skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whilst I get where you're coming from, to me you are falling into the 'mainstream can't be cool' point of view. Just because someone is successful and rich doesn't mean they can't be judged on what they do anymore.

In some respects, I think that continuing to do what you love even after you have 'fuck you money' is one of the strongest indicators of a persons passions. Carmack could have stopped programming games years ago, yet he continues to innovate and push boundaries. For him, the rocket company IS his pet project and is just as brilliant an example of hacking as anything else. Both Gates and Jobs could have retired to a private island (or even private archipelago) years ago, instead both continued to work at their passions long past necessary. And now Gates has a new pet project, it just happens to have a lot more money and publicity than Dwarf Fortress.
Good point. But I would argue that, fundamentally, the interaction between the eyes and the brain is much different than the interaction we have with cameras. The optic system is deeply, deeply meshed with the brain's perception of reality.
In favor of arrogance
Why would you pin everything on being accepted... you're not automatically 'wrong' just because you're not in the small group of of startups 'most right' for them at a particular time. If you have the mentality that you need to have them to succeed then you are sabotaging yourself and selling yourself short.

Rejected twice, kicking ass anyway.
i'm just saying that it's not the same order of problem as not having the mail at all. also, the majority of my tags are applied using filter rules, which are relatively easy to duplicate on an offline archive.
Great concept, though porting it to the Symbian or even Android platforms could make more sense given the high prevalence of diabetics in South Asia.
I wish I could have ignored you saying that John Carmack is not a real hacker, but I couldn't.

Carmack has consistently pushed forward multiple industries on multiple fronts, and remains to this day a far better programmer than any I've ever worked with. He revolutionized computer gaming while living the life just because he loves it. He's not famous because he has Ferraris; his Ferraris are famous because they're his.

He doesn't need anyone to set him up with an annuity--maybe because his love was more mainstream than theirs, or maybe because his skill was far greater than theirs--but that in no way diminishes what he has accomplished or his motivations for accomplishing it.
Congrats to these guys. I tried working in the Made for iPod (MFI) program to build hardware devices and it's a really tough process to get Apple to open up a little.

This might open the pipeline for a lot of innovation.
"site appears to be a platform for launching sidebar ads"

Not sure what browser you are using, but ads on the site are adsense ads, which do not "Launch" anything.
The information about faces and direction of gaze leads to an important tip on presentations. Always choose images that are facing your text. Flip the image if necessary to make it happen.

See http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide023.htm... for an example of this advice being given. (And read the rest of that presentation if you have to give presentations - it is quite good.)
There's a lot of cool chemistry involved in the eye adjusting to darkness and light. My favorite fun fact is that as you adjust to darkness, the spectrum of light your eye perceives becomes slightly blueshifted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect
Rebooting my iPhone stopped the errors, and is currently downloading the update.
Perhaps you have TinyUmbrella installed?
No, Go is completely open source: http://golang.org/src/ and http://code.google.com/p/go/.
it's not obvious that there is news worth clicking for. ideally, you want google to say "this guy's interested in oslo? i bet he'd really like to know that something of note just happened over there". people who were searching for the news directly would have typed in "oslo bomb".
I'd strongly encourage you to take advantage of any driving school that Mercedes offers. I've read countless messages from individuals who insist that these safety systems (ABS, TCS, and ESP) are a detriment to their ability to drive the car, but I've experienced them in two makes of automobile (VW and BWM) now, and I now know from first-hand experience that they work fantastic. There is no replacement for testing them out for yourself.
Off-topic, but their analytics for email conversion rates are going to be way off due to this post on HN:

utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Maker+Shed+Jul+21+2011
This is the most preposterous breakout cable I've ever seen. $59 for the two connectors and a cable?
If that's considered a solution [1], this answers @kloncks' "Why is this special?" question.

[1] http://imgur.com/lQuYT
As they should.

But not when I just want to watch an item, or see the items I'm watching.
I'll reword it, I agree that it is confusing still.
Well, starting with a position of strength everywhere but search, they've been losing a billion dollars or more a year. They just had to spend $8.5B buying Skype in a market that Messenger should have owned. Microsoft doesn't even have a social network offering. Google's lead in search has continued to grow.

I said at the time that focusing primarily on search was the wrong call. It sure seems to me like results since then have proven me right.
Don't spend any money on US movies. Not that hard, because so many are terrible these days anyway. There are fantastic European and Asian films as alternatives too.
I believe AppScale supports Go, so I don't see how it's any harder to port a Go App Engine app to run elsewhere than porting Python or Java apps.

Go to Google is not like C# is to MS. Microsoft's C# platform is not free and they have complete control over the language. The Go compilers and libraries are open source. You're free to take and use them as you see fit (under the terms of its BSD license). Google can't "lock you in" to using Go.
The only thing he's missing out on is romance and sex. His occupation and lifestyle appears to satisfy all the other typical human needs. Taking a DSM perspective is not the most enlightening perspective.

The sex thing is a big problem.

In the past, great artists were able to find companionship and sex despite poverty and oddness. Why is it that hackers have such difficulty? If Richard Stallman's medium was anything other than computers he would have to fight off the women, but somehow hackers are girl-repellent despite being devoted artistic geniuses?

I don't think his devotion will last long or stay fresh unless he starts fulfilling sex and romance needs. Exposure like this NYT article should help, and also a rising income would help a lot. Then he still has to make time for women and he might find the intimacy too threatening.

Anyway for the sake of Dwarf Fortress and his art ambitions I hope he figures out a way to fulfill sex needs. Other than that I don't see anything unsustainable or obviously unhealthy about his lifestyle.
I also rely on Google for most online services but I do take a few precautions: I use my own domain for email and route it to GMail and configure outgoing email to look like it is from my domain, I backup GMail, Docs, Blogger blog, and Picasa on a regular basis, and I route my Blogger based blog to blog.MYDOMAINNAME.com.

Sure, it would be awful to lose my Google account but I could recover from it.
Yes, if I have time to dig into it and access to documentation. Stackoverflow really helps too. :-)

Of course a quick glance at a program in an unfamiliar non-procedural language defeats me.
Come on man. You are delusional!!! Terrorist attacks are 90% by muslim extremists... Stop living in a fantasy world... new york, washington dc, london, spain, egypt, turkey, mumbai, kenya, yemen, thailand, Philippines, russia etc... I am not saying all of them but 90% is probably very accurate...

Instead of blaming it on others, it should be addressed by the muslim world and not just denied. When a radical christian does something like, he is denounced by all christian leaders and people.

Love thy enemy != Kill the infidels
I'm pretty sure email competency is required at almost every college these days. Certainly at my college, and at those of almost everyone I know, and I am not in a technology related field.
All resources are infinite in Minecraft in that context. Rather what is meant is that even if you kept within a single small area of the map you could generate infinite supplies of those resources. When you cut down a tree the leaves drop saplings which can grow new trees, for example. There's a list of renewable Minecraft resources here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Renewable_Resources
I hope that this can lead to a cool system of iPad driven arduinos!
Can't wait for elite749.com
The purpose of a corporation is to further the aims of England, under royal charter, and as a reward is allowed to make a profit.

That's how it was in the 1500s.
sure but I want my television and radio ads to be changed in real time, google is just a small slice of what I do in a day.
> Supports communication at speeds up to 57.6 Kbps.

Is that a technical limitation or typo? Many devices use 115.2 Kbps if I'm not mistaken
500 years, each, in prison for all who knew of it? Lovely.

Unfortunately it wouldn't come with its own Kafkaesque implementation and thus wouldn't be half as frustrating as watching your company die while imprisoned half a world away from home, facing obvious yet insidious institutional corruption, and thus wouldn't match the distress they caused.
The secretary is going to have a lot of disavowing to do...
The majority of googles revenue comes from exactly the fact that they can sell targeted advertising.

Neglecting that is what is unnecessary.
Yea, I generally try to examine the URL before posting links on HN for that reason.
I'd like remind everyone that, as it says on the site, this conference is for "anyone working at an ad agency, advertiser, or publisher," because we seem to have a lot of people trying to register who don't fall into one of those 3 categories.
"Extending New Relic's Custom Parameters," A Guest Post from Papertrail
So does anyone know if there's a conversion chip in there or whether the standard iPhone connector has a serial pin on it. I seem to remember someone hooking up a GPS to the iPhone 2 and plugging serial straight on. There are already a number of breakout plugs out there, so I'd be surprised if this opens up radical new innovation.

As a side note, other people have used the audio jack for I/O, like the iPhly Remote Control or Square
On Succeeding Steve Jobs
I say... if HN wanted to discuss Google changing their front-page search results to exclude realtime/twitter-like stuff this isn't the article to promote discussion.

But I suspect it's only on the front page because it's a topical (and terrible) news story that couldn't be on the homepage without some slight tech-angle to make it HN valid.

Cynical.
Sorry. I hear what you're saying and I think you are deeply wrong. (Oh no, someone is wrong on the Internet! :)

Carmack, Gates, Zuck and Woz are the real deal. Saying they aren't because others toil in obscurity is some hopeless romanticism about hacker culture. A heart warmer, maybe?, but not justified.

Just because financial outcomes are not matched to your hacker ideal doesn't invalidate either approach. The rich famous hackers were also good at business and publicity. Not everyone wants that or is good at all three, which is the case with Dwarf Fortress.

Money is not the scorecard. Read the article. That point is addressed.
If 'January 1986' is meant to refer to Challenger, keep in mind that Columbia was launched Jan 12 1986[1], and Challenger was launched Jan 28, 1986[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-61-C

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L
Yeah, because someone downloading documents, at the rate supplied by your server(!), is obviously an attacker.

For what it's worth, it would have been obvious they weren't facing a DoS.
Ebay has harnessed the power of Precogs?
How to Avoid the 7 Deadly Website Sins
They are involved in Afghanistan...
These days he splits his non-Ferrari-driving-time between hacking on next gen. cross-platform game engines and hacking on rockets (at Armadillo aerospace). He may be a successful hacker, but he's most definitely a hacker right down to the core.
iPhone, iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS (x2), iPhone 4, iPod Touch 2nd Gen (x2), iPod Touch 4th Gen, iPad, iPad2, cheap android phone.
Finally: SSL for Custom Domains on AppEngine (Powered by CloudFlare)
I'm not sure why this problem (the general problem - the risk of valid accounts being arbitrarily blocked) isn't an easy fix for google. Most spammers/fraudsters seek efficiency, so just take that efficiency away. When an account is first suspected, start requiring a CAPTCHA for every email sent. Then, when the time comes to block, let there be an annoying but doable automated procedure for unblocking (perhaps involving emails sent from the addresses of several of your frequent contacts), with a time delay - after your first block, it takes 5 hours to unblock, after your second, 1 day, and so on.

It would reduce what is now a very scary prospect for people who (like me) put too many eggs in G's basket, to a minor inconvenience rarely encountered. And I can't see that it would make life much easier for spammers.
Definitely. Intact the most important paper on eyesight (IMHO) concludes that the way to guard against myopia is to spend more time outdoors where most objects in your vision will be far away.
I'll find the link when I'm not on this stupid iPad!
Review of Test Equipment for TIM in June Qpedia Thermal eMagazine
I have never had any trouble with "jon@jrock.us". People type the characters in your email address verbatim. They do not randomly add stuff.
Follow @AskMDN on Twitter: Mozilla's experts will answer your Web dev questions
Real-time audio programming 101: time waits for nothing
Yes and no. Advertisers want to know how well a particular program performs, even if it's by referral. When examining their performance in Google Analytics, and noticing that their conversion rate is atypical, they'll likely end up looking for traffic sources. Once they do that, they'll see the high number of visitors from news.ycombinator.com, and the mystery will be solved.
This is why I have my own server... If everything gets deleted, it's my fault (I should have been backing up). I'm not going to punish myself for not paying attention to my non-existent terms of service.

I recognise that with the 'cloud', comes simplicity... but I'm not sure if I will ever be able to let go of my own data.
Note that P/E ratios are sensitive to leverage (e.g., share buy backs create higher P/E ratios without altering fundamental profitability by increasing leverage), so the trend towards low leverage among the largest tech companies could explain some of this.
House Speaker Pulls Out of Talks to Raise Debt Ceiling
Google+ Kicks Alyssa Milano Kicked To Curb
It has serial on the connector. It is 3.3V TTL level so you will need a converter to turn it into 'real' serial.

If you jailbreak a device you can access this port without any problems and do cool stuff.

Just be sure to properly buffer and convert the signals. You don't want to kill your device.

Sparkfun sells connectors in a breakout board. So does DealExtreme I think.
Norway has had troops active in Afghanistan since basically day 1.
Just because we are bereaved does not make us saps!
What law would people bring a class action lawsuit against Google with? The same one they used against Microsoft to make Windows less buggy?
There's a little bit of ambiguity. Starfleet didn't use money, at least not explicitly, but there were humans who amassed personal fortunes, and other Federation worlds that had market economies. Money was also referenced several times in various Treks [0], sometimes with a character talking about how humans don't have money, and other times with a character talking about selling something, charging for something, or being willing to spend money for something ("I'd give real money if he'd shut up" - McCoy, referencing Chang's Shakespeare quotes, ST VI)

[0] http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Money
Why is this better than Bluetooth? All the iOS devices have it and there are breakout boards with RS232. There are even some that are cheaper than this cable...
This is awesome and I hope to get our company to buy into this concept!

Feels similar to what the internet archive does.
Give Directly
Thunderbolt MacBook Air Shipments Hit 500,000
Norway's troops in Afghanistan have contributed to the deaths of far more civilians than were killed in this episode.
Killing people is a bad long term policy.
It's amazing that it's even an issue.
Gruber makes a good point about the likelihood of a successor coming from within Apple, but the following seems paranoid to me:

>I can’t see how a speculative and sketchily-sourced story such as this, published 30 minutes before Apple announced overwhelmingly positive financial results, was not intended to dampen, to some degree, the positive effect of those results on Apple’s stock.

What interest does the WSJ have in manipulating Apple stock? This is effectively what Gruber claims.
You pay the Apple tax if you make a device like this. You will also need to license a chip from Apple that does some crypto to validate your device and you will have to buy the connector from a specific vendor that is blessed by Apple.

It all adds up.

I love how Google is letting the market go crazy with their recently announced external accessory APIs. That is what Apple should have done. Of course it is highly incompaitble with their tight control on anything iOS related :-/
RNA-Based Cholesterol Drug Is Readied for Human Tests
How is this any different than Knoppix with scratch turned off?
> equivalent would be that you're allowed to take out a fire insurance policy on your neighbors house, and then proceed to smoke cigarettes and flick the lit butts at his house

Yes, hedge funds (and everyone) are allowed to bet on this. If there's an issue here, the question is who is selling fire insurance policies (at non-exorbitant rates) when they know that arsonists are around? If it's European banks that know they'll be bailed out, that's a problem.

In theory, all CDS trades are registered with DTCC since 2009, and my understanding is this works pretty well for contracts as standardized and liquid as Greece. See also the WSJ article linked by ristretto below.

source: http://www.dtcc.com/news/press/releases/2009/cds_contract_va...

data: http://www.dtcc.com/products/derivserv/data_table_i.php?tbid... (see 'Hellenic Republic')

some analysis of data integrity: http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0912y.htm

thanks to: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/debunking-some-myths-about-...)
"The most aggressive thing they've done is commit handfuls of troops to a multinational "peacekeeping" mission"
ie: They are aiding the Americans in killing civilians. I guess that the civilians are now fighting back. Funny how that happens...
Easily the best post in Daring Fireball in months.

Reminds me of 'The Tablet' (http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/the_tablet) and others to just how different Gruber is from other tech writers, even apple-related-tech writers like Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, etc. He throughly thinks about the topic with tremendous insight and unique points of view.

This post is an interesting view on the world of tech, finance and journalism.
Dwarf Fortress sounds to me like nethack in its difficulty but unlike nethack in its endlessness. You can play all you want, but there will be no end!
What is needed is to charge the company directly as well as any specific people. Nothing should happen without oversight and that's the company's responsibility, in the way a warranty return is the company's, not the mailroom guy's, responsibility.

The discussion is a bit like the Chinese-Room thought experiment. Would you charge the worker if the manual on deciphering Chinese was actually a manual on running a Ponzi scheme in Chinese? In some hypotheses it might be unclear to the workers that the process is ultimately unjust, but practically (speaking as someone who's been (briefly) employed at a few shady companies), intentional ignorance of their effects, and usually an attitude that the customer deserved it for not knowing better, are pervasive from customer service up to management.
I talked to the person with this complaint, then looked into it myself. The account was suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service. After digging into the situation, my personal opinion is that Google took appropriate action. I'm sorry that I can't go into more detail.
I agree. Which is why I'm not overly concerned with what they think about the subject. ;) My supervisor seemed content with "doctor's recommendation" once when I mentioned it to him.
RailsCamp New England Registration is open Aug 19 - 22, Bryant Pond, ME
If I remember correctly, your device does not actually get full serial port access. Instead Apple provides a protocol made up of data packets that you can send to and from your device.

These packets must be signed by a little crypto chip that you have to license from Apple.

Yes, very tight control.

A device like this is not simply a cable. It actually contains a little micro-controller that reads and writes Apple's serial packets on one end and turns it into real RS232 serial on the other end.

So there is overhead. Enough for the speed to drop down considerably.
That is awesome; thanks for the link! I always expected that we used a more complex algorithm, but this extremely simple one probably works just as well.
Did Google's Photovine sprout from Piictu?
Yes, but only to an extent. There are no (to the best of my knowledge) actually blond arabs (though hair dye is a dime a dozen these days, of course). And Semites can generally be readily identified by certain features that while they can be shared with Caucasians are rarely not present on Arabs (bridge of the nose, the brow, the eye placement, etc.).
I have not played Dwarf Fortress, but is the game really so processor intensive that a 1 GHz dual-core iPad 2 (with GPU) could not keep up?
I've not seen a full crack before. Links?
Starbucks enters joint venture in China
Firefox add-on: instant-address-bar-search for Google, Wikipedia, Youtube ...
If the World Lived Like New Yorkers, We’d All Fit Into Texas
TwitLonger - When you talk too much for Twitter