skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding idea #52 SoftBricks (Bricks that contain
software components that you can connect just like
lego pieces).

I had a very similar idea more than a decade ago.
I wrote a business plan and shopped (unsuccessfully)
for venture capital. Here's the title and first
paragraph from my plan of Nov. 18, 1998:

Proto-pliance: A concept plan for a company which designs,
manufactures, and sells hardware and software for rapid
prototyping or customization of electronic devices

The basis of this plan is developing electronic blocks or "bricks"
that can be used to build simple, useful, custom electronic devices
in as little time as half-an-hour to a few hours, with the help of a
person who can do light weight programming. No electrical engineering,
soldering, or firmware programming required. One proposed business
name, Proto-pliance, a blend of prototyping and appliance, is used in the
broadest sense. The "prototype" may be put to real uses; the "appliance"
may be any kind of electronic or electromechanical device. The business
designs, manufactures, and sells hardware (the bricks) and the required
software (development tools).

I suspect that hundreds of other people have had this
same idea (BugLabs and several others fit the bill),
but I'm disappointed to see that no one has managed to
make a big success out of this. This is a seemingly
really good idea but it hasn't panned out.
Costa Nostra. Who ordered a large with everything?
At this point, of course, you've moved the goalposts to the thermal side of the field. Are we talking about 'teaching the controversy' of athermal effects, or of thermal ones? ...

Radiative, conductive, and dielectric heating can all warm up the right substance. But I cannot agree that "absolutely nothing [different] happens" since their mechanisms are quite distinct. Please tell me why this is incorrect.

The mechanisms are not the least bit distinct at the molecular level. In each of these cases, heating occurs by simple friction.

It comes down to the difference between a chemical change and a physical change. Microwaving the water, shining a light on it, or cooking it on a stove burner will cause physical changes. Ionizing radiation causes chemical changes. The distinction between these two types of effects isn't just important, it's the only one that matters.
…they should also be concerned about infrared, radio, and power lines.

Unfortunately, many people are worried about these things.
The story, at the height of LSU’s Jager boomlet, quotes kids calling the herb- infused drink “liquid Valium,” and theorizing that Jager was an aphrodisiac. When Sidney Frank saw this, he flew into action, assembling a team of hot chicks, dubbed Jagerettes, and dispatching them to New Orleans bars to hand out photocopies of the story.

:\ Marketing genius? Cool. Getting rich selling date rape? Less cool.

Although I guess that goes for everyone in the alcohol industry...

Edit: Turns out date rape is one of the things you can't criticize on HN. Who knew.

Edit 2: Wow, really? I'm disgusted. You five guys are dicks. I know, I know, no greater sin than complaining about downvoting, but this is disgraceful.
In comparison with Clicky the pricing is very expensive to track actions on high traffic websites. Probably good for startups in subscription space that have lower traffic / high revenue per user though.
Yeah. Superheating. That's what must be causing all these new cases of cancer that have appeared since people began using hand-held cellular phones in the late 1980s.

/rolls eyes
I'm rooting for all the big technology companies to do really well: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ebay, Apple. Higher market caps means more flexibility in acquisitions, and these are the companies which aren't afraid to take risks.
If you've just graduated, I'd say your first criteria should be the job profile - the work that you'll be doing, and the opportunity for you to learn and grow there. Also, make sure you negotiate a salary that can cover your expenses and you can live decently. Beyond that, don't stress too much on how others will judge you based on the salary you get - many people do that, but think about it like this, if right now you focus on doing things that you enjoy and that provide you opportunity to grow, you're likely to do well in such an environment...and in the long run (say in the next 4-5 years), you'll be in a much better & happier position as compared to your other friends who took up a job based more on the salary.
I took readability's algorithm (in JavaScript) and ported it over to C#. It's not a direct port of course, as lots of things in C# are done differently than in JavaScript, and I didn't have the browsers DOM to work with. In addition, readability performs the processing while on the current page, leaving elements in place. For me, I just have the HTML string to work with. That's the biggest difference, otherwise I followed their idea on how to extract the main content.
"this is anecdotal at best"

Considering someone did just tell the anecdote, I'd say this is anecdotal at the very least. I've read about various abuses revolving around the Texas court system requireing the bond-posting Grellas mentioned.

But I'm too tired to google-up any link, so I've leave it "anecdotal" too.

The "legal tax" in the US is high but lowering it is hard when so many parties want to spin an advantage out of said lowering.
I don't know that folks need much convincing to buy alcohol, especially stuff that is like a blank palette for mixing drinks.

People also don't need much convincing to buy luxury products to signal to other folks it seems.
I just saw your profile. You work with Jackbe? I've known their bay area team for 4 years.. awesome guys!
It would be a great metric in a controlled scenario between two choices. The more choices you add, the less meaningful it becomes. I would say it has negligible value in determining that your girlfriend is mistaken about liking to skii.
I also think Loopt's Mixx would a competitor. Isn't also similar in a way?
I think it's worth taking a salary hit, especially early on, if it gets you working on more interesting projects, particularly if they're relatively new and you're likely to have a lot of opportunity to take on responsibility and shape their direction.

In the longer term, though, unless you're gambling with startups etc. and equity, you should look to be making average market rates at least, because otherwise it will start to eat away at you and damage your morale.
Of course you can't condemn anyone to hell because there is no such thing as hell.
That happens on iPhones too though.
This is the funniest site I have seen in 2010. I literally laughed out loud at the dog/Christmas tree photo and the narrative is excellent writing.
Amount of equity to give to employees & consultants
A Curious Breach Of Privacy
No, not at these scales, they don't. As with any other antenna, the lowest frequency at which a fractal antenna is effective is still strongly influenced by the size of its largest dimension.
Yup. I love it.
Awesome colleagues, Friendly environment. I'm learning a lot here. :)
Radiation damage, if it occurs, is cumulative.

"I don't know what effect I'm talking about, exactly, but I'm sure it's cumulative."
Guvnor didn't exist when I used drools :-)
Absolutely agree :)

But seriously, if the students turn in programs that won't even compile, I'd say the blame should be on the TAs and the Profs!
To answer my own question, yes, it's a modern thing. Here's the original ritual of anathematizing:

"Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive (Name) himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment."

Looks like this was changed to exclude the hell bit in 1917.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathema#Catholic_Church
We'll definitely be using it. Here is the link to the patent:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
I have friend who cases against the police and others on a contingency basis.

Believe me, they do not have any capital to invest to indemnifying their client against a judgment. None.

The possibilities of losing a fair amount of money in case of this sort would essentially write the police a blank check to engage in whatever without threat of lawsuit.
good luck! and I hope you can negotiate a good salary with them :)
If your UI is really heavy on complicated form elements, Ext.js might just do the trick.

I tend to recommend Dojo over Ext. Due to the licensing issues with Ext and the fact that Dojo has significant backing in the industry. As far as feature set they are similar and would be considered full client side UI development toolkits. They are good if you are building Web Apps. If you just want to sprinkle in some elements on a web page stick with jQuery.
Honestly, the world isn't black and white like that. And I can see why you argued about it; that would drive anyone mad being told what they do and don't like based on a histogram of time spent in the last 2 years.

There are many explanations for not spending time doing things you like; competing priorities is the main one (i.e. I like other things more than them) and also environment (perhaps you enjoy kayaking but hate the drive to get there, or don't want to go with johnny and max because you don't like max).

Just because you don't do something doesn't mean you don't like it. It's a false dichotomy.
There is a certain crowd of atheists that believe religion--any religion--is not merely incorrect but is actually transparently irrational. Notionally, that if a religious person would just take an afternoon and think carefully over what he knows, he must either (A) become an atheist or (B) be quite intellectually dishonest or (C) not be very smart.

It naturally follows that atheists are inherently smarter or at least more honest than religious folks of any stripe. So when someone from this crowd comes across a religious person who is plainly intelligent, who indeed they look up to, who clearly cares and thinks about religious things . . . well, the result is generally some sort of spit-take. I see it once or twice a month at least.

I expect some folks are a bit shell-shocked that the great patio11 also claims to be Catholic.
Google App Engine update: performance improvements & new admin tools
Not really. It looks like a brigade of tinfoil-hatters from a pseudo-journal called "Microwave News" took early and decisive control of the discussion.
Yes, I meant connections to one particular service. In that case both IP fields and the server port are fixed, so the only varying parameter is the client port number.
I'm not so much of a free-market purist (i.e no regulation) as a freedom of choice purist. I don't like seeing anyone get taken advantage of needlessly so if there are better alternatives for people I would want them to know about it. So, is the problem here that people just don't know about the alternatives or is it that they see the cost of the extra planning and paperwork as greater than the cost of the premium? I would also think that proper use of a payday loan would be in circumstances you didn't plan for, but some people will make bad choices and use them recklessly.
I would encourage you to look at the details of the McDonalds coffee case before using it as an example. Particularly, that the plaintif was hospitalized for 8 days and underwent skin grafts, and that McDonalds serves their coffee significantly hotter than culinary taste demands, despite hundreds of reported injuries and previous settlements.

That doesn't necessarily mean the outcome was justified, but it certainly wasn't a frivolous case.
Should HN prevent systematic down-votes of every comment by a user in a thread?
Sometimes I notice a cascade of downvotes, and I know one guy went through a thread and downvoted everything I said. Is this good?
I have mixed feelings about the money question. On one hand, it's good to hear if the founders have thought about it and have a realistic answer. On the other, there are so many different ways of monetizing things, many of them are obvious to anybody who's experienced in business, and the exact way in which a particular new business does it is probably not too important. Whatever works, works. And they may even have to try several different things to see which is most effective. But the "how do I monetize this" aspect is generic and reusable across many different types of businesses. It's generally not part of a startup's secret sauce. The product, the service, the "what problem are you solving that people will pay you to solve" element is.

Btw, I also attend Boulder New Tech Meetup regularly. Awesome series of events. However, as I write this I realize I just missed the Colo Green Tech Meetup tonight -- gah!
Authorization via social graphs?
Every heard of Kutiman?

Wiki [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiman]

Official [http://thru-you.com/#/videos/1/]
AKA: real-time repair tool. Impressive results overall, and a fun use for AR for sure, though it seems they're not using previous frames' covering textures as hints (or not overly well). Especially visible with a heavy-noise background like where the drainage grate is, at around 1:46.

Next up: augmented reality headgear, so you don't have to see billboards while driving / hunting zombies in the real world. Or your annoying coworkers.
Great list and a useful read, you should open your comments up, I bet you'd get a lot of reactions.
It sounds like the problem wasn't related in the slightest to a loser-pays system, but to the insane rule requiring the posting of a bond before access to the appeals process was granted. IANAL; is this common?
I'd never even heard of Grey Goose (shows how in touch with 'hip' society I must be) but the "Stop Acting Rich" book by Stanley seemed to obsess over it. I had the audio book and it felt like he'd gone on for two hours about how dumb it was to buy Grey Goose if you couldn't afford it, and that 'real millionaires' don't buy it. I guess I'm not surprised to learn it is a very recent invention, seemingly created specifically to target the late internet-boom 'new rich' generation's desire to signal wealth.
Police report every incident on Twitter for a day
vim: k, but vi and other CLI apps tend to already have keys for doing paging that are "native" to the app and/or more "homerow friendly". The Page Up/Down keys on many keyboard tend to be in awkward locations like far off to the right side, for example, of where the center of typing gravity is located.
I don't think the commenter I replied had these types of cases in mind. I think he meant "We don't get paid unless we get money for you" ambulance chaser type of lawyers.
Yeah, I still use mine. http://jircii.dashnine.org/ :)
And again, I'll say that it is also true that those who don't have any experience, tend to undervalue it.

Your statement and my statement are not mutually exclusive.

The same goes with education. Those who have one can overvalue it. Those who don't have one can undervalue it.
Meh, I'm better looking and can trust my friends, so depending on how you value things, it all evens out in some way or another. :)
The best Steve Jobs clone ever
The guy you have to get to the first level usually isn't the same guy you need to get the second level.

I do wonder how Apple would have turned out if Spindler didn't become CEO. That's when things really started to go downhill.
It's re-synthesize but then for the number of frames per second, there are already re-synthesize plugins for Photoshop and Gimp so this is only a logical step up.
I was thinking more of things like OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, which I believe do malware filtering. I could be mistaken, though...this definitely isn't my area of expertise.
Clinton Inspires Strategic Philanthropy
Steve Jobs certainly understood the importance of ship dates, so he wasn't exactly going to fall into the Duke Nukem / Grand Turismo 5 tar pit.

"Real artists ship"
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship...
No it's not a good thing.

As far as whether HN should prevent this I don't know. I'm inclined to say that yes, there should be protections, but I don't know nearly enough about the issue to say.

Potential Issues:
(1) Maybe your comments were just that bad and you deserved to be downvoted. - I'd say that this is unlikely, and even if it were true than other HNers will undoubtedly step in and downvote each comment individually.

(2) Actually that's all I can think of... Screw it I'm in favor of preventing cascading downvoting
The government, being sovereign, cannot be sued except by its own consent.
Well, it is unfair, but not necessarily because it's corrupt. It's just another example of the sad fact that our economic system in general places a disproportionate financial burden on the poor.

Someone who desperately needs $200 to see them through the end of the month is someone who is a lot less likely to be able to pay it back at the end of the month. So the lender needs to charge them a more. It might only be $10— but of course, to someone who desperately needs $200 to see them through the end of the month, $10 is a lot of money.

Meanwhile, someone borrowing a hundred times as much to buy a new car can pay a hundredth of the interest, because they have the income to afford it.

And there really isn't any way around that. At least, not in this political climate.
Multiple app stores, multiple phone configurations, multiplies confusion for customers. I'd like to make apps for android, but it is such a moving target in so many ways.
If you are looking for a co-founder it probably wouldn't hurt to have a link to your blog (which you mention) on you profile.
The $1 Billion Home Is Complete - Cities - GOOD
...read read read... ...read read read... ..."a million marks or francs"...

Wait, what?

Oh, it's from 1995. I guess I should have seen it in the URL if I'd parsed it out, but isn't there a convention around here to post the year in the HN title for older articles like this?

EDIT: Um, or the subhed right up at the top of the article. Sheesh. I claim... banner blindness?
The only premium Vodka I would ever consider buying is Crystal Head Vodka, because you get a badass Crystal Skull after you're done drinking the Vodka!
Is the Valley Falling out of Love with Options?
Of course it affects the stock market but apart from agriculture it's mutably connected with all sorts of other factors like world news, how traders feel and so on.
Due to that it's not accurate measurable even when you find parts of the weather that influence the stock market.
Even with agriculture there are many side factors that make weather hard to measure accurate, saying that of course a mis-harvest is clear.
I sure hope so because my company uses it :)

I'm sure you were trying to point out that perhaps Azure doesn't meet your criteria for IaaS (yet). But, I think CloudKick offers many services that are possible to work with Azure right now.

Full VM access is just around the corner and people will be shopping for CloudKick types services very soon. My company is ready to be your first Azure customer.
If someone had asked me how long Grey Goose had been around I would of said forever - I guess that is a testament to their great marketing and pricing. Now I know the rest of the story.
To be fair, Rightscale uses the same trick on their homepage.
Portuguese drug decriminalization policy pays off
Why is this article about reading code and knowing what library you're getting yourself into titled "Stop Googling". The title is hardly fitting and the rant about not Googling things is just common sense and isn't worthy of a post.

The rest is up to the dev using the library. Use it as a black box, grey box or clear box - it's your choice and your risk.
Git uses libcurl for its http support. Libcurl is what is looking at your .netrc. But really, use ssh and ssh-agent. (That reminds me, I really need to send in that libcurl patch which adds support for the OS X keychain.)

- a dinosaur (thanks for making me feel old today)
Hey.. All the best for your startup !
DEKA is a strange duck. They have some genuinely brilliant people there, working on some genuinely revolutionary inventions -- but they just can't seem to actually bring them to market. Or, they're not interested in bringing them to market.

I've never seen one of their wheelchairs; I've seen some Segways, but they remain more a curiosity and spectacle than a common device; I've yet to hear of the Stirling engine / water purifier being deployed anywhere; and their cybernetics for amputees don't seem to be getting beyond experimental.

I really don't "get" them. The best I can figure is that everyone (influential) there is happy just to be working on these puzzles, and they don't really care if anyone uses them or not.
Noah, excellent breakdown as usual. And I totally agree with your take (vs. Wesabe's post-mortem post).

I'm going to send your article to like a dozen people right now, that I preach this stuff to and don't believe me :)
HTTP is the future for git and github. It has several benefits and no downsides.

1. No SSH keys required (if you've worked with people on windows machines or newbies to the command line, you'll recognize this is a massive win)

2. The same URL can be used for anonymous clones and private pushes. So if you are granted commit access, all you have to do is `git push` — no more changing remote URLs.

3. We can use the same URL for the web as we can for clones. This is a nice hidden usability win.

We're waiting for a couple of things (1.7.2+ to become default distribution, and caching of HTTP credentials) before we make a complete push.

That isn't to say we're deprecating ssh or have any plans to. It just means that we'll be increasingly pushing HTTP as the default.
Well, of course they do. One of the best sources of ad data is social data. If you know where, when, and what someone likes, you can easily target them.

Don't ALL companies want you to be more involved with them?
1. Depends what's on the list, how comoditized the items are, how interchangeable with non-Free hardware they are.

2. Actually testing its usefulness by putting it out there > speculating about it without actually seeing it.

3. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it, especially if the cost of doing it is low. It could be the kind of sleeper project that just sits in a corner of the web until some calamity or inflection point comes along that suddenly puts Free hardware on everyone's radar.
Thanks. I may have to experiment with the price/hover, but the navigation features are definitely on my mind for the future releases.
I haven't plotted out the amount of work to do yet but I've got my basic project outlined and down "on paper". I'll be drawing up my targets and GANTT chart this weekend. I'm probably biting off more than I can chew but I'll adjust where necessary. I hope to launch a public site for it next week with daily updates - probably a WordPress thing.
Cancer 'is purely man-made' after finding almost no trace in Egyptian mummies