skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not typical of your car Robin.
http://www.fuelly.com/car/audi/a1/2011

I see you're Welsh(or at least living there), Perhaps you're using imperial MPG in your post? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_MPG

I'm using american gallons. Multiply your figures times 0.83 to get american gal.

In imperial gallons, my figures are 60-66 MPG-imp.

If you were using american gallons, here are some substantive things that probably offer a difference or two in our relative inefficiencies:

I live in the southeastern US (Atlanta, GA), which is basically a sauna for 150+ days a year (today is 82% humidity, with a "Feels like" temp of 37 C/99 F), so constantly run the air (which is actually more efficient than opening the windows for my particular car, a 2005 Toyota Prius).

The Audi A1 is a mini-cooper sized car (which my wife has). My car (a prius) is a mid-sized sedan (comparable in size to a Ford Fusion, which gets 22 MPG City/32 MPG highway). You can easily fit 2.5 as "person" and 4x as much stuff in my car as you can hers.

I take very short trips (living in Midtown, which as it sounds, is in the middle of town), so the engine is only at maximally efficient thermal profile for a short part of the time.

My car is actually 6 years old (although newer models don't really have higher overall MPG it seems). But to someone from 1995, my 2005 Prius getting 52 MPG would seem strange indeed, seeing 27 MPG in the city and 34 MPG highway was typical gas mileage for a 1995 Nissan Sentra, a popular midsized car of that year.
I think the biggest reason against solar powered <anything> is that 'solar' doesn't mean 'free'.

Last time I've checked solar panels were just a way to transport energy (kind of like a battery). I.e. you have to invest $X into panel manufacturing to receive $Y worth of electricity in some remote location with no power. Several years ago $X was equal $Y.

Granted, technology is improving and panels cost less and less, now $X << $Y. But even today solar based solutions are not economical without goverment incentives.

EDIT: typo
Artsy Editor launched
Which of these "costs" do not exist in suburbs? (except subway, the analog of which is highways to the suburbs). All of those are present in suburbs too.
Supreme Court Accepts Case Challenging GPS Surveillance Without a Warrant
again, "completely lose" == "wait a bit to regain". Same as any truck, cement mixer, van...

There is no actual requirement that others on the road make your life convenient.
Apparently that's what BigNerdRanch does. Seriously, that just makes my inner nerd cry.
Oh awesome I didn't know about that I'll definitely look into it. Do you think people would be more likely to use it because they can type 'git' instead of 'tigger' (or whatever name it ends up being)?
"not because one would be worse than the other, but because I don't think they can be compared."

If you want to look at it qualitatively, I would argue that there are a wide variety of different types of rapes, and an equally wide variety of different types of forced drug consumption. So I'm not sure you can even compare within the same category.

But what I primarily meant when I said they were comparable is that one should approach them both from a similar normative ethical perspective.
Full Disclosure: I work at TripAdvisor.

Andy's assessment is accurate and is part of the reason I really, really like it here. The other part is the folks I get to work with.

If you're interested in joining us, drop me a line. Info in my HN profile.
I believe it, because I think the demand side is actually not too different at $1 vs. $5. There's not a lot of difference between the hassle of me getting out my credit card to pay for something at $5/month vs. $1/month. Maybe I value the hassle factor at about $5. So I only need twice the value out of the $5 service, not five times as much.
The NIH caBIG project site hosts a ton of such projects:
http://gforge.nci.nih.gov/
Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it
I don't like having to specify the task in the comment, simply because the risk of typos. It would be nicer if I could issue a command prior to committing that would let me flag the tasks complete, then it automatically adds it to the comment/handles finishing the task.

ie,

tigger mark
> 1) re-factor classes
> 2) improve optimization
> Enter numbers to mark task for completion, or blank to end:
http://sanebox.com is helpful too if you don't want to configure all those folders in gmail.
but that falls to sound parenting and not the government

Exactly this.

I recently found out that my 10 year-old was viewing online porn on my computer. I didn't go out and start lobbying the government to make porn illegal; instead I sat down with him and had a talk about it without freaking out.

The legality of any given act and how I want my kids to consider it are two completely different things. I think violent/sexual video games should be completly legal, but my kids won't be playing them (well, not in this house anyway :-) until I think they're ready.
The deep reach of Google
Any startup that relies on the network effect to provide value is a daunting challenge. Your product can be amazing, but without the right user acquisition strategy, you'll be left spinning your wheels. Kudos to the AirBNB team for having the vision and determination not to quit.
Also "Pi": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
Just bought the PDF, Damn paypal tricket me into paying $1.00 with billmelater =/
If the program uses the same algorithm I don't see why not. Here is a module for Drupal that uses Google Authenticator: http://drupal.org/project/ga_login This seems to be the implementation it's using: http://code.google.com/p/ga4php/source/browse/trunk/lib/ga4p...

Edit: of course, this is just another implementation of the TOTP method. It does not use Google's infrastructure to send you SMS / voice calls containing the code.
Best iPhone Cycling Satnav apps
If I had this I can see myself getting over-enthusiastic mid gig and stamping on my iPad screen :(
Anyone happen to know where I can find general information on implementing something like this? http://paperjs.org/examples/chain/ I'm interested in implementing this mechanic in Flash (for a game). I looked through the source code and it seems like a lot of code just to get to the point. Hoping to find something more basic that I can port over.
Taking a few minutes to configure folders is better than paying $60/yr, IMHO. :)
The multiple-inbox + starring trick is really key. Every morning I'll dive into my emails starting with the oldest and archive+next using the ] shortcut while starring any emails I have to act on later. Once I've gone through all my Inbox emails, I work through the starred emails.

Your inbox should be like the lobby of the emergency room—that's where you do your triage.
I'm not so sure of that. We don't get an exact transcript of what he said, nor what he was asked. It appears to me that he may have actually been thinking of "adult (or mature) video games" as pornography, which has always been subject to regulation. The opinion was quite clear in distinguishing obscenity (a term limited by SCOTUS to sexual content) from violence. It's not obvious to me whether the conversation recounted in that article was nearly so clear.
don't know about 3d/canvas in paper.js, but you should check out three.js, which does do 3d on canvas: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
Ask HN: Are there any sites that explain H1B/OPT/F1/J1 process pretty easily?
Startup looking to hire people. A lot of applications are for H1B/F1 OPT types. What are your experiences and time-frame for hiring people outside of the US?
I wrote these!

Got any questions?
You could probably code it in a weekend. Your weekend is worth more than $50. That is the point.
Jack Dorsey On What A CEO's Job Entails
Did anyone else notice that the directors name for the call center is 'Gaylord'?
> You can tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet).

I can't find the option in Outlook 2010. It's made working through my inbox more frustrating then it need be.
That would be simply enough to implement. I will look into it a little more. I think part of the reason I didn't do that is because I wanted it to be automatically marked off based on your git commits. But that's not as important as better usability in the long run.
It's somewhat nifty, I suspect it originated as a way to allow new packages to easily add jobs to cron if they need
Microsoft has traditionally been pretty generous with stock.
I think the reality is that anything can develop a weak moral compass if allowed to. But anything can also contribute to building a better one with good structure. Anyone would benefit from looking at the works of history's worst dictators.
Google reveals US government leads way in private data requests
Otixo: Cloud services in one place
Check the product page

http://otixo.com/product
That's disingenuous and doesn't clear up anything. Better: Perl 5 Version 16.
Some reflections:

Culture

- The "all engineering is organized by business function" is a business trick i've seen old dot-coms implement. When you have a business function that goes from making you money to costing you, just fire everyone in that business function and sell it off. You quickly get rid of what's dragging you down and continue your profitable business functions. However, this also creates duplication of some jobs, waste, and an insidious bureaucracy where teams are fighting each other. (I could have read that section wrong, but that's what it reminded me of)

- Engineering Swaps: Really? You just uproot people so they have to re-learn how something else works and take time away from getting stuff done? Couldn't you just do a couple hour-long knowledge sharing sessions between developers?

Random thoughts

- Don't design too far ahead - doesn't fighting fires and coming up on sudden, unexpected deadline changes due to lack of foresight kind of drag on your employees? You can't keep overworked code monkeys forever. It's one thing to code "quick and dirty" to get a job done. It's another thing not to plan for the future.

- Put end to end responsibility on a single engineer - so when that guy's on vacation nobody knows how to fix the thing he owns that broke?

- Process - Doesn't say if you require change control, but some sort of change alert/control system is really useful to tell people when you're changing something which may affect others, so they can immediately see what could have affected the broken thing and call the person who could have broken it.
Really good article.

One point I do disagree with is this:

It is better to deliver 20 projects with 10 bugs and miss 5 projects by two days than to deliver 10 projects that are all perfect and on time.

You never actually have such a choice, but if one did exist I'd pick 10 perfect on-time projects. The problem is I don't know what the 10 bugs are. While I'd like them to all be typos in the footer of the contacts page, they could also be data corruption or a password leak.

If I had ppl that delivered on time with no bugs, but at half the speed, it then becomes my job to do a good prioritizing the projects such that the half we do are the right half. I think the constraint of being half as fast might even force us to make better choices.
I was thinking of the decidedly non-technological search in Hudson v. Michigan actually, though I take your point that his record is mixed.
Polurls - the popurls of politics (Django site)
Personality Traits of Top Sellers
Right, but is it your premise that 4-year-olds should legally be allowed to purchase crack? That's the relevant discussion, not crack availability to adults.
Probably iOS5 NDA implied.
No, 11 numbers start with 1 in that range.
U.S. Playing Catch Up in Security for Contactless Devices
Shoot me an email to cwg23 at georgetown.edu
Just bought a copy for my iPad. I look forward to reading it!
Interesting to see that folks outside of Google are starting to understand what Google is attempting.
The other thing it introduces though is "not my code". There used to be a guy we used to call the "Teflon Don". You couldn't get a bug to stick to him. He could always find a way to move a bug to someone else -- even if it came back, he would spend more time trying to figure out how to pass it on to someone else, rather than just fix it.

At the end of the day hire good ppl. They'll do the right thing most of the time. Hire the wrong people and you'll find that your incentive structure will always lead to deviant behavior.
Hacking the Dropbox Cloud
The thing I like about this that is not a presentation but more "hands on" step-by-step tutorial/guide which teaches you how git works in practice.

Good work Tom!
Has the book "Learn C the hard way" released yet?
I was able to save the girl. You can reset the rocks by exiting the cave.

Where did you get the music?

How long did it take to get this demo going?
Looks exactly like the Soviet era planned cities to me. Huge project complexes everywhere.
All of this sounds like communism wrapped up in some hippie "green" facade.
Granted, something needs to be done, but this is NOT the answer.
Show HN: Please review my startup - www.webieu.com
I have been working on my startup for a few months now and I would really appreciate some feedback before I proceed any further.

Please review Webieu - http://www.webieu.com

Webieu allows you to search and compare hosting plans from different providers. Currently, the website can search only Linux VPS plans, but I plan to add Windows hosting, dedicated servers and possibly cloud services.

If you could help me with some feedback, I would really appreciate it. Specifically, any suggestions in the following areas will be very helpful.

1) Is the intent of the website clear when you first see it? What could be changed to make it more user friendly?

2) Are there any important parameters that I should add when choosing a plan? What else do you look for when shopping for a hosting plan/provider?

3) Are there any important features that you would like to see when comparing the hosting providers? (You can compare the features, plans and description when you go to "All VPS Providers")

I am actually an electrical engineer by education and this is the first time I am working on a website. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
This is pretty cool. Not to steal dan's thunder, but there is a similar project called git-issues that uses a separate branch instead of a dot file. Might be an approach worth checking out.

https://github.com/pjz/git-issues
and any other YC company on the list that I didn't realize was YC

inDinero is too.
You are far too attached your squishy, fragile body..

Edit: To actually add some substance to that, I mean space travel is dangerous, slow, and radioactive, and likely to remain that way for a while. So uploading to a robot really is probably the best way to go visit other planets for a while.
http://qik.com/ does at least the first two. Not sure about the 3rd.
This is exactly what CouchDB, and Mobile Couchbase for Android and iOS, is designed to fix.

Networks are slow. Mobile networks are slower. The most robust fix to the problem is to "optimistically replicate" your application data to the end user's device, so that the network latency does not become part of the user experience.

This is a strong fit for applications like CRM or geographically constrained apps, as the data sets are small enough to fit completely on your devices. For larger data sets the issue becomes: which subset of the data should be copied to the device ahead of time.

The user should never needs to wait on the network. All data operations are played against the local Couch, which handles asynchronously transmitting changes to and from the remote server, in the background. This pattern makes it much easier for app developers to make responsive applications, where users are never left waiting on multi-second round trip times.
I agree with this. Not only that, but isn't the whole reason game ratings are on the games, so that parents can know the intended audience for the game without knowing about it?

It's the parents responsibility. Plain and simple.

More than likely if the parents don't care if the children play it, odds are they're not doing a lot of things as a parent. It's not the responsibility of the government to become parents. Look at the mess they've made trying to do that with other things that obviously don't work, the drug war for instance.
With no sarcasm intended, carefully read over the Python manual, sentence by sentence, every so often. You'll learn something each time for quite a few iterations. Things that seemed a mass of pointless double-underscores will start to make sense.

Plus, you can't understand the solution until you encounter the problem. Reading the language manual every so often after you've encountered more problems is often enlightening. I've been working through the bash man page this way for years. (It's taking me a while because I don't really do much shell scripting, so I don't encounter very many problems that I need solutions to.)
Every base is base 10. There's your answer.
@Max, how did you come up with this list?
If we protect them from making difficult decisions when they're 12, they'll be forced to learn to make difficult decisions when they're 18 or 21 or 22, when bad decisions have MUCH worse consequences.
Well, I don't see any good reason to write this in C. The operations performed are very basic, and it only obscures what you're doing. Further, your program relies on Ruby and Grit (that gem itself an onerous dependency) to do things that require neither tool. This seems to be the sort of thing that should either be in pure C if you really want that, or as a standalone script that requires nothing, given its simplicity. And if it were a standalone Python script, for instance, you could easily use the "inspect" module to write some inline source to file. All that Ruby source in a C header is a very odd decision to me.

If I were writing this with the understanding that it were not to work on Windows (which you seem to have decided, upon reading the source), I think I'd just use a simple shell script.

I will add that there is no good reason at all to require an "init" command, as that could be a simple get-or-set method when another command is used.

Viewing the commit history, you need to be far more careful with how you use git and how you define your .gitignore.
That's actually a really well put together implementation of what I was trying to do. Thanks for showing it to me.

I wonder what the benefits/drawbacks of using a separate branch vs keeping it on the current branch are. One thing I can think of is that with Tigger you can maintain different task lists based on which branch you're on. Having it on a separate branch does seem like it might make it easier to manage though.
It's like when the Experts Exchange guys talk, and they sound like exactly what you would expect based on the product they make.
Your Startup Ideas are Useless without Action
That's quite true for some companies. My own view of the word is flexible, though so I'm trying to figure out the bounds.
Web Browsers live on as Platforms
Nah, you could just do a release number and it could just be Perl. Perl 2011.6.27. No biggie. And no, I don't advocate it either.
His statement is legally accurate.

When you engage in a trade transaction (as opposed to cash), the "income" from the transaction is the fair market value of the items/assets/property exchanged, at the time of the exchange.

The problem is that taxes aren't due until the end of the quarter (for businesses) or year (for individuals). Even if the value of the bitcoins has dropped, you owe taxes on the value when received. On the other hand, if the value has gone up, you don't owe any additional taxes until you use the appreciated bitcoins in another transaction.
Continuous Delivery is a Platform for Excellence, Not Excellence Itself
Ask HN: Micro-formats, are they still relevant/useful?
I'm in the process of building a social site and I was wondering if microformats are still relevant and or useful? Should I bother implementing them?

Thanks!
So true, I made that mistake with my first business. Somehow, as a little kid, it seemed completely reasonable to provide cheap web hosting with A+ support to my clients. My grand financial plan: 50 clients * 12$ / yr - 60$ = 540$ easy profit - didn't work that well :-)

I was working my ass off, helping these clients, earning next to nothing.
I don't think that's really fair. It's true that the NYT website is in the same fundamental business as content farms, that is using content to attract pageviews (forgetting the pay wall for a minute), but much more than 10% of the NYT is very high quality, compared to content farms. Sure, there's fluffy stuff printed every day, but there's also the kind of journalism and writing that you can't buy at .9c/word.

In this case, just look at the links to other Opinionator blogs on the right hand side of the linked article, for examples of stuff you won't find in any content farm.

* a five parts series on early computer scientists
* a post about a composer and musician growing up
* Stephen Strogatz's long (and excellent) series on math aimed at non-math people
* something about philosophy and rational choice that was dense enough that I couldn't skim quickly enough to summarize

Plus, I don't see ads on any of these pages. Are other people being served ads on the original article?

edited for formatting

edited again: in another browser, I see that this page does indeed have ads, so I was wrong about that.
Could it be they have installed so much B.S. on user's phones through partner business deals, that they had to do something?

Pushing this space management task onto the user is easier than prioritizing business deals, getting out of contracts, and removing old (cr)apps.

I can't wait, so I can get NASCAR, Blockbuster, and other Sprint HTC Evo crap out of my menu.
But how do you find good engineers who are also good graphic designers? That seems to be the sticking point to me.
This was one of the most helpful articles I've read. I don't have anything constructive to say - but thanks!
How is this a startup? Where, if anywhere, are you planning to make money?

For my part, hosting providers are close enough in "features" that what I really care about is reliability and service. It's simply not worth worrying about a few mb of ram or a few gb of disk or a few dollars if the servers are going to be down when you need them, or if there's not going to be anyone to talk to when there's problems.
Not to mention the fact that lower price points often pay higher % fees to payment processors because of per-transaction charges. Even PayPal micropayments is gonna take 10¢ on the dollar. My merchant account with BrainTree takes 30¢ per transaction plus a %. I don't know if some merchants offer different rates for micro payments but at that rate, you're talking about losing 30 to 35% of that $1 payment.

You might as well just build some iOS apps for you niche at those numbers.
Does anyone know if he has done a follow up presentation as mentioned at the end of the video?
Another interesting and related article from New York Times:
"Stand Up While You Read This" - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-whi...
we didn't really understand the market

Quote from your article:

"These were guys with very little knowledge of the tech industry, two designers who had a programmer working with them part time.

....

Even their lead (and only) engineer had moved back to Boston. As a casual observer from the outside, they appeared isolated and discouraged.

....

But they didn’t give up. They kept at it."

Like you said, persistence isn’t just key — it is everything.

I honestly feel that if you have determination, you can make any idea work and make it big. But it helps if you are having fun while doing it.
s/Perl 6/Perl Forever/
I'd like to see a "we gave 5,000 people standing desks and tracked them for ten years" study.