skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can anyone help explain how likely this is to be the result of water? Is it possible these lines were produced by wind?
Go read Paul Krugman on why the stimulus was way too small, and stop trolling.
"We looked not just at the narrow slice of tech companies that gets featured most often on TechCrunch, but at the broader universe..."

I'm a fan of TC but it's helpful to remember that it is something of a reality distortion field.
I've seen similar claims from Microsoft before, and it's all very nice, in theory. But as far as I'm concerned, all of this is theoretical until it actually happens. Microsoft has had a long history of making claims during the marketing phase that just do not bear out in the final product. Thus it is a dodgy proposition to prognosticate using their marketing material.
Cars don't come with hidden costs in the form of overdraft charges, late payment fees and foreclosure and the seizure of your assets, if you pay cash for them.

There is nothing wrong with cars and the personal responsibilities that go with them, financing is something that most people that are eligible for do not understand sufficiently to evaluate the risk.

Of course the standard capitalist answer is 'sucks to be you, should should have studied harder in school', but the fact is that this out-of-control lending is causing a large amount of trouble.

People should not by default be allowed to borrow this much money for simple reasons such as financial health of the nation and (in)solvency of the banks.

That way, if you can't afford a fancy car you won't be buying it.

Cheap credit has become a way to push the economy forward on money that hasn't been rightfully earned yet, that can't go on forever before it will come back to haunt us, the mortgage crisis is one nice example of what happens when the financial system is rotten. I won't be surprised if there will be another chapter to this based on the amount of credit card debt there and the number of people that find that they are no longer in a position to fulfill their obligations.
The Dawn of Mass Computing: Promotional Photos
Agreed.
I signed up, installed ruby and sinatra for a quick test environment before i realized i had no clue what the public ip was, or maybe you need to configure something for aws.

The ip you are given to ssh in with seems to not be open on other ports, or maybe its a different ip for common web ports – i don't know.

So, plan well ..
(or treat it simply as a cli test).
I don’t know whether switching costs matter. Apps are so cheap compared to the cost of the phone. Even if someone spends just as much on apps it’s not as though all those apps will always be used. Why would you lose sleep when you can’t play that $1 game anymore you already beat anyway?

I think that apps can strengthen your brand. Everybody knows that Angry Birds is an iPhone thing. Others want to show that they have it because it’s trendy.
Amazon Product Advertising API dying?
I was going to write a webapp based on the Amazon Product Advertising API. The documentation and code examples seem quite poor and not very current.
Searching the Amazon forums, I found this discussion:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=51239&tstart=15

So what do you think - is it worth learning the Amazon Advertising API? Do you think it is going away? What alternatives would you use?
I looked at the Ebay API but they say basically they will decide how often you can call the API, and if you use it too often, they will either turn off your access, or charge you. Amazon's 1 call per second is at least a known value.
Usually, they are stumbling all over themselves, and completely failing every question they are asked. These become the sorts of interviews people write about on The Daily WTF and other blogs online.

That is, unless they interview at an organization that is much more interested in finding compatible personality for their culture than they are in the person's ability. These organizations exist; I worked for one a year or two back. The candidate I was interviewing as part of a panel had not been asked a coding question to that point, and she was already quite far along in the interview process -- the next step after the panel interview was an offer. No one else really cared; they just wanted someone who would increase headcount while not disrupting the culture and structure of the organization.

So, the people who answer this way, they're just playing a numbers game. They keep going on interviews until they hit an organization like I describe above; at that point, all they need to be hired is to just be agreeable.
Few people just want to have money for no reason. Most people want to have money because of what they want to spend it on; their outrageous expenses are their passion in life and their reason for wanting money. It isn't helpful advice to say, "Don't spend money on Manolo Blahniks, and then you'll have plenty of money," if your whole reason for wanting money is so you can wear Monolo Blahniks.

In other words, it sounds like a sermon on loving money for itself instead of loving it for what it can buy you. Or, if you read it charitably, it's a sermon on loving security more and short-term pleasures less. As much as I sneer at expensive fashion and gravitate toward the <$10 wine bin at the grocery store, this article strikes me as nothing but unhelpful moralizing. Yeah. I get it. If I don't spend money, I'll have more. Yeah, I really, really get that looking good and living it up is a vacuous pastime -- I'm totally with you on this one -- but it's the most common passion on the planet, and it's a cop out to tell people to stop enjoying the one aspect of life that gives them the most pleasure and call it financial advice.
What I got out of it is that people with a lot of money (i.e. millionaires) tend to get there by being frugal and responsible with their money. Lots of other people, however, tend to buy big flashy items that say 'look at how much money I have', but buy them all on credit and then put all their disposable income into paying off their flashy lifestyle instead of accumulating lasting wealth.

Moral of the story: being rich and acting rich are two different things.
That's very true, those people are living within their means, not outside of it, and there are plenty of them.
I really like Plan 9. Too bad it never really took off.
I don't think there is as much filtering on stuff for internal consumption as external. (I'm an employee. Internal videos are the ones I was referring to.)
For many incompetent teachers, the most efficient way to remove them from the system would be to turn them into competent teachers. Teaching is a teachable skill.
I think it would make April 1 much more fun for people to be always sorting through Google's jokes trying to figure out which one was for real.
This article is offensive.

Pedophile is such a loaded term that to use it in this fashion is rather outrageous: "Farmers look more to a female’s future fertility potential, while foragers and other primates with shorter-term relationships focus more on her current fertility. This turns farmer males into pedophiles, i.e., more interested in younger females."

The trem "pedophile" has absolutely nothing to do with the desire to "mate", that is, to have children. Further, pedophiles usually have multiple victims, and if given the opportunity, leave a trail of victims in their wake. "Mate for life" indeed!
Yep, you're right. That doesn't change the rest of it though.
Since I'm creating a wedding startup, the insane amount of money people throw at one event has been in my mind lately...

It's a brutal cycle — the weddings featured in magazines and online are almost always out of the average couples budget, and what those stories do is create the idea of "this is what you should have". Couples then concern themselves with having the best card boxes, the perfect playlist, hand making favors that will be thrown out the next day by the majority of their guests, because this is what they're told is the right way of throwing a wedding. A one day event that people spend way too much money on because they're persuaded to by this industry.
I see we are still losing the rights for the moniker "Hacker".
That's how EC2 works. Canonical didn't say they are just going to pay for all your servers now.
I agree. NASA, and most people, thrive on having a mission - especially a challenge.
Assuming English is your native language and you're white* it should be easy to find work teaching english. You won't make a lot of money but it will allow you to live comfortably and save money for travel.

You can find a school that will hire you (although that might be tough for just a few months) or you can find private work but realise then you are working in a country as a tourist. Many people do this but you will need to weigh the possible consequences for yourself.

* People who are not white will generally have a much tougher time getting work as many places in the world believe English speaking countries are completely composed of white people.
Annoying, but not the end of the world. Doesn't make the article useless.
I've seen this happening in several communities, namely some of the online parkour forums. One in particular used to be a very tight nit group of people, but as Parkour grew, more and more people got on the forum. As those original "high quality" people left, I thought the next level of people "took over" there positions.

This kind of kept happening, but every time it got worse and worse. It wasn't until reading this article that I realized that they weren't "taking over" or "stepping up," but they were simply the next highest level.

I've seen it happen and tried to warn people who manage those communities of it.. usually with little success. Great article though, explains the concept extremely well.
Why do technology research? Is Google’s car going to lead anywhere?
I'm not sure you can really call this a "problem". That's like saying someone has an "entrepreneurship" problem because they keep wanting to create new companies from zero. If they're successful at it, why not?
I do agree that people should live within their means, but the root cause is not "the banks". If the government creates an environment in which the choice is, lend too much or go out of business when your rivals do and you have no customers, then a bank has no choice. And the smarter banks knew this; the whole CDO thing was a desperate attempt to somehow offset the risk.

If you want a root cause in the UK at least, look no further than Gordon Brown. 1 pound in 4 NuLabour spent was borrowed... And unlike my neighbours fancy car, that debt does affect me, despite having no part of it, aye, and no part of it spent on me either...
LOL "conspiracy". My blog posts are about technology, business, and marketing, not conspiracy theories. I would call it a marketing gimmick. By the way, did you hear that Apollo never went to the moon!?!?! The senile lady next door told me that along with the true identity of JFK's assassin. Don't ask who it is; you have to be a blood oath conspiracy buff.

Any regular HDTV can function as a "3D TV". Invest a couple hundred bucks into a few pairs of magical glasses instead of draining a couple grand into a glasses-less 3D TV.

That makes more (financial) sense to me...IF I were a consumer enthralled by 3D TV. Which, based on my article, I would assume I am not.
Stuck in Twitter, like the frog in the boiling water
Why are so many major investors going gourmet? 
Or more accurately, why are they turning to agricultural commodities to make their next billion? Because it's hard to know which energy source offers the best investment possibilities. Or so they say. Maybe they really just have a love for the rich treasures of honeys and cheeses? http://www.VentureCharities.biz.
> How much would someone have to pay you to drown X months of development work and your entire userbase in the Deadpool?

Destruction is so much easier than creation. They don't have to pay you, they just need to send the in-house destruction team.

> How many 0s does it take to make an option that's viable into one that's desirable?

How much does it take to fix a "man barely alive" into something that is "better, stronger, faster"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLs0V8T5AA
Thanks for the kind words Zach :).
http://www.ruf.dk/ - I heard about this invention years ago and apparently they are still working on it.. Don't know if I believe in it but it is an interesting concept.
When you're looking at ideas, filter not just for how much a particular idea interests you but how much it will cost to market. A productivity app that addresses a specific issue, for example, has a much more defined, low cost route to market than a website where you need to work with multiple manufacturers and attract consumers to launch a crowd-sourced clothing line production website.

The simplest formula is: 1. Solve a specific problem; 2. Tell the people who have the problem that you've solved it; 3. Convert them; 4. Profit. If the number of people you need to reach with #2 is vast, it's less likely you will reach #4 with the kind of budget you're talking about.
For an interesting comment, see Brad DeLong's "Greg Mankiw Quits the New York Times?": http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/greg-mankiw-quits-the-...
I made good money playing online poker - that's what I did for money the last year of college and the first year after I graduated.

My group were some of the first people to adopt player databases to get stats on opponents. Some kids at my college made the first of these types of programs, and we knew them.

Any smart person can make money playing online poker. But there's more money in making software, by many orders of magnitude.
The stresses of being a pro poker-player are roughly the same as being a start-up founder. My problem was it just got to be too much poker - poker for work, poker for fun, and I couldn't talk to anyone about anything but poker. The same thing happens with start-ups, but the conversation doesn't always start, "So I had KK in the big blind...," so it's more interesting.
Automatically running a command whenever a file is saved
Very close to the fight club quote: "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."
#.11 They'll take a really beautifully designed product suite and turn it into a Teletubbies trainwreck inside two years.
Thanks for the heads up.

Honestly we have a massive TODO list and our front page needs an overhaul.
Second that. Unless there's something major you just can't live without, which there doesn't appear to be in the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10, let the pawns go first.
Not everyone is like him. Carrying spare batteries is probably the exception, not the rule. I literally can‘t think of anybody I know in real life who even owns a spare battery for their mobile phone.

Apple probably figured that this was a feature worth ditching because hardly anybody needs it, maybe also because there are (clunky) workarounds (with all those external batteries). The iPods and later the iPhone have an active accessory ecosystem so Apple can do stuff like that.
A configuration management system like cfengine or puppet is probably distributing files directly from revision control. Changes made to files on the system will likely be reverted unless someone specifically disables the agent.

> a system that allows any programming language with sqlite3 bindings manage the config is going to help with automation.

It's just a different config language, there's nothing that inherently allows more automation. The guy writing a gui interface might find that sqlite3 more useful. The guy using puppet and erb templates will probably prefer the text file.

The point of a configuration language is to provide a human interface. If you don't need the human interface then why do you expose configuration at all?
Fair enough. Like I said in my article, "There is a huge check with Microsoft's name on it IF they pull this off."

I'm betting they do. I also bet on the iPad failing; I now owe my friend Scott an unboxing video of that putrid device. I digress.
> Why does a bank give a 30 year mortgage to someone who is 70?

Presumably they're counting on the mortgage being paid off by the estate of your fiscally conservative parents once they die.

Even if that isn't the case they can claim the townhouse from the estate and try to sell it to someone else.
Best of both worlds for server - upgrade from LTS version to LTS version only, skip the 'bleeding edge' *.10 releases.

Of course, plenty of people are still running 7, 8, and 9 servers with no problems.
Mentioned in the article, and applicable to more than poker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker)
Besides the original evaporative cooling essay, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/.
Yes, avoid dist-upgrade, it apparently can break dependencies. Upgrade to a major version with

%> sudo apt-get update && sudo do-release-upgrade
Governments actually have very little control of the economy. They can tax stuff to discourage it, or adjust interest rates. Pretty much anything else they do has horrible side effects that are very difficult to predict and often take years to exhibit. To see what they can do:

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

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

Or to put it more concisely, how exactly would you like the government to intervene?

So yeah, it _is_ the Banks who are to blame.
The title of this article alone is enough to make be feel like I just got sucker-punched in the gut.

It would be a hard pill to swallow if Microsoft gained control of Flash, Acrobat, Photoshop, the PDF spec -- in fact, that would be a near nightmare for the printing industry in which I work.

I hope this is just a bad dream...
www.deucescracked.com

I played online for a living for about a year and a half, and they're awesome.
Finding Developers and Women
How U.S. Cyber Command want to control the internet
A few observations, I've never used my iPhone enough in one day to run down the battery. If you are the kind of person who does then they sell external batteries. You could also take along the charger or in car charger and top your phone off during lunch or while driving around.
I don't see how your proposed solution affects either your first or second cases.

"What if someone edits the sqlite file via sqlite rather than the config file?"
- well, you've just introduced complexity by making them separate, and disparately maintained files. Previously, there was no config file, and you didn't have this problem.

"What if sqlite3 goes out of business? How will we edit the config files? Where can we purchase sqlite3 support?"
- your proposed solution does not address this at all. You are still dependent upon sqlite3.

"So now we can't even invoke the server, we need to invoke some complicated shell script? Sounds like a maintenance nightmare."
- doesn't address this at all, and this argument is orthogonal to the other arguments anyway.

While you might be able to make the argument for preferring a config file to SQLite3 (which is an implementation detail), your solution badly hacks together a hydra of both. Go back to the drawing board :).
You might call it unhelpful moralizing, but I would consider it helpful if it alerted people to the pretentious nature of their social signaling and got them back on track financially. Deferred gratification is an important lesson to learn.
i've run into this issue after upgrading--cpu usage is high and graphics rendering is slow. after disabling the proprietary nvidia driver everything went back to normal.

there's a beta nvidia driver that claims to fix some of the problems, i'm trying it now: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1577997
When it comes to apps, but more music and movies. Yes that will play into decisions heavily. Why would I buy an Android pad over an iPad if all my games, music and apps are on iTunes. It was the same with Windows desktop lock in (games and apps).
The Contradiction Of Linearity
I don't think that someone would react different, all things considered. The critiques were firm and had ground. Django core is used to criticism (think of Cal Henderson's Keynote), and the community slowly became aggravated with the things we hate in django. It was coming.

I really liked the keynote, and i salute the man that had the courage to do this. Lets hope this keynote makes deep impression on django core and sticks for some time so we can see the community and the project become better and better.

Kudos Eric.
Countries ranked by ease of starting a business
Pedestrian collision avoidance technology is already available in the Volvo S60.
it's funny.
you could make a game of it, where two players have to remove pieces in turns and drop them into a basket until the tower falls.
(or the other way around: build a tower as high as possible. player who stacks the last piece, making the tower chrash has lost.
To be a true philomath/autodidact, one does need to do more than just read a few books. You need to be possessed of such determination to learn as much as you can that you realize how little you know and are not satisfied until you've at least made an attempt to best the summit. Being able to hack out a few toy programs and call it a day is not enough. The pursuit of wisdom for a philomath is a life-long endeavor and measured with the same rigor as the process for an academic scholar.

We just live with the connotations of the term, "hack."

Here I was expecting to refute the OP, but instead I am left disappointed. He is not some academic elitist guffawing at the plebeians attempting to build their own ivory towers. Instead he is a corporate lifer making some inane red-herring argument. What he's really suggesting is that you cannot teach yourself anything. I find that notion particularly banal.
It's not unusual, people with debt problems are frequently targeted by criminals who want to get an "insider" in a company.

It happens more often than you think, corporate espionage, money laundering, theft of credit cards details, customer identities, etc. have all happened this way.
I laugh at all the idiots with 20inch chrome rims on a piece of crap vehicle, parked in front of a sh*t hole house. Chrome == Idiot!
Since I didn't ask to be publicly identified--let alone skewered--on Hackers.com, my manner of approach is irrelevant, in my view. I won't be so rude as to call your post "crap", but why don't you give an example of the "useful information" you say is missing from my ad that justifies you calling my ad "crap".

I haven't read any other thread on this site, but I assume "HN's approach to comments" is widely ignored?
Music I can understand. I wouldn’t want to be unable to listen to it on a mobile device other than an iPod or iPhone. It’s personal and I have spent a lot of money on it. (Music from the iTunes Store doesn’t have DRM anymore, though.) But something as ephemeral as apps? I have spent maybe $100 or even $150 on apps in the last two years (which gets you a ton of apps) but I wouldn’t miss much more than maybe $15 of apps were I to switch. That’s nothing.

I can understand that you don’t want to spend something like $3000 just to get the Creative Suite and Office after you switched to a Mac but apps are somehow completely different (ephemeral, cheap, disposable).
How efficient is the transmission of electricity from generation to end point? How efficient is the charging circuitry? The motors? How many kilowatts need to be burned in a coal plant to put a kilowatt of energy to the pavement in an EV? I assure you, EVs themselves may be very efficient, but the archaic technology that 70% of the US (via coal/NG/oil smoke-and-fire generation) is using to generate and transfer electricity is not.
What do we often tell a child who expresses an interest in teaching? "You won't
get rich as a teacher."

Yet, there are more than 350,000 millionaire educators, working or retired
teachers or professors, according to Stanley's research.

I think it's a little misleading to include college professors in the same group as public school teachers here.
Not to be contrary, but that's what I said.