skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to be about 3 miles from most of the launch pads to the VAB, so about 377 gallons for a one-way trip (http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/nasafact/count3teaf.htm)

The crawler can travel about 1 MPH loaded; the tour guide at KSC (at least when I was there several years ago) made a big deal about the blazing 2 MPH it can do when unloaded. :)
I actually meant seeing personalities for colours and shapes, independently of fonts.

I'm just wondering if there are some people who don't see personalities in these things (e.g., a font being "fun" or "stern") and whether they should, where budget permits, leave design to those who do?

Then again, I don't bat an eyelid at wine descriptors like "barn", "forest floor", "skinsy", etc while some people really dislike it.
interesting tell in the url, that novell is involved. may be a good way for microsoft to let some things go OSS without directly doing it through collabs with novell, who already has a foothold in the market. one can hope anyway. i like a lot of the microsoft technologies, i just wish they'd let it roam freely.
Humans have had spoken-word history long before written. Native Americans for example. Dolphins may have something similar, perhaps a "show and tell" of sorts, who knows, but I admit it's obviously not as evolved if they can't avoid an annual slaughter.

Another extremely intelligent creature is the octopus, I wouldn't mind them having some protection as well. But they aren't as "sexy" as dolphins so I don't expect that to be forthcoming any century soon.
I'm not even sure what he's suggesting. It's easy to say "let's ban political parties", but what would be the actual law? That people aren't allowed to call themselves Democrats (or Republicans?)? That people aren't allowed to say "I identify with the ideals espoused by X?"

Parties are an emergent phenomenon in almost all democratic systems, because politicians work in groups -- the same as anyone else, by the way. If Scott Adams suggested a specific legal system (for example, banning pooling campaign funds) I could find the flaw in that, but he cleverly gives no details, and so makes it impossible for people to find flaws in his (non-existent) system.
I like this a lot. For my current needs, I think this gives the best results of all the tools out there I've tried. I do occasionally get duplicates in the same set of results, but other than that this rocks!
An equally important part is to refrain from doing it when you think the other part would be gravely offended. As Martin explained, he was paying homage to Zed. Instead of trying to understand the reasons someone would like to homage him, Zed insulted Martin.

When I ask someone to take down a plagiarized version of something I wrote (it happens) I usually point out I do not license the material on my site. I don't call people names not I insult them - I just point out they shouldn't do it and urge them to take the content down because it's not fine with me they reuse it. Even that is rare - I am usually happy with adequate attribution.

I can't understand why someone talented as Zed feels a need to insult people. But that's me and I am not like him.
I agree with a couple of points in the article regarding scalability and inconvenience.

However, there are a couple of points that aren't real blockers:
1) employees handling your smartphone - In reality, the couple of times I've tried this, I scan the phone myself; the barista never touches it.
2) typing in password each time - Don't separately password the app. It's no less secure than a physical card, and most folks already have a primary password to access their smartphone anyway.

I do agree that it's more hassle than it's worth. I have a 3g iPhone which doesn't support multi-tasking, but perhaps a multitasking smartphone would be less painful to use (just keep the Starbucks app running in the background for a quick switch). Not very scalable though.

The long delay to access apps is endemic to most smartphone apps today (especially so in devices like the iPhone which doesn't support a 'dashboard'). This needs to change in the future to enable a whole slew of new usage behaviors.

As far as scalability goes, hopefully an industry standard will emerge so that a single app can manage a wallet of multiple virtual cards. Once you can go from carrying a dozen loyalty cards to a single app, using a smartphone for this functionality starts to make a lot more sense.
Banking Apps for Android, iPhone Expose Sensitive Info
This is a great way to increase the value (or beneficiaries) of altruistic acts. Maybe that startup Skyara should make this one of their use cases, where people with specific domain knowledge could offer lunches and donate the proceeds to charity.

Note: I have no affiliation with Skyara and hadn't even heard about them until I read this HN thread a couple minutes ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1874982
"we need a more nuanced scale of what is morally acceptable or not that includes various forms of intelligence (without the same logic being used to treat disabled people poorly)"

Explain the discrepancy.
Interesting. As one of the founders, it's good to hear the psychology at work here.
Site idea: leaders in their field volunteer their time for lunch. People bid and also pay for said lunch. Winning bid goes to designated charity. Perhaps have one auction per day. Could be anything from someone like PG to head of marketing at a major sports team, to notable chefs, writers, etc.
Great concept. I used to do subscribe to a service like this in Minneapolis, and just pick up the pre-made meals on my way home from work.

I just moved to SF, so I wouldn't subscribe to this right away as I'm still mostly experimenting with different restaurants around the city. But if 3+ months from now I needed this service, absolutely I would subscribe.

I'd say $10-20/meal feels right. Unless you can justify/educate me why higher price is better. Also, a discount for 4+ member families (or something along those lines) might be a good marketing hook.

Once you have more to show, I'd be glad to comment and advise in any way you think is helpful. The other comments on here have already stressed most of the important, immediate things for you to address.

In the meantime, contact info is in my bio, feel free to hit me up if you wanna grab a drink and chat.
This will be really fantastic when it gets freetype support to load ttf fonts.
Let's break it down.

1) Release a bunch of free apps.
2) Take the holiday season - the single month with the highest sales and traffic.
3) Round it up a little bit to get to $80K a month.
4) Find as many people as you can who're willing to believe the story.
5) Don't lie - just let people extrapolate - Say $80K in a month and let people assume that means $80K per month.

Their website is the classic long form sales letter.

Make it long so people get invested.
Offer $2600 worth of value for just $300.
Then knock another $200 off.

Appeal to the total idiots who think a 'free' ready to go app that is included will start making them $5,000 a day.

Quote examples like iShoot + kitchen table without telling the whole story i.e. the guy's programming experience and the actual number of months spent and the strategy he used.

A fool and his money are soon parted. These two gentleman are taking upon themselves this painful task.

If we set aside ethics it's just a strategy - One guy builds a super valuable product and sell it at high price to smart people who value it.

Another person builds a house of cards and targets people's greed and laziness.

Notice a few things -

1) Their insistence that they spend just 5 hours a week on this.
2) Their focus on showing earnings from a single month - the month in the year that has the most sales.
3) If you were to wish for a easy, no hassle way to make lots of money - You'd dream up exactly what they are claiming. It's absolutely perfect - you don't have to know coding, you need just 5 hours a week, and you'll start making $5,000 a day within 60 days.
While the "sold at a loss" might be true, I've also read some articles that claimed that some of the processing in the kinect hardware was being offloaded into the xbox itself. If true, this means that the drivers will need to replicate some code running on the xbox and Microsoft was rather nasty about researchers reversing some of what went on inside the running hardware.
I can also cause you to experience green by electrically stimulating your visual cortex, so ~500nm light need not be involved, nor your retina even. What is green now?
Do bubble rings count?
yup just what i was talking about, see below
Zoomooz.js - Make any page element zoom with JQuery
Anyone know what the "pagerank" variable in here is?

https://github.com/anthonyu/Sizzle/blob/master/src/proto/siz...
Fresh - A Sinatra inspired Erlang web framework
NYTimes design director Khoi Vinh's new book on web design: Ordering Disorder
X has worked for years with no configuration. Not sure if symbolisation is important here, if it was, we'd just rename it.
Awesome, man! We'll have to get on that ourselves.
Your final analogy unfortunately completely broke at the end. I think the only valid parallel conclusion you could have drawn would be something like, "Scientists should not review their own results before publication" or something to that effect.

Programmers advocate topics close to themselves all the time. Why can't scientists?
Isn't that a good reason Microsoft doesn't want this to work? It will show open source as good.
Thanks jscore! We're in the process of a redesign that will greatly simplify the whole thing, but I will see what I can do in the short term to make it more obvious what we sell. Thanks again :-]
I'd guess communication methods available to dolphins aren't as good as those available to humans. I think all aural communication that is available to dolphins is available to humans, and yet we use mostly speech and gesticulation, both of which seem to be either unavailable or very limited for dolphins.

As for the octopus, by quickly browsing the usual suspects you can find that quite a lot of people find them much more sexy than dolphins, but let's not get to deep into that.
This is a variation of the tired old argument which assumes that every pirated copy represents a lost sale. Hogwash.
Scientists can't tell you how to define morality, but much of moral reasoning starts from a shared set of premises that establish an ethical framework, and from there it's about empirical questions.

In this case the moral axiom would be that it is bad to cause suffering and good to cause joy. The science here is telling us that dolphins are capable of a full range of experiences, just as we are. It's up to you to interpret that information in your moral framework, but I think it's reasonable to believe many people will share a basic set of axioms about what is moral that make the implications here clear.
Doctors shouldn't treat themselves, lawyers shouldn't have themselves as clients

Why not? Is there a law against that? I'm genuinely curious.

and scientists shouldn't advocate on the topics they are deeply attached to

That's a non-sequitur analogy.

Besides, who do you propose to advocate a position if not those who have learned the most about it? Shall we forbid Dawkins from advocating evolution? Economists (it's a science!) from advocating economic policy?

Should we forbid programmers from advocating software patent reform because "it's a topic they are deeply attached to"?
Advertise On Facebook - Reach More People Than 10 Super Bowls - OnMedea
Creating a story that won't die: "1994's Most Bizarre Suicide"
"An equally important part is to refrain from doing it"

No, that would be closer to the "asking permission" philosophy.
I hope you guys do well, it just seems like a risky area to get into.
Can you clarify this please. This is something I am reading up on at the moment (MAX python API, OSC protocol etc).

"This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW."

I was not referring directly to TouchOSC I was using it as an example beforehand. Currently if I write my own controller, I need to implement the OSC protocol to send messages over the network. These messages then need converted to MIDI for the DAW to utilize. With direct MIDI support I can send midi straight out of my application over USB for the DAW to pick up. Is that essentially correct?

EDIT. Just noticed your Soundcloud profile. Nice work.
Does intelligence somehow determine the significance and importance of pain? Is it less real?
Perhaps, its doubly dubious given that Costa Rica doesn't have a military... however Costa Rica hasn't had a military in like 60 years, so the question is why didn't they do this sooner?

IMO the taking down of flags is probably the cause of not knowing where the border truly is. Up until recently there were sections of the US/Canadian border where you could accidentally drive into the other without going through a passport check by making a wrong turn.

Imagine been a farmer in the middle of nowhere, why does this land here belong to me, but that land on the other side of the old rubber tree doesn't? You wouldn't care if you hadn't seen a government official in your entire lifetime, you'd just go and build a house and put up a flag.

Again think of it from the PoV of the soldier who took down the flag. You're following orders, you're told you're performing an operation in your own territory near the border. This is your country... you don't know that the top brass isn't entirely certain that it is and that they're relying on an American company to have reliable maps of their own territory.
>Religion and civilization are ultimately incompatible.

That's a strange thing to say considering that, in the past, religion was the defining aspect of civilization.

It was religion that civilized the barbarians.
Cheers, thats a very good point.
Sweet. Collaboration is coming soon.
I've also found it's generally better to keep your base installation as sparse as possible, and use virtual machines for anything that does not absolutely need to be on the host.

That way you can set up servers, experiment with new platforms and/or applications, hack^Wlearn config files and system internals, etc. without risk of bogging down or blowing up your machine and having no recourse but a full reinstall and reconfig.

I've got core Ubuntu Server, OpenSuse, and CentOS server images, that include extras like git-core, htop, ssh, and a few other utilities I universally depend on, and that I can copy, deploy, and configure for whatever specialized purpose that comes up.

<3 it.
A lot of work has been done recently in psychology and neurobiology regarding the hows of not just thought, but emotion. Sociology has uncovered strange patterns in human “moral” behavior, such as how we donate more to one starving child than to a country of hungry millions. And the so-called “new atheists” have been talking about biological and evolutionary causes of morality for a few years now.

Science now includes morality.

Science is now about how things work and how we should act.

Addendum: With science we can determine which behaviors can maximize happiness. Isn't that prescriptive, not just descriptive?
Regardless of her trial strategy, the absurdity here is the federal law permitting essentially a financial death penalty for an individual sharing a few songs. The statutory copyright penalties were clearly written with commercial-type infringement in mind, not individuals engaging in personal use. The penalty is grossly unfair, the RIAA - regardless of their settlement offers - come off looking like huge pieces of shit, and the whole thing needs to be appealed and the judgment reversed.
pg, are you ready for the possible

"Why didn't you pick me for yc?! (sob)"

awkward lunch?
look at the site with fresh eyes.

Load the homepage and only allow yourself to read the most obvious 5 words on it.

What do you read? At the moment when I do that, I read: "plurty cart checkout light gloves".

Just put a nice bright tagline under plurty that says "Number 1 for rave lights" and bam!
I don't see how it's condescending. Either you're seeing something I'm not or you're mistaking a rhetorical device for condescension. The idea of art being some kind of moral threshold does seem very arbitrary.

Edit: Incidentally, I'm not one of the people who downvoted you.
Surely, he could do that anyway ? - it's a silent auction not a secret one, all bids are public.
Hey, 'carbocation, does Hacker News still remind you of your first year of med school? ;)
I had a brief encounter with Drizzle, didn't convince me, so I went the safest route, and abandoned MySQL altogether and switched to PostgreSQL.

It was reasonably painless, thankfully, and so far, it's doing great.
Google Confirms Gmail Speed Issue, Says It’s Now Fixed
Thanks! All of this stuff is coming in some form in the near future.

As a side-note, there is "unofficial" offline access right now. All of your edits are batched up when you edit offline and will be synced with the server when you reconnect. You just can't close your browser window/tab until you reconnect.

The undelete bar thing is already fixed and will be pushed out soon.
The Man Behind Comet Hartley 2
We've been looking at InfoBright http://www.infobright.com/ and Tokutech http://tokutek.com/ which are non-free table types with interesting properties. But haven't tried a complete branch yet.
My comment, or the comment I'm responding to? Preemptively: The fact that what I actually believe flies in the face of the conventional wisdom on Hacker News does not make it a trolling comment.
I found X quite easy to configure. Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this sometimes.

X11 as a protocol is old and mature like TCP or SMTP. Just like SMTP it has some problems, but Wayland throws away some core features to fix it. Hopefully, Wayland is flexible enough to get network transparency like X11 at some point.
Amazing close-ups of comet Hartley 2
"Modification of its products" "Product tampering"

So if I write a linux device driver for a USB mouse with a proprietary interface, I am "tampering" with the mouse and "modifying" it?

This is a human interface device. I highly doubt that even the DCMA could kick in on it, since it is not used for recording, storing, or displaying content of any kind (but I could be wrong). How, then, does Microsoft have the right to say what can and cannot be done with a piece of hardware that I rightfully purchased?

Whether the Kinect is a loss leader is irrelevant. Once I buy the thing, I own it, and I can do whatever I want to with it.
Hmmm, that's odd. Your changes are synced to the server every 5 seconds, and you should be notified if you have unsaved changes when you try to leave the page.
scientists shouldn't advocate on the topics they are deeply attached to

Very nicely put.

Along similar lines, quoting from a post I did a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140274):

"Activist groups have long looked for a hook by which to bring class actions against those whom they see as perpetrators of wrongs that they wish to stop. In this case, it is commercial tuna fishermen. However, the courts have denied them the right to sue on behalf of the dolphins (which are accidentally killed in the course of industrial tuna fishing) on grounds that dolphins aren't human beings and therefore do not have 'standing' to sue. This means that the activist groups also cannot bring class actions in the name of the dolphins. Of course, if the dolphins are 'self-aware,' then they arguably can be treated in a special way by the courts - as 'non-human humans' - and be given the right to sue. The research is being cast as disinterested science, but I believe it may be motivated by this extra-scientific goal and that is why it is routinely presented along with arguments for better ethical treatment of the dolphins. In essence, the bottom line will be this: better ethical treatment = enforceable legal rights (i.e., enforceable by activist groups suing tuna fisherman in federal court once a court recognizes their right to bring such suits on behalf of a 'self-aware' species that now should have 'standing' to sue)."

I am not trying to knock the science - just saying that, when cast as a moral imperative, it is as much advocacy as it is science and that its objectivity must be considered in that light. Perhaps it would be best for those who do these studies to stick to the facts and let others do the advocacy. It would give them a higher degree of credibility as scientists if they separated these roles.
One easy way: On a Linux box you can type:

whois domainIAmInterestedIn.com
Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Generated to Treat Lung Disease
If you consider intelligence in terms of IQ tests, they're pretty smart. If you consider it in terms of optimizing power, the ability to shape the future to their goals, a quadriplegic low-IQ human with a eyeblink controlled typing screen obliterates them. I would consider them pre-people at most, ripe for uplift.
As humans had previously been defined as "tool-makers", when Goodall telegraphed [Louis] Leakey to report that the chimps were modifying twigs in order to "fish" termites out of holes in rock-solid termite mounds, it provoked the now famous response: "We must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human."
Today is my 22nd birthday... weird.
Naval Ravikant of AngelList Plans New Fund with Babak Nivi
Panasonic buys a $30 million stake in Tesla
Bedbugs invading NYC classrooms at alarming rate
It's actually something I've been working on that I want to put up on github. I hacked up a Python version of it as a proof-of-concept but rewrote it in C as an installable executable using autotools.

Basically I tell it which directory I want it to watch for changes and it does automatic syncing by piping rsync. I keep a local and remote signature of the files and their timestamps. When it first starts up, it pulls the server sig file and compares it to the local one. If there's a mismatch, the server is updated. From there it manages the signatures locally until they're different.

Writing the sig file to the remote server is done in the same rsync pass because it's stored in the local directory as a dotfile.

I realize rsync does its own checksums, but using my own crude signature files makes it so I don't have to keep calling rsync. I only call it when something changes.

I also have some stuff I'm working on that ties into auto-restarting servers when syncing finishes, rolling server deployments for no downtime, db migrations, etc.
(a) No.

(b) Limor isn't putting a bounty on pirating a game. She's putting a bounty on forced interoperability with a hostile proprietary peripheral. The bounty is great (even though I think "her team" will lose). I think it's kind of insulting to compare it to pirating games, which is indefensible.
I doubt there's any reasoning behind it beyond "but they're people!"

I find the comparison between the treatment of mentally handicapped people and smarter animals to be a very interesting moral issue. I've not seen an argument that doesn't essentially boil down to "but humans are better".
What do you mean, "big enough?" There hasn't yet been a company who has been able to resist the buyout, much less wage an insurgency.
So, essentially, "Look at that skirt! She was asking for it!"

That isn't even remotely the argument that was made in the comment you're replying to.
John Carmack on the Mac App Store
How much does it cost be the one they choose?
If I understand this comment correctly, that's pretty much not at all the way DirecTV works. The people who "broke" DirecTV in the '90s didn't do it by hacking into DirecTV's servers.
There are few animals that pass the test. The great apes, bottlenose dolphins, magpies, and asian elephants for example.

All of these animals have a large brain-to-body-size ratio, complex social interactions, problem solving ability, and a relatively long period of parental care for their young.
Check out Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. Same idea taken a lot further.