skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, exactly. It crawls the CSS for images and preloads them with jQuery.
Social Media Crackdowns Trigger Legal Fights
>The device presents itself as a USB hub, then waits until late at night, when it connects its keyboard and types out and compiles an entire rootkit.

This idea is terrifying.
Well, if there were a million bloggers posting random predictions and only one analyst, it would seem, intuitively, that the top nine would likely all be bloggers. It all depends on the number of bloggers that made predictions but aren't in your list. Is it zero? A trillion? Given that most bloggers tend to advertise their successes but not their failures, how can you get a definitive number?
I don't see how meditation is connected to religion.

Religions want you to seek answers from them.

Meditation encourages you to seek answers from within.
>Like I said - you're thinking in the past. Have some vision.

I was recently told that by someone trying to convince me the future of education was schools buying Android tablets with no actual prompt or reason for doing so. Let alone a budget justification to the BoE. Good luck.

>We can pipe that content via satellite, dump it to a DVD even if needed.

Do you have any idea how much satellite connections cost relative to third world incomes?

I don't think you understand what third world living is like. We're talking about people with no reliable access to electricity, dirty water at best, that live in slums, and can't afford to even pay for an internet cafe.

It's not something that time is going to solve, either. The quality of life of the third world has gotten worse over the past 40-60 years and more of the world's poor lives in filthy slums than at any other time in history.

Urbanization has actually served to ghettoize and disenfranchise the third world, as they can't even grow the food necessary for subsistence, let alone growth.

But no, I lack vision and clearly these people need a fucking flash widget telling them about Natalie Portman.

>It is "anemic" on information

No it's anemic on information because video and audio aren't nearly as information dense or economical as text. AV is an affectation designed to be a sweetener in education, not an actual vehicle that can improve anything.

>Wait 5 years.

You're a fool.

What the world needs is another agricultural innovator like Norman Borlaug, not a yuppie wet dream that does nothing for billions of starving brown people.

Education that focuses on food production and not a "service economy" would go much further towards enabling them to help themselves rather than being dependent on the desires of the West for luxury.

A lot of the problems in Africa stem from that they've literally forgotten how to properly grow food.

But no, I lack vision. Of course all their problems are going to disappear in 5 years and they'll have macbooks and be sipping coffee in a Starbucks while they download their qwiki lessons on Calculus.

Because, you know, you can learn calculus so much easier from a synth voice saying d/dx(x^2)=2x out loud.
Though I liked your comments in the article, I agree with jhamburger, this is a lot different than taking a random sampling of the popular finance bloggers and comparing their top picks vs. the top picks of analysts. You could still allow the bloggers to choose the companies they know best, but you would get more realistic picture of their investing prowess than the results here. That said, I very much agree with the 4 points you stated in the article.
Why sharing is the future of business
You got the oft-excluded part of the quote right -- temporary security -- but the actual quote is, "he who would trade Essential Liberty for some Temporary Security, deserves neither Liberty or Security."

Many people omit the word, "temporary". The suspicious part of me says they do it so their (mis-quoted) statement appears more bold and uncompromising.
Another thought from a DreamIt '10 grad:

For me, the greatest part of DreamIt was the physical space. Founders + partners + mentors + speakers = immediate exposure to 100+ experts in everything from web development to sales, database management to pitching. It was great to share experiences and build camaraderie with a group of smart and talented new friends. Not picking up the phone or emailing, but turning around and bouncing ideas off the person at the table next to me -- totally awesome and super valuable.

Highly recommended.
You can also get fix your whole encoding then.
Sure, corporations are people, they have feelings. Of course they need privacy.

<obvious sarcasm tag>
Ok... that's what I thought. Thanks.

By the way, thanks for this series of articles... I've found it most diverting. I guess I'm the sort of person who enjoys "recreational maze generation" :p
Perhaps somebody can explain why the downvote...

Meditation, for those that could actually pass the 2:00 timer, is directly relevant as it is all the books referred to by the Amazon link. And I posted an interesting critique and comparison of techniques to possibly use in doing meditation.
Informative Slate article discussing this phenomenon-
http://www.slate.com/id/2217001/pagenum/all/#p2

From personal observation, it also has to do with the fact that a significant portion of Chinese immigrants last century originated from Hong Kong. Hong Kong was controlled by the British for 150 years; thus the level of English language use in Hong Kong has historically been higher compared to other Asian cities.

I'm pretty sure that all of my Hong Kong friends have had names picked for them when they were born; I wouldn't be surprised if a historian/anthropologist concludes that, indeed, that was how it all got started.

(edit: well, one could counter that Indians don't really lend themselves to English names even though India was subject to the British Empire for some time, etc.,; perhaps there are specific factors pertaining to the Chinese. Still, I do think it's important to separate out the different cases within the Chinese diaspora—mainland (urban versus rural), Hong Kong, Taiwan, expatriate/naturalized—each group has a unique history and it doesn't really make sense to try to reason about all of them at once.)
Hold up, aren't cross-domain requests disallowed for a good reason (security)? I get that Access-Control is unsupported in old IE, but gosh, doesn't it make way more sense?
Decentralizing comments across hundreds of Twitter accounts sounds like a bad idea. Why not just offer comments on Techmeme? (Perhaps with Discus which hooks into Twitter)
Users competent enough to repair an iPhone but not competent enough to open one that is sealed with something other than a phillips head screw?
You may also be interested in http://www.timecube.com/ or perhaps some beachfront property?
Samsung Vibrant Froyo upgrade finally coming January 21
After all the discussion here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116437), it appears T-Mobile is manning up, admitting they caused the delay, and releasing (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376045,00.asp) Froyo for Vibrant phones starting Jan. 21. It's interesting to note that T-Mobile is claiming responsibility, and not Samsung as most speculated.

Now, whether this is true or not is a completely different story...
App Engine Web Development On Your CR-48
"Group buying", etc [Groupon, Living Social, etc] are marketing expenses. The best way for any merchant to think about it is that by being featured on a group buying site, they can have a Black Friday. Huge buying potential, lots of customers, a chance to upsell or convert. You get the same benefits and risks as every retailer does the day after Thanksgiving.
Even worse than rickrolling: it's facebook whoring (Like it! 2755 likes! Register to see what your friends like! Spread the calm! [twitter logo] [facebook logo]) which I find quite jarring.
The difference is "YOU stole MY idea" vs "I built a better implementation of YOUR idea." In other words, just perception. remember how many different kinds of cereal are in the store.

If you wanted to start a car company, would you be concerned about "stealing ideas" because there were already other makes of cars on the market?
Clickable links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116437

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376045,00.asp
Do most people really consider those with MBAs to be the "working rich"? Or are you conflating those with MBAs and successful businessmen?
I would like to emphasize ecaroth's point:

Just start making stuff. Who cares if somebody already made it. Who cares if nobody will ever see it.

Getting over that, in the last couple of years, has been the single best thing I could do for myself -- personally, skill wise (programmatically), and professionally.

Nike is right: just do it.
Lady Gaga's monster influence
I think it's interesting that cordless phone and corded phone trend lines are very nearly converging. I wonder if some new method of communication (post-smartphone) will mean the same fate for today's hot communication technology?
Calling this a computer is rather misleading- it's really a 4-bit adder.
This is not true. Micromax phones are just re-branded chinese/korean knockoff phones. There was a craze for these phone two years back because of dual-sim capability. Now everybody realized that the quality is very bad and started buying nokia/samsung/lg dual-sim phones instead.
Philly Emerging Tech 2011 Sessions
Nonetheless, most forms of meditation, and most practitioners of meditation, and most folks that will teach you about meditation, come with religious baggage.
The Hacker's Diet - How to lose weight and hair through stress, poor nutrition
Replaced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2125005
Rockstar Developers, Mickey Mantle, & Muhammad Ali
Show HN: WhatMyFriendsRead.com - social link sharing
Somebody said "Launch early, launch often", so I guess it's about time.

WhatMyFriendsRead.com -- a social recommendation service for interesting links and content. Main idea: What is interesting for you is what your friends find interesting. I made a functional prototype hacked together in php+mysql with ugly html+css. But it works which is why I guess now would be a "launch early" moment. Or atleast show to a bunch of people for feedback :-)

On the site your main source of links is from people you add as your friends or people you subscribe to. People you subscribe to provide you with links by posting them. Friends provide you with links both by posting them but also by reading other peoples links. By reading them they recommend them to you. If you want to change the type of content you are getting then you have to change your subscriptions or friends. This way the normal karma driven paradigm is changed to a more action based paradigm. Your actions can have the effect of people subscribing or unsubscribing you.

I have a number of problems with my site, which I would like advice on:

- I have no idea how to drive traffic to my site. The site doesn't really work without having a critical mass of people using it, so I have to bootstrap content into it somehow. I also have to get people to visit it somehow. I thought about reddit's self-served ads as a cheap way to present it to users, but I'm not sure if I'd hit the target audience - whomever they might be.

- "Prompted by login-form". The concept only really works if users make profile on the site and invest some effort in setting it up with friends. I think it's a serious flaw that there is no readily accessible non-authed part of the site, but how do I fix it? Auto-generate a user to new visitors and link them to some default subscriptions?

- Lack of business plan. No idea how to break even, let alone earn money on the site.

Some background as to why I made it: In the fall (2010) Reddit was invaded by Digg users. Reddit.com won the Digg-Reddit "war", but in my opinion the old Reddit-userbase lost, as the site was somewhat diluted. A lot more pics on the frontpage, and less serious articles. My initial thought was to design a site that could withstand a large influx of new users without changing the experience for existing users. If the existing users mainly discussed tech news and there suddenly was a large influx of lolcat loving people then the original users should still mainly see tech news and the new people lolcats. Whatmyfriendsread.com was the result.
Well, don't forget that the lowest tier Linode comes with 200GB bandwidth/month whereas EC2 is pay as you go.
Did anyone else catch Sam Harris' response to Edge's 2011 question, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"? I found it quite interesting. http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_12.html#harriss

"I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made."
Πήδηξε από τον τρίτο για να γλιτώσει | Espresso | CoverStory
Hip-hop, Creativity and the Brain: Q&A with Dr. Charles Limb
I've used this on at least 10 production sites, for years. It works great.

The Filament Group blog is filled with gems like this, highly recommended reading. FWIW, Filament Group contribute heavily to jqUI, and developed Themeroller.
Not conflation, just cherry-picking the vehicle for the top quartile of MBAs to become wealthy businesspeople without necessarily being entrepreneurs. I know plenty of MBAs that make less money than me but that actually drops them into the yuppie category.

You'll notice that the specific category was "working rich". Corporate CEOs generally lose access to a lot of their income and wealth building avenues when they stop working, even if it scarcely means anything to their quality of life.

I don't consider my hackernews commentary to be research-grade so you'll excuse me if my precision isn't turned up to 11.

I use shortcuts. I trust the community here to be competent enough to know what I mean without some kind of pedant-autistic nitpicker harassing me every single bloody time I'm even slightly imprecise in discussing a subject in a way that isn't even remotely important.

I am exhausted with that tendency here.
According to the expected output, you'd need something like:

function say(x)
{
return function (y) { alert( capitalize(x) + " " + capitalize(y)); }
}

Where capitalize makes the first character uppercase.
Having trouble raising money? You may be signaling price
I wish it had video interaction. Record a video of me "doing nothing" for 2 minutes, and let people watch them at watchpeopledonothingfor2minutes.com

I wonder how many people cheat.
Server Engineer
we want you! Smule a leader in iphone and ipad application development is seeking Senior and Junior level server engineers for our team in Palo Alto. to apply please email us at jobs@smule.com with the job code hack in the subject line
I agree with you, but I think the "overpriced" label still has real meaning for the high-margin products you mentioned. A company's ability to charge higher margins can be for several reasons, whether they be legitimate competitive advantages: first to market, superior products, better marketing, better image, vertical-integration, etc. Or less legitimate/illegitimate: monopolies, oligopolies, collusion, anti-competitive practices, underpaid labor, etc.

For SMS in particular, the only way they get away with charging so much is consumers don't have much choice in the matter, as all the major US carriers charge for SMS, and the cost is minimal to them for the reasons described in the link. Their justification for doing so then seems to fall on the less legitimate side of the scale. For Coke, since their value is based in some part on their recipe, you could argue their justification for their margins is, at least in part, due to the exclusivity and superiority of the product, rather simply relying on collusion or being a member of an oligopoly.

This isn't to say that companies shouldn't charge whatever the market will pay, but charging high margins for the wrong reasons hurts the brand's image, erodes customer loyalty, and most importantly means they probably aren't innovating -- leading to more problems down the road. Apple's strategy vs. Microsoft's, $17 CD sales vs. $1 digital downloads, and iphone users lamenting being stuck on ATT (and possibly now switching to verizon) are all examples of this having an effect.

That said, I doubt any startups are capable of or willing to rely on illegitimate methods to maintain high margins, I just wanted to argue that there can be negative consequences for existing companies who choose to do so without legitimate justification.
ASK HN: How do you plan out your app?
Do you use a pen and paper, wire framing tools, Basecamp...what?
This is similar to what I experienced on a bike tour: even though on hilly terrain the distance you are pedaling uphill equals the distance you are traveling downhill, you are spending 90% of your time going uphill.
The Robertson (square-socket) screw was patented. Robertson's refusal to license the patents to Henry Ford is one reason it never became popular in the U.S. You can find find them in Canada, however:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson
Another good article on this topic here:

http://danielmiessler.com/blog/using-git-to-maintain-your-we...
App is the Wor(l)d of the Year. Is that only good news?
Wouldn't it be better to put this in load instead of ready so it won't slow down the loading of visible images or other resources?

(Ready = DOM is ready, load = page elements are loaded)
Cold Fusion Rides Again (in Italy)
They say it makes way over unity heat, radiation, and copper, but no conventional sense....
Yeah, my friend who is more knowledgeable than myself in equity trading said this a few days before apple reported earnings:

"The reason is so that on earnings day, AAPL
can crush "consensus" earnings estimates and have their stock price
increase. This is what Steve Jobs wants to happen, and the street analysts
are happy to fall in line so that he'll continue to meet with them (or their
clients) and/or do business with their firm if Apple ever needs investment
banking advice

The next question you might ask is: doesn't this look bad for Apple if
people are projecting worse earnings into the future? Don't stocks trade
loosely on things like P/E ratios?

The answer is that if you look out a full year, the effect is actually the
exact opposite, analysts tend to be way too optimistic
(link<http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/06/mckinsey-equity-analyst...;
).

You can see how this would work. You look at earnings estimates a year out
and think: "man, this stock looks pretty good if earnings are going to grow
X% over the next year". And then you look at the next quarter results and
say "man they did better than expectations! This stock must be REALLY good.
Maybe they will grow at X+5% over the next year!".

What you failed to realize was that earnings estimates will be decreased
over the course of the year like clockwork, and eventually that yearly
estimate that was too bullish will turn into a quarterly estimate that is
too bearish.

The result of all this is the the graph above, with amateurs forecasting an
extra 10% in quarterly revenue and extra 20% in EPS."
This guy is missing the point. Small businesses have to buy exposure because they don't have the capacity to generate it. Big brands that have exposure, fans, advertising, etc don't need Groupon & Co - it's one of many options they have for acquiring new customers.

Also, as Groupon and Living Social do customer acquisition deals where they cover the discount in order to get people to sign up (Groupon has done it too, although I'm not sure I'm allowed to say which deals we did it for), then big brands enter the picture as audience vendors to the deal sites.

So LS pays $10/customer for Amazon's brand equity. The local spa doesn't have brand equity so they buy customers from LS or G for 75% (in practice more like 30-60%) of that customer's bill.

He's also WAAAAYYYYY off when he says local businesses are being left behind. Groupon has done a couple dozen national deals, and while there are more and bigger ones to come, there are some large number, call it 1,000 for round number purposes, deals a day, spread over ~500 cities, almost all of them from local merchants. Amazon was the first national deal I've heard about LS doing so I assume they're about the same.
sketchpad for mockups & google docs (for change history) -> mockups in photoshop -> framework install & data structure setup -> code code code code
That is such a long time.
I agree that AT&T should not have "personal privacy" rights but the reasoning described in the article seems very odd to me (IANAL, obviously). To me, "personal" and "person" seem obviously related. And more importantly, the fact that the outcome of the case hinges on this grammatical detail seems silly. But, I suppose until corporate personhood is repealed or overturned, this is the only way to restrict corporate overreach.
I start off with a list of features, then pen and paper. Then I start building out the app in pure html without any style.

Really, planning out apps never really works. Once you start actually building and using the app you'll realize how different it is from the initial vision.

TL;DR: I plan out my app by building it out.
And that's because the only ones considered to master Meditation are those told in historical religious documents.

The Buddha was the only one to provide a direct roadmap on how to do it, with prior textural help from the Hindu Vedas. The Vedas were closely guarded by the Brahmins (Hindu Priest class) and therefore hard for the 'average man' to get a hold of.

So yes, there is a great deal of 'religious detrius' to remove, but I believe the benefits are still there for the here and now, not some future afterlife/reincarnation. Clear and quiet thoughts have no monetary worth, but I'd trade no physical objects for them.
Ask HN: Do you meditate? How/Why? 
I've been doing a little bit of meditation lately and it helped me take time off to put things in perspective and generally feel a little less stressed out about life and work. However, I sometimes find myself thinking that maybe I should spend that time doing something useful (even if I know meditation is good for me).

What's your take? Do you do it? How and why do you do it? Care to share your experience? I guess what I'm looking for is a bit of peer validation for either side of the coin, and your thoughts. Thanks everyone.
This is a dumb 4-bit adder, something every CS student builds using breadboards, in a middle of some Digital Logic course.
I think the poster was trying to say something I fundamentally agree with:

There is something noble (and important) in providing jobs. As a business owner the thing I'm most proud of is now what we make, but the families that can afford a healthy and happy life because of what we make. Over the years I've directly created more than 100 jobs by my best estimation. That's 100 people who have a steady paycheck and everything that comes with it because of what I started.

That's really cool. So while saving the rainforest or joining the peace-corp are both noble and very important, lets not forget that entrepreneurs are very often doing important things with their lives as well.

I think that's what the grand parent was after:)
You can bound the expected cover time of a random walk on a graph. This is an intensively studied problem:

http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=covering+time+random+walk

iirc the expected cover time for any graph is polynomial with high probability. Something like |E|^3 or so.