skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr -- can someone summarize it?
We could be in for new fitness craze: persistence runting.
I'm pretty sure most of them aren't using rapidshare for the music alone, but the movies, tv shows, games, and porn they carry.
Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS.
I moved over from S3 primarily b/c I was movingn from EC3 to Rackspace Cloud Servers. The biggest headache I have now is you can't serve files over SSL on Rackspace Cloud and they don't support CNAME aliasing. But I hear those are both coming.
Scala + Mozart/Oz
For an interesting historical perspective of the interaction, check "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...
This is actually a reason to reconsider getting a se-phone, some of their hardware have been good for several years, but crippled with bad software(even the android versions) its useless.

I will definitly check their latest hardware more carefully thanks to this.
I can see myself uninstalling Spotify by the time it starts failing to play the music I want to play more often than not.

This sums it up, I think (quote from the link):

The blog ends with "Above all, this means we can continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term." which suggests this move is made out of need rather than of want and effectively that translates in to 'an advertising supported free music service is not viable'.
Why people don’t buy your product
Yes! Thank you for putting this together.
Scientist creates 3-D scanner iPhone app (w/ video)
A comprehensive scan of the human genome finds that hundreds of our genes have undergone positive natural selection during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.

http://www.livescience.com/609-hundreds-human-genes-evolving...

Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html

There are many more examples that can be found through Google.
Awesome to see an Icelandic startup on the HN frontpage!

This post is a great example of how applying typical established marketing knowledge to a product presentation can improve things a lot.

It's well known that presenting benefits, use cases and personas is a more successful approach than presenting features and screenshots. - For most users - I thought every A/B test in the world had already proven that.

And yet we have all these startups out there presenting nothing but features. I think presenting features might probably work better for techies and more tech-savy people, but for the great majority stuff like this will always work better.

Great job. Iceland ftw!
Potentially, optical (laser) transmitters have a lot more bandwidth, but need very fine aiming control. At those distances, a high-gain antenna would have to be too large to be feasible, even with an extensive upgrade of ground-based receivers.
This is kind of what Apple does. Apple sells the vision and value of the product, not the features and functionality. Apple wants people to buy into the vision
I was recently asked "Why did you learn <language X>, especially when there was no scope for its use in your career at the time?". I found out it was an almost impossible to understand concept for the asker.

Most people are so obsessed with counting the pictures, they cannot imagine someone doing something else.
Android catching up to Apple in app revenue
Only if you assume people will only download what they can listen to in the time allowed.

I know a few usenet/rapidshare service subscribers, they download more HD movies per month than they could watch if they sat there 24x7 watching them, never mind the amount of music they could download if they turned their attention to it.
Do you program Lisp in Vim ever, or always Emacs? I'm a vim user, working through some Lisp books and wondering what the best workflow for Lisp in Vim is, or whether I should start learning Emacs for Lisp.
Show HN: pygm.us, the fail-only URL shortener
I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly better outcome.

e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering.

Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.
According to this list the top donor was University of Calif at 1.6MM - http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&...

$994,795 seems like a pitifully small number on the scale of Goldman Sachs & government donations - but I would think this is a drop in the bucket. I don't buy that ~1MM buys the administration. Wouldn't it be more likely this amount was donated simply by Goldman employees acting independently? If the amount was $100MM then yeah, I think you have a case for the conspiracy theory.

It is also tough for me to believe that $80,000 buys the chief of staff.

Am I off-base?
M-x ansi-term does colors, too
Weird. I can access the provided link, but when I click the homepage, I need an account.
I agree. There is likely no legal precedent. Someone or a consumer rights group with have to take a registar/hoster to court to litigate the actual language and what the related rights are.

Until then they can and will insert arbitrary rules to their advantage... as they should? Maybe, I dunno, depends on whose ethics you're living by.
WhorePresents and IHave Gas: How to Avoid Unfortunate Domain Names
Eventually Android will overtake Apple in app revenue. It is simple economics. The thing is, I do not think that Apple really cares.
Awesome! Nice Comment. I wish I could produce as pithy prose as you :-)

Actually, I wasn't sure how long the title could be, so I made my main point in the first comment.

Sorry if you wanted a mega-meta-discussion. I'm just simple that way. I happen to like the points on comments, find they make my browsing more efficient and enjoyable, and hope they return.
The Wilderness Downtown: HTML5 interactive film
Fair point. It was actually easier to get that url since I had bitly open.
Funky, Dirty, Native HTML5
It must be a parallel project.

When 4.0 was released to the public, the next update provided 40 b13 nightly users was a 4.2 alpha. (some plug-ins break)
I understand the sentiment behind this grousing, but I do not understand the practical value of voicing this cynicism.

Surely you don't think reports like this should never be produced and disseminated?

Don't get me wrong, I strongly want to see some folks go to jail. But saying "crooks need to go to jail" is a far cry from saying "nothing is going to come of this". One statement is assertive and explicit, the other is defeatist and ambiguous.
This is one of the few areas where bipartisanship works. Wall Street is the most important part of the economy no matter who is in power.
What’s next, TeamLab?
Find out TeamLab future enhancements and determine what comes next!
This is excellent, thank you to whoever is putting it together.
This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing up is the worst mistake we ever make".

A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true.

Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no.

Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?
My mistake. Correcting post to say 'second highest donor'.
I just finished his book 'Don't make me think' which i highly recommend.
In 3000 BC, artists, thinkers, lawyers, doctors and engineers (to what extent they existed) were all part of one (mostly parasitic, but in some ways quite useful) caste: priests.

People tend to think of ancient priests as charlatans, but they were also the people who held onto all the knowledge: that if you chew these "magical" leaves while tilling the fields, you don't get tired; if you plant when this "divine" star is rising, you get the best results. The emergence of artists, engineers, et al, apart from a priesthood didn't emerge until the birth of philosophy in the first millennium BC.
That's the thing about lobbying. The ROI is very high.
Perhaps something will:

Senator Carl Levin, releasing the findings of a two-year inquiry yesterday, said he wants the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether Goldman Sachs violated the law by misleading clients who bought the complex securities known as collateralized debt obligations without knowing the firm would benefit if they fell in value.

The Michigan Democrat also said federal prosecutors should review whether to bring perjury charges against Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and other current and former employees who testified in Congress last year. Levin said they denied under oath that Goldman Sachs took a financial position against the mortgage market solely for its own profit, statements the senator said were untrue.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-14/goldman-sachs-misle...
I wanted a project to get myself familiar with the pyramid framework, so I threw together this little jobby.

As I say on the site, the idea is that if a URL shortener is known to be unreliable, it'll force people to use it only for short-term convenience (the "non-evil" use case) and thus won't cause long-term problems (e.g., what if the site goes away, et cetera).

I realize there are other concerns (operators trying to monetize the links by inserting interstitial ads), so I suppose you'll just have to trust me when I say I promise that pygm.us won't do that. :)
That would not put you on the same side. They would say that's exactly the same thing as the illegal file-sharing it's meant to be an alternative to.
For the ruby people out there you guys should try xiki (xiki.org). It extends emacs with a bunch of cool commands via el4r.
Wikimedia Commons is messy but free, and has some good stuff if you dig (in some areas, at least). E.g.: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Textures
Well, for any major fitness difference, evolution could happen considerably more quickly than millions of years. A 10% difference would be noticeable in only hundreds of years, and a 1% difference in thousands.
Wow, I see the Mac, Amiga and other next gen UIs that came soon afterwards in these. I'm also struck by how much more appealing these screenshots appear than the early versions of Microsoft Windows.
Agreed. that way you can tell what is regarded as important without having the actual number influence you as much
Clickable: http://readytakeoff.com
Is the email corpus available? One valuable thing that came out of Enron was real-world email data.
Ask HN: Moving from fulltime to contractor, need help figuring through rates.
I started working for this company as a sub contractor. Our rate (there were two of us) was $50/hour discounted to $45 after negotiations (they guaranteed X hours a month).

At the time, I had little experience (though I could do the work) virtually no portfolio or anything, and it was a struggle to find new work. I eventually went to work directly for this company full time, hired at 55k+ and renegotiated to 70k+ after 6 months.

I am leaving the company basically because I want to have my own free time, etc and am now in a position where I will be able to get plenty of work. They are having a hard time filling my position with someone with my skills, etc.

I have informally agreed to work with them as a contractor over the summer to help train the new developer on our system, be an emergency backup, etc.

I have a very good relationship with this company, both as an employee and just friendships within the company.

They are a medium level of SOL if I just walk and don't give them work/help, but I don't want to leverage that at all, or at least minimize them feeling like I am squeezing them for all they are worth.

Does anyone have some pointers here on how to go about this? Both keeping things as amiable as possible and maximizing my rate.
Interview with Gorilla Logic CEO (and former Sun emp.) Stu Stern
I also recommend "All The Devils Are Here" [1] which covers basically the same ground as "Inside Job" the documentary but in more detail.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/All-Devils-Are-Here-Financial/dp/15918...
Is it just me or is venturebeat buying into this whole green movement a little to much? They featured a article about natural gas a week ago that was grossly inaccurate and was devoid of any research. It was upsetting because I really like Matt and his operation.
April 16 Declared Foursquare Day in NYC
Show me comment points after I've reached a karma threshold. If I have 2000 karma points, then comment points show up for me.
Interview with Rich Aberman of WePay
The FSF does not represent Linus Tolvards and was not involved in developing the Linux kernel. The FSF is not the only or even the biggest contributor to the open-source pool of software. Their opinion about what the Linux kernel should disallow through its licensing is immaterial.

Also, Linus' opinion represents that of the majority of core kernel contributers. This can be checked, based on their mailing list, and based on the growing list of companies sponsoring its development.

why you think the FSF's position is ambiguous

I do not think they are ambiguous. GPL.v3 is perfectly within their goals and they have been consistent. Their message is also clear and I admire RMS for what he has done.

My problem is with all the other people that suddenly discover the virtues of Free Software and consider it within their right to trash other people's work. Unfortunately being negative on the Internet is far too easy. Meritocracy doesn't work. The FSF has the right to bitch and moan about open-source versus free-software. Most other people do not.
I am considering majoring in Computational Math because my primary interest is Data Science and Machine Learning.
Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value" for us...

I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.
I can guarantee there are a lot of established players/techies on this site, not just startups ;)

But, I understand what you are saying. Just trying to get info from those that run their own bladefarms... such as myself.
Your description of human monogamy does not gel with my understanding. My understanding is that as far as monogamous relationships go, we've always been pretty much the way we are now. That is, we are a mostly monogamous species, but not completely. The benefits of social status that you describe still exist now; a middle class man cannot afford a mistress. But the elite in any society is relatively small compared to the size of the society, so most couples are mostly monogamous.

(I keep saying "mostly" because we, as a species, cheat. In "The Third Chimpanzee" Jared Diamond makes a compelling case that cheating is actually an evolutionary strategy, and that we shouldn't dismiss it as people faltering from the ideal marriage. That is, if many, many people do it across all cultures, it's probably in our genes.)
> People are trying to make this a licensing issue, when it definitely it is not.

I agree. In fact, that was my original argument.

> the only valid concern I see for Android is that development is not done in the open.

I don't actually care if the development is not done in the open. What I actually care about is being ability to modify and install alternative versions of the software on my devices. I have had to throw away a lot of perfectly good hardware because the software was old and outdated with no way to update it. I've also had to deal with bugs with no way to fix them. Of course, none of this is Google's problem because they don't make the hardware.

> they can always buy alternative devices, or build their own devices (isn't that the purpose of Free Software anyway?).

The purpose of Free Software to build hardware? I think you've got something wrong there. As a programmer, I don't build hardware. I build software.

> If openness is really what people need, open devices will win

No, because most people are not programmers (or highly technical) and therefore have no need or ability to run alternative software. So no, openness will not win out. This appeal to the masses is not a good argument.
In the book "Voyager : seeking newer worlds in the third great age of discovery" they said that as the crafts got further out they had to use large radio antenna's in Spain, Hawaii, and Australia to lock onto the signal, creating an Earth-scale virtual antenna.

Truly amazing stuff.
Ehh, sometimes, but I've noticed that sometimes the system orders new comments with not a lot of karma near the top.
This is a ridiculous statement. The report is about one month's statistics of a single ad network, from which you can reliable extrapolate, well, nothing.

Besides, the stat in question concerns network ad revenue only, not app sales revenue.

This is just sloppy work.
San Jose Area job seeker
20+ years experience in management, finance, real estate/facilities and administration. Please contact aljbeck@comcast.net for resume.
Sensationalist title for sure, but I think you are being generous with it being a "fair argument", I think its a bunch of bollocks. Could make that argument in one para.
It is easy if the language your compiler is written in is itself running on the JVM and you can access the nice libraries for generating the bytecode, for example ASM (http://asm.ow2.org/) which Clojure uses. I built a toy compiler for a Pascal-like language targeting JVM and conceptually it is easy (as you maybe meant), but generating binary bytecode "by hand" would require a lot of extra work. I took a look at ABCL source, it dedicates at least 100kb of Lisp code to a bytecode-generating library.

By the way, ABCL source code seems very interesting for anyone interested in compilers/interpreters/Lisp.
I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture - that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it required us to settle in one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.
Very cool tech demo, however inversing the up/down transformation would make it feel proper 3d, as in that the box "remains the same" while you move your iPad, giving the illusion that it's in the iPad.
The Great +1 Logical Fallacy
Most people seem to totally overlook the name when they start a company. It can easily be the hardest and most frustrating part of building a product/business.
o/ well long-distance high five to you :).

I wouldn't really say it's still going strong, haha. Unfortunately, we never really got the traction on that that we needed to allow it to keep running by itself (Cody and I were submitting a lot of the content, which was fine, but it would have been really awesome if we didn't have to).

<sarcasm>Big surprise there, though, we were trying to compete against HN and reddit</sarcasm>

Back in November, we both started working a new project: http://thingist.com, which has been taking a lot of my time lately, so I haven't been submitting as much.

Anyway, good to see you around here, man :)
Hey @panic - I love the shiny new products, but could you pretty please update Coda a bit? It used to be my favorite editor, but the lack of git is killing me!
Did you mean 2^32? That I could understand. 2^52 looks entirely random to me.
Morten Lund: Life of an Entrepreneur
I tried to use Emacs lisp, several times, but was never able to warp my head around the weird functions naming.

Any suggestion?

Ignore the "weird function naming" until you get used to it. Read the docs to pick up advice on how to do things the Emacs way, so the simplest macros aren't "tens of lines of code". And finally, read the Emacs souce code to see how Emacs does it. Remember, Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, too!
Apple has a monopoly in the iOS app distribution game, so their pricing terms are appalling for a different set of reasons (regardless of what they are you must agree if you want to ship the app). While I think Amazon is playing hardball, they in no way are the only way to sell Android applications. If the terms aren't agreeable, just don't use their store.
Yeah, it doesn't make things so much easier that i'd pay more for it. The process is about 10 seconds right now, and settling up payment is easy if you're not a tourist in NY. It'd be one thing if it was a frustrating experience, but to be honest it's pretty easy already.

Plus I'm sure the car services are going to be resistant to the fees associated with it, changing their work flow, and are thinking about all the income I'm sure they don't declare. Actually, I just remembered this article from a while back about the car services: http://nymag.com/news/features/54678/

But sure, maybe someday I'll tap a screen to take care of it once we hit a quorum of use, I have no opposition to it. It just doesn't seem to be a problem in my life that needs solving. Yet another third party trying to get in between the transaction to skim some money off.
As someone on the receiving end of these, I hear about 'my startup', 'my school project', etc. all day long. I don't care. It's all about the money. More than likely it's owned by someone with a lot of domains, if that's the case, they are almost certainly in the same boat.

tl;dr: the dollar figure is all that matters, your story makes me vomit in my mouth a little as an excuse to lowball.
On the positive correlation between alcohol use and income: I think it's because alcohol is socially disinhibitory, and expected to be that way, and this makes it socially useful for, e.g., getting information out of people that they'd usually guard. Most office politics is learned at the bar. If you ask someone, at 3:00 pm, certain pointed questions, you're a creep and a gossip. If you ask those questions after-hours at the bar when everyone's "supposed" to be drunk and loose-lipped, no one gives a shit.