skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry to single you out, but comments like this really get me. It's OBVIOUSLY MUCH harder than it looks to you.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had hooked up a fuel cell to cleanly power a car.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had proved P != NP.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had used [insert pop science news headline] to solve [insert major science-related problem].

If you've got a simple solution to a complex problem, you're probably not seeing the whole picture. Or you should be implementing it yourself.
Indinero - Jessica Mah Interview [video]
>No, the village people drew a logically strong inference from their analysis of the available data.

Wrong. They engaged in a logical fallacy, full stop. The correct response would have been for them to replace the boy with someone who wasn't so prone to lying (and for your clock example, replace or fix the clock). They must check every alarm raised from their designated "wolf watcher".

Interestingly, a good usage of an ad hominem would have been the argument for replacing the boy (e.g. "It's too inefficient to use him as the watcher because he's a liar").
Are we really that sure Tannedbaum was right?

http://kernel.org/doc/ols/2007/ols2007v1-pages-251-262.pdf
And their army of lawyers.
We need third party verification of the Consumer Price Index and Google's just the group to give it to us. Maybe next up they'll tackle unemployment numbers?
This looks very much like output from neato - http://www.graphviz.org/. I'd be pretty surprised if it wasn't.
Everything by my university.
That's incorrect. Their position is that there's not a significant amount of CC licensed music without an NC attached, and it's too difficult to tell the difference, so they're banning all CC music regardless of whether or not it's CC-NC.
Show HN: I made a simple personal finance API (like Yodlee)
It's at http://finkin.com. The goal is to allow a developer to sign up in seconds, and within minutes begin querying data. It runs under https and stores no access information.

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431583, I realized that all those types of sites are not tailored to developers like the other simple APIs around the web are (i.e. flickr). I made mine as simple as I thought possible.

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676458, I realized that eventually it should be a scalable model where you pay pennies per the # of requests you make.

Right now it supports many institutions (not as many as Yodlee, as I don't scrape) but given enough demand, more will be added. I am currently beta testing the functionality before moving to a dedicated machine and having a SLA.

In the future, I plan to support more API functions such as getting a bank's routing number, being able to push user credentials up to the server where they will be encrypted and available for things like push notifications, bill pay API, etc.
I just wanted to clarify that Braintree does has additional recurring billing features that are not mentioned here. You have the ability to set up multiple plans, modify individual subscriptions, created add-ons and discounts, create one time charges and more. For a more complete list of features you can check out our website: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/recurring-....

-Jen
(Braintree)
The angry emo D rant
Just for the fun of it I asked Cleverbot (cleverbot.com) what the first amendment was. Here was the response:

What is the first amendment?
I don't know. What is the first duty?

NELL at least has a guess, even if it is wrong. Of course is someone told Cleverbot that the first amendment was a musical instrument it would probably repeat that as well.
Haskell Enumerators Tutorial Part 1: Iteratee
Yes. I've often wished there was something like this! Not just at the city level, but county, state, and national. I would do this in a heart beat -- is, if I weren't rather busy already. I may still apply, from half-way across the world.
If we're doing fun facts: Salvador Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo (the little lollies, like Kojak used to suck) back in 1969.

Improbably but true. I'd link to their website but they've turned the whole thing into Flash so I can't. Their design has clearly been going downhill since 1969....
Nope, they banned all CC works instead of noncommercial ones.
A few things:

1) no download, no registration - but I still have to enter a username and password. So I don't understand why you say 'no registration' when I still have to register a username

2) there is no compelling reason for me to install this - it took a while to find this which I guess is the main reason I would install it: 'Synchronized: Access Dashler from any computer and browser.'

3) When I clicked on 'Home' I expected to go to http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/ - I did not realise that the toolbar was not the main thing about Dashler. Then it also took me a while to work out how to get back to the toolbar page again.

4) I agree with a previous poster that I would have loved to see screenshots as I can't view videos at work

Lastly - looks like fun and an interesting idea, but it's not completely clear to me why I should want it. Perhaps you need to make that more clear on the front page.
A BSD license gives the user near absolute freedom to do what one wishes with a piece of source code -- they can sell it, modify and make proprietary, integrate with existing proprietary licensed projects, etc.

On the other hand, the GPL imposes heavy restrictions on what a user can do with a software's source code in order to preserve other users' freedoms.

That's the fundamental split in permissive licenses vs copyleft licenses. It has been argued to death and the author probably (correctly) assumed that most readers are already familiar with it.
Any monkey can innovate. Watch while I innovate the following new word: gronkuiotis. What matters is not innovation but well-engineered ideas. That is, ideas which will work in reality rather than in gronkuiotis, I mean, design-world.

Now I happen to think that this project has some merit, though the rotation of the two main plugs will never pass muster -- it'll break quickly and at any rate almost certainly will rapidly become a fire hazard internally after a few turns. But that's probably fixable.

But what I think the GP was getting on about, and what also annoys me greatly as well, is that there are many "designers" (i.e. artists) who think that engineering is the easy part, and what really matters is "innovating". The mindset of "designers" goes like this. "Let me think of this cool version of a chair! Now I just need to find a lowly engineer to do the menial engineering part, I'm sure it's inconsequential." Design-first-engineer-second is how you wind up with poorly engineered "innovations" like these: http://www.strida.com/en/products/

The basic problem is that most artists have no training in making something which actually works. It's not sexy to get something to work. It's sexy to draw pretty pictures.

When I was a little kid I used to draw spaceships where a lightbulb was focused through a long series of lenses until it became stronger and stronger and was blasted out the back, Star Wars Propulsion style. I was quite the innovator, and had some awesome spaceships with impressive lens sequences. That didn't mean my idea contributed to the global discourse.
Also note that there are two nice follow-ups:

http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/enumerators-tutorial-part-2/

http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/enumerators-tutorial-part-3/
The best way to control a Google TV: talk to it
I'm sure that the many elderly and disabled individuals who are currently unable to drive themselves would be very interested in a fully autonomous car. If they're not asking for it, it may only be because they're not aware it's something possible to ask for.

In many areas of the US, not being able to drive is a pretty major impediment to quality of life. This technology could transform many peoples daily lives.
The visualization is pretty nice. I'd be inclined to give a pass to the 2-person clusters -- unless similarity was 100%. But look at some of those clusters.. that's not coincidence or even just "helping someone out".
Yup, happens all the time.
Why Foreclosure Fraud Is So Dangerous to Property Rights
Feedback on my start-up's software
My start-up, Apps On Cloud, has just launched our new web-based software in private beta. Its basically a salesforce.com, scaled down to small businesses level, but also includes project management (time tracking, goals, etc) and employee management (detailed employee profiles and automated org charts) It also has a social aspect with Twitter-like features for following your co-workers activities.

Use of the software is free until Jan, so if anyone would like to check it out, can you let me know what you think? We're looking for feedback before we announce publicly in case it has major UI or functionality issues.

http://appsoncloud.com/

Thank you!
I think this is one of those arguments where its really hard to find the line between art and reality, which has the effect of simultaneously making The Social Network an amazing and controversial film.

I'm a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin and I think he takes the screenwriting craft to a whole new level. When he's writing something I don't think he just creates a "story" in his head, I think he crafts a whole society as a canvas. He has the ability, like many artists, to craft an extremely vivid picture in his mind and then translate that vision and eventually the story to his writing. So when he's telling the "Zuckerburg" story he creates an alternate reality but with some small basis in truth. A world where women are treated in a misogynistic manner, in a world inhabited by socially inept genius and an out of touch upper crust.

In this case he bases a lot of what he's built on the books and stories written, quite frankly, by the losers of the Facebook battles. These inform and lead the story but by the time its complete the villains, attitudes, and societies have been morphed into something quite more archetypical then their corresponding reality. Small quirks he finds interesting get expanded into large issues. Molehills are turned into mountains.

And really he's done a great job. The level of discourse on HN alone testifies to his ability to tell a story - like it or not.
"On a good month, you'll make a few thousand. On a bad month, you'll make next to nothing."

Wow. I guess that's true if you go cold-turkey and don't have anything set up beforehand.

Personally, I'd rather give up some of my free time while working for someone else, and once things get rolling, then make the leap. A leap I'm much more likely to survive.
Personal Cloud platform Tonido welcomes php developers to write apps
I was browsing Wikipedia's list of Java implementations recently, so I was wondering in what way the Java Trap still exists, as now you can find dozens of both proprietary and open implementations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines
I always loved the way every engineering degree teaches you that the most important thing is that you must never work with another student, copy existing work or collaborate in any way.

Thats what industry demands - engineers that must work totally in isolation.

Of course it's not as bad as my PhD where I had to sign a disclaimer that it was entirely my own work and not the result of any collaboration or group effort. This as for an experiment at CERN that had about 10,000 people working on it!
> The poster I replied to claimed that Dalvik is different because people target different languages at it

Reading comprehension, bro. Give it a try.

The Dalvik VM, like the Java Virtual Machine, is quite capable of running languages that aren't Java. There's nothing controversial or incorrect about that statement.
Hmm... I may be blind or crazy, but I had to actually use your search function on your excel site ( http://chandoo.org ) for "excel school" to find the actual product that is bringing you the most revenue!

Here is the sign up page for those of you that are curious: http://chandoo.org/wp/excel-school/

Call me crazy, but shouldn't you make that prominent somewhere on your homepage and each article... or am I missing something? (again, I could be completely blind or missing it, but if I am missing it... that's still an issue for your highest generating product)

I have a feeling that what seems to be almost a secret (the school) on your site which is generating the majority of your $100,000 could be GREATLY increased with higher visibility of the school. If my assumptions are correct and you implement my suggestion (which anyone here probably would), let us know when you hit $500k -- I have a feeling in 6 months.
... eight months ago.
Multiple "About" pages are confusing:

"Dashler is a bookmarklet. When clicked, it opens up a toolbar on top of the webpage you viewing."

"Dashler builds things that make browsing the web faster, easier, and more productive."

"Dashler is a bootstrapped start-up founded by Sam Mati."

"Dashler is not a search engine, encyclopedia, dictionary, social network, URL shortener, video website, news aggregator, website analytics provider, blogging service, stock analysis tool, e-mail provider, etc."

"Dashler is content to let others innovate in these areas."

"Dashler is a bookmark. There's no download."

Also, the hovering toolbar gets in the way of sites using top nav. I'd recommend trying it more like the Digg bar or Reddit bar, glued to the top of the window, and styled to match the detected browser's default chrome.
This fact surprises many, but Hubble was actually quite critical of using red-shift as an indicator of cosmological distance. In 1953 (the year before his death) he even convinced Robert Millikan, 1923 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics and director of physics at the California Insitute of Technology, that it was probably wrong to interpret red-shift as an expanison of the universe.

Hubble ended his book _Observational Approach to Cosmology_ with the statement: "... if the recession factor is dropped, if red-shifts are not primarily velocity-shifts, the picture is simple and plausible. There is no evidence of expansion and no restriction of time-scale, no trace of spatial curvature, and no limitation of spatial dimensions. Moreover, there is no problem of inter-nebular material. The observable region is thoroughly homogeneous; it is too small a sample to indicate the nature of the universe at large. The univers might even be an expanding model, provided the rate of expansion, which pure theory does not specify, is inappreciable. For that matter, the universe might even be contracting."
Just a minor point, you really should add a voice over to the video. Even if you don't like your own voice, it's way better than nothing. I spent the first 30 seconds trying to figure out what was wrong with my sound.
Perhaps you sould list these products on amazon as well, eh.
The tests for BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been around for decades. Here in Evil Socialist Canada, our governments have been paying the patent holders for this genetic test $200 a pop and providing genetic screening to our citizens for free for at least 10 years.

I forget the name of the company holding the patent at the moment. But, a bitter battle was fought around the world against these patents. Eventually it was the US's views that were upheld at WIPO, protecting the company who made their "discovery" on the backs of hundreds of millions of dollars in public R&D funding, including the Human Genome Project.

23 and Me didn't save anyone's life. The US Congress muscled through a patent regime that prevented anyone except private companies like 23 and Me from being able to provide this basic health procedure to the masses of American citizens.

You can go and celebrate this company because this guy and his wife had the money to afford to pay for this test. I see it as a loss for all the Americans who can't afford to pay. And therefore a loss to American society as a whole.
I really hope it is, otherwise, it would make it even harder fixing Ubuntu's #1 bug (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)
I don't think the gotcha is so much with before_validation, as with Ruby's implicit return values.
Actually, the school will probably try to claim rights on it.
Ask HN: Review my project - reportaproblem.at
So I built this project out of personal experience, when it happened to me that I accidentally broke a feature on my web site and nobody bothered to tell me.

I figured the reason for this is that users simply go away when something is not working, I do this myself. But what's the reason for that? It's quite cumbersome to notify the site owner: first you need to search for a contact or feedback link, and then you also need to describe what feature you're actually talking about.

So with reportaproblem you as a site owner receive a simple HTML snippet containing a "Report a problem" link that you attach next to all your important features on your web page.

When a user clicks such a link, inside the page a popover appears and you can quickly enter what's wrong without leaving the page.

I haven't (yet) put all that much effort into it, for example it probably needs a more decent navigation. I see it more like a proof of concept for now, also because I don't know whether or not it's a small and viable business idea at all.

In general, such links from reportaproblem.at are free, but I consider asking for a one-time fee to customize it (right now it's also free), and I also plan to provide additional features if it catches on.

I'm curious for your opinions. Thanks a lot!

http://www.reportaproblem.at/
Photoshop Environment and Tools
For all the wonders that Photoshop can do, it still remains as a humble image editor that also has the awesome tools that let you create original works artwork. If you like taking pictures or drawing your own art, Photoshop can greatly enhance your skills and creativity.
Oracle-IBM pact cuts Android off at the knees
clickable: http://www.reportaproblem.at/
Indeed. That's the group he feels comfortable slagging off in the post.
Direct link to the graph porn some commenters have mentioned:
https://files.me.com/jonathan.wan/uxhv4p

That's really the only thing I find interesting about this thread.
The read from the Oracle lawsuit is that using any of those will get you sued.

I've read many arguments about how Dalvik is 'different' and some or all of these are 'safe' and so on, but the reality is that 'safe' is whatever Oracle decides it is.
I had to spend a good deal of energy trying to figure out a) what it is your product actually does, and b) why I'd want to use it over my default built in google search box. Maybe you should try having a landing page with the example already launched and a video with sound nearby to make it quicker for users to 'get it'.
That's so awesome; it reminds of when I went homeless and lived on campus with a storage unit (crazy math+cs grad student days).
Are you serious? If you did that well on the SAT, surely you see the fallacy implicit in your comment. But just in case, I'll spell it out - I can't imagine any justification for the assumption that the ordering of people by the degree to which they "know their stuff" is the same as the ordering of them by SAT score. I'm sure there's a correlation, but what you said requires something far stronger. You may not have meant it in such a precise sense, but even in that case I think my objection actually still applies.
IT Security Salaries Expected to Rise in 2011
"do you think that there will be many new ones?"

Yes, I think there will continue to be some new projects, and other projects will fall off. Apache isn't the end-all be-all of Java projects, however.

Several of the larger newer projects were under SpringSource's wing, and there continue to be new projects there. And there's Codehaus. And some Java projects under GitHub, Java.net, SourceForge, etc. Then there's Groovy, Grails, and related projects. JRuby (formerly at Sun, now at EngineYard) is Ruby, but it allows some reuse of other Java projects. Android (like the author states) is a subset of Java, so all of those Android app projects. Kindle's KDK is Java. Your cable box may even run on Java.

If you've been only looking at Apache for Java growth, you've been looking in the wrong place.

"Or how many existing projects will have any significant effort put behind them?"

The Java projects at Apache have had continued effort put behind them, but some of the people that would have put effort towards Apache projects have spread out into some of the places I mentioned.

"If Java at Apache flounders, the platform as a whole will also diminish."

That's BS. If Apache fell on its ass, Java would still survive. See all of the other projects I mentioned, plus all of the current Java jobs I mentioned.

Where "Java" itself isn't the new hot thing, Java is dominant, and things using/requiring Java are hot, for example- look at this Google trends of Java vs. Android to see what I mean:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=java%2C+android
Interesting.

Two questions:

(1) How can we trust you with our bank login credentials?

(2) What is the current list of banks you support?

Would a call to https://api.finkin.com/v1.0/InstitutionSearch give me the full list?
I am sure many people will critized the fact that you have to place it by hand to each area and that its farely simple.

To be honest thats what i like about it. I like the simplicity.

Getsatisfaction and co completely miss the point and scare users off. It makes no sense to have a badge on the side. We use it in several projects. Its more a survey less a bug report channel. And the overhead of registering first keeps people out.

The benefit of the product is in two directions. First Users have a way to communicate. Second Users see that somebody would care if a problem arises.

I can imagine this product within smaller blogs/webshops and other smaller to middle-sized products.

The only problem i would see is that these pages then to be rather poorly implemented and it could easily happen that those errors break the plugin. But the user would have the same problem with all other implementations.
What good's a Volt without an outlet?
Ask HN: Do you know of any rails meetups in the Portland area
Im working on a side project which I hope to turn into a full fledged startup. I need to find a co-founder because the amount of work seems to be growing and I just cant seem to be able to do everything. I was hoping to go to a rails meetup and see if anyone might be interested in working with me on it.
Compared to a GTA/GRA salary, 35K for 11 months is really good.

Compared to being in a start-up based on Ramen, 35K is great!