skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just just "5,340" as a result, this is an hint for me that I spend too much time trying to improve my hearing skills and too little trying to learn words outside the domain I mostly use English for (computers, programming, technology, ...).

I wonder if there is some good web site that helps you learning new words. An iPhone application will also work for me, but I need one that is able to also tell me the sound of the word. I searched a bit in the past without good results.
Ideas for giant hacks against drought and desertification
Where the fuck is this
I felt the same. Also there were some words I thought I knew what they meant, but my definition would only be partially correct.

Also some definitions you can guess at - do these count as part of your vocabulary or not? E.g. Clerisy, can be easily deduced to be the class of clerics, but not sure if I'd be able to say if it was a real word or not.
I never really 'got it'. Having to frame discussions in the form of a question seemed limiting, and a bit of a barrier.

It's useful as a Q&A, but I don't see it as a social network. Quora does seem better than Yahoo Answers though.
Khan Academy - not sure how far 'post school' it goes though. Try the exercises, definitely good for a refresher at least.
it takes a few days for the body to reprogram itself for freezing ambient temperatures after spending months in roasting ambient temperatures

I noticed this empirically with myself whenever I traveled from California to Sweden in the winter. Coming to Sweden, I'd be cold all the time for the first couple of days, and then back in CA, I'd have hot flashes for a few days there. Nice to know that I wasn't imagining things. :)
Any idea what to do on an iPad? I'm stuck on the hipster typewriter image.
StackOverflow, because of its subject matter will never be mainstream, but I it's immensely popular among those in the programming community, and that's a pretty huge market.
what he said but vim instead of emacs.
Why? What could that possibly demonstrate except that you're vindictive and put such little value on your time that you're willing to go to a recruiting event just to pay back the wrong person for some perceived way you've been wronged.
If you can't see the point of operating systems research, how else would you like to see the state of the art advanced?
I don't like it too much. It's still based on designing for desktop first.

I prefer the ones that use a mobile first approach, which is more future-proof and is supported on more devices.

Also, another thing to consider is fluid-width vs fixed-width. Fluid width layouts are harder, but much more future proof. The mobile device landscape changes fast, and there are lots of sizes to design for. A fluid-width website would be much better in this case.

Some of these are Gridless[1], HTML5 Boilerplate[2] and 320 and Up[3].

[1]: http://thatcoolguy.github.com/gridless-boilerplate/

[2]: http://html5boilerplate.com/

[3]: http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/320andup/
The President in India is a figurehead. No real power. How many PMs have been Muslim? Chief ministers? Riiigh.

> top Bollywood actors are Muslim

How is this an indication of how good Muslims are? This is like saying most athletes in the US are black, so African Americans are doing great in America.

> "some animosity towards Muslims"

Selective memory here.
If you're interested in that image: http://fiftyfootshadows.net
μTorrent became popular because it was so lean. I feel uneasy about all these superfluous features they've added and are planning on adding.

It's a single solution to find, get and play content anywhere, on any device.[1]—That's the complete antithesis of μTorrent, and sounds a lot more like Miro and Vuze.

Also, considering the torrenting community, a paid version is a very poor idea—it'll be interesting to see how many people who run it will have actually paid for it.

[1] http://www.utorrent.com/community/labs/plus
We're using the window procedure to keep our house near Boston cool, and it definitely works. Most of the time it's sufficient (except when I turn on the 3x24" monitors...), but when there's a heat spell and nighttime temps don't drop below 22C or so, it heats up to a very uncomfortable level over a few days and we have to use the AC at least to keep the bedroom at a reasonable temperature.
Watch,harry potter,online
watch,harry potter,online
first film which earned Deathly Hallows 18.3 million in its first three days in November last year. The new film is expected to more than 20 million its opening weekend.
Erik Quanstrom has a version which fixes some of Rc's faults, like having no return statement and the weird ifs behaviour.
State of Haskell 2011 Survey
Well, I don't know about that but Somalia seems like an example that goes against that rule. They have had no stable government since 1991 and been fighting ever since yet they all belong to the same tribe, they speak the same language and are all of the same religion.
See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, first section. It may not have been news to you, but some of it was news to me. And definitely interesting.
The licence isn't the only weird thing about truecrypt, the fact that they've been known to change their binaries (as I believe was reported on HN a while back) without posting a changelog, the fact that no one knows who the devs really are etc... all somewhat suspicious for such a high profile tool. But maybe I'm too paranoid in my paranoia.

I for one welcome our new overlords!
While it is certainly true that patents are not required for progress to occur, I don't believe anyone is arguing that.

The question is whether more progress occurs under the current patent system than would without it (or under an altered system). Are inventors more likely to be properly rewarded for their inventions, thereby motivating them to invent? And does the value of this motivated invention outweigh the value of allowing everyone the ability to freely build on others' inventions?

It is certainly a tricky question to answer, but you can look at the problems faced by countries that don't have strong patent enforcement to get an idea of what would happen if we scrapped the system entirely.

It does seem to me that the situation has gotten out of hand, with completely obvious inventions (especially in the software field) being granted patents, but that doesn't mean that doing away with the entire system is the answer - which your argument here seems to imply.
Find the Best of the Best Blogs for Entrepreneurs
Quora is fucked.
A long list of online resources for startups
Rising Tides Lift All Ships
So great man! I'm so happy for this, although the second part is already written I'm definitely going to mention this. This is almost the same solution as I've come up with there!
Thanks!
Is it a good deal?
This would be even more fantastic if it could generate slides from something like Markdown instead of having you write HTML manually.
The perceived likelihood of success makes an impact as well, I think. For example, much of my family were Pontian Greeks from the Black Sea coast, and at one point their attitude was very similar to that of Palestinians--- commitment to regaining the lost homeland and reconstituting their former nation, anger at expulsion, etc.

After the 1920s or so, that sort of irredentist sentiment slowly waned as it became clear that Greece was never getting any of Asia Minor back, so there was really no point in spending your life with that as your goal; might as well just learn standard modern Greek and integrate into Greek society. But I can imagine an alternate history where Pontian Greeks are living in neighboring Greece in refugee camps, considering it only a temporary location while agitating to recover their homeland.
Guide:Jailbreak iOS 4.3.4 on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
Just because an individual is browsing HN does not mean the individual is procrastinating. Please consult a dictionary for an accurate definition of the term.
didnt try it on the ipad yet. doesn't it work correctly?
Brain do not have real distinction for dreams and real stuff. If you "live through" your dream - this is the same for your brain as to actually get all inputs from the outside world - that's what I am talking about.

What you are talking about - to dream enough to want it "so bad you can taste it", but not actually "taste" it. That's where you get hooked into going through A, B, C .... to get finally to Z.

I.e. there is fine balance. The question - how to find this balance and how to teach kidos to master it.

PS: IMHO =)
i think the biggest problem with Quora is that it was hyped up to be more than it was. It's just a Q&A site, and it was hyped up as being a Facebook killer.
They have to do their homework, ask around, and make the best possible guess. And more importantly, focus on the more general skills than the specific framework.

If someone is getting started in a vacuum, they're doing it wrong.
In my own personal adventure with this (DO vs THINK) I have the following thoughts on the subject...

1. "DOING" doesn't necessarily always mean what you think it means. DOING simply means "forward-moving-action", even if it isn't the super-important-thing-you-have-been-procrastinating-on-for-a-week.

2. I've found that simply the act of DOING anything that moves me forward, seems to move ALL my efforts forward; a lot of times, just enough to get me over the hill that has blocked me in the first place.

3. Thinking has its place though. DOING without any THINKING... that isn't any better than constant thinking with no doing. I currently have a 50/50 split between the two and end up thinking of critically important things from time to time that I wouldn't have had I kept DOING non-stop.

4. DOING is suppose to be fun/challenging/engaging. If it never is, you might be working on the wrong project or in the wrong line of work. Don't be afraid to step back for a sec and think about that, maybe look at some alternatives down the road or start dabbling in some hobby work to try and find what sparks your soul.

5. If you have been stuck THINKING about something for a month and not moved on it yet because it doesn't feel like you "have it figured out yet", set aside a day or an afternoon and commit to DOING it with the following allowances you give yourself:

- This is a dry-run, nothing serious.
- Be as hacky as possible, move as fast as possible.
- You are just "playing around".

I've found I get stuck when I need to make a next-move that isn't totally clear and I think it's committing me to something long-term.

Once you get that momentum moving forward on whatever has been blocking you, you'll get clarity that you are either on the right track (then go back and clean up what you did) or you had it all wrong this whole time (pivot time!).

This is just what has helped me (a chronic thinker).
Google do share the percentage of advertising revenue that they give to publishers: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...

(It’s 68% for AdSense for content, and 51% for Adsense for search.)
From my experience, telling everybody around may work both ways - it may put you in to frame where you HAVE to get to your target, or get enough discussion to experience it and forget about it. But in general, I would say yes - for me it is better to keep things in secret, try to build dependencies on these targets and slowly go through it.
the problem with that is that quality takes a nose-dive. they tried to address that by "enforcing" quality with various arbitrary rules, moderators, etc, and pretty much failed - it created an alienating, stifling, clique-like atmosphere (in a sense they violated the "social contract" - a social site is for being social, yet they were penalising certain, normal, social behaviours).

so i left; sounds like they still haven't found a solution (it doesn't help that it's predominantly populated from one social group - one not unlike hn, so i won't comment further on that ;o).

what i argued at the time was that they should encourage quality by giving more support to people to cultivate their answers - to get feedback, edit, and improve. http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Cooke/Why-did-you-delete-all-you...
Looks good!

Thank you.
Sounds like you have your weekend project.
Cheap Indiana Health Insurance Rates
I live in a relatively wealthy part of Mexico City. I don't know my neighbors, and, for the most part, I don't think that they know each other either.

Nobody here has air conditioning or proper heating. The climate is very benign, rarely getting hot or cold. There's little need for interior climate control, and even less insulation: windows are paper thin and don't shut very tight, among other things. (However, a lot of people do have small portable electric heaters, which are very inefficient to begin with and made more so by the lack of insulation.)

Maybe having or not having AC plays a role as to whether you get to know your neighbors, but it's not the only and certainly not the defining one. Television and not working where you live are, I suspect, far more important.
Ask HN: I'm starting a service to send solicited ads via sms. Your thoughts?
Hi, I' m in Kenya . I want to start a
service where ;
Users who would
like to to receive sms ads can sign up.
Users in turn receive mobile phone
credit per sms ad that they
receive .

Advertisers can then use
my service (from the website) to target
users with relevant ads . I 'll then send
this ads to the relevant users via
sms. I' ll charge advertisers a
constant service charge , profit margin
plus cost per sms ad
sent.

Questions
1. As an advertiser
what things would you like to know
about users in order to determine
which users to send which ads to? eg
age , marital status, gender etc</p >

2. As
a user would you be willing to join
such a service . If yes, on what
conditions < p>

3 .Any other advice, in
biz or your thoughts are
welcome .</p >

anything ,
HTML5 visualisation of global migration flows
Google reader mobile, even on the desktop, because it let's me read a few stories at a time. I'd love 2 features:

1) let me make the damn font bigger
2) let me customize how many stories I view at a time. 15 is too many for me.

Btw, I wrote a bookmarklet to bump the font size up on reader mobile if anyone wants it.
And dropping a few concrete blocks onto railway lines could completely immobilise most countries with fear. Ditto for a few shooting sprees in shopping malls. It's easy to think of any number of utterly trivial ways to bring a society to a standstill.

The fact that these things aren't happening every day gives the lie to the "war on terror."
Quora is extremely useful. It eliminates a lot of my visits to about.com style websites and replaces them with structured q&a. It also adds a layer of transparency (you can see who has answered a question, their 'credentials') and get a feel for who to trust.

It's quick and the answers to any questions so far have been insightful. I fail to see how structuring all q&a dispersed over the web to a centralised site is a bad thing?

In addition Quora facilitates learning over time for topics and even individual questions I am interested. I absolutely love the follow topic & question features, i've learned a lot about topics I am passionate about using them. Information I probably would never have been able to find in any other way prior to Quora.
While I agree with you, most people in America could cause a lot more trouble buying a gun and driving around with that.

I realise that is a very stretched metaphor, but even stupid people can cause serious problems, if they don't mind going to jail for them. I'm sure cell blocking would be a jailable offense. Harder (but not impossible) to get caught for however.
Pretty much... I like to tell people that it's not really cold here until your snot starts freezing the instant you go outside. That tends to happen at 10-15 below zero (Fahrenheit).
Well, to be fair there was a certain kind of logic behind my "shiny buttons will save Quora" argument:

1) Pivot
2) Redesign
3) Existing members come for the redesign and stay for the new Quora, thus giving the new strategy a chance.

Although you could say that when all you have is Photoshop, every site looks like it needs to be redesigned… ;)
Fahrenheit was invented by a guy named Fahrenheit, not Faraday.
Same issue on iPhone: just seeing the first slide I assume (the typewriter), and tapping on it or outside does nothing.
Are there other tips in launch marketing that could be added?
> Faraday

Fahrenheit. (It doesn't seem to be true that he intended 100 degrees to be human body temperature. It's possible that he specifically wanted the difference between body temperature and freezing point to be (a power of 2) degrees.)
I don't worry about this too much.
If I know about one person (you) that thought it was good enough to keep thinking about it even after reading, I'm sure it says more people did the same. :)
From what I recall something like 50% of the code is for device drivers, though there is interesting stuff going elsewhere. LWN covers it pretty well (in fact nowhere else really does at all) http://lwn.net/Kernel/

Also, those stats don't take into how used something is. You can dump 200k lines for a device only used by 0.1% of users, yet if you wrote something of 2k lines, used by every user (scheduling/filesystem etc.) you wouldn't make the table, even though your impact is greater.
Its a dry heat. I live in the Tampa, Florida area, and once it gets past 84 degrees, I feel quite miserable.

My current dwelling is a 50s ranchette with concrete block walls. The orginal Jalousie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalousie_window) windows have been replaced, but the house has no insulation in the attic.

The house had several window A/Cs, one was from the early 80s. I replaced them with a 3-zone minisplit.

I cannot recommend the minisplit enough. Of course, this house is less than 1,000 sqft of A/C'ed space.

You're lucky, you can just use swampcoolers. We have to use electricity to keep cool.

I've been to Arizona in the summer and prefer that kind of heat.
Definitely. I would have liked the test to be "would you be comfortable using this word in a sentence? (if you had to)" Even as a native speaker there are times when I know the definition of a word, but opt for a simpler word because I don't know all of the implications of using it.
Visuals are easy to follow after a few seconds, looks useful.

A minor point: as usual with these cases, I wonder if the selected data sources do not contradict each other, and when they do, how the choice is made.

Another point is the definition of a migrant. Perhaps it was taken from a data source, but I would like to see it explicitly stated on the site: words do not always have the same meaning for everyone.
You mentioned caves and I found this...
http://thecavehouse.com/
Domain names with curse words in them are a big turn off for me. I'm not going to share this on Facebook, forward this to my friends, etc... even though it's a pretty cool idea.

Other than the domain name, it seems like there's an incentive to post if you want a place identified, but little incentive to identify places. Something like badges ("world traveler", "Canada expert", etc.) or a wall-of-fame could be good incentives.
I hadn't heard of the Carrington event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859). Even in 1859 it caused havoc, so it's interesting to think what it would do to modern infrastructure. From the article:

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
D'oh, stupid thinko, sorry for the confusion. (And Faraday and Fahrenheit don't even share the same soundex...).
Their remit also covers fighting the trade of counterfeited goods. There are a lot of Italian luxury items being counterfeited around the world every day (Armani, Prada etc), so the GdF was given a lot of power and money to fight knockoff traders. Then the local RIAA-equivalents managed to equate unauthorized copies of digital content as "counterfeited goods", hence involving the GdF on policing the internet -- previously a task left to the Postal Police (the separate body policing communications in Italy -- yes, it's weird how we have so many different corps, no wonder real criminals are never caught).

The GdF is powerful, much more than the average Police corps, and they really don't understand the internet. Nobody can reign them in, at the moment -- some members of government are currently under investigation for corrupting GdF elements to (guess what) favour PM Berlusconi's businesses.

Yeah, Italy is fucked up, that's why I don't live there anymore. Not that things are getting much better in the UK...
The methodology of the blog post you point to repeatedly is laughable. The main objection is that the cross-sectional correlation the author claims is completely incompetent to show causation.
That's pretty sad to hear, in a societal sense. What kind of work does an office manager at your company do?
rc is a truly beautiful thing.

I wrote a pretty complex web framework and CMS with it ( http://werc.cat-v.org ), and the more I used it, the more I loved it.

I found it to be extremely well crafted, with every feature fitting beautifully with the rest, it misses many fancy things people expect, but once you know your way around what it has, you can do almost anything.

Like awk, is one of those few languages that you can fully keep in your head, and that plus the power of calling other Unix/Plan 9 commands makes it very effective.
I always assumed the heat-capacity of my bones took much longer to change temperature than the muscles and flesh of my body, but once it does, it lasts longer too.
Sure! https://github.com/inportb/playground/blob/master/Pinako/gev...
The lack of return statements is rarely missed, although it could be handy in some cases, there are ways around it.

There is nothing weird about ifs' behavior once you understand it.

Byron's rc tried to 'fix' ifs, and made everything worse.
This is extremely cool. There have been a few other Emacs webserver implementations, but none showing this much promise/active development. I'm really excited to see where this goes!
Ad serving solutions
Solar panels are expensive and not very efficient and require a decent amount of square footage. Plus, batteries are expensive too and can take up a decent amount of space.
Here's what I don't understand about Quora - at the end of the day, all of the arguments in favor of why Quora is so good, especially arguments put forward by Robert Scoble, boil down to one thing: lots of interesting people post to it.

Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or easy to pull off - hell, Hacker News itself is the same, in that I only use it because of the great people here.

I just don't see how you can take it mainstream.

It's not so much that no one outside of the valley uses it, it's that, if people outside of the Valley DID use it, no one would like it anymore!

That's not a good position to be in.
It's actually rather fun to watch in person, though I can understand why you think it's bizarre. It's, as far as I can see, really ceremonial - though it remains a big deal for the security forces personnel involved.
Took me a while to figure out that it's only keyboard controlled.

How about mouse input, or at least some "please use a keyboard" thing?
Today? Probably none. In ten or twenty years? God only knows. IMO, it's insane to ignore the possibility.
That's a really good analysis of the current limitations of this framework. I'm wondering whether you happened to send this criticism to Skeleton's creator to see if it's something he's aware of, or something that he intends to improve.