skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I.

When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innovation going on, it simply isn't making news, and it doesn't appear to be getting the kind of investment attention it should.
http://cl.ly/8be68ace3c7b91dc8772

escaped zoo animal?
We don't blame the past for not discovering penicillin until the 19th-20th Century (there is debate on the exact date). The future won't blame us for not discovering {as-yet-undiscovered amazing thing} yet, either.
40 Striking Showcase Of Textured Web Designed For Your Inspiration
Here’s an inspiring showcase of textured websites that you can take cues from. You’ll see metallic, grainy, grungy, and woody examples, to name only a few. Feast your eyes on this showcase, and if you know any other textured websites that are worthy of mention, share them with the rest of us in the comments!
Personally, my bet would be that the extreme amount of effort we put in to promoting diversity in educational institutes and the work place will be something people eventually can't imagine being necessary.

Hopefully.

Edit: I guess I wasn't explicit enough as people took this the wrong way.. What I meant is that diversity will "just happen." I of course realize that it is a very important thing and that our efforts certainly are a good thing.
How to Convert Window Shoppers into Buyers
Don't want to rain on your parade, but how the usage (or lack ) of a certain piece of software can affect your mood?

Don't you think this is unnecessary bias?
I watched that yesterday (after reading the David Byrne article last week).

Good documentary (apart from all the "show and tell" cut and paste video and one or two of the soundtrack choices - Schools out for a burned out school! ugh)

Loved the optimism at the end and how a bunch of people living there see it as a really exciting place to live full of possibility.

(it also occurred to me that if anyone was going to film Samuel R. Delanys Dhalgren - Detroit would be the place to film it)

http://www.sfsite.com/02b/dh122.htm
You don't seem to be aware of the fact that Krugman has always said that the 2009 stimulus act was far too small. Another fun tidbit: the actual price tag of the act as passed is less than $800 billion, not a trillion. I believe a one trillion version was considered in congress before this smaller compromise passed, perhaps that's what you were thinking of.

Bu let's not get bogged down by technicalities. Something passed Congress. You didn't like it because you think the idea itself is bad. Krugman didn't like it because he wanted it to have been far larger. And now today you're using the results of something Krugman didn't like to say "See? Krugman is wrong!"
I doubt how we treat the young and the elderly will stop changing. Just look at child labor laws and social security, medicade/care in the US for one example of radical change.
Sparrow - Tweetie-like Gmail client for Mac
Are you sure? You have to click on the "link" for the comment and flag from there.
gitref.org is great. Its concise enough to get you and your team started. You can then move on to progit.org if you want advanced info

if you care about mercurial (I do), hginit.com is great. It even provides a intro specifically for users coming from Subversion. you can then move on to http://hgbook.red-bean.com/.
I was thinking something similar recently. Not necessarily a web-app, but an app that encrypted message in the client, and was only decrypted on receipt. So even if the mail/message server/store was hacked, none of the messages would be readable.
I was trying to think of things the future can look down on us for, but I can only come up with:

* Polluting the environment.

* Allowing people to day of easily curable diseases.

Seems like thinking outside of our own times is really hard.
Many of these amazing things are around in embryonic form, but few people choose to invest any money or time in them. The future can certainly blame us for that.
How many of you don't use Google CS Curriculum search?
I was surprised when I met several CS grads who were not using this, because they hadn't heard about it!
How to Choose Small Business Software if You’re Not an IT Pro
Private Money Consultancy Lenders Talk About Property Valuation
No .. you have no right to treat people according to your own closed-minded and bigoted views.

If we were all to follow your ugly example of what 'freedom' involves, racism and prejudice would be accepted blindly. It's only those who are part of the status quo, who can be as cavalier about the subject of 'political correctness' as you are.

You're an ass.

Why? Because all of your comparisons assume that the author's reasoning is imagined and fabricated. You are totally negating something which is obviously vitally important to the author.

It's a fact that transgendered people's needs are real, and that not dealing with these needs causes a great deal of pain and disadvantage for those involved.

It's not politically correct to think this - it's simply part of being a decent human being.
A decline in manufacturing? Or an increase in productivity?
polluters
SEO via InfoGraphics:A look at Same, eh
I (and many others) blame close-mindedness for holding back Scientific Progress and the fruits of the Enlightenment. Would Penicillin have been discovered earlier if people hadn't been so keen to label as 'heresy' what was just new, potentially valid hypotheses about the universe?
Slavery is still acceptable, as long as it's out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Or do you expect Dell to have ensured fair wages and working conditions for every person involved in the resource extraction and manufacture of the machine on the desk in front of me?
Ok, added that. thanks!
That's because it's too difficult to make addons for IE9.
That's very kind of you, thanks.

Right now I'm learning Rails, along with Ruby, to work on a web app I've been imagining. I spent a decent chunk of time on iPhone development but always felt the gap in not knowing how to do server-side stuff.

I love making things for other people to use. That's the thing I have, since childhood, given a damn about, and why I learned how to program. I'm a product manager at Aurora Feint these days, but I often miss being more hands-on.

I also consult on mobile UX when I've got time – and will consider writing iOS code for the right clients.

I'll be at Startup School – if you're attending, it'd be great to meet up. (That goes for anyone else going, too!)
Just looked at my co-worker's Android phone and its keyboard does the same thing. If you hold down a letter on the screen it will pop up the alternatives.
What I find pity-full is that they are trying to bury their competition with litigation instead of a good product, like many other companies out there they are just a law-firm that pretends to sell products.
"Any software problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection." -Steven M. Bellovin
I honestly think that should be the headline of the post since I find that a lot more interesting. I've had the feeling for some time that the early adopter market is shifting from Firefox to Chrome and this provides some anecdotal evidence for that conclusion.
How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills
As an employee you don’t have to accept those promotions. You can push to expand your role in engineering instead.
I can't wait to get 2.0 from MacHeist, only to have the developer get bought out by Google and then for all development on the app to cease.

In reality, I think it's an interesting idea, although it feels a little slow for me (expected for a beta) and it appears to never stop syncing. I'm sure a lot of people will be complaining about the lack of Gmail keyboard shortcuts (c'mon, Cmd+Shift+A for archive?).
But how do I verify that the JS code being served to me in this moment is the version audited by the trusted party? AFAIK, mainstream browsers have no button to compute a hash over the contents of a website.

(And it's not just reusable JS libraries one would have to audit and checksum; the HTML code of individually rendered message pages could also contain JS code to subvert the security).
Apple let you review your own app eh? :) I would have thought they would have prevented that by now.
If "progressive" is a relative term generally taken to mean "gradually advancing in extent" or "favoring or promoting reform". It seems perfectly reasonable to call the extension of freedom to black people a progressive political action for the 1860s. This is in contrast with a "conservative" action of resisting change.

Lincoln was a Republican who favored a policy that was progressive in its time. Progressive Republicans are now an extremely endangered species.
Great post, thanks.

Typos:

For one HN has it's own 'flavor' => its

HN gets it's (more than) fair share of spam => its

Weird HTML:

It seems line-breaks are hard-coded with BRs inside of P elements? In this phrase the BRs are missing and therefore it crosses over to the invisible right side:

The thresholds at which this happens changes over time, the downvote threshold is at 200 right now and the flag cap is at 100. There
I challenged myself to write this without touching Apple but I agree entirely.

Apple gives a damn about the user experience from the very moment you walk into an Apple Store, and it continues through opening the box and first-run of your hardware, all the way to your day-to-day usage.
Lol. That is all.
Another good one:

Q: Why don't people ever email me when I invite them to in a comment?

A: The Email field in your profile is for site administrators only. If you want other users to be able to see it, you need to include it in your About box.
Fire Pits
A fire pit can create a great new feature in any garden or outdoor space.
Thanks for the comment. We are trying to keep it fun/professional. You can search for Mergers and Acquisitions or Zoo Animals, your choice.
I was watching a video on TED the other day about this phenomenon. If you talk about your goals your brain releases the chemicals that are needed to make you feel that you have actually done something. You "feel good" about doing something even if you haven't actually done it. Having already felt good about your self you have little to no motivation to start doing it.

In contrast, if you don't talk about your goals then you really try to achieve them because you know at the end you will "feel good".
There are a bunch more to think about:

War? Terrorism? Torture? Are we to believe that for the rest of eternity we will have these 3 things?

Discriminating against gays? abortion (either that we allowed it at all, or that people fought against it, I don't even know which will prevail), income inequality, immigration laws.
Meat consumption - Vegetarianism.

"Slave" Labour - there are still 26 million slaves in the world.

Some prison systems, notably the U.S.
Greed. Which arguably is the reason the other ills (except hatin on old people) listed in the article exist. But, honestly, believing humans will evolve beyond greed in the future is far-fetched.
Some very good suggestions! I like that Liar's Poker was included in the startup section, thought I was the only one to have read that. Rock on.
I've been curious about this for a while now. I'm at 192 right now. If I reach 200 while I can still reply to this thread, I'll post about it.
Search the Future: A Web startup demos a "predictive" search engine.
"Kung fu", translated literally from the Chinese means "hard work". So you may be misinterpreting the writer's intent. He didn't strike me as some pseudo-martial arts meathead.

Perhaps you've never heard someone use the word kung fu to describe their martial art, because their art wasn't of that particular Chinese tradition?

Personally I thought the writer's usage was apt, given that he had newly dedicated himself to a difficult path of work.
Ask HN: Does anyone have any experience with civil/env. engineering startups?
I'm a software developer that works for an engineering firm. A few of us here are thinking about creating a civil/environmental engineering startup. Naturally, a startup in this field would have some differences to a company focusing on web development. Does anyone on HN have any experience in this area? How did you go about landing clients in the beginning? Were there any pitfalls that I should be aware of?
Hopefully:

* War

* Garbage

* Pollution

* Taking your shoes off in airports :)
Yes, I have seen my friend using hotmail recently (on Windows). It is pretty good.
Possibly the future will judge us by the irreparable damage done to the environment and our ecosystem and for all the species that we allowed to die out that they'll never get a chance to see, let alone conserve.

Possibly they will remember us as the ones that killed off the oceans but in that case there might not be anybody there to remember us at all.

Hopefully they'll remember us as the generation that got off their asses and decided to do something, that stopped the damage and the wars before it was too late and that was the first to expand beyond the Earth to avoid having all our eggs in that one basket.

I'm bullish on the future, now let's make it happen somehow.
Do you really think humanity isn't doing anything else wrong?
Google TV’s Minisite Launches, Finally Sheds Some Light On The Platform
Which you picked up from books after getting a degree at a university that most likely taught you (or at least improved) your ability to think and learn. I think it is a bit disingenuous to say that you learned CS for far less than the tuition at a typical university after you got a degree at a typical university.
Seriously .. WTF? (You don't believe that diversity will be seen as something that's worthwhile, and you're hoping for this conclusion?)

Or, perhaps I've misread what you're trying to say?
A GnuPGP-extension for Firefox (or Chrome), enabling encrypting or signing any text boxes. Sounds possible, don't know how well it would react with rich editing forms.

edit: complemented with a web-service storing your keys in the 'cloud'.
What does this help with?
That link looks like it could be what the OP is after. The _only_ caveat is you need recipients to tell you where their key is stored. It would be good if there was a service that stored public keys keyed by email.
This is philosophy made relevant; there's no evaluation like self-evaluation.
Do you think this product could work? (Product Review Aggregator)
FireGPG recently shut down, put used to provide this.
I appreciate your remarks – I've enjoyed your comments since I joined HN.

I hadn't thought of it in this way but you're absolutely right. I especially see the application in leadership. People who think they don't have time to spend on leading effectively end up with apathetic, frustrated or downright rebellious teams. The best that can possibly happen is that the people they lead operate at some fraction of full capacity, instead of pushing the limits of what they can do.

Whereas, just finding the energy to give a damn about leading well, they'd reap benefits in many multiples of what they initially put in.
Recorded music. The most bewildering thing about us to our descendants 80 years from now would be that millions of people routinely walked around with headphones, tuned to radio stations, or walked around public spaces, listening to exactly the same music over and over again.
Yes, you need a karma of 200+ to be able to downvote. Reached that just a few weeks ago.
You can only downvote comments which were made after you reached the treshhold.
This deserves another Paul Graham essay reference: "What You Can't Say". Graham details how each period of history has something different that we look back at and think of as horrible. He also uncovers some patterns between them.

Some excerpts:

"In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what’s ok and what isn’t. So you can try diffing other cultures’ ideas against ours as well. / In one culture x is ok, and in another it’s considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that’s shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one."

"To launch a taboo, a group has to be posed halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo."

"Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn’t just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. Conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress."

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Take a look at Aldo Cortesi's AppHash for one impl of verification of code right when it loads on the page.
"A kata is just a simple program that you write over and over again as a way to practice."

Sounds like a waste of time. I can see how it would be good for a physical activity where you need to train your muscle memory, but I can just as easily train my programming reflexes by doing my job or working on open source. There are so many things you could program, why make up things to program that don't need to be programmed?

Does anyone actually do this? If so, can you describe the ways in which it actually helps you get better.
* Gay marriage (lack of)

* Drug prohibition

...always immediately jump out at me; I'm sure there are many, many others.
I have spent a lot of time talking and writing about my failures. Now that Eric has outed speakers as lying on stage, I ought to drop the pretence and admit that I'm actually a very successful guy with a near-perfect track record ;-)
To sum it up: it depends on your business model, and how you intend on using the OSM stuff, so we need more data to give you a better idea.

As far as source code goes, you only need to release your source if you use and modify the actual OSM rendering engine source code. Your code used to display maps (rails, django, php code whatever) is your own and won't be "compromised" by using software licensed in even a restrictive open source licensing scheme.

An example using my site: I plan on using OSM for parts of ridewithgps - I will make money by selling accounts that have special features shown on an OSM map. So, that person can print or redistribute the maps according to the Creative Commons, but I won't lose "value" because features my business model relies on revolve around performance analysis of their own data, not displaying something on the map.

If your business model is making topographical trail maps and selling them, using OSM data, then you will may have a barrier to success: anyone can print out the map and distribute it freely or for money, regardless of whether it was made through your site or not.
Document Your Code
What about saying "Hamburger shopping basket"? That'd find you an online store selling hamburgers.

Or use Google's Froogle.
Netflix, that is the only reason. If Netflix instant streaming didn't require Silverlight I would never have installed it.
Our webmail installation encrypts the password on the client side, it's never sent in plain and we never know what it is. It's not hard, various crpyto libs are available for Javascript. I've written multiple HTML based login systems that never require knowledge of the plain text

Is that what you mean ?

Edit:
Oh, you mean we never know the plaintext of the email.

You mean like this :
http://www.hanewin.net/encrypt/

http://46dogs.blogspot.com/2007/11/encrypting-to-pgp-gnupg-g...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2802541/pgp-encryption-in...

tl;dr - too slow
I'm a recent grad, got a software engineer job, and just recently rented a beautiful loft in Downtown Detroit, and I LOVE it. There's a lot of decay in the city, but there's also a lot going on that gets overshadowed. TEDx Detroit just occurred last night and touched on all of these things much better than I could. They should have videos posted soon: http://tedxdetroit.com/
How does google know where MAC addresses are? I thought that they were non-routable, so they are limited to the extremely local connection. Presumably the range from your computer to the termination of the cable modem on the other end.
Nice list. I wouldn't expect to see SICP, The Little Schemer, and CLSR next to Head First HTML, however. Certainly, the former are a bit more timeless.
You're right that the pressure to actively promote diversity will fade as diversity increases, however I don't really see this as something we'll look back on and say "what were we thinking?"
Travelling with music is not new, it is just much easier. Today you don't have to be a king to make it happen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Music_(Handel)
Sure, we all know that no job or entrepeneurial venture ever involves being knowledgeable, bored, or feeling unmotivated or unchallenged. Nope. The minute you hit one of these minor obstacles you should throw up your hands and quit immediately. That's the recipe for a happy life..

"If you aren’t failing enough – leave and go find somewhere where you fail before you succeed. When you find yourself succeeding too often – leave again."

I see - and where, exactly, are the people who will hire someone and then keep them around while they fail on a regular basis?
Interesting article, Ed.

Disrupting the previously established opinions of others is a very difficult thing to do. I haven't seen it done very often at all.
Cheap Debt for Corporations Fails to Spur Economy
Somewhat misleading title. You can iterate quickly in the App Store if you're not actually using the App Store to distribute changes.
I've been using chrome as my primary browser for over a year now. I find firefox to be almost as frustrating to use as IE in terms of performance.
I don't see how this will change. 80 years ago, people were listening to the exact same songs over and over again. They only difference is that their players weren't portable.
Here comes Google TV
It's the MAC or your wireless router. They collected them with their street view cars.

There was a big, overblown privacy scare some months ago because it was discovered that the cars also accidentally saved some stray unencrypted packets of traffic as they cruised around.
There is something pressing against you. The apathy of everyone else around you. Few things are more painful than being around people whose give a damn isn't aligned with your own. You'll spend a lot of time advocating things that seem alien at worst and wasteful and best.
Beautiful architectural design
If someone is able to determine the MAC address of your router by you simply visiting a page, you've got bigger problems.
Unfortunately on Google App Engine you can not use primary domains (or whatever they are called). So www seems like an obvious choice for apps there.
It is a bit non-obvious. Check out the demo linked, and turn on timing mode. Now try to click the blue circle (it moves after each click) as fast as possible. Turn on and off the bubble cursor mode and see if your time changes.

TL;DR: It allows you to be less accurate with the mouse because the nearest target is auto-highlighted.

I could see it being useful for someone that has a hard time controlling the mouse accurately, either from some kind of physical limitation or inexperience.

Also: http://uiobservatory.com/2010/the-bubble-cursor-in-action/