skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is a good tool. I can put my photos on it, and all my friends, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, will all be able to see it. (Not my grandparents, they don't have computer. :( ) Facebook "implicitly" notifies all those people so I don't have to send a lame spam email "Hey I've posted some photos, check it out". It is similarly good for organizing outings. Just create an event and invite people, no need to send an email with 20 recipients; An forum-like thing in the event lets people asks questions, which stays up and acts like an FAQ.
Scala's...

weird...

Scala would fall under the typed functional family. It has it's own version of ADT's and it has pattern matching. But in a lot of ways it's a hybrid OO/Functional language. A lot of the decisions in the language's design were made so that it'd play nice with Java-proper.

My initial superficial feelings about it was that it combined the worst of both worlds. It had all the popularity of a functional language, and all the nice syntax of Java.

Since then I've started writing a Droid app to get a real feel for the language, and all my superficial feelings were wrong. I like the language a lot. But it's still a little weird compared to all the other typed functional languages. You can't see as much ML in Scala as you can in F# or even Haskell.

Still, if you're stuck (or prefer) the JVM, then that's probably the typed functional language you'd want to try. That's the reason I'm using it for Droid development.
Chat with strangers using Google ID
The conflict was inevitable but as we often see in business, old players use regulation, unions and back room deals to protect their markets. Look at the RIAA, TV and movie industries. The technology is available to bring content to any device, anytime but they use regulation to stop it.

It's bullshit. SF taxis are inefficient and difficult to use. Ubercab solves a problem and calls out just how ridiculous the SF Taxi system is. Instead of fighting to make their business more relevant, the taxi unions fight with regulation.

I use Ubercab a lot. Why?
* Because a car comes to me in a few minutes.
* I don't have to stand in the rain and wonder if the illuminated taxi light means the taxi will stop or not.
* I don't have to wonder if the cab takes cards or if the driver will simply refuse to take them even if his company does.
* Most importantly, I don't have to hold on for dear life wondering if I'm going to die before i get where I'm going.

Let's all stand up and say screw you unions. Ubercab is an innovator. SF taxis, be more efficient and you'll win. Otherwise, get out of the way.
Top Ten Best Apps for iPhone 4 | Technorox
I try to quit when I'm stuck. Because when I'm stuck, I'm not really stuck, just tired. I think about my problem in bed until I fall asleep, and wake up often much closer to the answer.

If I get stuck significantly before bedtime, I take an extra shower or a walk or something, and that often has the same effect.
It'd be interesting if someone took studies on the health benefits to each of these categories and calculated both the direct and indirect costs of belonging to each of these groups.

Although it would be more controversial since the number of factors associated with health cannot be reduced to food choice, it would make for an interesting argument either way.
I don't know if I agree with the word professional. It does signal things like: wearing a suit, talking the talk, playing politics well, turning up on time, etc...

The only things that are important to me are that the person is honest, a hard-worker, intelligent, a clear communicator and has common sense.
Space tourism to accelerate climate change
Lyons is looking through the lens of old media (as he often does). He sees the failure of Digg as being about the failure of hanging on to an audience.

But it's not an audience, it's a community - an involved community that felt betrayed.
huh? its an indicator of both the reliability of public trans, as well as the person.

I would expect anyone I worked with to take reasonable precautions to be on time for meetings(not for everyday work)

In a certain public trans system that should afford them a certain amount of lateness.

beyond that, it starts to reflect on their flakiness
Looks like they're raising money because they can (good valuation), but little seems to be said about why (especially given that they still have money from the last round)
This seems like it depends heavily on what kind of vegan diet you live on. A diet heavy in fresh fruits/vegetables is much more expensive than one consisting mainly of rice and beans, and you can get wildly different per-day cost estimates depending on how you tweak the ratios.

The choices in all the columns here seem pretty arbitrary, too. Are they nutritionally equivalent? Where are those prices from? Etc. Not saying that I disagree overall, but this ad-hoc comparison doesn't give me any evidence either way. For example, if I wanted to eat cheaper on the meat side, I'd just replace that $7.30 chicken fajita with $5 worth of tacos ($3 for a lb of ground beef, $0.50 for some tortillas, $1.50 for cheese/etc.).
Wordpress to Org-mode + Hyde + Discus
Our take on the infamous cover in 2006:
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_believe_businessweek...
The fact that C02 levels have been higher is not necessarily in contradiction to the article, nor an important omission.

This issue as other's have pointed out is the CAUSE of the current levels and the implications thereof.

In the past the high levels of C02 were at least partially due to ice ages, which prevented the normal processes for the mitigation of C02, once the levels built up enough the greenhouse effect melted the ice and restored the levels.

Look around, there's no ice age.

So not only is there no discernible cause for the increase except out actions, we don't have a huge C02-eating army trapped in the ice waiting to be released.

Some natural mechanism will probably step in, but who knows what effects it will have.

We are monkeying with a system we know to have far reaching and potentially devastating effects.
The Cocoa/Java bridge has been deprecated for ages; other than that, I can't think of any other secret sauce that Apple spreads on their JVM (of course, if there were hidden APIs, and if the Apple JVM used them, and if Apple wanted them to stay secret, I wouldn't be able to say). Regardless, it's not like Java on OS X is going to disappear; if nothing else, Apple's internal usage of Java and their desire to eat their own dog food guarantees as much.

This warning comes with considerably more heads-up than most such developer related warnings from Apple, so by the time 10.7 ships, I would imagine that an open JDK/JRE will be readily available.
Question one is a little complicated (but not very).

Rather than paraphrase, here's the relevant paragraph from the official rules:

"Any runner is out when he runs more than three feet away from his baseline to avoid being tagged unless his action is to avoid interference with a fielder fielding a batted ball. A runner’s baseline is established when the tag attempt occurs and is a straight line from the runner to the base he is attempting to reach safely."

That's from 7.08 (a) (1).

I can't see any way this rule could prevent them from following the theory in this article - possibly it might be problematic if the tag attempt occurs while he is still right near his original base (or home plate), but in that case he would surely be tagged out anyway.
no, people should be alotted a certain amount of variance for daily arrival times.

They only really need to be on time for meetings, where their lateness wastes N peoples times
This sounds familiar:

"Ubercab threatens dispatchers’ way of earning a living"

Oh, yeah:

"[TECHNOLOGY] threatens [PROFESSION]s' way of earning a living"

Not a valid argument.
I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coincidence.

Nor does he have a hard time explaining what he did. He has spoken several times at Startup School about his approach to solving problems. I've learned a lot from him.
Why is sports available live on cable instead of just over the air broadcast? Because that's where the viewers are. Certainly there is feedback in that viewers subscribe to cable because of the live sports offerings, but the feedback goes both ways. If a substantial user base moves off of cable, live sports offerings will show up wherever the users are.
Maybe taxi license requirements are vastly different between the two countries making it prohibitively expensive or unrealistic to do the same in the US?
If you're Joe Average, a sizable fraction of your lifetime expense is medical and opportunity costs incurred in the last decades of your life.

Veganism and vegetarianism appear to at least somewhat reduce methionine intake, and therefore act like mild calorie restriction mimetics. Ergo they also somewhat reduce late life expenditure on medicine, and reduce the opportunity cost burden of frailty and chronic sickness:

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...

http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm
Designers Lie. That's OK.
>Making a decision based on pure speculation is a terrible idea.

That's how practically all decisions about the future are made.
Seth Godin has a good point about professionalism. Being professional is doing the same thing and getting the same result over and over.

These days more often than not this is not what you're looking for. You're looking for the fresh angle, the different point of view, the purple cow.

You're looking for passion. For love. These are two words you seldom see together with professionalism.

EDIT: the word "amateur" has the same roots as "amore" and literally means "love what you do".
I couldn't comment on the costs involved in either country, but that really isn't relevant. If you can't balance a company's finances without saying "we won't follow the law because it's too expensive" then you're doing something wrong.

That argument sounds semi-reasonable when coming from a teenager downloading films illegaly, not from a serious company avoiding paying for a license it needs.
Money never hurts. Raise as much as you can, spend as little as possible.

Running out of cash is the first reason why company go out of business (nota bene: you can run out of cash and be profitable, cash != profits).
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX?
I read through several Javascript tutorials last week. This weekend I've been reading/experimenting with a bunch of JQuery stuff.

Now, on the JQuery site, a good number of the articles mention AJAX. I don't know anything about AJAX (yet). What should I know about it to start out, and when should I start learning it? (After JQuery or now.)
They have tons of debt.
No. I'll have to check it out the next time I'm picking up some rum.
Unless they relocate all drivers to live outside the US they're going to have a slight problem, I think...
It would be interesting to see someone try to price externalities into this sort of comparison, although almost certainly the result would be as expected (veganism in a walk) and like all such projections, would be wildly subjective.
Uhm, the key difference being that between that time and now Facebook has grown 5-6x. By what metric was that a bad decision, exactly?
Wow.

Thanks for the awesome response and you don't need to ask for help. I'm the one offering it. If I don't reply to your mail soon then don't worry. It's just that I have an awesome bunch of people to help and I my hands can work only so fast.

Thank you so much.
My philosophy on planning your own life:

You should think enough (and just enough, no more) about what you want in life so that when unusual opportunities arrive, you notice them, and jump at them.
Project ROME
Catch Up On the News With Summify. We Have Invite Codes
Yeah, but neither is ignoring the law because you disagree with it.
Back to the Mac with a vengeance
Vectroid?
if anyone's curious what the post is referring to,

http://en.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272007200

starts @23:00 or so
Yeah, these numbers are totally arbitrary. Just in breakfast, they have the pescetarian eating a $0.50 bagel and the vegetarian eating $1.60 of yogurt and blueberries ... The vegetarian could just as easily eat the same bagel (with a cheaper than salmon cream cheese), or better yet, the same eggs that the omnivore is eating.

I had no idea that there was even an argument that eating meat was cheap. Eating meat in many places is a sign of wealth which has only recently been made available.
I'm a huge proponent of dynamic typing, but I don't think your statement about bugs is true.

If I typo something in ruby, I will not know unless that code path gets executed through a test. This would never happen in a statically typed language.

However I think the productivity benefits of dynamic typing far outweighs this risk in my experience.
As an original Digg user, i.e. pre the HD-DVD crack code debacle, I don't think Twitter was the cause of the demise.

It was HN, for me.

At first, I went to digg for the wonderful tech/startup stories that would surface - then it evolved into meaningless crap.

I languished for a little, with no where to go, then found HN. People complain about how HN is getting so bad, but it's nothing as bad as when Digg started to get diluted by mainstream interests.

The truth is that Digg definitely had to cater to a broader audience to sustain growth, and I have always been a Rose fan, but it's kinda sad to see it go by the wayside like this.

At least Kevin tried something with v4, but it was too little too late.
Sounds a bit like what you guys have been saying about Facebook recently ;)
First, Steam distributes games only. Second, Apple does not tend to depend on third-parties for critical infrastructure.
I'm really surprised this is article is being upvoted. It's a recap of another article from another site, and the sample diet for each category is totally arbitrary. It might be a good topic for discussion, but by itself is wholly lacking in content.

Are people voting for the pretty graphic?
Depends on what you mean by "punctuality" if you mean arriving at work at the same time every day then I would say you are dead wrong. If on the other hand you mean being respectful of others time and not being late for explicitly scheduled events or calling ahead if you will be, then that may be true.
This works for me too. In addition, going for a coffee helps, as does splashing some water on my face.

In addition to quitting when I'm stuck, I also quit when I achieve. A git commit produces a nice starting point for the next day, and I have the Mortal Kombat guy tell me 'excellent' as a post-commit (yes really). Then I leave the startupcave feeling like a boss.
It's good to know, in the midst of an unending hype machine around tech startups, that there are people out there who act as a solid reality-based counter-balance.

My first programming job was in '97 in southern California, at the height of the dot-com bubble, and it's amazing that the industry and the associated media reports still give me déjà vu thirteen years later.
The perfect Django setup.
Please let me know if we've forgotten something, we'd love to add some more info.
Thanks man :^).
Things seem past repair. Get a good lawyer, and do what they advise.

You probably don't need to worry about the guy starting a competing company. If he does it will fail.
You can already buy Office or CS online and download it. My local electronics store even sells cheap Office licenses with nothing but the key. Microsoft or Adobe don’t need the App Store.
Rome is a lightweight tool to do some of the kinds of things that Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash Pro, and Fireworks do. It's nicely done for the most part, but certainly won't satisfy a professional designer, and doesn't seem to completely close the loop on what a non-designer would want.

For example, I was able to create an "animation" but couldn't figure out how to actually animate anything. I get that I could RTFM, but really in the Web 2.0 age it should be obvious how to perform the main function of a UI.

Then I generated a business card, which was easy, but there's no way to order a box of those cards from a commercial printer right in the tool. So they miss out on a huge opportunity to create a seamless web-to-print application.

Rome is pretty, but not revolutionary.
This article seems to be written taking as a premise that "conventional wisdom" holds vegetarian and vegan diets to be more expensive than the standard western omnivorous diet. To me, this seems ridiculous; it should be obvious to most people that a vegetarian or vegan diet would be less expensive from readily available information:

(a) when you go to the grocery store, on a per pound or per serving basis, meat tends to be more expensive than in season vegetables or fruits (or grains, beans, etc.)

(b) rich countries consume more meat than poor countries, and as their economies grow or shrink they change their meat consumption (for example, look at China in recent years or the US over the past century)

(c) a junior high knowledge of life sciences and trophic levels (remember the 10% rule?) should make it clear why eating animals that we raise on our own agricultural output (e.g. corn, soy, other grains) would be drastically less efficient/more costly than just eating those crops ourselves.

What should be surprising is that this sample only finds the vegan diet to be less than 25% cheaper than the omnivorous diet. Admittedly, the omnivore on the sample day didn't eat any beef, or large cuts of meat, but still, I would have thought that the vegetarian and vegan options would have been cheaper. I guess really this is a demonstration of the degree to which meat production is subsidized.
Yep, obviously you should be a bit earlier for special occasions, but being 10 minutes late on a regular day is no big deal...
Interesting, but if a wrong-endian book is in a bookshelf or a pile, can't you just correct the problem by inserting it upside-down? The only case where I'd notice a difference is the top book in a stack.
Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman (arbitrage)
Thanks for that. The apps run on Android? I thought Dalvik only supported Java... Or is there a Scala -> Java compiler (or Java bytecode -> Dalvik bytecode, for that matter)?
Yeah I don't get this either. I mean sure, you don't want to work for equity in something you don't care about. But I would LOVE to work for equity in some of the local start-ups around here.

I don't mind giving my time for no up front compensation and in exchange growing a really awesome idea or prototype into a lucrative business with a viable exit!

One of the biggest problems we are trying to solve right now is actually the problem of disconnect between business idea-generator types and programmers / engineers.

I know too many programmers that are good, but don't have ideas. So they go work for big firms. At the same time I know many entrepreneurs who's only roadblock to funding is a technical partner.

A coder is useless if he can't negotiate term sheets, get funding, and scale a business. Likewise an entrepreneur is useless if he can't code.

I think matching these people up via equity is exactly what we need to be doing.

Doesn't it suck watching a project you were paid 20 grand for rake in upper six figures going into the second year? I think that 5% equity is looking pre-tty good then.
Can someone tell me one really good way Yahoo Pipes is being used?

I can't seem to find something that is tangible and usable. Most of the site deals with developers, and some of them sometimes are more concerned with the language/tools of the application rather than making something that other people can understand or relate to.
So Digg is officially a cautionary tale now..

Newsweek is wrong though. Digg wasn't beaten by Twitter, or even by its own redesign. It was beaten because instead of building a great community they focused on being the best place to share links. And over time those links started to suck.

Digg was really beaten by itself, and by Reddit.
Repeating a comment I made a couple of weeks ago on another post on serendipity - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786959 -

This is even stronger than Pasteur's famous, "Chance favors the prepared mind" - if you are not actually working on a problem, there is no possible way to benefit from serendipity.
For many people it seems Reddit's the post-Digg destination. Certainly Reddit has been growing by leaps and bounds and trying to keep up.
HN Review: Turn your Blippy into a Charity Fundraising Machine
I just asked for help with http://recruiterbox.com/
Thanks for this!
Then I suspect that you would not fit into the "professional" category as defined by the OP. (That's not to suggest that the OP's definition of the word is the only appropriate one).
I don't know about you, but I think the existence of HNN is kind of a refutation of your argument. I know I never had the chance, here in rural Indiana, to engage with this many thoughtful people.

What you're forgetting is 99.9999% of all discussion ever has been banal. The only difference is that Google now indexes some of it. The other 0.0001% is what changes the world.

And Google indexes that now, too.
My biggest indicator has always been, "do they do what they say they'll do?"

If they want to meet for coffee and offer to buy you that coffee in exchange for your time, do they do this without you prompting them? If you end up buying your own coffee, and they simply forgot, do they acknowledge it?

If they say they will email/phone you by a certain time, do they do this? If not, and they eventually do get to you, do they acknowledge/apologize for not keeping their word?

For me, to quickly find out, it always come down to these little things. Sure, people forget to call/email/buy coffee all the time, that's acceptable. But, do they take accountability for that slip? Do they take responsibility for it without you prompting them?

If the little things are handled professionally, I've never had an experience (yet) where the big things aren't...
This is necessary but not sufficient. I use facebook but I still don't get what is the point of using it.
Check out their track record. Observe them, listen to them. Do they give you a vibe of understated competence and confidence? Or do they relentlessly hype themselves and speak in vague buzzwords? Ask questions, dig deep. "Drill down" into their area of alleged expertise. Do they answer your questions easily and with insight? Or do they engage in an avoidance strategy? Keep poking like this, the answer will become obvious.
The vegan and vegetarian sections made me cringe, not nearly enough protein. They neglected to include the cost of supplements that you need to take if you plan on being a vegan or vegetarian while maintaining an active lifestyle.

Also, it likely matters what's in season and what is available cheaply in your locale. Someone near the coasts is going to have access to much cheaper seafood than someone in the Rockies and Plains. If you have access to markets where you can buy directly from fishers, farmers, or butchers you can usually see a pretty significant cost savings.

I am very curious where they found a $0.25 serving of salmon and cheese for the pescetarian breakfast. A serving size of smoked salmon is usually 1/2 - 1/4 of a package that goes for 5 or more dollars in the grocers in my area. Some of the other prices were questionable as well ($7.30 for a fish/chicken fajita??).
It depends whether other people are waiting or not.