Also, thanks for the link and other information!