skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That story reminds me of my own heater core troubles. I had an old car that sprang a leak in the heater core, dumping antifreeze all over the inside of the car. The cost of having someone replace the heater core and "do it right" was more than the value of the car, and I live in Florida so heat is really only something it would be nice to have 2 or 3 days out of the year. I didn't use duct tape, but I did use a $2 part and some zip ties to bypass the heater core entirely. The car lasted me 3 more years until I got tired of the other problems it was developing and finally decided to give it to a friend.

What's the point of my story? Perhaps duct tape isn't always the best solution, but there are certainly times where the application of duct tape (or zip ties) is an appropriate response, the trick is identifying when and where, and being willing and able to do it when it makes sense.
The difference between occidental and oriental philosophy and religion is Western ideas are surprising while Eastern are dull and expected.

Again and again we reminded that God's ways are far above our ways. As for this example, early Christians were encouraged not to prepare a defense in trials but that "the Holy Spirit" would give them the words at the right moment.

Of course that sounds awful under human reasoning, except God and the Holy Spirit are real!!

God says...
ask hosts withal occasioned mother join circuit variations
wanton assurance vanished heavier rouse fed shineth embarrassments
d teacheth endure maintaining troubled imprinted

I've often woundered why they call the first A-Bomb test site "Trinity site". The Trinity theology is awful and against everything in scientific thinking, an embarassment for pretty-much anyone who feels they must defend it.

Western thinking is like Star Wars with "the force".

The battle of Midway was a lucky break because they broke the Japanese code. The United States used Najaho code talkers. The Allies broke the German Enigma code. Luck.

A mentor said "If I had to be skilled or lucky, I'd pick lucky." So much is dominated by "luck" in this world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rDWqjnW7w

God says...
deliberation going _ wine arrive asunder ceaseth skilful
impair ceases respects Eagerly society vouchsafe sufficient
unaided healedst vices us Very Run deal verses commender
wings perceivedst limitation
> Even the nobel peace prize winner this year claims that another 200 years of British colonialism is what china needs to uplift itself out of totalitarianism.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner of this year is a fairly obscure writer in China. It is nothing more than the Nobel Prize committee giving the middle finger to China. IMHO it was a worse choice than Al Gore, Obama, Kissinger or Arafat.

> Instead we just get dumbfucks like you equivocating Nazis with

Nice ad hominem. Do you seriously wanted British Colonialism to last another 200 years? Maybe I am not as objective, since the British killed my people in concentration camps. Destroying all industry and putting people in concentration camps sure did a lot to uplift people!

> when they really have more in common with the current Chinese administration.

Really? The current Chinese administration is only involved in the ethnicide in one other country (Tibet) and has no ambitions to control other countries for its own benefit.

How many countries did the British Empire control?
This would give a whole new level of meaning to Google's favorite product subheading... "Beta"
HN has a lot of young inexperienced, overconfident people eager to ridicule you and your idea. It's good for technical feedback, but not great for support or business feedback. I thnk the poster did the exact right thing.
Ugh. Link-bait title.

This is just as useful:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1566568
Glad you like it. Please let me know if htty ends up causing you pain in the course of your API work. Either tweet me @get_htty or @njonsson or enter a bug or wish-list item at http://github.com/htty/htty/issues.
For years, even decades, I've heard this cited as if it's a legal can of worms that makes the whole notion of automated driving a political impossibility, so to speak, in the foreseeable future. Sure, it would save a lot of lives, the argument goes, but the rare failures would bring down a deluge of lawsuits that would crush any manufacturer foolish enough to try to mass-produce something like this.

I don't think that's the case, even taking as a given America's disgusting obsession with lawsuits. There's an obvious answer to the liability question, and one that I think Google is already depending on in allowing their robot cars to drive all over California: The person in the driver's seat is responsible as always. That person can choose to press the autopilot button but it's not fundamentally different than cruise control. Touching the brakes (or the steering wheel) immediately transfers control back to the driver. The car is doing what it does, as always, strictly as the driver's proxy.

Now of course it will happen that some driver sues the manufacturer because there was an accident they believe wouldn't have happened if they'd never gone on autopilot. Just like there have been (I blithely presume) lawsuits over cruise control. But the manufacturer will weather those lawsuits and reasonable legal precedent will be established soon enough.

But now suppose you press autopilot, go to sleep, and wake up to find you've committed vehicular homicide. That's a scary thought, but is it a potential dealbreaker in bringing this to the mass market? I think the answer is no, because we've already established the liability question: You were, officially and legally speaking, criminally negligent to go to sleep. Unofficially it might well have been a perfectly reasonable risk to have taken, if the probability of it ending in tragegy is sufficiently low. Logically, you could argue, citing statistics on human and robot drivers, that going to sleep with the car on autopilot was markedly less negligent than not putting the car on autopilot at all. I don't know if that would fly in court. But as far as legal obstacles to adoption of robot cars, I don't see it as much of an issue.

PS: I'm not a lawyer.
Compensation: tbd.

All I needed to see.
love it. another one of those "damn, why didn't i make that" apps :D
The aim of the project was to make htty an incremental advance over curl by layering aspects of a browser UX on top of it. What you get with htty that curl doesn't give you is primarily a session, and consequently a history. The other features are icing on the cake.

In the near future, the difference will be more striking. The ability to parse and build requests on various media types will make htty even better at the tasks of both API exploration and HTML screen-scraping.
It does seem tricky for the car to properly account for the presence of a cyclist using just the cameras and radar and whatnot. What if as a cyclist you carried a special RFID that robot cars would all be programmed to recognize?
what is does is increases the "skin" a user has invested into the site, whereas before, they wouldn't even consider registering
Any website or web service with a database of "things" (with attributes) is a competitor to Thingd: WorldCat, IMDB, gdgt, Google Merchant Center, Zappos, CNET reviews, Etsy...

Good luck Thingd --- you'll need it!
Congratson a great site. It's useful and interesting. No, don't invest much more into it and no, it can't be a business. It's a super niche site intended for a supernniche audience. You've proven that you can go from idea to production, and that's very rare in life (most people are talkers, you're a doer). Now, do the smart thing, and heed the advice here. Move on to your next big idea, this one only has hobby potential.
I think this happens everywhere. I have first hand knowledge of this problem on news websites. (I'm talking about the "really dumb and contentious discussion")
For each of your examples which show successful adaption, I believe that there are others that show that species have been dying out because they cannot adapt or evolve because of the rapid changes occurring in the ecosystem or because the niche to which they adapted is no longer there.

I would prefer not to see humanity bet the ranch on the ability of the global ecosystem to adapt rapidly when there is scant evidence that such an adaption will happen at all, much less, happen quickly and painlessly. I think we need to gather more data and learn more about the way our global ecosystem functions. I thin it is prudent to work hard to minimize the quantities of greenhouse gas dumped into the atmosphere, move to renewable energy sources, and generally try to not perturb the system until we understand it.
Glengarry Glen Ross
ABC
Always Be Closing!

I'm dating my self here but Risky Business.
Looks like Tonido (the maker of the hardware) is looking to get directly into the hosting business, at the somewhat ridiculous price of $20/month:
http://www.tonido.com/tonidocloud_what.html
"Intellectual pursuits are more respectable and rewarding than non-intellectual ones". Personally, I'd say it might be okay to run a little baseball team and make a few dozen people's lives more interesting. Even doing a phd in QFT, as you note, might help some people in the long run. But are you trying to define a heuristic that proposes that one human is better than the other solely due to the field of work?

I find this trend rather disturbing. It's almost parallel to the "nerds don't get laid" paradigm. For the record, I'm a physics major. And I'd any-day prefer to be a little-league team manager than troll on comment threads.
"Setup Fee" should be changed to "Purchase Fee" for clarity's sake. The setup fee of a typical webhost is for configuration (plugging in, making accessible to the world) exclusively.
T-Mobile's "rootkit" is nothing but a palliative.
I think they're brute-forcing the semantic web
All credits due to @cyanogen, of cyanogenmod.com.
My zero-equity co-founder is the internet. If I had jumped back into 1960 I would have to spend 50 years creating the internet. He doesn't even want a cut of my company!
Don't know why you were downvoted, the whole chmod "problem" is a storm in a teacup.

I'm surprised nobody commented on the last guy's reply (no problem had occurred yet). Apparently all were busy watching the sky fall.
I like the effort they go through in the comment thread to discuss the performance, power draw, etc. compared to a VPS. For instance, a VPS appears to draw 56 watts per user, while the SheevaPlug plus disk at high load draw only 20 watts; a pretty nice power savings.

From the site http://pluggr.info/#ps

"Please note that TonidoPlugs installed on our network have the torrent functionality disabled, as it is a violation of our AUP to download torrents via our network."

Sigh. I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes. I like to transfer free software and creative commons licenses work using Bittorrent; I should be able to do that on my own server, and if they want to charge me for the bandwidth usage, that's fine, but they shouldn't just ban it outright. Also odd that they don't actually mention this on their AUP http://pluggr.info/#tos but they do seem to forbid running IRC servers for some reason.
I would have assumed you had a plan before you stood on the corner asking questions. Maybe you decided:

- how many people you wanted to talk to
- the type of people (kids, working adults, homeless, men, women, etc)
- the response you were expecting from the interaction
- the number of responses you were expecting

Now, did the results of your experiment meet the criteria for your test and if so, were the responses actionable?

I would say you were crazy and wasted your time if you didn't already have an idea of what you were trying to accomplish. Otherwise, I'd say, "Great! What did you find out".
Surely "when I'm tired" is one of the situations in which this tech should not be used. In Australia, for example, where long-distance driving is common, fatigue is one of the biggest contributors to road accident statistics.

Apart from the risk of someone actually falling asleep while the car is on auto-pilot, anything that reduces one's alertness over the duration of a drive makes this technology more dangerous (which is not to categorise it as dangerous).

The road recognition features would deal with simple cases like drifting out of lane but not so much in built-up areas or around unpredictable drivers. I think a big part of safe driving is adapting to accommodate the behaviour of other road users. Hopefully some tech will be developed in this area such as recognising inappropriate signalling, drifting out of lane, tailgating (ahead) etc.
Can the person who downvoted this please explain why?
The `cdto` functionality (and then some) already exists in many shells, even the Windows shell.

`pushd` switches directories and maintains a stack of visited directories. `popd` pops the previous directory off the stack and then switches to it.

In zsh, it seems that `cd` is an alias for `pushd`. You can `cd` to a directory, then `popd` to go back.

In Windows, `pushd` seems to the easiest/only way to navigate to network directories on the command-line.
I'd love to hear the author say this to the women in my family with a straight face.

- My mother and her best friend (also a woman) started a business last year (her 2nd), and she's looking at starting a third.

- My stepmother founded/runs a non-profit (her 2nd or 3rd, not sure).

- My sister declared she wanted to be a dean at age 18. 12 years and 3 degrees later, she's now a dean at American.

- All 4 of my aunts run their own businesses, three have done several and the fourth started hers this week. One currently owns/runs one of the larger companies in Germany.

Anecdotal evidence be damned!
dist-upgrade doesn't upgrade the distribution: The difference between dist and normal upgrade is that normal upgrade will not install new packages if required, it will only update existing packages.

You have to use some other commands to get an actual Ubuntu version upgrade (I don't know them, but you seem to have the GUI version down.)
LTS+1 seems to be a tough release for Ubuntu, since they hold back on letting bleeding stuff through on the LTS.

11.04 should have fewer bugs and major changes, I would THINK.
CBC agreement with talent agency prohibits use of Creative Commons music
You don't know me and I'm just starting to post on HN, but I've read a bit of your writings and you're clearly a brilliant guy. I recently saw a thread from a couple years ago where a few people made the flawed assertion that the aggregate rate of failure among entrepreneurs was uniform, and that your chances of success were also 10%, just like everyone else. Your response basically said that you were quite confident you were better than the average entrepreneur, and that you were pretty sure you're on the right hand of the bell curve.

I actually admire that bravado in people who can walk the walk. I'm not a fan of false humility.

All that being said, you seem to wear the solo-founder badge a bit too triumphantly. I can't comment on the superiority of your solution versus competitors but I'll bet you can hold your own. Getting someone on board who can SELL your story, and communicate your product to interested buyers would probably do wonders for your sales if you found the right guy.

Trust me, I see where you're coming from. After a bad past experience myself, I am now a single founder building up my product in solitude. But I know where my limits end, and when my product is ready to go to the next level, I'll have no problem bringing on a VETTED and qualified partner to grow the company as fast as possible.

Just a thought!
Where do you live that drivers through bottles at cyclists, and how common is this?
That's true of everything.

I'd much rather pay for what I need from a competitive marketplace that is constantly driving down the cost of everything than leave it up to monopolistic government to hand out the privilege of drinking water.

The market works damn well for the vast majority of things with which government has not blessed with its involvement.

Water is no different than most things. In fact, it falls out of the sky in a lot of places.

Places where its difficult to obtain water usually have plenty of government managing the privileges.

The free market is people peacefully trading with each other. Most government is coercion. I don't see how more of it is a solution.
This 4HWW blog post was submitted here about 6 months ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321730

In the comments section, user feb basically asked HN if our users could verify this is legit, but he didn't get a response then. Anyone?
Pedestrians rule in NYC, at least on upper Broadway, ie Harlem. Crowds will cross, disregarding the state of any light. Just stay in the middle.
I wonder how they'd scale up this service if suddenly everyone wanted it. It seems pretty awesome though, especially if you're the type of person who deals with lots of small problems daily.
You also get to choose the best car for the task; electric cars for short hops, other technologies for longer shots. You may not need to do a trip in one shot, so local electrics can commute a bunch of people to a local bus that may commute 30 miles without stopping. Public transport would get a lot more economical as a result, too, and determining the best place to locate them would be a relatively simple computer problem.

Car companies may fight it but it won't matter, the economics are overwhelmingly against them on this, because signing up for this service will be overwhelmingly cheaper than owning your own car, probably by at least an order of magnitude for most people.
An interesting antidote: http://pastebin.com/cm75Z9UA
JRuby cn also be a good way to run ruby on windows.
Just get that node.js chat server running on your sheevaplug... nowadays there are many new architectural iterations of IRC.

Same with BitTorrent... I wonder how they filter that. What if I set up an Anomos server?

http://anomos.info/
It's an equipment and room booking/reservation system for schools and colleges (initially). I have some ideas about the interface I want but I like the design chops to implement them efficiently.

There are the usual elements found in web apps like dashboards, navigation and forms. There are also month/week/day views to view and make bookings for a given resource.
> Why there is so much advertising crap around?

Counter-question. How else do you think we can afford to keep all of this "free" internet crap free?
How the Shopping Cart Has Changed
HN, hands down the best community on the web.
Not entirely true if you're talking about a poor area whose market can't bear a price which makes supplying them profitable.

The article also mentions that conservation is forced disproportionately on the poor given the examples of Cal in the 80s.
http://xkcd.com/386/ :)
And I suppose we'll have to get rid of bicycles and pedestrians, too, in this perfect world where intuition of human behavior is unnecessary to safely pilot a vehicle on the road?
This is news? There's a few hundred clowns in the U.S. congress...
It wasn't deliberate link-bait. I use the term "zero-equity co-founder" because it makes the point that these provide something which (until recently) you would need to bring in a co-founder for.
Ask HN: How to check if URL is posted to HN (without actually posting it)
Is it possible to check if a URL has been posted to HN without actually posting it?
"The day you believe in your heart of hearts that you did your best"

Sometimes when u wait that long, the opportunity has been taken by someone else, you running out of money or your customer's are just too frustrated with your business. I believe that you are correct that stepping up communication is important but we also have to keep in mind that time is money. My advice would be to put a time frame on it and if the issue is not solved start executing your plan. Also always remember that the health of the business comes first.
Water is so ridiculously cheap in America. We need some mechanism to price in future shortages so people conserve now. Most people (90% or more) won't respond to anything besides a price signal...
Unlimited iTunes Subscriptions?
I was hoping that this was a cautionary tale that ended with someone in prison, but sadly not (yet).
Your response basically said that you were quite confident...

Ah yes, the old Putnam thread which gets trotted out every month or so...

I know where my limits end, and when my product is ready to go to the next level, I'll have no problem bringing on a VETTED and qualified partner to grow the company as fast as possible.

Sure. One of the bullet points from my talk which didn't get translated into the blog post was "Step 1: Figure out what you're good at". I'm very much aware of my limitations, and if I ever forget them tptacek will step in to remind me how horrible I am at web design and how I need to do a better job of selling Tarsnap.

As for marketing, I very nearly listed Hacker News as my marketing co-founder: Roughly 10% of Tarsnap users come to the website from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389304 -- far more than any other single page (although my blog is more in aggregate).
What is the average rate of return of Venture capital firms?
I know there is no way to get an exact number, but I'm looking for a ball park figure.
The fact that it's intriguing doesn't necessarily make it link bait-y. My curiosity was engaged and the unique frame of the message increased the complexity of how I think of the single founder issue. I also have renewed appreciation for the heavy lifting I won't have to do thanks to existing libraries, frameworks and services.

Good marketing, yes, but the content was virtuous on top of that.
I've had two fail on me over the years. One is a 1GB stick that only shows some weird size that reformatting won't even fix, and the other was a 2GB that completely died. After finding Dropbox though, I no longer carry a flash drive unless I'm giving a presentation and want a backup in case the internet is down.
Of the fact that Rare team was spun out of Microsoft.
Had this article been written by a man, people would zero in immediately on Penelope's real issue:

She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.

She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.

I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.

Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.
One way, although inelegant, would be to post a URL and see if I can delete it right away. If I can, that means it hasn't been posted prior to me posting. I'll have to detect the "0 minutes ago" and the delete link

If I cannot delete, that means it already exists
But the same can be said for _any_ component in your business that was made outside your office walls. Your operating system. Your compiler. Your office chair.

This is in fact how an open and free economy works. You always build on the work of others.