skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Gore's investment in carbon credits was originally part of him trying to put his money where his mouth was, not just pull a fast one on everyone. But you can always find a devil if you look long enough."

so...he's not hiding the fact that he's doing it for the money? Well played Mr. Gore.

The point is that he is supporting a push for carbon credit laws in which corporations will be forced to purchase carbon credits from companies that he has funded (and will see a return on the investment).

Why again should I listen to a guy that will stand to make a killing from this?

I love how the people on the left rail against the pharmaceutical companies for making insane profits, yet when it comes to green energy, look the other way,
If Groupon can really make $400 Million in sales this year at 50%+ margins on the deal then they could be worth quite a bit on the surface. However, with recent acquisitions and other costs, I would expect their expenses to be through the roof.

Problems:

-500 Employees is a lot of overhead.
-Acquisitions are spendy, too, and add more overhead.
-When businesses wise-up they are either going to have only Gap deals left or have to significantly lower their margins in order to drive real value to the merchant. Not every mom & pop business is going to fall for this "we sell it for $10 and give you nothing sales pitch."

I'm impressed with what Groupon has built, but the valuation seems inflated for a company that has so many vowels in its spelling.
Ask HN: Facebook Java SDK
For fun and to get more familiar with Java I have been writing what I will only call a Java SDK for the Facebook API. It is coming along quite nicely considering I have to basically recreate all the Facebook objects in Java. As long as you can pass your access token to the script you can easily call any of the objects the Facebook API will return. The JSON is all parsed and everything. Is this something anyone would be interested in? I am a couple days away from having implemented all of the Facebook objects and would need to clean up the code and do some documentation if I posted it online.
Volatile and Decentralized: In Defense of Mark Zuckerberg
You pay $450/month in electricity?? That seems quite a lot.
(even though I can't really tell how much I pay because it's been four years I have automated my bills)
I Need to Get Better At Email
I'm guessing from a quick Google that EPF is Malaysia's compulsory retirement savings program?
Thanks for the feedback, very good info. If you happen to stop by Saigon before the end of the month, shoot me an email if you'd like to grab a coffee. I'm in Kuala Lumpur in November too, feel free to reach out. Godspeed and much prosperity in your business.
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dphod/on_october_1_2...

Starcraft has built-in cheat codes, which disable achievements. You can play on offline mode, which doesn't have achievements, and not have to worry about getting caught with trainers et al.

Most likely, someone using a trainer is doing it to illicitly gain something that has value in multiplayer.
That's a pretty speculative causal conclusion, if a causal conclusion is what "no fluke" is getting at. The rapid advance of computers and the internet because it's the big recent technology. Many ages have their new technologies that undergo rapid advances, and computing is this age's. You could've predicted in the 1950s, and many people did, that computing would be the big technology of the 20th century, long before you had any idea how its regulation would play out.
I got it to work via asdf-install, but I had to cheat a little to do it: I removed linedit's version check that was not present in the dependent package (I think osicat).
Inspiring, and definitely puts a new light on when the CEO where I work announced he had Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.
JQuery 1.4.3 Release Candidate 1 Released
+1 on those numbers, except the salary varies quite a lot more that that.

A graduate developer is often on $40-50K, and an experienced developer can get contracts for $70-75/hour without too much trouble ($130K+/year)
Could you give some details about how and why you got this job, and what considerations had to be made when designing it?
Start with Paul Graham's essay about startup ideas:

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Phrase the idea as a question worth exploring: can I build a startup on the idea of [insert idea here]?

To quote:

> Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.

So what I suggest you do, is build a webapp based on some idea, but don't count on it making you much money. You'll still be getting experience and learning how to run and manage your servers (and that's really the core of your business).

$200/mo is quite manageable if you just put Google ads and have a decent amount of visitors. To do that, you don't need to have a business idea, you just need a site that provides some cool service that a decent amount of people would want to use it.

Point being, you don't have to hunt for a business idea.
"It has nothing to do with corruption. He has publicly discussed his business interests, they are common knowledge, and he is in part using it a case study for the good economic opportunities behind sustainable technology and policy. Corruption is pushing for changes that benefit you without acknowledging it, or obscuring your intentions"

Ok, it's not corruption. It's just plain unethical.

If Bush had come out and said to the American people that he was going to profit from the Iraq war, would it then make it okay?

I guess the next time I'm going to commit a crime or do something unethical, I should let everyone know my intentions. This will make it okay.

"he is in part using it a case study for the good economic opportunities behind sustainable technology and policy"

a "case study". Really? Really?? I call a billion dollars in personal profits enforced by the government more than a case study.
Blizzard already has built in cheats in single player. You just press enter and type a few phrases. However the built-in cheats disable achievements when activated.
The most simple recommendation that I would like to make is to avoid at all costs becoming an evangelist for any particular political philosophy. They all fare poorly when taken too literally because people are too complex and reality is too subtle. Nobody is free without food, but food is worthless without freedom, to extend your metaphor.

And now for the answer to your question: I would read something by Karl Popper, and then ponder some of the great social experiments of the 20th century - Milgram and Zombardo for a start.
Oops didn't mean to derail the topic. You made a good point with which I agree. I just wanted to add how in one case government intervention is needed while in the other case it would be detrimental (think international tariffs on specific models and types of cars, etc.)
Intel tool will let its chips run iPhone apps
Reduce Body Fat To Improve Your Health
Next New Networks Finds Life After 'Obama Girl'
Perth, Australia is substantially the same. If you're really eating ramen or beans and rice, food could be a bit less.

Figure about $100/month for comfortable use of electricity and gas.
$500.00 for a single room flat in Warsaw == 1500PLN
Are you sure it is that much?

Also, I call BS on "specialist" making 9000 PLN a month

P.S. Official median salary in PL is 1500PLN a month.
"point out where they were "damning" and where information was "falsified", hint: it didn't happen, you're a fish swallowing a hook."

No, you are. You are supporting the push to take money out of your pocket to support the nonsense that is global warming (which has changed names 3 times now).
I did it with exactly 0, but I did have a lot of luck and plenty of people that wanted to see me succeed so they threw me jobs, contacts and so on. That helped tremendously.

Conservatively, I'd say you need about 6 to 9 months living expenses in the bank and if that ever goes below 2 months remaining it might be time to see if you can land a job somewhere again.

The safe way to do this is to try out your consulting next to your regular employment.

That might take longer but the chances of failure are dramatically less.
Interested!
How can I contact you?
Ask HN: What makes an aggregator site great?
What makes an aggregator site great? I am thinking of building one for a niche market but I thought I would get your opinion first.
That's actually what I'm working on right now. Initally, the software was built for me and my wife (she's a type 1 diabetic) -- it wasn't until recently I decided to try and turn it into a service. Eventually, I hope to be branching out into alert services so people can check in on grandparents, automated medicine reminders, etc.
Depends on your expenses. How long do you anticipate that amount would last? And, would you be totally doomed if after X months, your startup isn't making any money and you run out of savings?

I think $18k is plenty fine, (but that's just me). I'm planning to do a similar thing and my savings are less than that.
I also think full concurrency/access from all Workers is the improper implementation.

The most important focus when writing commonly-labeled "HTML5" apps should be performance, for now at least. We are, at long last, overcoming the click-fetch-wait style of interaction with Web data; the dynamic nature of its replacement is a key feature, and the influx of performance-constrained rich-web devices need to support complex dynamic apps too.

So, I think we need to rethink the roles of common Web technologies. The DOM is no place for state; it should be treated more as an interface layer than a representation of data. JavaScript engines are tuned enough, and the basic architecture for extremely rich apps is in place, we just need to use our tools intelligently as implementors.
Instapaper's Bookmarklet API request for Mobile Safari
I hate that - I wish someone could come up with a way to either front-load or back-load the prompts that interrupt the install.

The upgrade alone took 3 hours on my laptop, and that ballooned to 5+ from it getting hung up on prompts.
I'm currently bootstrapping a startup on my savings, with no incomes. I moved from Paris to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam). It's a very inexpensive place to live in.

- Room on a flat: $150-$200
- Food: $120
Ditto, when I heard I needed an account with Blizzard to play SC2, my first thought was F-you.

I happily buy games from Bioware where I need to make an account, why? Because I've not heard of bioware abusing the privileged. I buy games from Steam, why? Because I've not heard of Valve abusing the privilege. However, I've heard of Blizzard abusing their authority near constantly, they're the PayPal of the new-generation of copy protection.
"The important lesson here, and the one you should take away from our experience, is this: Whenever you think you have enough data for the A/B test, get more! Sometimes, you will fall into that 0.1%, and your decision will be wrong, and might impact your metrics adversely, and you might never find out."

This is actually terrible advice because continuing a test in which one set is significantly better than another has a cost. You are showing an inferior set to a segment of your users and that costs you money (or signups or whatever metric it is you're improving which, at the end of the day, presumably equates to money).

As an example, suppose you do a test and discover something that doubles your signup rate (and therefore monetization rate) and you've got a confidence level of 99.9%. It's true, there's a 1 in 1,000 chance your result is flawed and you'll end up with the wrong decision. But there's a 999 in 1,000 that you're showing a significantly inferior signup page to half of your customers, costing you about 25% of potential revenue. It doesn't even take someone who knows what EV stands for to realize his EV on ending the test is huge here.
Ludwig Wendzich on the state of Net neutrality in New Zealand
Copenhagen has a wrong part?
BKNR-datastore seems really nice but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it yet. Do you know if it supports concurrent writes yet? I know it didn't circa 2008 or so...
I've walked people out of the office over things like this. Generally, people like this will shotgun every language and technology about which they've ever read a blog entry. It usually gets them past the phone screen (which I try to spread out on my team so everyone learns to do them) and in the door.

When I see them claiming experience with any of the "cool" technologies, I usually throw them a couple questions related to Haskell[1], ocaml, Erlang, Lisp, 6502 assembly, etc. If they flub that area without acknowledging that it was a toy project, I'll know they are probably lying someone else. I'll be a lot more aggressive zoning in on the design and implementation of their most recent project. If they're soft, where I might normally give a little room for "nervous at interviews," they're pretty much done.

However, if they nail it, I know we're going to be able to work well together. Especially so if they get excited that someone is asking them about something...that...they'll...never...get...to...work...with...in...our...boring...IT...department.

sigh

[1] This one is almost too easy. "I hear these 'monad' things are really tough. What are they about?"
They can't be serious with the "Building Accessible Websites" cover. http://joeclark.org/book/
I recently spoke to devs who are in the microsoft program. They say Windows Mobile 7 launch is premature. The documentation is not complete and many things are not at all described and have to be asked to a marketing person, who asks a tech guy, etc. Furthermore, Microsoft is signing contracts stipulating 1 to 1 ports of games and apps (they are paying the top devs to do this). However, some things are impossible to port. For example, you cannot show an embedded browser in some games in WM7, but facebook integration needs an integrated browser to display their authentification stuff.

So it's all really problematic and difficult.

The licensing fees for WM7 are also the highest in the market for handset developers (not sure about this, someone just told me).

Also, iPhone ports between the two is very difficult, because you need to translate Objective C to C#, then translate OpenGL to DX. You may as well just rewrite the game. Porting process is taking about half the time to develop the original game, according to my dude.
This is a good point. I generally like the “show us the code” method of social proof in open source communities much more than the “show us your certifications” method in academia. The problem of course is that the latter is much easier to scale up, because the certification stands in for a close and careful examination of each person... “Oh, he graduated from X school? he’s probably alright” is much faster than “Let me spend a few hours reading a major piece of work.”

It’s interesting to wonder whether how you’d go about building communities for doing science in a way that had tasks for inexpert but hard-working/bright newcomers to get started on, and allowed building reputation without all of the hassles of degrees and academic politics where much of the effort is misdirected. I wonder when/if some of the methods and norms of online communities will begin to supplant those of academia as it is today.

Interestingly, when it was smaller, science used to be much more accessible in this way. Once you were literate, you’d passed enough of a bar for serious people to treat you with some respect, and all kinds of advances were made by amateurs. So are the more open systems in computing just because of the youth of the field, or does online communication allow amateurism to scale further than it used to?
Problem is, while a robot car for every person is far from the optimal solution, there's a very large gap between the current public transit technology and the required technology to allow public transit to approach or match the advantages of a personal car.
I've recently acquired a... satchel? Man bag? Okay, it's basically a purse. My iPad is slightly too big to fit inside comfortably. A 7" tablet would probably be the perfect size for that.
Great start, looks promising. Few questions:

* Do you plan to support non-fully css3 compliant devices like Blackberry Bold 9000? jQuery Mobile due for release in a week should be.

* Are the current widgets limited to the few in the demo: list, button, popup? Any guidelines on how to create new ones?

Thanks.
Doesn't seem to work on my end when I go through the Google News link.
How much money you need depends on how much time you need. I had more savings than you when I started working on Tarsnap, but a secure backup system isn't something you can throw out in a few months, so I needed a longer runway.
You just described a poker room's rake perfectly.
Kostroma, Russia

I don't include clothes because these are more difficult to consider.

$250-350 for 2 room rent
$200+ for some "normal" food (meat and veggies included), if you prepare it yourself
$25 internet (10 mbit)
$6 movie ticket
$3 taxi ride
$0.2 for cheap ramen
$1 for some better ramen
$2.5 big mac

Average salary here for non-management position is around $600-800, I think.

I don't agree on salaries in Moscow. It's not a big deal to find a 70k RUR ($2.1k) position for an IT guy.
Not sure what you're saying about the Evo. I have one and it fits into my jeans pocket just fine. It's not even that awkward to shove a Blackberry in there with it.
5 Best Names for a Microsoft-Adobe Merger
The problem is a cultural narrative of "this is my perfect day!" This is what creates bridezilla out of otherwise very nice (but, not self-aware-enough) women.
Sorry, that was a bad typo :) I pay $450 a quarter, so $150 a month. Fixed my comment.
What they use these machines for normally is to drill shafts for ventilation or egress in mines. Generally there are two ways to drill shafts, top down (blind sinking etc.) or bottom up (raiseboring). Top down shafts used to be predominate, but these days they are only used for larger shaft diameters 5.5m+.

What you do is drill a pilot hole down for the shaft, attach the reamer head, then literally pull the drill rig upwards to ream the hole. Obviously in this case we can't get the reamer down there so they are using the pilot shaft hole to get the guys out (hence the tiny capsule!)

The rig (Strata 950) is used all over the world for these jobs, and it wasn't specifically designed for this, it just happened to be there at the time.

The major design considerations were the massive forces and torques that would be applied. However the biggest worry we had was the impact and fatigue strength of the rig, especially the reamer. This thing has upwards of 500T of thrust pulling it up and 600kNm of Torque on a 5.5m head. If it encounters a void or some other ground anomaly and it stalls or hits something, the damage it can cause is massive. It has been a while but I remember 25mm welds throughout it.

Hope that wasn't too long winded, but it is as 'simple' as I could really make it during my lunch break.

edit: some clarification
> Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?

Sorry, how do YOU know when your head gasket has blown and the car is overheating? What's that, your first indicator is the electronic temperature sensor on your dashboard!? My, there certainly is no way a computer could detect that.

If you are about to say, you detect it through loss of power, steam from the engine bay, coolant in the oil... I got news for you, you just detected it slower than a computer would have. A properly designed automatic driving system would monitor the vitals of the engine, and pull over in the event something goes critical, much the same way your PC shuts off when the CPU hits some predetermined temperature. Even better, if all cars were automatically driven, it would communicate this abnormality with the other cars on the road. It would be able to determine that this is unusual (it's not just a hot day), and it would also be able to co-operate with the other cars on the road to pull over safely as fast as possible.

The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible". They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch". In the case engineers miss a case, good feedback control systems can often cope for the unexpected event, and in the event they can't, there's always manual control. Hell, let's be honest here- most drivers would not detect a blown head gasket until the car simply stopped functioning, and the engine was completely destroyed anyway. There's tons of case where humans perform terribly, including some on your list. Accidents are caused all the time by people braking for squirrels when they shouldn't.
Ask HN: What are the best dates in 2011 for a product launch
There are pros and cons to launching around a major event, but it's good to know the options available. Let's collect a list of key opportunities for product launches next year. Please supply the dates, the event that coincides with it, and the category of startup for which it's best suited. Here's a few to get things going:

CES: Jan 6-9 (Consumer electronics)

3GSM World Congress Barcelona: Feb 14-17 (Mobile)

Spring Demo: Feb 27 - March 1 (General)

CTIA Las Vegas: March 21-24 (Mobile)

I will post a summary of responses on my blog so you can subscribe if you'd like to see the results (http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/feed).
Governments actually have very little control of the economy. They can tax stuff to discourage it, or adjust interest rates.

Or governments can, you know, use the legislature to control all legal economic activity. In particular, the US Congress has power over almost all commerce.
I do think that there are high-quality things that are expensive, but I think people buy by price rather than by blind quality tests relatively frequently. There are good expensive wines, but the wine price/quality correlation is not very strong at all. If you actually know what you're buying and how to judge it, though, by all means buy whatever you want!

I've personally been something of a beer aficionado for 5-6 years now, and I've seen this creeping into craft brewing quite a bit lately. Especially after the explosion in the last 1-2 years of mainstream popularity, there's now a very weak relationship between the quality of beer you get and whether you pay $3 or $30 for a 22-oz bottle. Tons of good stuff and crap across the spectrum, and increasingly manufacturers are pricing as a way of status-signaling rather than based on either cost or quality. There have even been cases of brewers rebadging the same recipe from a middle-range beer as high-end premium stuff with a fancy label, and it sells and gets good reviews! (But it doesn't do any better in blind taste tests.)
Praveen Rathore's Blog - Increasing violence in kids.
I'm not sure what to make of this farce, but I'm definitely not following Mike's suggestion to create a facebook account and list all my email accounts there.
Rent for small apartments close to the Green or Yellow lines are in the R$1000-1200 range for rent only. You must add charges("condominio"), electricity and tax("iptu"). I have two units, one close to Clinicas hospital, another close to Ana Rosa station, that I rent for R$1200 each, plus charges of around R$350 each.

At a far-from-trendy mid-market bar, the going price for a large bottle of Original is in the R$6-7 range, not only in Vila Madalena but also in Paraiso, Vila Mariana, Bela Vista, Jardins, Pinheiros. The price for a Bohemia at a "padaria" is R$4.

My fix-priced cell phone plan for 300 minutes, unlimited text and very limited 3G is R$250.

Bus or Metro tickets are R$2.70 now, not US$1 as I (mis)quoted.

São Paulo isn't cheap.