skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, only two years late on this one. Way to go, Microsoft.

Not that a tweet from... somebody, (Who precisely, is @tizzers?) citing an anonymous source is exactly reputable.
If I knew how to make X several million dollars, I would probably also now how to make myself several million dollars. I agree that if I had make X several million dollars, it would be a good hook.
You know it sucks. Find the right tool set and practices to help your clients improve. You can't fix it overnight, but there's ~so~ much room for improvement in our industry.
I've done the recycled comment thing once, and it worked pretty well. However, I did introduce it as such and restructured it into a standalone piece of writing for the benefit of the reader.

I haven't been able to figure out the difference between commented and uncommented blogs. There are some great blogs in each category. I think it's easier for people to comment when they see other comments (even for other posts). Otherwise, they assume it's not the thing to do on this blog and move on. At least that's my theory.

Not a Posterous user so can't say much about those features.
Fonts were the most ugly part of Linux by far to me and the reason I bought an iBook long ago. The other reason was perfect hardware support so I could suspend / resume properly.

I don't expect Canonical to support all the hardware in the world, but everybody stares at the OS font all day long.
+1 because I got it.
As a sighted user, I can look at the preview image of an embedded video and that may influence whether or not I decide to play the video.

Why should a user with impaired vision be denied the same opportunity?
Users use, and customers pay. In this case, the two are different groups.
Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers
I dislike IDEs for all their features which for the most part I think just add clutter, since I've ever found a use for most of them like debuggers etc. but I'll admit that they are useful if done right and can bring a productivity boost.

When I have to write things like:

strstr($str, $delimiter)

and

explode($delimiter, $str)

Netbeans ctrl+p comes in very handy in re-enforcing my choice of arguement order because if I make a mistake that's a very subtle bug waiting to happen.

or when I have to wrote things like:

g_file_new_for_commandline_arg

who wants to type that out when they don't have to?

or this over and over:

AStudpidlyLongName::

when I can just type `ast` and press ctrl+[space] and get the name in a completion list highlighted every single time.

or:

m_ui->tooBar->addWidget

when I can m_ui.t... and have to automatically figure the correct sequence, this comes in pretty handly when you're working code written by other and they decide to use hard objects as opposed more common pointers.
> "Although, heck, maybe he talks about masturbating in front of girls the whole time."

To be fair, I don't know any guy that doesn't, while in the presence of women, talk about masturbating.

Though I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not defending him from downvotes or suggesting people upvote him (I didn't).
Gladwell on Social Media and Activism
Cosmic accidents: How water arrived on Earth
I lived in the suburbs of Stuttgart, and the public transit to the other suburb where I worked was excellent. I usually biked, just for the convenience and because it was healthier, but the comparison with the situation in most of the United States is mindblowing.
Ask HN: How did Google grab my Facebook profile picture?
About 5 days ago, I went on a short vacation to Osaka with the gf. While there, I uploaded a new profile picture to Facebook from my trip. It isn't particularly embarrassing, but somehow the picture (along with a Facebook stamp) showed up as my profile picture in Gtalk, even though I have never mailed it to myself and have never set it as my profile pic. (My GF text messaged it to me)

How did that happen? My Google and Bing-fu don't seem to bring up an appropriate response. This shows up whether or not I'm logged into Facebook or not.

Screenshot to show what I mean:

http://jawaadmahmood.com/images/Screenshot.png

(Yes that's me browsing it in Chrome.)

I haven't set it as my iPhone picture or anything yet.

With a little work in Firefox I managed to extract the location of the picture. I backed it up to my own server.

http://jawaadmahmood.com/images/facebook-stamp.jpg

Can anyone offer any idea on how this happened?
An observation: it's often best to keep the police out of your life, even when you think you've been wronged, unless you're confident you can prove your innocence.
http://jawaadmahmood.com/images/Screenshot.png
http://jawaadmahmood.com/images/facebook-stamp.jpg

Clickable links.
> I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right

FWIW I tried to install Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and the main thing that made her go back to Windows was the look of the fonts. So I think Canonical is right to focus on polishing up things that can attract non-technical users.
Tell HN: Started a blog to track attempt of starting a startup
I decided to finally get to work on a project I care about after years of putting it off. I've been busting ass on it for a few weeks now and decided to start a blog to track what I'm doing. I thought maybe people could learn from me, offer advice, and, if I'm lucky enough to become successful, it might be a useful glimpse at the process of starting a business from scratch. Right now it's just background information, but I'll be posting a new entry tonight with goals and a roadmap. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

http://blog.spkto.us

edit: put on custom domain
Really? In North America, black is hot and white is neutral, and you always switch (and fuse, and breaker) the black wire.

"A neutral wire is the return leg of a circuit; in building wiring systems the neutral wire is connected to earth ground at least at one point. North American standards state that the neutral is neither switched nor fused. The neutral is connected to the center tap of the power company transformer of a split-phase system, or the center of the wye connection of a polyphase power system. American electrical codes require that the neutral be connected to earth at the "service panel" only and at no other point within the building wiring system. Formally the neutral is called the "grounded conductor"; as of the 2008 NEC, the terms "neutral conductor" and "neutral point" have been defined in the Code to record what had been common usage. [1]

Hot is any conductor (wire or otherwise) connected with an electrical system that has electric potential to electrical ground or neutral."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_North_Amer...
As an ecologist, it's always bothered me that because people can't immediately observe the effects of their actions in this regard, they don't assign much importance to them...

If the issue was Lex Luthor destroying the western US to make midwest property values go up, would you suck it up, or would you advocate forcing him to stop?

The end result here will be just as catastrophic. We can't let people go their own way because they don't "believe" in science. It won't make it any less true.
I kind of have the same problem you do, adding a comment into a discussion feels natural to me, I can give a couple of points in the part of the discussion I feel most comfortable in and leave it at that.

With a blog I always feel like I want to do a well researched comprehensive piece spanning an entire issue. This is where I decide I don't have time to become the master of the area I'm thinking about and don't write it. It's that perfectionism that prevents me from really getting started.
With an online postscript viewer link
http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=8368f85b
I would definitely, but registering a trademark with madrid protocol protection can sum up to a high cost if you cover a number of countries.

edit:

here are the prices (just checked with local/national IP office, those are the prices):

fees: http://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/fees/sched.html

and then additional fees for each individual country:
http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/madridgazette/en/remark...
New iOS 4.2 Beta 2 suggests iPad Tethering is on the way
I think the idea with the title was that the new iPod Nano should function as a remote and display for the iPhone.
Yes, do it. It's pretty inexpensive (1000 € for the whole Europe).
Let's revisit your comment in June 2011, shall we?
STOP. Put it on your own domain, now, then start blogging. Then invent a time machine and give me this advice when I started, because it would have saved me a lot of grief down the road.
Fixed link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711
Guess what RIM's PlayBook and a nuclear reactor have in common
The Shell Hater's Handbook
1) If you have smartphone than your MP3 player is probably sitting in a drawer.

2) Most bluetooth headsets already do AVRCP so this adds what?

3) Bluetooth is great until things loose sync. Then you have to pair them again. I've already got one bluetooth remote that looses connection daily. I've gone back to a $20 IR remote that works 100% of the time, everyday.

4) 2 words for you: Microsoft Sideshow.

5) I've found the built-in controllers from BMW, MB, Audi, and Ford Sync to be much better than some sticky-taped aftermarket device.

6) This is Sony, they epitomize NIH more than any other company. I still don't understand how they are allowed to keep a bluetooth SIG label on the PS3. You can't use the DS3 controller or BD remote on any other BT device. They barely support BT keyboards and headsets. Based on history I'm sure it will be proprietary.

This is cool, as in it better costs less than $30 or have a really needed function. Just showing the time and playlist isn't going to cut it.
While this doesn't necessarily negate the "we can't remember syntax" argument...I remember back before mobile phones were rampant, I was really great at remembering phone numbers. People besides by parents were regularly surprised at how I'd remember numbers I'd seen or read just once. Then I got a mobile phone.

I think I probably have less than 5 numbers memorized (those of my immediate family). In essence, using an IDE encourages us not to memorize syntax.
Map - Split a problem up and distribute to workers

Reduce - Gather and aggregate/collate the results from the workers

That's it. That's the big thing to understand. The fact that everyone keeps looking for some new way to describe MapReduce I think adds to the mystique and the belief that it is somehow profoundly complex.

Aside from the many typos, I don't see how this is useful. MapReduce is an absurdly simple concept. Once you litter any explanation with analogies or scenarios, you distract the comprehension of the reader.

Am I to think about parsing text on a blog? Bad CEOs? Google and programs? What?
Oh yes, this is what iPod nano should have been, since everybody is carrying both your phone and the iPod nano to work out. And doom to the those kids that do not have a smartphone.

> I love this idea.

What a cool idea! It's a watch that controls the phone, since reaching the phone in your pocket is so hard! Maybe the next big idea is to have a ring-attached remote to control this watch which controls the phone in the pocket since it is so hard to reach the watch on your wrist.

And don't get me started on the "find my phone" feature. It's bluetooth and its 20 feet range.
Mock a mockingbird combinators in Ruby
Goodyear Ultra Grip Extreme Studded Winter Tire | Tire reviews and prices
Agreed. Shuttleworth & co seem more interested in tweaking visual desktop stuff (window buttons, windicators, indicator applet, etc.) than actually making sure their software is as bug-free as possible. Every time I upgrade to the newest release (literally every single upgrade since Hardy, when I started using Ubuntu) a bunch of stuff that used to work breaks. Lucid hasn't been as bad as others (Jaunty and Karmic I'm looking at you) but it's not without its problems. And I'm running a 5-year old laptop here.

I know it's hard to control quality on a desktop sourced from thousands of individual/independent contributors, but Canonical would do well to put money into their QA department to ensure release-to-release stability instead of into their design department--which for the most part seems to be a Shuttleworth cargo-cult dictatorship anyway.
Ask HN: Rate my startup MyRunningMate
http://myrunningmate.com
An app that provides political campaigns the means to run and manage a virtual phone bank. Once setup, volunteers call a provided phone number which automatically connects them to voters one after another. An accompanying web page allows the volunteer to monitor their calls and report on the outcome of those calls.

Please poke around and try it out. You can test it out without actually contacting voters. No need to fill in real contact info, just make it all up.

Building this app took 16 days. The last three weekends and nights after my day job. Now comes the hard part for me, marketing it. I am going to aim for downballot campaigns. For a few reasons, no one below federal level campaigns use my main competition. I am also hoping the name MyRunningMate will be a container company for several services directed at political campaigns.
N82 Buzzer Ringer Ways Problem
A key point missed in the article is the SRP. It will retail for anywhere between $80 and $100. This is a lot for a pretty simple set of functionality.

http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=26635

iPod Nano 6G manufacturing cost is $43 but it retails for $149. I'm not sure how much LiveView overlaps the Nano's market. Either way, we need some competitor to put pressure on the nano's insane margin.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/28/materials_cost...
The Day I found out my cofounder gave himself a raise
It's the usual short-sighted, first-order effects thinking we see so often in politics. Behaviour X is problematic; target a law at behaviour X; ergo "problem solved". But that's not the way it works. Laws can never directly address behaviour X. Instead, the law creates behaviour Y in the state apparatus; Y may be opposed to X, but it also has effects of its own; and the damage from Y may exceed the damage from X.
TWi Cloud Computing with Tom Kiblin Discuss An Industry First (video)
Can you imagine driving a car with auto-complete, color coding, or drop down menus?

Have you been in a car built in the last few years?
Productivity Tips for People who Hate GTD
Thanks for the advice! Care to elaborate a bit? I have a handful of domains right now, including the domain for the name of the software. Would you recommend using the domain of the name of the software I'm working on, or should I use my other blogging domain?
I'm pretty sure tptacek knows how houses are built, loewenskind. I believe his point, though, is that not all of us live in disposable houses - just all the poor schmucks who have a house built after WWII, really. I have a carriage house apartment that shows a bit of the transition; it was built in 1946. Instead of slats under the plaster, it has sort of horizontal strips of sheet rock, over which plaster was applied.

Most of our workforce - including everybody who did plaster - was gone for several years. Then they all came back and had the GI Bill to buy cheap houses. The market spoke, and we're left with a lot of people who know how to build cheap houses.

Now, my house is built of three layers of brick, made right here in town in a factory long gone. Its interior walls are 2x4 studs that actually measure two inches by four inches, and are roughly the consistency of iron after their 130-year drying period. (They still smell nice when drilled for wiring, though - imagine that!) There is half an inch of real plaster on that. You cannot harm this house.

I should tell you, though, that drywall is gaining popularity in Europe as well. It's just so cheap and quick, you see.
Xmarks is Dead. Long Live Xmarks?
"Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US?"

If you had 3 million in the bank, you could easily afford a plan through many of the private health insurance companies in the US.
Playing around with some common latin phrases, I think I just found an Easter Egg, or quite an odd mistranslation:

http://translate.google.com/#la|en|quid%20pro%20quo

Edit: and reverse-engineering from the english -> latin translator, we can finish the phrase:

http://translate.google.com/#la|en|quid%20pro%20quo%20Pro%20...

I don't know whether or not "quid pro quo Pro Quo manet" is actually sensible Latin or not, but something tells me that "What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas" isn't the most accurate translation.
The safest thing for most end-devices is not being servers in the first place.

Now, if the device is cracked through one of its client software (NATs don't prevent that), then it could start up a rogue server, while if it were behind a NAT it couldn't. That's no worse for the machine itself (it's hosed anyway), but you could argue that's worse for the rest of the network.

I think it's not. Botnets are annoying and dangerous when they act as clients. Spam, DDoS, automatic attacks are all client behaviour. Even if you want server behaviour, connections don't have to be initiated from the outside. The compromised device just have to know the relevant IP, and initiate the connexion itself.

Finally, if you want to block incoming connections anyway, a plain firewall is cleaner. At least FTP will work.
If it means I get to belong to the Culture, yes!
That's no conspiracy theory. A conspiracy involves secret collaboration.

The well-known negotiation technique of anchoring is all that theory is. It seems plausible to me.
ตลาดหลักทรัพย์แห่งประเทศไทย : รายละเอียดข่าว
ghsfggfjjsjznnzjjznmnzm,zkisiuusnshjxhxbnbnxmn
As noted, this was Osborne, but even more importantly, Osborne (the man) later said that this was just an excuse for ... a general failure to execute, as I recall.

I'm pretty sure I read this in The Wall Street Journal, if you have access to their archives you ought to be able to find it.
That sounds like the opposite of the point I was making.
I'm glad that the Maverick Meerkat EC2 images(1) are working great. In the latest Lucid Lynx image (24.9.) as well as in the updates for the previous ones they introduced a nasty bug(2) causing a phantom load of 100% on one CPU. No fix in sight yet; this was really annoying. In my experiments so far, Maverick Meerkat works just great!

[1] http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/574910
The RC has not actually been released. Various news sites are reporting it prematurely to get extra traffic as usual, and the Ubuntu Release Team would like people to wait [1] for the official release announcement, which will be posted to the release blog [2] , and the ubuntu-announce mailing list [3].

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-release-cand...

[2] http://release-blog.ubuntu.com

[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce
All the government is asking for here is a continuation of the status quo. it's always had the ability to wiretap phones, but people don't use phones as much anymore - they use IM, Facebook, etc. to hatch their devious plots.

Wiretapping - analog or digital - requires a judge's approval in this country. Sure, it can be abused. But do we in the IT world really want to be providing an untraceable means of communication for the next 9/11 bombers? Or, for that matter, white collar criminals, bank robbers, etc.?

To me providing checks and balances on the governments ability to snoop on civilians lives shouldn't be a technology arms race. It should be based on an engaged citizenry that keeps watch on its elected officials, making sure they are acting within the law.
I do, in fact, have more than one obscure Windows-only program - the entire translation industry is Windows-only.

I'm not sure why you think I "have" to spend money and upgrade. I can't lose data, and I don't keep sensitive data on a laptop - the worst that can happen is that I have to reinstall the machine if it's beyond rescue.
On a related note, why do fonts look so terrible? Surely it's not just a lack of decent, free, typefaces? FreeType is unencumbered by bytecode hinting patents as of May 2010. The only other patent (according to http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html) is a Microsoft algorithm for color filtering for subpixel rendering (which, according to the page, is circumvented by using a different color filter).
Dropbox (YC S07) Giving .EDU Addresses 1 GB per Referral
I'll have to call [citation needed] on "double battery life". I have 3 jabber accounts with keepalives, skype with it's own keepalives, sip with reregistration and pinging, additional status messages are transmitted every couple of seconds on all of them. If I turn all of them off, my battery life does not increase 2 times. ~5-10% the last time I checked. I really doubt disabling the dhcp-equivalent on 3G can improve the battery life 2 times.
They don't have sick days. When you are sick you are sick it could be 1 day or 6 months. They don't give sick days because the government pays for your time off. So while they may miss out on your productivity, financially, they've lost little.

As an American I've encountered far too many Americans coming into work with just "a little cold" and getting the rest of the office sick. Dragging everyone else down with them because they can't afford to take time off to see a doctor and get medicated.
you're absolutely right - but ugly fonts were fixable even previously. I used Droid or even Calibri from my Windows 7 install.

I dont think there have been any changes in font rendering itself (which is the main cause of Linux fonts looking bad compared to Win7 or OSX) - rather, just a new font.

But suspend/resume ? I just cant fix it - it is so bad that I have started believing in Linux suspend/resume being sentient (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613621)
Is it possible to upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 without reinstalling the whole OS?
How true, IE6 used to have a large market share( may be still has considerable market share ) only because for all of its short comings, it gets the work done.
The point is this - if my locality wishes to criminalize drugs and yours doesn't, we both get what we want. My locality has a bunch of drug users getting raped in prison, yours doesn't. We all get what we want.

This doesn't work for a few narrow issues. If you dump oil into your oceans, it floats into my oceans and you are forcing me to deal with polluted waters. If you allow piracy (the "arrr, matey" kind), the pirates rob everyone rather than just people in your locality. In cases like this, force will be used no matter what. There is no getting around it.

Look, I'm almost as libertarian as they come. I'm not even making a pro-AGW argument, since I'm unconvinced of AGW myself. I'm just pointing out that you need to fully think through your position - it's a great proposal, but doesn't solve every problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Helvetica-like". OS X Uses Lucida Grande as a system font, which is quite different to Helvetica (Lucida Grande == Humanist, Helvetica == Neo Grotesque)

I can't vouch for Windows, but if memory serves it's system font is also a humanist style.
Surprising Ways to Get a Better Night's Sleep
It should be? What gives you reason to think it isn't possible?
We just need to put our heads together and create a warp drive. Come on people, let's do it. It must be possible! "Warp drive by 2030" - next Obama speech.