skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You already can publish changes by including them in the app description or in the update-install approval dialog box.

They showed their cloud syncing online store at Google IO. Watch, starting around 31:10 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3U2GXhz44

The whole video is very much worth watching for any developers.
I only briefly looked through the README, but why is this necessary? Does The Real RVM (tm) not work (well) on Windows?
I'm not convinced. Here in the UK the poor are regularly hauled over the coals for buying cheap booze in supermarkets. Much of my family up north while having a comparable lifestyle earn less than my family down south and both sides drink just as often.

The big difference seems to be the cost of the alcohol. My southern family drink cognac, wine and top shelf spirits. My Northern family drink special offer standard lager like Carling, cider like Magners and rarely drink wine or the occasional more common spirits. I'm fairly certain the southern part of my family spends much more on the north, but they drink roughly around the same.

I'm not sure intelligence has too much to do with it, I guess it depends on whether you're tracking consumption vs spending.
Yeah, I'm a bit suspicious. Google returns nothing right now.
No Nonsense Muscle Building Review - Is There a Faster Way to Build Muscle?
There are three common muscle building bits of nonsense, they are:- you should train like a bodybuilder, you should follow what they say in the muscle magazines and last is the secret to building muscle is pills or powders.
I'm pretty sure you can get out of many fines completely on grounds of indigency.
Misaligned incentives.

You shouldn't pay your programmers to fix bugs or lay down lines of code, but to produce working software. You shouldn't pay your doctor to treat you, but to make and keep you well. You shouldn't pay your mechanic to fix things, but to make your car run. And you shouldn't pay your dentist to fill cavities, but to keep your teeth healthy.

The DoD calls it performance based logistics. We build a system and promise to fix it whenever it breaks. If it's working X well for Y days of the year, we get paid $$$. Otherwise, we get paid $$ or even $.

It just makes so much sense. It weirds me out that maintainence is handled any other way. It's just begging for vendors to take advantage of consumers who don't know any better by selling things that are useless or even harmful.
Smellycast: Uncover code smells & target features using Limited Red & Cucumber
A hackathon I'd like to be part of
You nailed it! A social network for carbon credit sharing. Call Sequoia.
It's possible to create a white hole in your kitchen sink
This is exactly why the lottery is called a tax on the poor. For one, it's hard to think about expected value when you can't pay your bills.

Also people greatly overestimate their odds of winning big prizes like that. If the odds of winning the lottery were 1 in a million I'd be buying tickets by the truckload.
Hey guys, I'm new here, and I've already got an app on the android market called Cubes. What I intend to do before the end of November is come out with a paid version that is integrated with Open Feint.
W3schools.com is an awesome place to get started. It doesn't teach how to make a site secure in the least, but as far as getting a kid stoked on the different web technologies out there, it can't be beat. Super easy tutorials, clean layout, and simple sample problems
> You must deal mainly with very old poorly maintained houses (rentals?), because all those problems do not exist in normal outlets.

Rural areas, farmhouses, but one building I lived in in Toronto had a problem (a bad one) with one of the sockets and it was a fairly recent upgrade from what I remember.

> You have soot on your contacts???? Corrosion? Did it rain inside your house?

No, simply an installation from the 70's still operating in 2005. There are millions like that. And I don't live there anymore, I'm back Europe now.

> NEVER tighten aluminium contacts!

Not over-tighten, tighten. You should do it to the proper torque (there are special tools for that).

> But aluminium to the contacts is very rare in america these days, where it does exists it's usually been pigtailed with copper.

Yes, that's the slightly newer method, also since outlawed (and used as a way to fix problems).

The biggest problem I think with the alu wiring was not even that it could not work, but that people would use it with the wrong connectors, the al specific sockets were pretty pricey.

The only place where I know that aluminum is still used in residential wiring is on the entrance wire from the pole to the transformer, usually that's a very tricky connector that uses wedges to make the contact.

If I found myself in a house with aluminum wiring I'd probably rewire the whole thing just for safety. Costly (especially with the US system which staples cables to studs) but worth the peace of mind.
The effect is pretty straightforward and not hard to make work in a lab. The problem is that it works at very high temperatures, and ion-permeable membranes degrade quickly at those temperatures. Anything sufficiently hot will randomly eject atoms and evaporate, even ceramic. It sounds like his work is an improved ceramic membrane, but it's not useful unless it lasts thousands of hours at full temperature, with temperature cycling every day.
Fits.me is one company that's been working on the problem of buying clothes online that fit well, using a robot mannequin: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20018094-1.html
Tax brackets do not work that way! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQg8JKo_3ZQ

You only pay the higher rate for income within that bracket.

Making an extra dollar pushing your taxable income to $34,001 as a single American in 2010 does not raise your Federal taxes from $5100.00 to $8500.25 by naïvely applying the higher rate — it actually raises your taxes by 25¢ from $4681.10 to $4681.35.
Actually EV "makes sense" even when applied only once. You should take any positive EV gamble you can at any time you can, and avoid the opposite.

Life is a series of one time decisions. You might not get the same exact gamble again, but you'll get many others, and if you keep taking ones with positive expectation you'll end up ahead in the long run.
Physicists Convert Information Into Energy
You should probably understand a little bit of html & css. Other than that you should be good to go.
Russia's Inflatable Military
The word alcohol – al kohl – is Arabic in origin, like many other words that begin with “al,” like algebra, algorithm, alchemy, and Al Gore.

Excellent.
Rather than the complicated deal that he had proposed, I am thinking of offering a monthly retainer for three months. Any thoughts or other suggestions here?
http://www.johnsonems.com/?q=node/2
Wonderfully straightforward resource for the basics.
Intro to F# part 2: First-class function, point-free style
I find IAN to be much slower than booking.com or Priceline, but maybe that was just a personal experience of mine and doesn't reflect the usual case.. hmm..
He did state that their approach was by no means the only one. However, they have been remarkably successful at it...
Half (or more?) of Apache's contributors are IBM employees. For example: http://harmony.apache.org/contributors.html
It is blindingly obvious to me, and apparently to hardly anyone else, that curing aging should be a top priority of governments and researchers for both economic and humanitarian reasons. About time for another donation to SENS...
Keep refreshing to get different background autoplay WAV clips!
Ok, I would like to see a Hack And Tell in silicon valley. Who wants to help?
Personally I hate extra features; but that doesn't mean that the possibility shouldn't exist. Diaspora's plans for opening up their system appears to be "we'll add plugins later." This seems fundamentally flawed to me. I'd rather use a protocol that had a minimalistic base that could then be extended with the desired functionality. I really don't care about relationship statuses, so why should I have my profile cluttered with them? The best extensions of a flexible protocol would grow in popularity as users demanded them; instead of having to wait for the Diaspora team or some other ruling body to approve your patch to add in a new feature, you could write your own extension to the base protocol and convince other people to implement that extension on their profiles. If other people liked them then they'd tell their friends, and the extension would spread organically according to demand, not by decree of some Overload of the Social Networks.

I don't really care about the users and features at this point; the foundation is what matters, and it seems to me that the current foundations are all low-grade concrete and not reinforced at all with rebar.
"'If you build something that people value, something that is unique, and ahead of the others, then you will make money.' – Ev"

So, I guess Twitter did not build something that people value, something that is unique, and ahead of the others.
15 Impressive Green and Recycled Homes
Hi ,

I thought this might interest you: 15 Impressive Green and Recycled Homes

Enjoy the rest of your week.
Amy
Apologize for the double post. I haven't noticed it was on HN already http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780004
Hi, I know few ppl I can help u to get things done =)!
The app looks nice, but it is kind of strange to see an iPhone app come from the company whose big selling point is allowing you to post by email.
I'll list it on the site! What do you need for organization? Or is this thread enough?
I cringe whenever people bring up point 1.

Just because your front-end uses JS, doesn't mean that the same code runs on the back-end. You still have to write new code.

I guess there are 2 good parts about it, though. For one, you get awesome HTML/XML parsing & traversing out of the box. Which can be nice, I guess.

Also, you get to use some preexisting JS libraries. Underscore is the biggest one that comes to mind. (Does coffeescript work? haven't tried that one) JQuery works theoretically, but it does mostly DOM stuff, which isn't used enough to warrant the huge lib.
This doesn't seem to clearly identify anywhere what it is that is being measured; everything is based on a "latent factor for consumtion of alcohol" that is said to be standardized, but never given a proper definition. The closest I could find was:

"Indicators of alcohol consumption in the Add Health data include the frequency of binge drinking (drinking five or more units of alcohol in one sitting) and the frequency of getting drunk."

That doesn't say if those are the only factors used, or if they mixed in several different data sets until they found a combination that made for a compelling graph. I'll give them credit for mentioning that they've controlled for income though, as that was my first assumption.

I would be interested to know if the skew is really in total alcohol consumption, or if one side tends to binge occasionally while the other gets lightly buzzed frequently, or if there is a different split entirely that this is glossing over.
I have to ask then, Why is Africa in SUCH poverty. Compared to the rest of the world, Africa as a continent is third world. Why the hell has it never been better than what it was when kings and queens had control of Africa. Did it have a brain drain when the slaves were exported?
Your scheme only works if the dentist can control for your genetics and veto your daily decisions to drink Coke, eat candy, and 'forget' to floss. But if your daily habits sabotage the efforts of a doctor who sees you only twice a year, the performance based logistics model doesn't really work.
Nike Swoosh
I think in general the processor speed, hard drive size, etc, etc. are all 'good enough' to do about anything 99% of startups want to do. Part of this is probably just being pragmatic and not thinking 3 CPU generations ahead.

Mobile capabilities are just now maturing and will pretty soon be 'good enough.'

So the real question is social, not technological trends. How do you develop the next Facebook, or twitter or crags list in the current social environment. What are big pain points that society is now willing to address with a technological solution. How can you build that solution?
Agileiq has done a lot of great things for Django already. Keep up the great work. Your blog and code on GitHub is truly appreciated.
very dandy but...

the female plugs in the adapter are not to spec to female outlet plugs. so it can't be legally sold there. (me thinks. in Brazil you can't sell outlet stuff that are not up to government spec)

no matter how well it fits or looks. Unless he managed to implement the shutter activated by the earth plug and minimum depths for the live contacts in that little box. Then i would be honestly impressed.
It's in Microsoft's interests for there to be a strong alternative C# implementation. This is just so they can reassure their customers against the risk of vendor lock-in (and M$ does need to reassure customers about that risk).

For example, I've taken a semi-detailed look at both Java and C#. I find C# and .Net to be very pleasant to work in. I would totally choose C#/.Net for my own startup over Java.
First learn how to turn a profit, then give out advice about how to build a startup... The other way around makes you look a bit silly.
Ask HN: Converting Mobile App to Paid Version
Recently I've been building up a free android game called Cubes. The initial result has been pretty positive with about 60k total downloads in the first 2 months. I decided to put ads in the app, but have been pretty disappointed with gains so far.

Because of this, I'm going to make a paid version of the game, with a price point of 99 cents. Removing the ads is obvious, and I also planned on integrating with Open Feint (a social gaming framework that provides high score and achievement support). My question is, how else can I make the paid version compelling?

I should mention that users already have the ability to create their own levels using a very flexible xml schema and the ability to select between two "ships". What else could I offer, considering the fact that I'm only going to charge 99 cents?

Search for "Cubes" by "The Mob" on the android market.

Custom level tutorial at http://themobsoftware.com/?page_id=2
I heard this story about two years ago, not a lot of new information about the fuel cell here.
Whirlwind Solar Installs BIPV Solar Laminate System on Passive House
David,

Thank you for emailing us. We have been using chargify for a couple months now and we now have about 700 paying customers. Under the new scheme, it looks like we will need to pay $350 for those 700 accounts. Is my understanding correct? If so, this price change is going to put a very heavy burden on us as it will take us some time to get to 2000 accounts so that the average cost is lowered.

Would you considered a more closely geared pricing model that does not penalize us every-time we successfully grow pass one of the pricing thresholds? For example, please check out Sendgrid's pricing structure, which scales very intuitively. They provide a different type of service and so the exact numbers are not relevant. However, their structure could be a good reference for Chargify.
I can't believe I'm turning into "that guy who bellyaches about profanity," but... did the "beep beep, motherfucker" really add anything to the post?
1. That humans kill each other because of differing opinions.
2. That I see only my own point of view till I live - at every moment, there are billions of folks who are living a different life and experience.
3. When we gaze at a star, we are gazing into the past.
Why can't you run the same code...? Can't you at least use the same domain objects?
It seems like the casual user wouldn't be willing to write complex xml. Have you thought about adding a gui level creator?
Was I the only one reciting the rules to Fight Club while reading the article?

Rule 8: If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club#Plot_summary

Basic rules that come to mind to keep it hacker centric could be:

1. If this is your first night to Hack and Tell, you must
Tell.
2. Before leaving Hack And Tell you must vote yay or nay
on each Tell. If your Tell has less than X votes, you
are not allowed back for Y weeks.
3. If you're just returning from a Y week layoff, you must
Tell.
4. You must have a Tell every Z weeks.

I'm not at all certain what the correct values for X, Y, and Z are. Z would obviously depend on the group size and time allotment. I think voting should be anonymous and not announced until after everyone's left so voters are more likely to be honest.

If it gets popular I could even see having a Hack and Tell website that hosted videos of "successful" Tells and so forth. Going out on a limb and having national votes to try and get a group of hackers together for a nationally voted "Best Hack" event or some such.

Could be fun.

[ed: formatting]
AKA Map of gay/lesbian bars
I see. I did miss the part about the $100 late fee. And you know what, I would still take option A because the expected loss is not meaningful to me, I don't intend to have this happen again. For one, I should not have been speeding or whatever and then compounded the problem by ignoring the punishment. I deserve that penalty and gambling it away is missing the point. In fact, I'd rather the money go to the local municipality than some casino's pocket. Or I would take another bet with better odds or payout :)

Then there is the other part.

You can't ignore utility. Heard of loss aversion before? How people prefer more risk when it is supposed to mitigate a loss? This is a textbook example of that psychological fallacy. Am I willing to risk a further $130 to avert my loss? No, not in this situation, considering my actions and the increased utility the money has to me as a poor college student. But phrased this way most people would take the risk!

I look at it this way. I am not willing to take an even odds bet of $130 that a coin will turn up heads, especially when I already owe $250. Are you? Most people are risk averse when the situation is phrased properly. If you are willing to take the bet then you derive less utility from the money and so are not applying the correct mental context of a cash strapped individual. Unless a poor appreciation of money is why this individual is cash strapped in the first place.

And finally, there is the fact that this could breed irresponsibility in many people. They do it once, win and a lesson is not learned. Increased likelihood of repeated behaviour and say the bet is lost the next time we have more money lost than if the bitterness of the fine had been instilled. They would have to do this enough times for the law of large numbers to kick in for them to approach their expected loss. Worse is if this becomes a general philosophy toward bills. Oversimplification of course but the point remains.
I remember claims that, by now a couple years ago, cell phones would cost $10 and the batteries would last for weeks.

My phone dies in 3 days if I have bluetooth on, and it cost $60 for the one-step-above-dirt phone after a 2 year contract got me a discount.

Also, how many people do you think are "well advised" of safely using security features? Even simple ones? Who don't see Facebook as one gigantic privacy / security geyser? ie, non-security-aware-geek-types? This is a minor, arguable security improvement and a major feel-good for people who don't know any better, and not much else.
It depends on how complex your front-end is. As you put more logic on the client-side, the chance of some of that code being useful on the server-side grows.

For example, the Objective-J compiler and loader system ( http://github.com/280north/cappuccino/tree/master/Objective-... ) runs with almost no modification both in the browser-- for on-the-fly compilation during development-- and from the command line-- for pre-compilation prior to deployment. (As an aside it runs on Narwhal, not Node.JS. But the point stands.)
I have a Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion World Map on the wall of my office. I often marvel at Africa's size.

There are many cool features about this map. Land masses are very nearly undistorted and no land mass is cut. Any straight line within the bounds of the map is very nearly on a geodesic (great circle). And of course you see the entire surface of the earth without spinning a globe or turning a page.
What exactly are you voting on? This isn't a competition. I should also note that I hand select the people that actually present after taking a look at the product description and a) checking to see that it doesn't violate the "no startup", "no work related things"... or attempt to. b) if there's overflow invite the ones I think will be best. So far it hasnt' failed, but, there's only been about 25 talks total over 3 nights.

Incidentally, don't do more than 7 or 8 of these talks a night--it gets way too long too quick.
"She wants you to come back and play with her" is equally classy.
The Texas corporation income tax is one of the highest in the nation. When Texas comes to tax your servers with the state income tax, you'll really be sorry.
Yes, CoffeeScript produces plain-vanilla JavaScript that works fine on both the browser and the server. The CoffeeScript compiler itself also works in any JS runtime...

For an example of what a CoffeeScript/Node app looks like, take a peek at this:

http://github.com/jashkenas/api-playground/blob/master/src/a...
Thanks. I assumed it would. Cool link.
Error in the textual description of the document: it's not larger than "all combined". You can't fit all of europe and the rest in there simultaneously. Note that most of europe is excluded from the largest map shown. One of the small alternate maps shows europe included and displaces what is the US in the large map.
These guys must sleep really soundly at night, knowing that they're using their various talents trying to make a quick buck off of invading the privacy of and in some cases likely endangering the safety of their fellow human beings.

I realize that that sentence could arguably describe a number of mainstream startups. However, there's something more sinister and downright evil about this one in it's blatant disregard of common decency in the name of profits.

This type of reckless employment of modern data processing and search algorithms reminds me that as software engineers we have great power and thus great responsibility. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. If we don't use our power ethically, then surely some politician some day with an axe to grind will ensure that we do. And a sad day that will be.
This reads a bit like a parody of all the other node is awesome blog post out there. Node is fine and all but maybe it's time to put down the kool-aid. Also I find it a little bold to claim that node is "faster than any other server language / platform out there", even worse there is absolutely no numbers to back up any of this guys claims.
The auto insurance industry seems to have figured out how to encourage drivers to behave safely. They say, in effect, "Based on what we know of your lifestyle, habits, and past rate of accidents, it will cost you $300/mo for us to assure your access to a functional car."

Don't see why dentistry should be any different. My auto insurance gives me about $8/mo off for having anti-lock brakes. My dentist could give me $X/yr off for brushing. (And he can tell...)

And of course, in general, I'm not trying to sabotoge his efforts. I want to be healthy as much as he wants to be paid. That is, after all, what I'm paying him for. If anything, it encourages him to encourage me to develop healthy habits.
I don't think I'd have done it, honestly, if I hadn't started working at Meetup. It's the kind of thing that does take time to organize, but I really wanted to discover what Meetup organizers go through. It's been all kinds of rewarding, fun and great though! Highly recommend it! Let me know if I can help!
I know few developers from Belarus. I can help u!