skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I've heard from several Europeans I've met (who are currently living in the US, either for work or school) is that Americans have a reputation for being very friendly but making a lot of empty social promises.

One European I met at my local watering hole was a programmer and a very cool guy, so we made plans to get together for beers and nerd talk. He mentioned the whole thing about social promises and said that he's had tons of cases where an American would express an intention to hang out at some later date and then flake out.

I insisted that I totally intended to call him up the following weekend and set something up, but of course I totally forgot, and by the time I remembered it had been an awkward amount of time, so I never did call.
There is no centralization with Bitcoin.

Because Bitcoin transactions are not able to be reversed, buying them is notoriously difficult online, as fraudsters like to buy them with stolen credit cards. (Of course, this means that almost nobody sells Bitcoins for PayPal/credit cards/etc. due to chargeback risk.)

It's much better to deal with someone you know, or, failing that, someone with existing reputation. I was hoping to make life easier for fellow HN scenesters.

Please pardon the intrusion, commerce-phobe.
That's the ultimate advantage of electric cars: independence from any single energy source. Have sunshine? Use solar. Have water? Use hydro. Have uranium? Use fission.

And advances to generation technology increase the efficiency of everything downstream accordingly.
I listen regularly http://eslpod.com and is a very good help for us non native-english speakers
Clickable link: http://min.us/lmLZve
Bitcoin addresses look like this:

1HkrUYFNW6XHR99HoDivQuHRhMghwVaVMF
I will try to get that if I can afford it
Amazingly, Illustrator allows you to output to multiple formats. However, it's vector based work allows your designs to work in far wider range of places beyond just the pixelated world of the web.

Logos, icons, or other illustrations should be done in Illustrator. If you do a 500px logo in Photoshop, you are effective fixed at 500px.

If you're merely referring to using Photoshop as a glorified layout editor for creating a quick rendition of the site, I guess that's fine. But then it's overkill by a large margin for the task.

If you expect to do graphics for the web, learn illustrator. If you except to merely mock up a site to later have it used merely as a reference for CSS/HTML, then their is less expensive software out there.
They're base58.
Hackers Turn a Gmail April Fool’s Joke Into a Reality
If the payment fails, will you still redirect to the link?

If you only redirected based on successful payments, you could use this as a simpler paypal for charging clients on your site using unique gumroaded links.
It's profit all the way down.
Why start-ups need to forget about China and go to Dubai
For the OP (and HN readers in general), I recommend Founders Talk - http://5by5.tv/founderstalk. But make sure to check the list of all the shows - http://5by5.tv/broadcasts - lots of good ones.
I see. Your comment at the end about the link-bait title seemed out of place with the rest of your post. If that was your main point, then the irrelevant bit about the iPhone and the blurring with tablets really distracted from it.

Perhaps you thought the word 'fad' in the headline was drawn from the 2007 Bill Gates quotation? I didn't read it that way at all.

Rather, to me it came off as a shorter Mundie, and an entirely uncontroversial paraphrase of what he said. He was savvy enough to avoid the word 'fad' in his statement, but he casted enough doubt on the longevity of tablets to invoke the spectre of the 2007 quotation by Gates.

Edit: I like the distillation of your point below, and find it vote-worthy. +1
You only get redirected if your payment goes through. Yes, that is a potential use-case.
Web co. lets teachers learn from each other - BostonHerald.com
If people buy books through my site I get a cut
I am curious about why you think numpy/scipy does not fit that bill ? Python is a straightforward general purpose programming language, has a lot of stats functionalities, can access GPU functions. While python's story for parallel programming is pretty poor, it is actually quite decent for numerical computation, because parallelizing those is not very difficult in general.
Getting the Word Out
Wow I didnt know that. I've been using the chrome bookmarklet and it seems to work OK.
From my experience in working at another large Internet company, my advice to Google would be: get rid of middle management. Get rid of the people who are not actually touching the product (in terms of code, design, testing, etc.). The impact of PMs is exponential in slowing down the processes in a company like Google (i.e. in the Internet space). Others may disagree (for example, established companies like Oracle may not fit this model); but I think if you're competing in the fast-paced "Web" world, you can't be slowed down by PMs.

Good engineers are fairly self-driven. Hire people who work well in a team; make sure they get along well and just let them loose with minimal supervision. Have a decent set of guidelines in place; make an "architect" available to them who they can call on for advice and "best practices".

I am reminded of this old article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html It's definitely worth a read.
Ask HN: Should I put my trial version download behind a contact form 
Hi there, I am about to release a software product (won't give the name since website is not ready yet) and I need your insight.

1. The software is targeted to specific people, mostly architects and civil engineers. It's a windows app, nothing web based.
2. It will be a commercial app, with a single type of license (to keep it simple in the beginning).
3. I will be giving a trial version (I am thinking to make it valid for 10 days).
4. In the website, I am planning to put the trial download behind a contact form, so that I can contact people who downloaded the trial later on.

However, I am not sure to go with this plan, putting a contact form might alienate my potential customers. What are your thoughts and experiences on the subject?
Seriously? I'm not sure I could take anyone seriously that tried to sell me a link of "value." Why not just share the link for free like people have been doing since the beginning of time?

Don't get me wrong. You did a great job getting this rolled out over a weekend and it looks nice. I must need some enlightening because I really don't get it.
Having experience with winforms and Cocoa development, I have to vouch for the slickness of Cocoa MVC vs what usually happens with Winforms and event driven development.
If you look SE Radio (Software Engineering Radio) on iTunes podcast, or their own website, there's an episode where they interview the Guardian website developers (it is an award-winning website after all, gets a monstrous number of hits).
Google Makes $900 Million Stalking-Horse Bid For Nortel Patents
Looks like the 'planetary' gears should be conical instead of cylindrical?
Pithy, incisive remarks are to be celebrated, not supressed.
I've failed to make a point.

There is a kind of self-regulation mechanism in bitcoin. It limits the ability of adopters to heavily imbalance the system. Also, that's quite unlike the currencies issued by countries ;-)
Is It Possible to Feel Passionate About Being a Tax Consultant?
http://doctype.tv
This is a commonplace-type issue with all public documents. For example, every time I am granted a trademark (which are publicly published upon grant), I receive a letter on official-looking stationary sayingnincan protect my trademark for $3,000. It's a complete racket by a company with an official sounding name but unaffiliated with the USPTO.
I agree that it's a fraction of a second slower, as the box populates a bit slower than Gnome-Do. (Though I suspect that's just an area for optimization rather than an intent of the design.)

However, for frequently-used applications, you can also pin them to the launcher allowing you to launch them with one key combination. Super-1 will launch the first application penned to the launcher, Super-2 will launch the second, etc. In effect this gives you 10 'hotkey' slots for launching applications.
"it is puzzling to see why anyone should worry about potential shortages of neodymium and other rare-earths for alternative power and transport."

Well, I'm sure the military doesn't want to redesign everything that already uses them - we're broke enough as it is...
People tend to forge their identities when they feel inadequate about their past. As an immigrant privy to no Americans present get-togethers, I see it all the time. The same people who lump all Southerners or Midwesterners into a overweight, bible thumping yokel stereotype, will froth at the mouth about Americans' ignorance of latest political discourse in their small corner of the world. People from predominantly white countries will claim that the US is less cultured because there is too much brown immigration. People who didn't have toilet paper back home will talk about the lack of museums. And so on and so forth.

My personal observation is, the majority tend to forget all the bad and remember all the good about their former home, and conversely, pick out all the bad and none of the good of their new home. It may be hard for you to believe because you are a rationalist, but it's very common.
I wonder why this was not obvious to me. The original ShelfLuv had 5 columns of books which is why 10 loaded at a time. Great suggestion
pg's comments aren't differentiated in any way, but on discussions of potential new features, I'm very interested in seeing his comments. Even if they don't add on to the ideas being discussed, they're of interest because they indicate possible new features or changes to the site.

Also, username hiding is a good idea in some cases, but I think it's worse overall. It encourages snarkiness, some posters are actually worth looking out for (grellas on legal threads, pg on HN, etc), and it makes back and forth discussions difficult to follow unless you give each user a unique ID per thread. Impersonation can also be a problem. Overall, I think it adds up to more problems than it solves.
I agree in general with these premises:

1. Stop theorizing.

2. Write lots of software.

3. Learn from your mistakes.

However I completely disagree with the conclusion that quantity always trumps quality. Seems to be a lot of blog posts showing up on HN lately that make fairly bold conclusions in the title, which are then supported weakly by simple premises that most rational people will agree with. They then quickly jump straight to the conclusion without showing how they got there.

First problem is obviously the word always. I don't think I have to explain the red flag there.

Assuming instead we actually mean to say, "in general quantity is more important than quality," lets see if we can make that argument from the above three statements...

Getting to work quickly, building some prototypes, writing some quick code to test our assumptions, or using other techniques (my preferences is TDD) to learn through the act of actually building software is undeniably a good idea. I'm sure 90% of us here agree that this is the best way to accomplish this. However, we also know that along the way we are going to produce some badly written software (that still basically does what we need) and are going to need to improve it's quality if we want to keep building new features, extending and maintaining it.

Quantity does not absolutely (or even generally) trump quality in practice. They are logically related in a balance that deserves to be recognized, and that balance should be considered and applied to the software design by people who actually understand how the tradeoff affects it.

A good article to read on internal quality tradeoffs is here:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TradableQualityHypothesis.html

Some more MF stuff on Technical Debt in general
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/tags/technical%20debt.html

A short explanation is that quality is very relevant, particularly over time. Prototyping with quick, poorly planned or designed code in order to learn before committing to a final design is a good idea if (and only if) we are willing and able to throw most, if not all, of the prototype code away at the end and only keep what we've learned from the process.

Of course, I won't make that argument that quality is always important. I'm not willing to get into absolutes territory here. I will however gladly argue that it is usually important.
One thing to note is that the authors are foremost very well known machine learning researchers. Reading Bottou's PhD thesis (in French unfortunately for most HN readers) was kind of depressing in a way, when you see the kind of things he did 20 years ago in an environment which seemed more powerful than what we have today. This environment was not lush I think, but it certainly was the inspiration for i: some info in Englisg at http://leon.bottou.org/projects/lush
You're absolutely right -- but it was the decision I had to make.
IndexedDB has much to learn from SQLite
Right-clicking on the 'Applications' lens presents an organized list of application types. It's only one-level deep rather than truly hierarchical but it works quite well.
And the webpage on a gh_pages branch?
Of course, the "right" tool for a job might, and often does, vary from craftsman to craftsman.

It probably wouldn't be "craft" were that not the case.
Why would a prime number of teeth be beneficial? Every full rotation, all n teeth should have the same amount of wear.
Pretty little liars episode 24
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Yeah I like the Instapaper instant save - might borrow that concept :)

Funny I have been thinking about hiding/de-emphasizing the social stuff on my site. I thought it was a good idea when I added it. But now I'm thinking that people have so many options when looking for new links that when it comes to their own bookmarks - thats all they want to see.
Documentary explores the lives, influence of early VC's
It's not a big problem anymore, but as I point out in the article a) it can happen a small percentage of the time and b) many registrars ARE in conflict of interest with their customers.
30% kinda provokes sticker shock.

What if you went with max (5%, 0.01/MB)? 30% of 0 is still 0, after all.
I ONLY look at the new page. The front page I can get from my facebook feed.
From VC's to Super-Angels: The New Rules of Startup Investment
My design partner uses Illustrator for layout quite successfully. It doesn't handle pixel perfect layouts but gets us so close so quickly that it's well worth it. Out final stage involves editing the UI "sprites" in Photoshop for pixel perfection. So, yes, Illustrator is a valid web design package.
30% commission is for when you are selling people's stuff for them. Unless you have a huge audience who can't wait to buy random stuff on the internet (like Apple does), 30% is outrageous. If Paypal started charging 30% commissions on money transfers people would drop it like a hot potato.
I'm European and I do this all the time too, I think it has more to do with the individual than with cultural norms.
Fall and Rise of UX
Can you change the SA user name
If this isn't a nearly $1b testament for real patent reform (not what is going through Congress now), I don't know what is...
Any source supporting the assertions about fraudulent transactions? Not that I contest, just never heard any story before.
First they came for the musician's business model, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a musician.

Then they came for the designer's business model, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a designer.

...
You'll get an internal 'Microsoft' who focuses on things like lock-in instead of quality, and other zero or negative-sum games like that. You'll need an internal patent and copyright system to keep one team from freeriding on another, etc. etc.
Russian Wall-E Case Mod
Hacker News March 3th Edition
What is Transactional Email?
I usually vote no on such ideas from the standpoint that if they don't like the trial, the won't want to be contacted either. However, if you want to reduce the pain for customers to reach out to you or purchase a license -- make it easy to do from the trial software (a prominent upgrade/purchase/contact button with as few click-throughs as possible)
@JoachimSchipper: That is a good question. I'll need to do some research on that.
> Attacks in Tunisia and only open WiFi networks are the sort of attacks which can defeat revocation.

Could you give more details about this statement from your essay?
Machined brass? That's gonna be heavy, and wouldn't any scratches through the finish eventually develop tarnish?

When seeing the headline, I was hoping for something more like "John's Phone", except minus the flaws with its switches and buttons[1] and perhaps minus the physical address book which makes it thicker than necessary.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/06/johns-phone-review-the-wo... -> direct video http://www.viddler.com/player/c6a25174/
I don't normally post things that are behind registration walls, but this webcast is excellent for anyone looking to raise money. Covers topics such as when to look for Angels vs VC, what return VCs are looking for, etc.

I'm not normally an advocate of this sort of thing, but if someone was to rip it and post it up on youtube they'd be doing a great favour to the startup community :)

(It may actually be legal, given the video is produced by UKTI it's probably under crown copyright which allows reproduction as long as you don't modify it in misleading ways).
I think there are some links that do have value. For example, if I wanted to release a new web app to my Twitter followers but wanted some sort of barrier (without having to set it all up myself) - I would use Gumroad.

If I had a bunch of files laying around my FTP that I never sold and would like to sell off for $5 a pop without the overhead of creating a store - I would use Gumroad.

Does that make it any better in your mind?
I've never found a consistently better OO API than Cocoa (that survived any amount of time). It's a great evolution of the NeXTStep frameworks, which were mentioned all over the GoF book.

You can tell a lot of care goes into that API.
Google answers Viacom in YouTube appeal
> a dead meme-horse

It's reassuring to know that meme-horses can die. I was afraid we were stuck with them forever...
Nowjs for Node - Directly call remote functions in Javascript
Once I started treating "learning X" with the following mentality, I had the best results:

Have a project. Want to learn some photoshop, find a picture/logo/whatever that you want to emulate. Or whatever you want to create, think of what techniques are involved and learn those. Don't try and learn 3D text if you're thinking of creating a logo with a gradient. Google "photoshop gradients", and make sure it's from a credible source (such as psdtuts).

I find if I'm only learning what I want to learn, I don't get bored, so I stay motivated to learn, and simply exploring a tool/language/et al, I will become curious and branch out from what I was originally planning to learn, and thus learn new things organically, rather than forced. So for example, if I'm creating a Web 2.0 and I start using Inner glow, that might entice me to learn about drop shadows, and how the overlay tool works and what the difference is between "Multiply" and "Darker". Give it a shot and see if that gives you some direction.
I'd recommend Fireworks if you want to iterate the whole layout and if you don't need to invest too much time polishing the graphic style of UI elements. Fireworks has a lot more direct manipulation of the canvas elements.

Photoshop on the other hand has more and better graphics manipulation tools: color pickers blending options and effects. It you need to come up with a carefully crafted graphic style, use Photoshop.

I use both, depends on the task I need to do.
Currently the panel will display if you mouse to the upper-left of the screen. It took me a day or so to get used to but I strongly prefer it over the entire left edge of the screen being a hotspot -- on other OSes I waste a lot of time waiting for the panel/dock to go away when I mistakenly mouse just a little too far to the edge of the screen when trying to interact with a window.
Imagine you have a Fireworks iPhone mockup template.

Instead of setting up a store somewhere to list your ONE item, you put the template up on your website and link to it through gumroad.

Then, you give out the Gumroad link on Twitter: "Need a sweet Fireworks iPhone UI template? Buy it for a buck: gumroad.url"

Your twatting friends click it, give you a dollar, get redirected to your website. They download the template, you get a dollar - all in like 2 minutes while your oatmeal was cooking.
Thanks for the suggestion.

However, I find the other part of your comment non-constructive. If you don't think that my question is inappropriate for HN, fine. But just writing it off without giving any justification or advice doesn't do anything to improve the community.
I really like you color pallette. How did you come up with it?
This is a short blog post that I wrote to try and explain exactly what transactional email is and why you should use it.

I found that many people, in my daily conversations, had no idea of what transactional emails are. As such, this is my attempt to shed some light on what it is.

Would appreciate some feedback!
How about a "suggest an edit" button? Maybe senior members can suggest

# more polite language

# removal of irrelevant bits

# removal of memes

and hopefully this would encourage newbies to write better comments.
Presumably the desired condition is that gcd(n,m) = 1 (the number of teeth be relatively prime) so that each tooth of one gear meets with each tooth of the second gear, cyclically. If there are variations/defects in teeth, this might help them wear more uniformly.
GAC, tip for Visual Studio
I like this quote from the conclusion:

"The most important lesson to be taken from my experience with this project is that no single tool is suﬃcient to solve a reasonably complicated engineering problem"
it'll be interesting to see if with this renewed nuclear scare if we'll see centralized power generation as such a benefit. as small scale energy production gets more cost effective I could see many homes generating their own power (solar, thermal) - though I'm not saying any time soon.
Suicides Now More Plentiful Than Traffic Deaths
It really depends on where you are. America's states are analogous to European countries, albeit with a common language. The cultures are very, very different.
1.This American Life 2.Wait Wait Dont tell me 3. RadioLab 4.Stanford Entrep Videos 5.The moth 6. MarketPlace Money 7.Both sides of the table 8. Freakanomics radio
World's Most Social City Meets Social Media: Why NY Startups are Hot
Former ValueClick Exec Who Joined Gigya As CEO Jumps To ... ValueClick