skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Would you use my product" is really an awful question to ask. At a basic level, sure you get enough responses to see if its worthwhile. But the data is valueless, because its not even close to indicative of whether or not people will pay for it.

People will always tell you "oh sure, sounds like a good idea, I'd use it" because they want to save face and encourage you. There is NO cost to them, real or social, and so they will most often choose that option.

Hell, when I did presales research for a b2b product, I talked with people who told me about their woes, gave great data and indicated that they would pay $X a month for a service that solves their problem. Guess what: none of those people ended up being my first customers, despite telling me they were interested and willing to pay.

I could probably care less about "giving away" my ideas these days, there's just too much that goes on behind execution to care anymore. Entrepeneurs get paid because we deal with problems and bullshit every day; if you want to have the same problems and bullshit I'm facing, go for it. Competition is overrated when it comes to affecting your bottom-line.

That said, just build the damn thing or pretend to have something built where you can measure the amount of people willing to pay for it (not a survey, I mean literal clicks and submissions where people think they're going to go to pay for it).
We're planning (tentatively) on adding accounts, private MarkUps, and a few other features in the next version.
And gets you outside and off the computer, which most of us should do more often.
Google using robotic self-driving cars for street view
That never happens. But I think you can pass the test without ever mastering the material. Sheer memorization will allow students to pass tests and only have a minimal understanding of what they have covered.
Launching an app quickly seems particularly effective, though I've noticed in the last year that people are very quick to launch tumblelogs around news events that catch on very quickly. The Kanye West "Imma Let You Finish" fad on http://kanyegate.tumblr.com/ was a significant one in terms of traction.
> The "vaccines cause autism" is another political issue where pseudo science is being used to argue for government dictating medical choices to families. The "Debunkings" I've seen have been political nonsense.

Um, what? I thought the research showing a link was actually fraudulent (as in the guy took money to make shit up): http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/Autism/12850 . Even if his misconduct wasn't quite that bad, the paper was still bad enough that it got retracted by the journal that originally published it: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/the-lancet-retra... .

> I don't take a position either way on whether vaccines can cause autism. Just that the constant propaganda on this issue is a form of a political witch hunt that has nothing to do with science.

My understanding is that there was one paper (now retracted) claiming a possible link, followed by the author telling the press there was a link, followed by (1) many papers disproving any link and (2) lots of "OMG PANIC" news stories and celebrities telling people to do stupid shit.
I expect that once these cars become common enough for that to be a realistic problem, there will be some kind of certification devised and cars running uncertified software will be prohibited from public roads.
The point is that XML, like any format, is not perfect. If you get the chance to transition to using JSON or another well-used less flawed format in the future, why not?

Some clarifications:

* XML's End tags/elements are visual noise and cause additional unnecessary data to need to be stored.

* Greater thans, less thans, and slashes are more visual noise and less intuitive and readable than the brackets, commas, and colons in JSON.

* The fact that you can have values as attributes or as element values has caused confusion since the beginning. Attributes allow 1:1, but schemas can describe 1:1 as element values even though the same element could otherwise appear multiple times and be 1:*. Why should you be wasting time having to decide which to use when you are trying to define a format?

Few bust on XML because they think that would be lunacy, since it is so prevalent. If everyone uses it, it must be better right?
Yea, those crazy voters...engaging in a little self-masochism because they want things like police officers, firefighters, armed forces, potable water, roads, education, and social security.

In general, I agree that the private sector can do better than the government in many areas. The problem is, when it comes to health care coverage they haven't, not when the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical bills.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs still have the chance to do it better. Nothing in the health reform bill prevents them from doing so. So if you think you can do better d2viant, more power to ya. There are tens of millions of Americans with no health care coverage who are waiting for your better & more efficient solution.
The Robot Road
> The fact of the matter is, the planet is getting cooler, in recent history

Link, please? I went looking, and couldn't find anything supporting this.

I believe you believe in this "fact" because it is a religion to you

Um, yeah...
I don't think Palo Alto is the best place to do this if that is your goal.
Actually, if you can build a smart traffic system out of this, you can drastically reduce the time cars spend idling and creating pollution.
You tell us. Did you get any useful information? It's only stupid or crazy if it didn't work, and genius if it did.

You should turn it into an experiment and try at different times of day and locations (you will get vastly different people shopping in the middle of the day, at a bar, or heading to a wifi coffee shop after work)
Incidently, a group of hackers/ciphergeeks and I spend a month writing a letter to the EFF to accept bitcoins. The EFF will most likely to liquidate it for US dollars and then add info on 'way to help' page on donating bitcoin to the EFF.

We achieved our primary objective of promoting bitcoins. Now, Computer Chaos Club is probably our next target.

We understood that the bitcoin network would probably be targeted by people hostile to liberty in the future when it is more popular.
You have described my personal vision of a PRT-connected future even better than I have myself.

What's so beautiful about it is that it takes a massive infrastructural liability -- a century of building our world around the automobile instead of around rail or other mass transit systems -- and turns it on its head. We get out of infrastructure jail free.

Think of the time humans spend behind the wheel of a car today. How many hours a day? How many solid days of driving a year? How many man-years of humanity are wasted on fruitless idling in traffic? A society with autonomous personal transport becomes a measurably more productive one and likely a happier and more satisfied one as well.
I don't know Sebastian that well, but I believe his motivations are largely idealistic. At least, that's the pitch he and his group used to make to prospective members - that solving the autonomous driving problem could save tens of thousands of lives a year.
I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and cars should be stopping).

Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both parties.

The "illusion of safety" is most dangerous at traffic lights. 2-3 times I've had cars just sail through, completely oblivious. Note: they're sailing through on RED lights. Not amber going red. It's not one of those borderline cases.

Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined. I would be pissed if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest in their own safety. I know what the light changes are at intersections I cross a lot. Where are these cops when cars sail through red lights or nearly run over pedestrians when turning when the pedestrians have right of way?

I get the distinct impression these skills will come in handy when I move to New York next month!

Anyway, back to the self-driving cars: this I believe will be a painful transition that will take many, many years. It's nice to see Google working on this.
E-mail is not a conversation. If you are not communicating, pick up the phone or meet face to face. Pick one or two things that are really bothering you and tell him. Ask him what you are doing that bothers him. At this point it's just poor communication. Other folks have pointed out it's a question of his complementary skills, which I agree with. The real question is one you two are communicating more effectively is he able to do things that add significant value to your startup.
Sometimes I think that "Ideas are cheap; show me the end product." (Just like "Talk is cheap; show me the code.")
Ask HN: Best movie about work/business?
What do you think is the best movie about work/business?

(imo it's "Gung Ho". It's motivational, funny, and educational. "Office Space" is awesome, though.)
Panoramic Quake 3
The linked page seems to have trouble recognizing the arrow example. The others I can be a bit sloppy, but that one I have to really slow down and trace (or pretend trace since the guideline inexplicably disappears).
Cowards Don't Reject People
Office Space for humor. Wall Street for drama.
> argue that no computer program can be a match for a human's ability handle new and surprising situations

I suspect that this ability is due to our having more awareness of context. I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to dump a larger amount of contextual knowledge into a car, probably just attach an expert system and pay a few tens of millions of dollars to have people fill it with data. I'm not sure what the state of machine learning is, but they could perhaps pay owners to upload logs (maybe especially after any accident / close call, or maybe that would give a skewed perception) and then crunch those to find new rules.

> Also, we don't have information on how error-prone this system actually is. All we know is that a car it was driving had one accident. We don't know how many times the human driver had to take control because it would have otherwise crashed.

Yup, that the humans ever took control at all says it probably isn't quite ready yet. But it looks very promising. If I ever have kids I might not need to deal with them learning to drive, and maybe my next car could let me browse the internet on the way in to socialize (well, why else won't they let me telecommute?) at work.
Windows Services for UNIX
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Ghostbusters is great for entrepreneurs.
Who is this Russian dude that you're referencing?
I use http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/ for an OS X HTTP client.
Slideshare is the new experts-exchange.
Seems like a circular question. Office Space is a movie about work because it specifically defines itself as a movie about work. But when I nominate (as I now will) Apocalypse Now as a great movie about the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam, everybody will look at me funny. As if soldiers weren't professionals being paid to go to work.

Of course, I might be wrong about Apocalypse Now, as I've never actually been an infantryman in the Vietnam War. I have been a science grad student, however, and I can say without hesitation that Real Genius is the Apocalypse Now of graduate school. Even the physically-impossible hacker tall tales in that movie are note-perfect.

EDIT: More examples. Adaptation is very much a movie about being a professional screenwriter. And there are dozens of movies about being a professional cop, musician, athlete, reporter, or artist.
Is there any information on the algorithms behind this?
An End to Painful Clicking with Steppers
paychex offers this service as well
SEO bums are not geeks, they are cancer. SEO is why Google and other search engines suck now.

Remember to get your herbal V14gra, and to Digg this!
Pacu, cross-platform code editor
Maybe you just need to practice NOT eating marshmallow.

Lay out one marshmallow and try not to eat for X seconds. Once you reach that X seconds, add another marshmallow. Keep doing it until you can't do it.

After recording the number of marshmallows you ate, you try for bigger number of marshmallows next time.

However, I never tested this. So if you ever try this idea, let me know how it goes.
Yea, but users could give a crap about that. It's their official product and the default way for people to use the service. It shouldn't have rate limits on how much you can use their website. They need to fix it.
There is no problem with it being rate limited. Provided that rate is above the rate which a user could reasonably be using twitter at.
Just a note, I got really exited when I saw this. I go to the University of Wisconsin, which is also referred to as UW. It took me a while to find out which "UW" it is referring to. It seems the only place that mentions it is in the FAQ. Perhaps you could put "University of Washington" on your homepage?
Sounds like someone's a little bitter about an API usage dispute and a poached employee.

He brings up legitimate, but minor issues that are just a part of Twitter's growing pains. Let's be honest, the background customization has never been a huge selling point for Twitter. Sure its fun, but most people use Twitter via mobile clients & txt messaging and never see the backgrounds. I think I've seen the backgrounds of maybe 10 of the people I follow.

The #newtwitter rate limiting is an annoying issue they need to resolve, but they'll resolve it. They're still ironing out the #newtwitter kinks.
Google's self driving car
Snapshot of the new workplace: Karen Owen's PowerPoint
Having been in 3 major car accidents, one for each decade I've been alive, where I was at the wheel only once and alcohol was not involved in any of them... I have to say I do not find these numbers at all surprising. I would have guessed higher.
I feel this is the responsibility of an audit system and not the code itself. I have never understood why people write code to verify a contract when it should be done as a rule in a proper SCM system.

A better process is to write or purchase plug-ins for your SCM system that audit all commits and either notify of a contract violation or refuses commit without a supervisors override. Enforcing contracts is not the domain of custom code it is the domain of SCM and therefore should be implemented at an SCM level. This way you write it once and everyone benefits whereas with test you are a. writing test for every contract and b. leaving in the hands of the current developer to ensure the contract is met. Further by having it audited you can build a process around that audit to guarantee that the issue is accounted for.

I am not sold on TDD, but I have not thrown it out as snake-oil yet either. It is in no way the harbinger of quality it was heralded to be, but logically there are some places that it seems like it can and does help but my general feeling about it in the way that it is sold (test everything), is that it is a wast of time.
"To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions." -- Derek Sivers (at http://sivers.org/multiply )
1. You've exhausted all other options; and

Many times it's worth consulting a lawyer earlier rather than later, as such a consultation can do all sorts of things for you - eliminate options you might have otherwise wasted time pursuing, illuminate options you weren't aware of, and also keep you from making any mistakes that could come back to hurt you later.

That last point is most important and most overlooked by non-lawyers, I think. I've learned from friends who have learned the hard way that in disputes like this involving money or business, it's crucial you know the applicable law from the outset and adhere to it, even if you only intend a legal solution as the absolute last resort.

If it does come to that, your case is strongly bolstered in court if you can show that you were aware of the applicable law and diligently followed it from the outset. For example, if your adversary in court broke the law, and then you broke it too to counteract him, the court will look unfavorably on both. Two wrongs do not make a right, especially in the eyes of courts. So it's worth positioning yourself from the beginning of any such dispute as completely in compliance with legal requirements.

If you don't know what those requirements are, an early consultation with a lawyer could be valuable.

PS - it's also less stressful to simply rely on the law to guide your decisions in this uncharted territory, rather than trying to make it up as you go. Don't reinvent the wheel here, instead leverage the hundreds/thousands of years of codified dispute resolution and legal theory.
It's one of those ideas that seem so obvious and that has the potential to change the world, but it is highly dependent of having critical mass. Technologically, it is very simple to implement it. One doesn't need much more than something like CouchDB, and you could have users changing things even from the admin interface.

With job4dev (shameless plug), we have something very similar, applied to job listings and company info. We created a "wikipedia for jobs", but lots of the curating needs to be done by hand. We are automating as much as we can, using as many APIs as possible, but there's still the need for human involvement.

The problem is, you need to have people wanting to use this. It's the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem. I could see this working if there is some sort of incentive, or even if it ties itself to Mechanical Turk. Without that, it is no different than Freebase, dbpedia, or Aaron's Infogami.
How's this better than Freebase or dbpedia?
There are two ways of reducing fossil fuel consumption: reduce demand and reduce supply. Reducing supply (by preventing drilling new wells, embargoing oil producers and bombing foreign oil wells) is currently ahead, thus the price has risen from $30ish to $80ish / bbl. Owners of existing wells have made a huge windfall. It would be surprising if they weren't heavily interested in further supply reductions.
Where they'll get their foot in the door is closed campuses. I bet the military could run this on the base and keep the liability issues in the family. Similarly, perhaps a large corporation would license it. Or even better, airports.
Slackware is a bit different now that you only need to download a DVD and then pretty much all the software you want is installed, and most of the time software that isn't installed has a slackbuild which is pretty easy to install with its dependencies.

Ubuntu however is easier and works fine for me.
I would guess car rental companies would be a better first partner, they already put cameras in their car. A lot of the videos you see on youtube, with drivers crashing thanks to behaviour which could get them a Darwin award, are from rental cars.

Then they could partner with FedEx, UPS, or DHL.

Then car manufactures can put in optional parental override, but a better marketing name would be computer assist. Especially for old people, they wouldn't get computer override, they'd have computer assist.

And a few years after that, when the statistic are in and computer driven cars are much, much, much less likely to kill anyone then human driven cars. Even after you discount drivers under the influence. Then we'll see political pressure to have computer "assistance" in every car.
I agree that this is easiest, and I'm surprised that the article calls it "hardcore" (slides 38-39). But it does bring to mind a more devious challenge: Someone ran "chmod -x ld.so"...
Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
I'm wondering how much of my info I should entrust to memory sticks. I'm curious to hear first-hand failure accounts.

Also, if the answer is "no", that would be interesting too.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned one of the biggest issues with general acceptance of this system:

Police will be able to force anyone to pull over anywhere, at any time, and for any or no reason.

Even though they can do that now, people still decide to pull over. They are not forced to.

And what if there becomes a database that police forces compile, showing the history of movements of everyone? That database could potentially be leaked.

I think the privacy implications of this should get at least some thought.
How does this compare to Freebase?
What's funny about that is that it was based on a real case, and the real case was actually worse. The movie played things down a bit, to make them more believable.
I’m a big http-console fan. It was the inspiration for my htty project.
Possible use case: If I can put a bigger hard drive inside this, it would be a nice personal mini "mozy" backup service for me. No, it wouldn't be terabytes of stuff, but the dedicated connection would be worth it.
You don't do a full reinstall unless you want to. Just run 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' in a terminal. (not 'apt-get update' nor 'apt-get upgrade')

Or start the Ubuntu Update Manager (System -> Admin -> Update Manager), which will display an option to dist-upgrade when one is available.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned one of the biggest issues with general acceptance of this system:

Police will be able to force anyone to pull over anywhere, at any time, and for any or no reason.

Even though they can do that now, people still decide to pull over. They are not forced to.

And what if there becomes a database that police forces compile, showing the history of movements of everyone? That database could potentially be leaked.
I think the privacy implications of this should get at least some thought.
But drivingmenuts said "Since the Internet is not as widespread in Mexico [...]"

Even Mexico's own numbers (by AMIPCI) show Internet usage at 27.2% of the population vs the US's 77%. This is even lower than the ITU's estimate of 43.5% penetration for Albania.

Stats: http://www.internetworldstats.com/
The market is the only mechanism that can allocate scarce resources equitably. And the only alternative is politics.

In California, those with influence have secured water for agriculture at below market rates, water delivered with infrastructure built by taxpayer dollars.

When people can get a resource for less than the cost of delivering it, they use it with less discretion. And the prices of the things they produce with it don't reflect the true value of the water, even if they did pay for all costs of delivery.

That's because water has value itself. Its not just the cost of delivering it that matters.

But when a resource is allocated with a political process, the only costs that are considered are the costs of delivery. Assuming the taxpayer's interests are represented at all.

The political process is notoriously shortsighted. But if someone owns a resource, they have an interest in preserving it. Its sale price represents the total future value of it, not just what can be extracted during a politicians term of office.

Private ownership is not the cause of all of the political wars over water. It is their solution.