skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember a class back in my psychology course in college. They ask you to focus on something, such as a counting task and (in this case waiting for him to say 'points') put something totally obvious in front of you that you won't see.

Here's a good example of the total blindness that focus can cause. [Ed: shasta beat me to it] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pK0BQ9CUHk; pretend there's money on it (like this guys presentation had) and focus on it hard.

Remember, magicians rely on misleading your focus for their entire acts. Watch the coin hidden in my right hand, when I really slipped it into my left hand and dropped it into my pocket and oh look the coin is gone. Is it behind your right ear? Oh no I took it out of my pocket and look it's behind your left ear!
But Android is only a small part of why he is influential and important, it is the most visible I suppose.
Regarding step #5: while bootstrapping is great, it's not always the best choice. I agree with 37signals that more companies should consider bootstrapping, but lots of great companies have required investment up front—indeed, historically, virtually all of them did. To make that 5¢ lollipop, you first have to build a lollipop factory. Nowadays the "factory" might be "an index of the web", and the lollipops might be "ads served based on web searches", but the principle is the same.
How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success (Infographic)
CO2 is not a pollutant; that is a mind-trick used to justify control by powermongers (socialist or otherwise) over 100% of everything , since everything, including YOU, emits CO2.

Now if you are talking about a refinery that does lead smelting, that is quite different.

BTW I suggest you read up on the CO2 trading scams that came to light in Europe a while ago, and that a rational person would realize are endemic to such markets ... relatively non-partisan link from Canada's CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2009/12/11/eu-carbon-c...
Until the mid term elections that's exactly what President Obama did. (He would claim he wants ideas from Republicans, but mention a few things that were no compromise, and it was exactly those things that the Republicans actually wanted a compromise on.)

Basically whoever has a majority talks that way - both parties.

I wish we could have at least 3 (very different) parties so that no one party could ever get an automatic majority.

Failing that I like the current situation where each house has a different party in the majority.

It's just not good for politicians to have too much power, forcing them to compromise and negotiate is very good for them.
It just occurred to me that if I'd gone to the "Night before the Oscars" party, Linus would have been the only one I'm 100% certain I would have recognized and been certain about his name.
Google Docs OCR in 34 languages
It's a long term investment to bring security down to the hardware level.
Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
Worse, it treats already loyal customers like shit. Oh great there's a Groupon for my gym. Wish I could take advantage somehow; look how cheap it is! Hmm, look at all these Groupon people overcrowding my machines and classes.
The funny part is, none of the news sources are actually reporting on what's the actual vulnerability found, or any technical details. :(:(
The finance sector is a perfect example of how an industry influences the government for profit, to the detriment of the greater goals of a society. I don't think lawsuits are a suitable way to deal with the energy problem, but I could be convinced. Lawsuits as they exist today give too much power to those with more legal resources.

The government already provides incentives to individuals who don't murder people, and businesses who don't hire child workers. There's lots of profit to be made in building an army and stealing from others, but we discourage it as a society because it doesn't result in a net benefit. There are plenty of fines for fraud and other transactions that are deemed to be not in the best interest of society, no matter how much profit they generate for the actor. Where is the break-even point on this spectrum as far as you are concerned?

The winners are still picked by market forces. The losers are picked by the scientific evidence and the decision making processes of our democracy. The market is set up to penalize actors who take from the common good. "Subsidy" is a misnomer, think of it as a sumptuary tax or a fine. These taxes can be left in place indefinitely, since the goal is to discourage use.
I plan to keep it.
For those who are real risk-adverse, charging an hourly rate to build out someones idea is a win/win (the business guy keeps his company stake, and you get the capital necessary to work on your own projects once the contract is over). If you're not entirely sold on someone's startup but feel like you could do a good job building out their idea, there's really no better place to be than NYC right now. I split my time 25% NYC/75% Boston, and NYC is orders of magnitude hotter (at least from what I've witnessed).

Watch out though, it's real easy to end up billing 40 hours/week, then spending another 30 on unbilled hours on client management on top of that. More than once I've checked my SCM log, wonder why I haven't made a commit in 3 months and realized at the end of the day I just want to knock a beer or two back and watch some basketball.
Code Complete is a great read. I recommend rereading it annually to make sure you don't stray the course. I do not recommend reading it anally. Bad lighting.
>I believe the government enables these actors, not prevents them.

some governments, some actions. Some governments kill their people, some - protect, though still killing a bit.

>I think there is room for well defined externalities to be captured in transactions, but handing out subsidies to special interest in the name of technology progress is ridiculous.

yep, that is the point- minimizing the subsidies. 200-50 years ago we didn't know these externalities - they weren't included. Once they recognized - they need to be included. That really means removing [recognized] subsidy. No new subsidies should be created. Any subsidies, even for green tech, limit the market forces and create tumor of special interest on the body of the economy.

>I think Spain is going to provide a painful lesson in what happens when you subsidize green tech

no arguing here. Have you heard about Russian cars? It is the most heavily subsidized and protected industries in Russia. Such ugly and low-tech (and overpriced) cars can't be found anywhere.
How about a query that calls a function involving random numbers?
Neon brown.
Two Open Source Hardware Companies Featured On Entrepreneur.com
For fellow NYC-ers I'd recommend this new service Fred Wilson tweeted out today, sounds pretty interesting / useful:
http://www.pairupnyc.com/
I've seen the blue-yellow color only once before -- during a cluster headache. Seeing it again did not bring back the fondest of memories.
You earn a lot more cred with developers if you've started hacking to make your idea come to life.
Ask HN: Am I the only one who can't create a startup at the weekend?
I always knew that I'm no native hacker.

As I observe more and more projects announced here that were made during a weekend or in 6 hours, I know for sure:

I will never be able to create a side project in a few hours, setup a website and build the accompanying app to have it all sold before my next monday morning post at HN.

I think, I wouldn't even try this...
I mentally associate Altria with altruism when I come across it, which is probably the intent.
Xbox platform the new Windows?
tl;dr - We didn't think about your comment. We assumed you were taking a side. You didn't spell it out for us. We didn't bother to find an interpretation that would make sense.

tl;dr^2 - We are lazy and have poor reading comprehension.

I'm very sorry, if it taxes your imagination that someone would want to talk about what was written on the button. It's not like that would be at all relevant to the article, I guess. (My apologies to the sarcasm impaired.)
Who are the laziest and hackiest developers?
> Also, if they didn't render a result as an image, maybe it wouldn't take so freaking long...

Parent got upvotes? Isn't HN is supposedly populated by technical people?

Rendering the result as an image is trivial and fast in a modern server.

I very seriously doubt this is the problem, instead of doing all the symbolic mathematical calculations in the first place...

And, of course, the reason to render the result as an image is to have a consistent cross-(legacy)browser support for mathematical notation. Wikipedia renders mathematical formulas as embedded images too. No other solution (from MathML to Flash/Canvas etc renderers) is as widely supported (and none is as complete as Mathematica's math rendering engine).
Taulia raises Series A from top performing VC fund of all time via AngelList
Texas group launches scholarship exclusively for white males
Really? My family's donated many books to our local library, and they didn't seem to have any issue with that.
Buckles, last WWI doughboy, dies at 110 in W.Va.
I think it was an attempt to hide affiliate links.
Although to be fair, the beautiful people are the only reason those engineers get even 30 seconds of primetime TV. See: thousands of engineers doing equally awesome things not related to showbiz.
Other Ways to Slice Revenue Pies
I'd be interested to see what percentage of random dialed phone numbers end up connected to text-to-speech "if you want sales, press 1 now. If you want support, press 2 now, for all other queries, press pound or just wait." type of responses.

(Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)
Perhaps Intel plans on giving the Mcafee virus scanner away for free. The resulting bogged down and slow computers would lead to increased demand for more powerful Intel CPUs.

/sarcasm
$99 Business idea consulting firm from Austria
Based on money spent, they gave an awful lot of money in 2010 to people who not only disagree with those positions, but disagree with them LOUDLY and will call you a godless heathen, communist, terrorist, muslim or all of the above if the subject comes up. Just saying.

Maybe the Koch brothers don't watch Fox News. Someone should write them a letter and tell them where their money's going. After all, they helped finance the guy who beat Russ Feingold, the lone vote in the senate against the Patriot act in 2001 (99-1).
It would be funny to ask someone who was affecting that something like "Then what have you accomplished?" See I could picture Linus being completely oblivious to celebrity, there's a seriously big deal that he came up with while he was busy not watching popular movies.

If the person saying "oh football what's that?" hasn't actually done anything really impressive then what are they doing if too busy to notice pop culture? Just living in a cave and staring at the shadows?!
It's evil when you know that AT&T's "information" is really an instruction, and disregarding it is likely to produce a sudden downturn in the donations they just "happen" to make, while producing an upturn in donations to anyone who "happens" to "agree with their perspective".

In truth, none of these guys are living in bubbles. They all know that what they're being told to do is anti-citizen. And they also know that if they don't pass it into law, they'll be replaced with someone even less ethical and more mercenary.

I mean, how do you think this guy got his job in the first place?
If they could have accurately predicted today's women's clothing, the cards would have been banned as porn. Even SF cant manage the future. Forbidden Planet, one of my favorite movies, all the men had DA haircuts. Start Trek crew had these monster devices hanging out their ears. Heinlein envisioned Autodesk but the drawings were made by a robot device.
He was absolutely livid. This was back when he still played for the Mariners, in case that wasn't clear. I would have paid anything to have seen his facial expression.
It seems that, whether you're looking for a tech or business cofounder, you need to find someone who can get things done. It's really easy to evaluate marketing cofounders for a web startup: You just need to determine if they have a track record of driving traffic. Get the ones who can drive traffic and convert it into sales. Everyone else is a bullshit artist an isn't worth your time.
http://www.lorizzle.nl/
It's been tweaked for "Gangsta speak"
"Wow, how much does your software cost?"
Bringing security down to the hardware level only means you'll be enabling virus-access to the hardware level because hardware will never keep up with software.
Offer HN: Free office space in NYC (at hyperpublic)
Background: I just won the

"Free desks for one month for you and a friend/coworker at Hyperpublic HQ in NYC"

prize (http://hyperpublic.com/challenge). Since I'm nowhere near NYC I'd like offer any interested hacker in NYC the opportunity to have a great month at the office:

"Located in the Meatpacking district (nice part of the city), in the same building as Betaworks which is home to some great NYC startups, and a block away from Google's NYC office. We have 5-10 hackers in the office on any given day too so it's a good place to hang out and code."

Pitch your project, get found, enjoy!
Strangest Soccer Dive Caught on Video
it doesn't really make much sense...

maybe it would make more sense if there was video or audio along with it?
AT&T did not elect John Boehner. John Boehner should not share _any_ ties with AT&T.

This argument would apply as much to individual campaign contributions. Individuals have agendas just as corporations (and non-profits, and PAC's) do. If that were the rule then wouldn't electability just be based on the politician's personal wealth rather than the wealth of their supporters?
It isn't about assumptions being correct or incorrect. I'm saying that if possible, a language should adhere to the concepts and vocabulary that people bring to the table instead of inventing its own, unless there are major benefits to be had in doing so. I see no benefits to the layout model of CSS over that of Flex (quite the contrary), and the vocabulary used in Flex means I understand how the system works immediately without having to look anything up because I know what horizontal, vertical, gaps, and constraints are already from my everyday non-technical experience, whereas I have no idea what an 'inline-block' is, and even when I look it up at w3schools, I get "The element will generate a block box, laid out as an inline box", which is gibberish without further research.

Clearly learning CSS is non-negotiable for being a successful web developer. I'm not contesting that fact, I'm lamenting it.
Behold: The Google Helmet
What I've lost by not looking for investment
The power of publicity (both negative and positive) is now in the hands of everyone not just the hands of powerful institutions such as the traditional press or the government. Wikileaks and anonymous' hijinx are just one example of the brave new world we're entering, it'll be fascinating to see how it will play out.
They used to teach us elementary school that "blue+yellow=green". With the advance of science we fix some of our naive illusions. I don't know how many new we introduce...
7 steps to API success (Video)
Nothing is provable in politics. You're not going to get consensus on 'the people's best interest'. You're not even going to get consensus on 'the people'. (Apparently the stockholders of AT&T aren't invited.)

Given that, 'campaign reform' just sounds like another way to keep participants out that you don't agree with. Businesses shouldn't participate. Unions shouldn't participate. Churches shouldn't participate. Non-profits shouldn't participate. Rich people can participate - as long as they aren't allowed to participate too much, and can't have any privacy when they do it.

If people who don't pay taxes are allowed to vote themselves benefits, I don't see how anyone can argue that a business owner can't donate whatever they want to whatever cause or candidate they like. Everyone participates and things shake out how they shake out.
Just last week I had a talk with someone who knows the NY job market very well. Senior developers are getting 160-240 thousand dollars. That's 3x the team lead or senior analyst salaries in that list.
I would be interested too but I think there is no answer. It is incorrect. P3 corrects a lot of things from P2. I doubt you could support "poorly designed" unless you are talking about Python as a whole.
This is amazing. I didn't know this system at all. a-priori's comment is probably in the right then!

(And "descenseur" seems to be an actual French word according to http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/descenseur, so much for showing off and knowing my native tongue.)
Yes, that was my point. :-))
Oh definitely. I am sure they laughed all the way to Tahiti after they cashed their well-earned bonus check after that one.
You can paste images into Dr.Racket.
>CO2 is not a pollutant

unbalanced (by say consumption by forests) emitting of CO2 shifts the make-up of the atmosphere and thus energy balance of the planet's surface.

unbalanced (by say atropine injection) emitting of VX gases into your body would shift the make-up of enzymes in your nerve system :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_%28nerve_agent%29#Chemical_c...

How about "toxin" instead of "pollutant"?
I would recommend "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie.
he sounds depressed
Just a few years ago all the news was about how the American public was sick of this sort of "polarizing" style of politics, and wanted a kinder, gentler style epitomized by "compromise".

Of course, that was when the Democrats were coming in to power.

Now that the Republicans seem to be coming back in to power, it seems that "compromise" is off the table. Not that it ever was on the table for Republicans.
Why not just use a different ISP over the same cables? The cables could be maintained by a "home owner association" type license that connects you to a main tower or something similar.

Is the only possible way to connect to the internet by a State granted monopoly? I don't think so, but I feel our creativity has been shot because this is how it's worked for years.
Hah, didn't expect to see that while reading this thread. The post is here, although it's missing CSS and the images from that evening: http://web.archive.org/web/20060613002629/http://blakeross.c...

Was definitely a crazy night. I enjoyed reading Linus' post.
Three other tips:
1. Never give up
2. Failing is not the end
3. Work hard
I bow to Akesson's superior kung fu.
Mind my asking why you took down your site? I know you hadn’t posted much for years, but I always enjoyed your writing.
BTW, some news from today that's relevant :) http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=748155473273&set=...
What getting -4 really means is that if the 'community' of this webtopia could downvote you more they would
My hunch is that this very social network and its close cousin reddit are being manipulated by groups following discordian ideologies. In short, it's being manipulated for fun and "profit." ("Profit" in the form of media-manipulation capability.) In other words, it's being manipulated for the LULZ. (By people who don't know how to analyze what they read and argue cogently.)

The flavor of logic and discourse on this site has taken a definite turn for the worse. Nonsensical and somewhat juvenile reactions to my comments occur with frightening regularity.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270002
I ran out of time to write, and then -- to be frank -- I forgot to pay my web hosting bill. Was pretty bummed to lose all that writing, thank god for the wayback machine. I hope to restart my blog in the near future.
Those factors, statistically, do have a huge impact on the probability of whether or not the person is in the country illegally.
Show HN: My weekend HTML5/CSS3/CodeIgniter project	-SpotBright
http://173.255.210.56/codeigniter/index.php/auth/login

Last week I had a phone interview with a local web development team. They mentioned that if I joined the team I would be working with CodeIgniter. My previous job was doing front end for a rails app so I was familiar with Model-View-Controller but I had never worked with CodeIgniter. In an effort to be better prepared for my in person interview (which was this morning BTW) I decided to spend the weekend in a personal hackfest building something with CodeIgniter.

SpotBright - Shine a light on your location
I have been an avid user of Foursquare for about a year and have been fascinated by the idea of a private version for someone who wanted to track their location for whatever reason but didn’t want to broadcast it to the world. In this implementation the user creates an account and signs in. Once signed in the browser grabs their location and shows it on a map while at the same time saving it to localStorage and posting it to a MySQL database with AJAX. The page also shows the 15 most recent places that a user has checked in.

Front-end:
HTML5 geolocation - I am using .watchPosition() from the API previously known as HTML5 geolocation to get your location. For special sauce it saves your long and lat to HTML5 Local Storage as well as a MySQL database via AJAX. The rounded corners, drop shadows, and text drop shadows are all done with CSS3.

Back-end:
CodeIgniter was the framework and all of the data is saved to a MySQL database. This is my first time using CodeIgniter and I’m a convert. I’ll be back for more.

In a perfect world
Ideally you could log in with your Twitter or Facebook credentials. That is a feature that I intend to add. Keep in mind that this was built in order to show a potential employer that I can quickly grok a framework.
Too bad so many lack the attention span to utilize it.
While I am one of those that would hand over my saved stories, I wonder about the validity of any conclusions you would draw from the group analysis due to the dual nature of the save button. The same button that is used to up vote an article is also the same button that HNers use to save an article to read later, but might not upvote the article after having read it. I'm not quite sure what could be concluded from such an unclean data point.
I was about to post the exact same thing. It would be cool if there was a service that pulled CC licensed photos from Flickr for this purpose and scaled them according to the user's wishes, pulling from an archive of photos based on aspect ratio, size, etc.
Change the last a to u.
Anyone trusts this guy wiht any kind of technology where a small bug can mean the death of millions ?
Am I the only one who is missing something ?
Yeah, I just saw your tweet about this — what a crazy coincidence, a 5-year-old blog post mentioning red-carpeting in front of Will Smith dragged up as you announce another meeting.
Don't IQ-raising points of view usually have this dark side?

For example, the methods of analytic geometry and calculus let you solve problems mechanically that would be difficult or even impossible by other means. That's great if you're just trying to get an answer. It's not so great when you realize after executing a rigorous calculus proof of Snell's Law that you are not an inch closer to understanding why Snell's Law is really true. You turned yourself into an unthinking piece of machinery.

This applies not only to calculus. Most people who can execute the algorithms for calculating with fractions or solving linear equations don't actually understand what they're doing. They want an answer and they get it.
Gameduino does have an on board coprocessor for that kind of in-the-video-loop work. Sample "beam chaser" that does a split-screen scroll:

http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/samples/splitscreen/ind...
I have come across persons who cannot remove McAfee from their machines.