skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
xlhtml will work for .xls files. I'm not aware of one utility that will read out the text reliably from all MS formats though. I've been pondering this same problem as of late and have been thinking about a virtual machine approach.

have a conversion "service" running in a Windows VM that has the latest office installed. Use something like Python with the pywin32 module to extract text via COM.

Advantage there is you don't have to worry about your thing breaking with new releases of Office, you just upgrade to the latest version.

Disadvantage obviously, the overhead of the VM cost of a windows and office license and need to role back the vm snapshot from time to time if you get any viruses.
One of the problems with newspapers is that they also aggregate content, so some of the fluff and other stuff pays for the reporters and good bits... or so I recall. I think they do not face an easy transition to the web.
What a cool concept, but what a frustrating site!

I think I'm addicted in spite of the navigation/functional issues, but definitely I'm looking forward to improvements.
We agree totally on nuclear power.

I think that the concerns about feeding the starving people in impoverished countries should be better-directed at their governments. In many cases, food supplied as aid by the U.S. and U.N. is either rejected outright due to political bias, sold on the open market to produce money for corrupt officials, or left to rot in warehouses due to the local government not doing anything to put infrastructure in place to move 'the food' to 'the starving people'.

I'm not an advocate for biofuels, but making the argument that biofuel production is a direct cause of world starvation is more than a little far-fetched; the causes are complex, and more political than technological in origin, much like the failings of the nuclear power industry in the States.

Also don't ignore that, in the U.S., a great deal of arable land goes to waste because of government farm subsidies and other political buggery.

For the sake of playing with some numbers, let's assume that a reasonably efficient car, powered by ethanol, would require ten gallons of fuel per week, or around five hundred gallons per year. That's two acres per car, per year. There are approximately sixty million registered cars in the U.S., requiring a hundred and twenty million acres of farmland be dedicated to producing fuel for these cars, and this is only if the cars ran solely on ethanol.

So, if every car in the US were to run on Ethanol, it would consume one-fifth of the total agricultural production capacity.

Also note that some quick Googling for me shows that yields might be almost double the 250 gallons/acre number for biofuels.

This doesn't mean that biofuels are the ideal solution, but they are certainly a strong contender.

Actually, I may have just become a biofuel advocate. The technology to build flex-fuel cars exists now, and can take advantage of the existing transportation infrastructure until such time as a better means, be it hydrogen, super-capacitors, or dilithium crystals, is available. Doing so would reduce dependence on foreign oil, help boost the national economy, and would likely have the positive side effect of promoting research into increasing long-term, sustainable, high crop yields.
I think for me broadly, the answer lies in the fact that the laws of nature are necessary, whereas software is contingent. For example, perhaps a bug happens because of running out of memory, thus the software running properly is contingent on the memory. But on the other hand, gravity, for example, is necessary, in that it is not contingent on anything to make it work. It just works. So for me I think the reason software has bugs, but nature doesn't, is that the former is a contingent phenomena, the latter a necessary one.
So gas then.

I have 2 vehicles that run on it right now and there is a lot of it around and it can be synthesized. We aren't doing anything else with it (besides plastics and such).

The universe has yet to provide us with an energy "free lunch."
Only if it's fun or prestigious.

Corollary: The less talented the founders of a company are,
the more they should focus on things that are not fun or prestigious.

People who are very talented can do a better job even at
things other people are willing to do free, and charge for
the difference. But if you're no better than the people
working for free, you can only charge for things
they're unwilling to do.

E.g. if you're really good (for some definition of
good) you can make money playing your own songs. If
not, you can only make money playing covers at weddings.
The distinction in software between product companies and consulting companies is the same.
223 bookmarking sites-- that's mind-boggling. I wonder if any of these actually stand out from the crowd in some way.

(NB: In this case, "I wonder" means "I'd be interested enough to hear, but not nearly interested enough to investigate for myself.")
I like the greenhouse question (page 17). I can not imagine that the authors does not know that correlation does not imply causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...
One counterexample for you: Conway's game of life has finite number of rules but you can construct universal turing machine with it that will have formally undecidable behaviour.
This was what made me thing they did it intentionally. They don't support Linux, and yet they intentionally detect Linux and have special code written for it that doesn't work, when the standard code does work. That's incredibly suspicious, it's like when Hotmail decided to "only support Internet Explorer" by sniffing the user agent string when it actually worked fine on Firefox
I love the "Basically, WTF?" bullet point.
I'm waiting for people to sort out the little quirks of getting Ubuntu on it, at which point I will likely cough up for one. This Linpus thing that comes on it looks awful, but the device itself is rather appealing.
It's my understanding that a theory of everything describes the rules by which the universe operates. It doesn't say anything about emergent properties of these rules.

For example, if everything in the universe obeyed Newtonian mechanics, I would say that Newtonian mechanics was a theory of everything. You would say that it isn't.
Women are built to peak earlier:

http://www.livescience.com/health/061003_women_skin.html
That gigantic ad that follows you down the screen is ridiculous
$2,519.01 (red arrow) is not a large sum of money. Compound that with the time period indicated by the blue arrow. Elsewhere in the site founders explain that they charge a 3% transaction fee. In other words they pulled in $75.57 over 4 months.
</quote> http://jeffspost.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/why-didnt-it-take-...
Yeah, I think you also need a Word license for this to work.
I'm hoping there's a way to automate it through OO.o... I'm pretty sure you can run it headless.
Deccan Times
A complete news and information portal of India.
The current food crisis cannot be blamed on third world governments, as was the case in most earlier famines. This crisis in caused by a sudden spike in the price of rice, grain and other staples. See also this article: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

Moving from growing food to growing biofuels is necessarily going to influence the price of food - basically the prices of oil and of food staples are going to move in tandem. And we should be very careful before we commit one fifth of arable land to biofuels.

Ultimately this food crisis is caused by poverty, and there's no easy cure for that.
DRM for textbooks could be good for students
Del.icio.us for the number of users, being first, and the quality of information. Otherwise I wonder too :) (link in the profile).
Absolutely. It is probably a good sign that they took that down. If you show you are making peanuts, it would discourage potential competitors. If you show you are making millions, you are asking for competitors to pour in.

All I'm saying is that it is in my (selfish) interests to know how much they were making. Now that they don't display revenue, I won't decide to copy them until after they IPO, which will be too late, unfortunately.
"Most important, the laptop comes in blue, pink, white and brown, ensuring that buyers can find an Aspire One to match their luggage or living room décor."

Yeesh.
Green business: Scandinavia's lateral thinkers
I agree that the proof is pretty much handwaving, actually, but I still think their underlying conclusion is valid: Our efforts into optimizing languages should focus on making programmers more efficient, before hardware. (In other words, programmer time is almost always more expensive than processor time.)

Also, I think most things in computing called X's Law are not entirely serious, these days.
"A small number of scientists claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail. Gödel's theorem states that any non-trivial mathematical theory that has a finite description is either inconsistent or incomplete."

That's from the Wiki, FWIW. I'm not big on using Wiki as a source.

"Babbling religiously" is right on the line in my opinion. It makes you sound like an arrogant jerk. If you have problems with the content of the comment, state your case in neutral terms.

Learn to live with other people's ambiguity and looseness in phrasing. Then perhaps they'll be more forgiving of yours. (Downmod)
RubyFringe recap and slides
Somebody get this guy a thesaurus, and be quick about it.
Is eBay Oil to Retail's Water Amid Recessionary Pressures?
It could have been dated in Australian time... given we appear to be a day ahead of you guys at times :)
As the article mentions, the government has given billions of dollars for hydrogen car research in just the last few years. So yes, some people are that naive about hydrogen.
Spacecraft launches are much more impressive when viewed up close (2ish miles away) and in person. No video can do justice to the feeling of the wave of heat washing past you after ignition, or to the incredible sense of scale and speed involved.
Yes, AT&T's DSL setups are a triumph of proper defaults. They come in, plug everything in, give you the password (or set up your computer), and go away once everything is working and safe. Easy setup, safe installation.

Of course, I've had WPA and WEP hacked enough times to not trust either of them. MAC address filtering is a bit safer if you want to lock down access to the internet, but at least the password has to be changed. Default router passwords put users so badly at risk, there's really no excuse.
Time loop logic
That's true, if you want to be as safe as possible, then it pays to be attentive to all the instructions you receive.

But, my point was that we receive so many complicated instructions about complicated things that we don't really have time to understand fully, and there are only so many hours in a day. You simply must prioritize. The fact is, I expect that my doctor and my mechanic are going to tell me what to do, and that I can pretty much just trust them. In this case, Netgear violated that trust.
I actually worked for two summers at Interhack, so I found it interesting to see a link to their site here. The founder (Matt Curtin) is a really cool guy who teaches a Lisp course for one quarter a year at OSU (that's how I got the job). Matt had a hand in cracking the DES and wrote a book about it called Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard.

Unfortunately, Interhack does a lot of computer forensic stuff that has human-intensive requirements. Because of his work, Matt is considered an expert for the purposes of court testimony, and he spends much of his time working on and testifying in computer forensic evidence cases, rather than hacking in Lisp as I'm sure he would prefer to be doing.

Don't get me wrong... his company is doing great. They just got an entire floor in a 12-story office building built to their specifications, they worked on a high-profile case last year for the state of Ohio lost tape archive incident, and they have somewhere around ten full-time employees. I just wish he (and the company itself) had some time to show off his programming chops in something other than internal software.
MySQL Connection Pooling with Django and SQLAlchemy
Step by step guide for using SQLAlchemy for connection pooling in Django.
Limp, a Vim alternative to SLIME
I see this complaint all the time, and it's really annoying. It's just a matter of opinion. I program in vim with light-colored text on a black background. For the longest time, I used the compiz window manager so that I could invert the color of my Firefox window so that web pages would have light text on dark backgrounds.

I'm betting that the real issue is alternating from one to the other. If you spend all your time looking at dark on light and then try to switch, I can see how it could be an issue. But the opposite is also true. At least light text on a dark background has another good thing going for it... you're not staring at what is effectively a light bulb.

Either way, can we please stop talking about this? At least half of the submissions that lead to such a page have a comment like this. It comes off as complaining and laziness, since if you really wanted to read it, you can simply highlight the text, use copy-paste, or any number of other solutions (the "No Style" suggestion was a good one).
Despite going there and poking around briefly, I have absolutely no idea what this site does. I guess in that respect it is like iilwy, except with iilwy you can poke around for a day and still have no clue.
Zeromq: Fast Messaging
Mod_rails and full page caching with a custom cache location
Revisiting (and rethinking) the Twitter "Pay to Listen" business model
There are several different implementations of solar power that are suitable to produce the electricity we need. It is going to take time and money to implement, but it can be done without inventing something new.
Palringo Instant Messenger Comes to the iPhone
If you do I didn't use one. My trial liscense ran out a long time ago but the scripts still work.
Who Is Johng77536 And How Did He Game Twitter?
Are Lisp jobs so rare that they're Hacker News worthy?
Color preferences are a strange beast. I use green on black in emacs, and white on black in terminal windows and I'm pretty happy with things that way. But I have a terrible time reading webpages with any dark background. Wish I knew why.
> Nobody on your team wants to use source control? Create your own CVS repository

Oh for God's sake, stop! Create a git repository, a subversion resository, a darcs repository, but not a CVS repository.

[Edit] Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices. I guess cubicle farms are ugly, and if your co-workers are all annoying nerds being able to shut a door might be nice, but I've always preferred open, multi-desk offices where you can discuss things with the people around you.
> As you note, if the Chinese can eat it for thousands of years without negative impact, I reckon it's safe.

That's a dangerous statement. Your lifestyle is different to the lifestyle of the Chinese over the past few millennia.

People in northern Europe eat very large quantities of cholesterol-rich foods: salted/cured pig fat, and a thick meat-based jell-o made by boiling pig legs for hours, are two popular dishes in Russia. This diet is not only tolerable, but is recommended during the colder months, as (1) fat is the best energy store we have, and (2) cholesterol reduces the freezing point of lipid cell membranes, helping maintain their fluidity. On the other hand, such a diet would be outright suicidal for an average middle-American.

The same cultures also eat large quantities of heavily-salted preserved vegetables during the winter; the salt is not particularly good for you, but the negatives are outweighed by the benefits of vitamins in the vegetables, which would otherwise be unavailable in the winter months. Again, not recommended for the average American who has access to fresh fruit and vegetables all year.

In Australia, people are hospitalised every year from over-eating after a rich Christmas turkey meal in 40C heat. The tradition evolved in the English winter, where energy demands are higher and digestive systems operate at a greater efficiency.

I do agree with you on the fads. Human metabolism is still sufficiently misunderstood that any claim that advocates particular extreme dietary behaviour will ultimately be proven wrong. The sequence of events usually goes something like this: x provides essential nutrients -> x is added to every product on the market -> scientists claim x causes cancer! -> scientists discover a way to emulate x with y, a healthy alternative! -> y is added to every product on the market -> scientists claim y causes cancer! -> ...

Those claim are generally true, technically. Everything you eat kills you; the trick is balance and moderation.
Obviously, or I wouldn't be so eager to see them sell, but equity without liquidity is useless. Digg management has already demonstrated their willingness to treat my shares differently from the other founder's shares (see my comment above about Kevin cashing in shares).
Awesome line: "The saddest period of the average man's life -- his 20s -- is also the period when he is most likely to be single."

This is pretty much a shot across the bow to the vast majority of News.YC's readership.
What a brilliant observation about "known unknowns". Though, one could say that there are also unkown unkowns, and unkown knowns, yet.
I've often wondered what vim-using Lispers do about the lack of a REPL. I'm a vim user of many years (I dunno exactly how long...I first used it on my Amiga in the early 90s), and I've only spent enough time with emacs to know it's not really my cup of tea...but I predominantly work in non-REPL languages (though Perl now has Devel::REPL which is pretty nice), and so don't have anything to miss while working.

pg is a vim user, but I've never asked him, and I don't think he's ever talked about, what his workflow looks like.
My personal opinion is that Arrington just made up this 'acquisition'...
twitter, meet xsrf. xsrf, meet twitter.
Project BlueEye -  Ixpcam
I don't see how this is SEO. Secondly, I disagree that race, gender and IQ should be banned from discussion along with religion and politics. Ban trolls, not subjects.
The note that they get 2.5 million messages per second (and they mention 512byte messages). I don't doubt this is true but so what? All they are quoting (from my quick math) is the speed of a 10G network.

I can write a small program to stream 512byte messages from one machine to another on a 10G network and get 2.5 million messages across too. They're also assuming the network connection is setup and that the messages are fully formatted and ready to send. They also dont have any messaging acknowledgment or anything.

Please check my math:
(I was lax with 1000 or 1024, but results are similar)

k = 1024

meg = 1024 x 1024 = 1048576

Gigbit network = 1048576 x 1000= 1048576000

10Gigibit network = 1048576000 x 10 = 10485760000

Convert from bits to bytes:

10485760000 / 8 = 1310720000 bytes per second

i.e., 1310720000 is the number of bytes that a 10G network can push per second. Note, thats raw - TCP overhead and such will eat some measurable portion.

how many 512 byte messages fit in that?

1310720000/512 = 2,560,000 (just like they said)

I'm wondering if they actually tested this or just did this math. Because again, this has nothing to do with their product, its just the
throughput of a 10G network - and again, these numbers don't factor the 40byte TCP headers per packet.

So.. if we made a webserver out of their message infrastructure (even lets say, just a static webserver that only serves 512 byte pages ) - we can get 2.5million pages served per second?
@ivankirigin: any thought of changing the mascot?

as a consumer -- amazing as it sounds -- i would not trust something with that silly logo with my money, without doing some pretty extensive research.

in general, I feel that the look and feel of the logo, design, and mascot are just ...wrong. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but for a micro-payments service (or any that service that deals with real, hard, cash) I would surmise that presenting a reputable foot forward would go a long way in building trust and brand equity.
Do you happen to know if soy protein (as opposed to whole soy flour) has a significant amount of phytoestrogens?
I didn't show it at foocamp 2003, for example. A lot of the facts reported sound like they came from me, but garbled.

I've spoken to a LOT of reporters in my time and they almost never get it even close to right. One assumes all reporting is like this, too.
I don't know how bad it is in general. I stopped buying books that mentioned me a while ago. Praise Amazon for Search Inside The Book.

This book apparently came out of a businessweek article that was also a clusterfuck, though, so I'm guessing so.
Men find the women they are looking for, so they are happier. Women end up with the men that were looking for them...
If you read a bit of Wolfram, he asks a provocative question: suppose the universe is, in fact, discrete and not continuous. If this is the case, and I think that's non-controversial now, then it may be that Sir Newton took us way down the wrong road with his discovery of the integral. We've been doing continuous math-type things with a universe that simply does not work that way. The integral was simply a cheat -- a numbers game that looked as true to reality as we could possibly verify at the time.

So we're working with known unknowns. That is, the integral works so well in most everything we do we're comfortable where it falls apart -- right around ToE, probably. But if we went belly-up as far back as Newton, where to start to fix it? I know I'm sounding like a shill for NKS now, but I _did_ find it had some really interesting ideas. In a computational universe, we could have really simple physics that lead to incredibly complex and non-intuitive results.
Looking for Plan B - 'almost no one is seeking to create long-term value or build businesses'
I suggest getting a credit card that gives 1% cash back or some perk like this - you can see some really good deals like this on http://www.mymoneyblog.com
Google Knol - Google's Latest Attack on Copyright
Technically, a "Theory of Everything" in physics is just a theory that relates the four known forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnatism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. The latter three (I believe) have already been unified. It's a "theory of everything" because it describes every force in the universe.

That of course does not imply that the theory of everything automatically gets you a complete description of the universe. Even in the context of a single force, it can be difficult/impossible to come up with a closed form solution for how many different objects interact subject to that force. For example, the behavior of gravity is really well understood but that doesn't mean that we can come up with straightforward, closed form solutions for the n-body problem of a bunch of stars interacting with each other's gravitational pulls in space.
People who are telling the truth about themselves do not insist on being ‘off the record’
I suspect any engineer in a position of sufficient power did know about this, but no orders were given to upgrade the process appropriately, or, gasp!, take the reactor offline; doing so would be equated to admitting defeat of the Soviet nuclear physics program, a result that was very clearly unacceptable.

And let's not forget that a large fraction of casualties after the Chernobyl accident is attributable to the fact that the general public was not informed for an entire day after the accident, in fact not until a powerplant in Sweden reported heightened radioactivity levels. This, with Kiev, Ukraine's multi-million capital, only 100km from Chernobyl.