skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think you should take much stock in Japanese business culture. While there are some great aspects 'toyota way'/continuous improvement...

There's also a lot of drawbacks. The management by consensus, hammering the nail that sticks out, the lack of willingness to deal with real problems, putting cultural norms before economic logic -- these are all major issues with Japan that are partly responsible for why they have been stuck in an economic malaise for the last 20 years.
No it's not! That was thought 30 years ago, but building technology has advanced. Ventilation needs to be controlled. Having cracks and leaking windows is very inefficient in keeping an optimal indoor climate, not to mention very energy inefficient. An airtight, very well insulated house with active ventilation (an indoor climate control system, not to be confused with airco) is the best way to get an optimal indoor living climate all year round.
On his frugality and practicality:

>> Airlines have often jacked up prices – sometimes dramatically so – for the Berkshire weekend. If you
are coming from far away, compare the cost of flying to Kansas City versus Omaha. The drive is about 21
⁄2 hours
and it may be that you can save significant money, particularly if you had planned to rent a car in Omaha
Serious cook, serious equipment, serious mistake with a ceramic high-output cook top. We did it for the simple reason that my spouse is tired of cleaning up the disaster of a stove after cooking for 12. We considered induction for the home with some of our pets being underfoot/on counters while cooking.

Our expensive cook top was tested and branded as copper safe. It is, until water gets between the cook top and the copper pan. Also found that the rapid heat generated by an utterly imprecise dial control system could damage cookware, so I now tend to bring them to temp in two stages.

I would definitely go with gas if the line is already brought into the kitchen and available.

You can obtain Fogor induction cook tops and try them out and take them back if they don't work. Same mechanic as a full scale range. Make sure you do a double oven and if you can afford it, install a micro hood with a real vent outside the house - or your attic goods will smell like bacon in perpetuity.
Yeah, that's quite an abuse of the word "virus".
And Snow Leopard was only $29 if you had Leopard. Microsoft charges you a lot more for Windows.
T-Mobile takes a beating in Q4 2010; sheds 318,000 contract customers
Any idea how the air for first baloons was heated?
"Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth."

The followers of hate, fear, and superstition spend virtually every waking hour attempting to leverage such control. Why not visionaries?

But there is a counterpoint too. The ideology of some sectors of the transhumanist/visionary community is uncomfortably reminiscent of superstition itself. I am referring to Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity University cult, and others. It looks very much like a religious movement reminiscent of Scientology or flying saucer contactees in the 1950s. It doesn't strike me as being much more rational than many other superstitious religious movements.
Ask HN: Do site ads affect perception of content quality?
Exasperated question time.

I have the unfortunately ability to choose poor names for my web properties, so my current site sounds like some sort of SEO/garbage site (it is a tech site). I also have a standard layout of adsense leaderboard/sidebar ad on my WordPress site to monetize it a bit and help pay for hosting.

Total traffic is 920k pageviews a month (cool) but I notice I can never get traction, no matter how serious the story, on social news sites of any kind. I <i>think</i> this is either due to the name or the ad layout making the site look "spammy" so the 2-second gut reaction from a reader when they click over is "shenanigans!" and then they leave.

NOTE: I'm not using any hyper-aggressive techniques that make you want to kill the admin; like text-linking or the 300px story header ads that push the actual content down beyond the fold.

What I'm curious about is if YOU guys are effected by this, or if you are blind to ads and just read the content. (I am fairly biased when I visit a site that looks like it's shoving ads in my face, regardless of content - but I am too close to this to know if it's the issue).

This was all spurred by me clicking on a story that was submitted here to HN, going over to the site and immediately thinking "bullshit" when I saw leader/sidebar and banner ads all over... I didn't even read the content, I just got annoyed and closed it.

And it dawned on me that I might be doing this to my readers so I thought I would ask.
With induction you can control very finely how much energy is added to the pot, no need to put it slightly higher. Professional chefs have switched to induction across the world except for the US; talk to European chefs about their opinions of US kitchens - most find it downright antiquated.
Doesn't seem to work on ChromeOS :(
They don't work well with high-efficiency washers. The washer pulls a small amount of hot water so slowly that the heater never sees the demand to kick the heat on.
You can buy tea, socks, domain names, t-shirts, nightlights, video games, books, pen testing, and more using bitcoins: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
Making a NES emulator in flash is a cool hack. What's not cool is releasing an "app" that's just a link to a website with 1000+ copyrighted games. In fact, many of the games aren't even abandonware, because they're available for sale through the Wii's virtual console.

I'm not sure what bothers me more about the current generation of Internet users: that many of them actually think a site like this is legal, or that many know it's illegal and don't care.
A fatal disease will probably make the life insurance that pays for your cryopreservation much more costly. Signing up when you're still healthy and young may be more beneficial, even when the probability of eventually destroying your brain is higher.
One that comes to my mind is YouPorn. It's not as famous as some of the others but really seems to get the similarity matching and taxonomy stuff right.
There's something wrong with those numbers, at least on an "as delivered" basis.

Water on the Monterey penisula is already several times as expensive as San Jose's. Neither one uses de-salination.

The Monterey peninsula is adding some desalination and the projected cost for all water is double the current cost. (Does anyone think that the projection will turn out low?)
These things is what most people get their bad opinions of induction cooking from! The one linked above is a paltry 1500 watts. Enough to boil an egg. not to do proper cooking. A proper induction plate has one zone that can be boosted to 3500 of 4500 watts, which you need to get the same or better performance as a good gas stove. Don't base your opinions of cooking on induction on one of these small plates!
The average person is only motivated by hate, fear, and superstition. That is the main constraining factor.
Also leave a pull wire or two and always pull a new pull wire every time you add a cable and use the existing one.
It's an interesting technique to drum up business in the short term, but it seems ultimately self destructive--if the code you are responsible is dying constantly then it just makes you look incompetent.

> In 2008, after changes to his consulting arrangement with the company, BSR offered Wimberly a job as a full time employee, hoping to replace his consulting fees with a salary. Wimberly rejected that offer and, instead, increased his fee for maintaining the games by 250%.

Wow, that's cut-throat! Though I suppose we don't know his rate before and after (maybe he went from $10/hour to $35/hour).
I also don't think that facebook connect poses a single point of failure. If it becomes one then it is not the fault of the identity provider but the fault of the relying party, so if he only uses services that only offer auth via fb, or he did not connect his accounts with other identity providers then he should not complain right?
When you're spending $1500 on an induction plate, or $20k on a proper kitchen, the $250 to get some new pots isn't going to make the difference. And yes you can get induction tajines, Tefal has one for example. You use that one to cook in and the other one to look at.
If that's beginning of learning php+js just keep on. Probably you can't expect to win the world with what you've just build, but learn as much as you can and polish UX - like sorting books, pre-load next results so you get new book instantly when you press "more results" or whatever comes up to your mind.

Take it as a first step, use it as a reference and go for next step and so on.
+1 for inkscape. I love it.

-1 for the horrid experience inkscape is on the mac. Great on windows though.
YC: From Incubator to a) Biz Franchise?  b)  VC?  c) Biz practical Education?'
OK before starting, I want to clarify that I really like and respect what PG and his team does with YC.

What I would like to mention is that after the latest development of funding every YC team (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218038672660.htm), YC has changed the business model that is following. I do not know if this is planned change or a result of trust and appreciation from Ron Conway. As a matter of fact I really like the vote of confidence from Mr Conway to all these prominent entrepreneurs.

Now lets break it down a bit.
==================================================

Period A

What it used to be. A home grown set of teams (8 teams), after a selection from relatively narrow sample (startups primarily focused to software ventures, with founders that can hack their way to prototype and which address a relatively big market).

The above was nurtured with close relationships, that beyond common interest had a sense of common dream (according to PG a team can change their initial model, based on advice given).

What is the new identity of YC? (is YC pivoting?)
==================================================

Period B

A batch of 43 teams. I am sure that the networking logistics are a big advantage (http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html ==> paragraph about size), but the intimacy level will probably change (I do not want to be pessimistic but this is a probable outcome of the growth). Now is this good of bad?

Positive
1) Bigger network
2) More traction
3) Even with same chances of succeeding, the financial outcome better.
e.g. with 2 (10 % chance) good exits in 20 teams(in a year), maybe a 5-10 million exit after 2-3 years, but with 8 (10%) good exits from 86 teams, the prospective outcome is 40-80 million exit.

Now if you can achieve this with the same structure (people-resources), then this is an amazing productivity boost.

However the differentiator of Period A was the close relationship with PG and teams. This is not going to be the main rule for Period B. Now if the skills-mentorship of PG are transferable or shared by new instructors in YC, then maybe we are talking about a franchise style mentoring. This is possible, but surely there will be imitators with probably similar success rates. This model seems a bit more like a “practical business MBA”. Maybe Universities will try this model as well.

What about the 150.000 for each team?

This is actually a tricky point. VCs or even Angel Investors work with the 1/10 rule. If you want to fund 10/10 then to keep the same rate of success you need to fund another 90 startups outside YC(I don't know if Mr Conway funds so many startups).

Moreover we have another shift. The YC looks no longer like an incubator, but rather like an Angel VC which has already invested from day-1 to all teams. Quite a bet to take, considering that most teams don't have the working prototype beforehand.

Hope that all goes well for YC, because we definitely want to see more success stories.
My first thought: Facebook

Facebook added high-resolution images to compete with Google's potential social network offering. On the other end, Google now made low-resolution images and videos "free" to attack that side of the market.

My reason could be completely wrong though.
Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People
Big company with all its bets on downloadable purchases makes product available for download alongside physical media.

Vapid tech journalist follows along, declares all physical media to be dead in hopes of harvesting pageviews.
Definitely makes a difference for me...

John Gruber has made the point over and over that "Ads are content" (link: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/17/ads-mule)
I'd argue that if the government (us) hadn't bailed everybody out, the firms would fail and then they'd make $0. If a small firm could afford to pull in some of the unemployed traders, more power to them, but then it's an employer's economy and the salaries (and bonuses) would be more reasonable. The market would more or less work itself out (though it could be painful in the short term).
there are many things that facebook can and should improve (like enabling https all the time, not as opt in, and not disabling it when you use apps that don't use ssl/tls). that said I'd love if 10% of the web services I use would take security as serious as fb does.
Lua is a great language to learn, too. Simple yet powerful. Plus it is used seriously in the games' industry.
> We come up with further models to explain away why people believe things that to us seem so obviously false - "it helps them feel superior to others", and so on.

No, someone does not believe in the Christian religion because it doesn't make sense. It is self-contradictory, it has so many contradictions that it's impossible to accept it without feeling like an idiot. You could probably find zillions of contradictions, here are some of my favorites:

If god is almighty and sees the future, how come he didn't think of that on damn tree in the middle of paradise?

If god is perfect, how come he failed at making man perfect too?

If god is almighty and the enemy of Satan, how come he doesn't just kill Satan?

If god is good and almighty how come there are so much innocents suffering in the world? Probable answer: because he tests people. But if he sees the future it's needless.

And so on, you get the picture, when the clerics are done sorting these questions out drop me a note.
I'm curious about the performance and scalability of those database. Right now at work we have a MSSQL server with 32 CPU, SSDs and 128GB RAM and I was wondering if a graph database would be better.

Our dataset is very peculiar, we have about 20M nodes and 500M edges in one of our smallest database. We also need fulltext search and complex joins between tables.

I'm wondering if graph databases are mature enough or if they are not quite ready yet for production work. We're a small shop and software development is not our core competency.
Domaining Gone South: Today Apparently I Also Have A Small Penis
"Timing is everything"

It's related to "critical mass" People do things differently now then they did 3 years ago. What didn't work then may work now. You felt you had a great idea? It didn't work?

Try again, things have changed.
A rocket carrying human beings going to space to live for a few days in zero gravity, viewed from an airplane carrying hundreds of humans 30,000 feet in the air, filmed on a camera that fits into your pocket.

Do we need any more proof that human beings are incredible?
They have the money to offer something for free, so if it makes customers happier, there is no reason not to do it.

Offering "free space" for very HQ images and long videos would not be cost efficient.
The problem is their numbering system which makes it difficult to do countdowns.

ex, eye-ex, eye-eye-ex, ve-eye-eye-eye, ve-eye-eye, ve-eye
ve, eye-ve, eye-eye-eye, eye-eye, eye

now what's next ? What's less than eye?

don't know - we have to wait for somebody to invent zero...
So how come when I click on the posters of 99% of the negative comments to see their profile, their profile shows that they have posted no other comments anywhere? The profiles of most of the neutral or positive commenters show plenty of other activity.

Sock puppets?
ON the bright side, I think the Playbook is based on QNX, and hopefully will have a different experience from BlackBerry OS...
Are you talking about induction or ceramic? They're totally different, ceramic is crap, don't get that - it's only barely better than a 'regular' electric plate. There's no comparing the ease of use between the two - it's just that the look roughly similar from a distance, that's where the similarities end.
That's because Snow Leopard was Apple's equivalent to a Service Pack.
And even better, you can get access to the other PCIe devices--in particular the SATA devices. Though it might be tough to talk to devices that the main processor is actively using. Even if you somehow disable interrupts on the device, the potential for conflicts (leading to data corruption) seems amazingly high.
When making a game the "low level details and tiny optimizations" that you want to concentrate on are the ones that make the game more fun: fun little touches. Sometimes that requires code optimisations but mostly it involves the kind of special-case actions and quirky animations that make for great gameplay but nasty-looing code :)
Don't forget though that operating systems don't come out nearly as often for Microsoft--once every 3-5 years, and you don't pay for service pack upgrades.

Apple makes you pay for those service packs (Think Snow Leopard).

BTW upgrades (although more frequent) cost $129 usually, so in the end Mac users pay a lot more for their operating systems because they have to pay for all the service packs, and each OS upgrade (which comes more often) costs as much.
You honestly have to ask this question? In the 1950s a significant percentage of our population was without civil rights. Beyond that:

Life expectancy at birth: 69.9 to 77.9 (we live longer)

Infant mortality: 26.0 to 6.7 (less of us are dead on arrival)

% of population over 25 with 4 yrs or more of college education: 7.7% to 29.5% (access to education has improved)

Estimated Hourly Wage PPP, 2009 USD: $16.87 to $25.31 (we are making more money)

Real labor productivity index (in 1960): 100 to 172.8 (we are more productive)
Backlink Script 2011 - получить бесплатно обратки
I am largely ad blind. I only notice them when they are annoying, and when I do notice annoying ads I generally leave the site.

It is hard to comment on your situation without a link to evaluate. I would suggest that if you are thinking this way, you probably already know what the answer is.

Perhaps some A/B testing is in order to tailor your site to your audience.
If you check out the profiles of most of the people who are calling you names, etc., you'll see that they have no history. They are probably sock puppets.
How the Indian Goverment is trying to control the internet?
All of that. But also 6x grumpier, it seems.
Have you heard about Instant Personalisation?
Absolutely, yes.

If you don't include a cover letter, chances are very high that you'll go to the bottom of the pile.

If your cover letter has spelling or grammatical errors, chances are you'll go to the bottom of the pile.

If your cover letter doesn't speak to my company SPECIFICALLY, chances are you'll go to the bottom of the pile.

Basically, if you can't tell me why you want to work for my company and why you're a perfect fit, it tells me that your only interest is in a paycheck, and that you'll take no pride in your work and will show no initiative.

If you can't be bothered to proofread your cover letter and have a friend check it over, it tells me that you're sloppy and don't follow through.

If you can't even be bothered to hit the "spell check" button, it tells me that you're lazy.
But science and the acquisition of knowledge is all about pushing deeper into the implementation. We can't look at something like gravity and say, 'yep, that seems to work fine, adheres to its interface, we don't really need to know how it works, just that it passes its tests (apples fall, helium balloons float above oxygen, etc)'. We can't leave it there, because we have to know the implementation. We'll never improve if we don't. And we still haven't nailed it, but that's no excuse to stop.

It's like a beginning programmer looking at a hash table object and hitting 'view source'. What kind of programmer would he be if he didn't want to see behind the curtain at least once? How could he be expected to excel?
Goal setting and achieving requires one of two things in my mind; internal driving forces or external driving forces.

A long time ago I was both hired and fired by a pair of brilliant Hollywood producers. The mid-sized video game company I worked for had just been acquired by a major player; we killed ourselves for a year on a totally mind-blowing franchise game, yet the title was sh*tcanned near release (Oh, 3DO) and then they dumped the entire team off a ledge, myself included.

In the hiring interview the producer asked me "What is your six month goal, year, three and five year plans?" Oddly the hiring meeting helped me prepare for the layoff meeting and the next 18 years in my career. She referred to my near-term goals, which had changed, obviously but I was able to take the firing calmly because I saw it was a twist and event in part of a broader, longer-term plan.

The vast majority of people I know are nearly headless when it comes to goals. You don't have to define a 3,000 point plan, but if you can learn to set a horizon and a few steps towards the point you want to reach, you can in turn focus on the immediate and near-term and actually become much more flexible in your approach to the outcome. You learn from practice whether something takes you closer or further away from that 1, 3, or 5 year plan and make better personal decisions.

If you simply can't seem to meet any goals, there are tons of books and audio sources for basic goal and discipline building. Your goals may be unreasonable or you may lack the underlying strong habits to push for a better outcome.

I would suspect that you are lacking discipline. If you're undisciplined you may need to find other sources of drive to meet your goals. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to get some mentoring and find someone willing to help keep you focused and on track.
Very true. It seems like a simple thing to loudly inform the user that a new PCI device was connected. But that would probably only help savvy people--everyone else would just click ok without reading the dialog.

A real solution would be some sort of DMA whitelist provided by the OS driver.
After ITA - Google expanding in the hotel reservation business
Somedays I think Inkscape on the Mac is only slightly better than having to hand-code my data with a hex editor.
I don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death.

Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.
It could be the placement or it could be the ad type.

If you're looking for a more user friendly type ad, shoot me a message, I have something you would be interested in.
CLiki: The Common Lisp Wiki