skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A nice fiction.

The reality is that copyright covers verbatim copying. If you read a book and write a review, the term "derived work" makes English sense, but not legal sense. Similarly, if you read the MySQL code looking for magic words to say to the server to get it to give you data, saying those words is not copyright infringement. It's "learning", not "copying".

If anyone used MySQL, I would write a BSD-licensed API just to prove a point. (And to be non-blocking.) But the world has moved on since the Oracle deal...
I picked up The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose, for the third time. It's really interesting and well written, but I still feel it's a pretty heavy read. I figure that I'll get through it with Sal Khan's help, when I hit math and physics that's above my level.

I hope it will be a good way for me to improve my math, while learning about our history and the universe all at the same time.
It depends what makes you happy. I get happy when I get a great deal more than when its a nice shiny UI.

Of course, both a great deal and a great UI is best, but if I had to choose one, I know which it would be.
As an Apple user, I'd like to know what company makes UX the acid test for their business decisions over profit?
To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different:

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web...

This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering.
It looks like it's saying that Intel can't have programs designed to limit anyone from sell or using competing hardware, such as AMD. They can't offer kickbacks to computer makers if they only use Intel, for example.

It also requires Intel to very clearly state if their compiler will optimize differently for Intel and non-Intel hardware, even though they contain the same instructions (like SSE).

Anyone who has used Intel's compiler and the above cost them money is entitled to reimbursement from Intel.

They have to clearly state when they use benchmarks that have been compiled to work better on Intel hardware.

And they have to prove their compliance.

I am NOT a lawyer. The above is my best guess at what that legal document means.
Between dumping cable and using an ad blocker in Chrome, the only political ads I saw this past election cycle were the occasional billboard. It was absolutely blissful.

Here's hoping ad buys on Hulu continue to remain so expensive that politicians can't get in on it.
Because they have strong problems understanding the mathematics, but they devote all their time to code something they don't understand . I have tried my best to get them to understand it, or convince them to understand first and code later, to no use.
The (mostly) factual world is a tough place to live in. No convenient simplistic arguments that everyone can understand, for starters.
The best part when you pick up a sport is that it'll often make treadmills and lifting weights less boring. Once you realize "this hunk of iron I'm moving will let me throw further" or "this moving platform lets me play longer", then you'll have a much better time doing that stuff.

If your looking for sports, many cities have adult social/recreational sports clubs. I know Toronto has several. And if you don't know any sports, dodgeball is always fun! Just keep moving the whole time. Apologies to anyone to whom dodge ball is linked to poor physed memories.
I agree.

This question comes up in different forms time and time again and the answers are almost always the same: Just do it. The only thing stopping you doing it is you so stop procrastinating and get on with it or just admit you're actually not that bothered / committed / whatever.
Even for a twitter recommendation engine, that's just a lot of moving parts.

I hope your development is driven by accurate profiling and benchmarks. It's much better to have a dirty, but very surgical fix in a specific bottle-neck, than to have your application "scaled" with too many layers of individually "optimized" components, that bog each other to a crawl when combined.
Awesome name!

Do you see yourselves competing with the craigslist "for free" section?

If so, how do you plan to compete? I'm not sure the map makes up for the sheer number of items on cl.

If not, what differentiates you from them enough to say you're not competing?

Couple of points:
- take taken items out. I found an item near me only to find out that it had been taken 8 months ago. Nobody cares about items they can't Yoink.

- The text in the footer bar is rendering weird in chrome. It's got some strange white outline to it.

- Move the search out of the map. I wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't pointed out here. I would also duplicate the search box on the get page.

- How to get started belongs somewhere on the front page (maybe in a closable panel) not on the give or get pages. That page should focus on what's in the blue boxes.

- on the get screen "You know you got to have faith." should be "You know you've got to have faith."

- I like the stats page.

One last thing, how do you make money? I see no way to pay for anything and no advertising. Am I missing something?

Good luck to you!
"The web is considered 'public domain'"
Stars fall in Amazon protest about ebook prices
I'm sure having the trains run on time is nice, but I have to concur with piaw - from the people I've talked to, Apple sounds like a remarkably stifling place to work.
One of the big problems is there is no incentive for repeating or asserting previous results/findings. So even if someone is doubtful of an assertion made there is no incentive to follow up and verify the assertion in general. I don't think sharing code or secret data cleaning methods is going to bring much change unless someone is rewarded for repeating the results.
I think that you've restated what the RIAA wants people to think: "$1.5m... [which must now be paid because] a random woman ... downloaded a couple dozen songs."

That's not really what this is though: she shared/uploaded/seeded those songs for others to download. The verdict isn't b.c she downloaded the songs; it's because she shared the songs to an unknown number of people.
You need to wear the project manager and developer hat but at different times. Using a tool like Pivotal tracker really helps. Let me explain why.

For me the real problem is that when I am done with a task and don't know what to work on next, I tend to lose steam. If you have enough work lined up for a week, you will probably keep going. If you stop to think about what to do next after every small task, you will have a tough time keeping up the momentum.
Do you think what he says in the 3rd paragraph is the right balance?

I am not suggesting that you should put your head in the sand. It is critical to know what is going on in your market. But it is equally critical to have a strategy that makes sense in the context of what is going on and execute it with purpose and pace. If you spend too much time looking over your shoulder, you will not execute well. I've seen it again and again.
There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple).

I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.
"some random people send you email and have such "eclipse plug-in" problem" -> They are not random people, they are Ph.D. students working on their thesis and you can be assured that they will find a way to publish their comparison one way or the other. Some Ph.D. students will go at great length to figure out other's code before asking a question, but some will suck your energy big time and still do a poor job at representing your work. Now compare this to those who do not release their code: they can only be evaluated on their published results and they can spend their time on their next study/research work.

My point is that there is not a lot of incentive to release code: it requires a lot of your time, it is not always clear that granting agencies/employers consider this as being more positive than publications, and it exposes your work to all sorts of unfair replication/comparison.

Now, if research work without released code were never cited, that would be a terrific incentive to release your code :-)

P.S. I speak from experience and I release the code of my most important research work.
Martial arts have an extra motivation bonus as well. You're much less likely to give up and stop moving when your opponent is still trying to hit you.
Ben's review sounds accurate of Kinect's pros and cons, but what really stuck out to me was his pessimism of the device's possibilities.

It reminded me of my own skepticism towards iPhone gaming. Remember that? First person shooters will suck because there are no buttons. Racing games will suck because most of them only let you brake and steer. Third person platformers will suck because you can't control the camera and the character at the same time.

And yet iPhone gaming is flourishing because developers discovered what the device is fantastic for: tower defense, puzzle games, Scrabble, 2D platforming, on and on. Games and genres that would be throwaways on a burly console like the PS3 are perfect on the iPhone.

So I expect it to go with Kinect. It'll be a big deal when we discover new games and genres designed for a person rather than a controller.
Excellent choice. A tip to other would be visitors to DC: Pizza Paradiso has a beer list that would impress any serious beer aficionado, and it worth going to just for that. And unlike a lot of places with a good beer list, the beers are fresh and the list changes regularly.

Back on topic, I found DC area to be not particularly geared towards startups. There is a lot of IT/software business in the area, but it's overwhelmingly about government contracts. It's not like SF or Seattle where real products and companies are getting invented, built, funded, etc every day.

While DC is an interesting place to live for a short while, I can't really recommend it as a destination. The traffic is horrendous. The climate is weird (how a place can be so sticky and humid in summer, and so bone-chillingly cold in winter, I'll never know). The culture is not especially geared towards entrepreneurial types. And it's expensive.
I know a lot of people who "can program" and when confronted with a problem would spend a whole afternoon deciding if they can do it in the main function or need to code separate pieces and then a week to really do it. A great programmer just picks the problem and writes the code that solves it.
Why People Love the Latest Technology Gadgets | InfoMov.Com
nginx ftw
I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives" and not "less is better".

Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context?

For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers.
...and full of damn hipsters, let's be honest.

Great place to drink or work until you head back across the river to sleep :)
Devil's advocate here: isn't a quirky, idiosyncratic coding style with no documentation generally considered a liability just about anywhere else?
Fortunately, with ESPN3 I think things are getting better (and we'll eventually get to the point of full IPTV), but until every big game is available officially online, there's just going to be no way for me to ditch cable completely.
Top 5 Ridiculous Hacking Scenes in Movies
Say, you want to let people know that you are going to be in their city. Email will be too intrusive. So indirect communication is advantage (which social group allows). A contact in the city can see it and choose to ignore it. Another one, may jump at the opportunity, and welcome you and want to meet you.

But we are still left with the problem of broadcast to all, which the PPT articulates very nicely.
"User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive."

They are not necessarily always aligned either
and you may have to choose at one point. UX is very subjective and taking a dogmatic approach to it and how it affects your business isn't a very good idea.
There may be a few billion dollars to be made by some investment banks and hedge funds in carbon trading, but keep in mind that as of today, three of the six largest companies by market cap are oil companies (ExxonMobil, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell), and another is a mining company with substantial interests in petroleum (BHP Billiton). These four companies alone add up to over a trillion dollars in market value.

Also, the profits from purchasing carbon credits do not go directly into Al Gore's pocket. I don't have any idea where anyone would get such a stupid idea.
ESPN3 does not require cable (tv) subscription, only cable company subscription. I have Comcast (only internet) and happily watch ESPN3.

I understand you, I only get cable TV for NBA finals. Then I cancel it again :) On a big TV, ESPN3 is not always great enough quality.
Shiny is an aesthetic description. The importance of this discussion goes much deeper — simplicity versus complexity, and who benefits from each.

Upsells are an obstacle to completing your purchase. They're annoying. They are added compexity that has a nominal chance of benefiting the user. In contrast, they are guaranteed to benefit the company, since as a numbers game, you'll end up pitching enough upsells to convert n additional sales.

When considering the impact of adding complexity, imagine a toilet. Or, rather, your access to a toilet. Some toilets are a door knob away. Others require you to hunt down a coin and drop it into a slot before providing access.

Which toilet are you more proud to have in your business?
I've been following this site for a while and I've been paying attention. I haven't seen this specific question put in exactly this way. I'll have another root around though, thx! The whole thing kind of depresses me because at the moment I don't even have a job in IT, I've returned to university to get a master in humanities - digital culture studies in fact so it's not like I've left the tech world completely behind me. I couldn't succeed in the corporate world either as an employee or freelance. I would love to have some kind of part-time paying gig to supplement my income of 0 but my inability to do stuff for myself with just my dreams and desires as motivation is letting me down once again. I'm letting myself down once again. Don't get me wrong, this is not a Oh woe is me sob story, I'm doing okay, I know I could do better cuz I've got the smarts...
maybe some people who want basic full text search capabilities but do not want to roll their own solution or use solr/sphinx whatever, I recall innodb did not support that?
"if we knew then what we know now alcohol would never have been legalised"

So the St. Valentine's Day Massacre isn't enough to convince you Prohibition was a bad idea, eh?
looks like unsharp mask http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking
IMHO too excessive at this picture
Agreed. The whole war on drugs needs to be stopped. But nullification is not the right tactic--not least because it just doesn't work.
You can change order. You can't change color. Reprioritizing happens.
People don't generally care about absolute amounts. People care about "fair" amounts. And if they think $10 is unfair, they won't spend it even if they're going to get way more than $10 of value out of a book.

For myself, if I'm going to read any old book, I'll grab one from the basement or from the library rather than paying $2 for something that will have negative value to me once I'm done with it. (my basement is filled with books, I don't need more). OTOH, I'll readily pay $30 if I have to read it now.
Standard Auto Wreckers Gets Certified by Canada’s Retire your Ride Program
I have an MSc in CS and then did (still doing) a degree in Physics. I can report that you are right, most scientists are not great programmer. Most scientists just don't care about readability, maintainability, warnings, library dependencies, cross-platform issues, versioning, testing, etc.

I think it'd be perfectly reasonable for society and the gov't to demand that scientists who produce results based on data and data processing make the data and the programs available to their peers and the general public, and also demand that it satisfies some reasonable software engineering expectations. (These will be set by their own peers anyway.)

It is accepted by scientists that it is important to communicate research findings in the form of well-written human-readable papers. Over time the community must accept that including well-written machine-parsable data and code is just as important part of the scientific communication framework.

Finally, a personal anecdote. I was contacted by a senior researcher to work on a cutting-edge numeric simulation project, and he sent me the source code, but made it clear that it is "top secret", even though it is gov't funded, as it is much better than its competitors, also gov't funded. He estimated that this advantage will last for several years, meaning several papers.
Played with it a bit. I like it :D
I've attended climate science conferences and worked for years writing code for and with climate scientists. Down in the trenches, pretty much the only thing I saw was scientists interested in accurate results. I don't, however, claim to have worked with nearly everyone in the field. But I do on occasion feel compelled to defend my former coworkers (I work for myself now).
Except all the stores I've been to no one trusts the customer so when you do self checkout not only do you have to scan each item but you have to make sure you put each item in the bag area so it can feel the weight. God forbid you want to take a bag out and put it in your cart before you pay as well.
Initial reviews of a new technology in gaming always tend to focus too heavily on the now, and not the possible. In some respects there's good reason for such an analysis: if consumers don't accept the current state of the offering, there will be no future for it.

That said, a system like this really comes alive when innovative software developers start having at it. It's always, always, always about the games and not the tech. The tech enables the games, but it takes a genius title or two to really advance the tech's acceptance among consumers and developers.

As a gamer, I am very much looking forward to someone's unlocking the true potential of Kinect.
Ask HN: What are some tips for organizing and hosting a great HN meetup?
I'm thinking of organizing and HN meetup here in São Paulo, Brazil, but as I've never been to one of the US meetups, I wanted to know what are some things you guys have done at the US meetups to make them successful and valuable for those that attend?
Charity Car Program that Takes Zero Fees
Android 'MoodTracker' catches Pentagon's attention
Your assertion that all upsells have a 'nominal chance of benefiting the user' is wrong. Some users love upsells if they are the right deal.
The repeated "Opt out!" yelling tactic is obviously a way to intimidate and humiliate the participant, and dissuade anyone else who would otherwise choose to opt out.

I have not had the opportunity to opt out yet. But when I do, I will gladly join in the opt out screaming session, and add some other choice words of my own.

I refuse to quietly be a part of some absurd bureaucratic plot that slowly and steadily strips away my civil rights.
How does Kindergarten affects your future Earnings [pdf]
Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red.

It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.
Oracle just put a price on InnoDB. So unless you got $2000 a year - NO.
http://www.mysql.com/products/

Postgresql is your next choice.
Ask HN: Technical Sales Engineer
I'm interested in finding out if any HNers have ever been (or are currently) a technical sales engineer for a technology company operating in the (broad) IT space?

I'm specifically interested in your experience transitioning out from behind the monitor to a customer facing role. What were the challenges you faced? Do you have any advice for those considering making a similar move?

If you consider yourself an introvert it would be especially interesting to me to hear how you learned to step outside your comfort zone into an extroverted role.
OK, so it's an emulator for VIC-20 BASIC, but not for the VIC-20.
There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers.

There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers.

This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace.

The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature.
Frequently Bought Together

* This item: Uranium Ore by Images SI Inc. $39.95

* Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner Hardcover $10.78

* The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Paperback $14.28
To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the product do the talking:

Screenshot:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o....
Never simply give someone a quote
I have this problem, too: I get excited by new ideas and the early stages of implementing them are pure joy.

Then, invariably, some of the details create unexpected problems, and I feel like I'm stuck on some tangential issue, far from the original concept.

What works for me is to focus on one small, specific aspect of your code: it could be a function or feature, but forget about everything else and get it done.

Do the same same for the next logical piece, and before long, you've gotten out of the rut.

Good luck.