skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The images are quite nice. I assume some serious time was spend in photoshop getting them to look this way. I especially liked the blue city photo.

Other than that, I have to agree with what`s already been said. My first impression was that this was a photographer`s website. Then I read the text on the right and realized you are a web design company. Alright, but what kind of web design company? What exactly do you do. Make me WANT to enter my email. Tell me you're passionate about web design. Tell me that you've been pleasing clients with your awesome work since 2008. Maybe even tease me with a few links to some of your incredible work. You do web design. You do it well. There are clients out there that would be so much happier if they knew you were designing their website. You've got to get this across.

Good luck!
My mother lives in a small European 5k residents town, she does not spend much time on the Internet and she watches mostly satelite television. Yet she was interested in choosing the best among 4 or 5 offers -- just because she had a choice. Her offer was much better than everything I've seen in the US, and it still was only medium price to speed ratio, because she does not live in a big city. She does not actually need the amount of bandwidth she bought, but it was cheap, so she got that nevertheless.

It's not the customers demands that drive the prices down, it's the fear that other companies put better offer. If there are no other companies to worry about, they happily retain high prices, and that's what happens in the US.
Ask HN:  Most desired skill set in Silicon Valley? (RoR, PHP, MySQL, etc.)
Hello fellow Hn'ers. Via Southwest wifi on a flight back from San Jose, let's get a consensus on the most desirable skill sets in Silicon Valley for which companies are looking to hire (RoR, PHP, MySQL, etc.).

Directions: Leave only skill sets; up-vote if skill set already present, add skill set as comment if not present.
Thanks, will definitely be looking into various forms of reliability and maybe have some mirror servers just to provide 100% uptime.
I think multi-site stores would be a good target for this kind of app. Removing the need for networking/synchronisation across multiple sites can be handy. Especially if you show stock levels that let them easily look up accurate numbers at other stores.

I am not convinced 100% uptime is a showstopper, shops can revert to a paper receipt book temporarily if needed. Internet outages are inevitable, even if your server is still up.
Lead Software Engineer
Descriptions:
WB, Inc. is seeking a Lead Software Engineer. We are seeking an excellent programmer, but more importantly, a dedicated worker. We want someone who is passionate, creative, and hard working. We need a risk taker.

WB is seeking to shake up a conventional industry. We want to take the social sphere and crash it into the professional world, all through the use of media. Thus, we believe it is highly beneficial to have a background of coding for social media sometime in your past. If you have it, please point it out in your e-mail. If you don’t, tell us why it doesn’t matter.

We are offering a competitive salary plus equity but if you are applying simply for the money, don’t. This will be a demanding job, especially for the first few months, while we all work to get the site built and launched. It won’t be conventional hours or typical workdays. But it will be rewarding.

You have the opportunity to join the WB core team, lead the programming unit, and put your creativity and vision to constructive use. As WB’s Lead Software Engineer, you have the opportunity to be a part of something that doesn’t bore you. You have the chance to test your abilities, challenge yourself, be exhilarated every day at work.

If this is you, please submit your resume, a short e-mail describing your programming capabilities, and examples of your work to NAM2132@columbia.edu.

More information will be provided if selected past the interview stage.

Qualifications:
WB is seeking programmers with:
- Experience in building social media sites
- Enthusiasm, willingness to work hard, and creativity
- Knowledge of php and ajax is beneficial

Offering:
$60,000-$80,000/year plus equity depending on experience and abilities
Ha, I don't know if I should laugh or cry because students in my school actually DID talk like that!

The buzzword soup that MBAs pick up is definitely one of the weaker elements of the program on the whole. I've had professors admit that they want their students to learn these terms ("paradigm shift" is my favourite) so that they can "sound smart at cocktail parties"
What Would You Do? No One’s Calling Back
I was looking at a suscription model, kind of like what the 37 signals guys do, but with more affordable pricing. I was thinking something like $20-$30 a month for the basic package.

Thank you for your pointer about functionality and system threats, I hadn't really thought about that and will be looking into it very thoroughly.
This is how you get attention from VC's
Awesome video we created as part of our application to VCs to get some attention.
Excel's basic math errors are 99% of the reason I do my stats with python.
Ralph Lauren POLO Great Britain
Thanks ottoid, I'll let you know via private message or email as soon as I have a beta setup online, which should be coming in a couple of weeks tops so you can give it a go. It would be tremendously helpful to have someone actually try it out with real data.

The database is real time, and I'm definitely beginning to look into some sort of setup that would allow me to offer near 100% uptime.
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For another, much older, take on this check out "Light Up The World". One of my old professors has been working on this since the 90's, with the same goal of driving the Kerosene lamps out of existence.

I'm curious if there's much in the way of new technology in these lamps, at least enough to justify a patent.

EDIT: Link: http://www.lutw.org/
Sophisticated injection abuses the Twitter trend service
If you've got the money and the time, I say do it. It'll help your people-skills - not because they teach you how to manage people, but because you'll be doing lots of group work with people from different age groups, social status', ethnic backgrounds, and professional backgrounds. It's a real challenge to work with so many different types of people.
http://hackety-hack.com/
Microsoft Faces the Post-PC World
The Microsoft Kinect is by far the most genuinely futuristic piece of technology I've used this year. It's something that didn't even exist last year at this time, and has clearly pushed technology, in general, into entirely new territory.
Hi redguava, thank you for your input.

As you mention the app currently does allow you to run a multi-site setup, as well as a multi-company setup for those lucky people running more than one company.

Seeing the concern for 100% uptime I will be looking into offering as high uptime as possible, maybe adding some EC2 instances ontop of my Linode servers or something of the sort.

Thanks again!
It is a reality in most places. I've looked for smaller ISPs in several areas where I've lived, and there is nothing. It's basically AT&T or Cox/Time-Warner or jump in the lake.
Check out psutil (http://code.google.com/p/psutil/). I discovered it the other day when I needed to get a list of open ports used by an ssh client running in a subprocess, and it was as easy as this:

sshc = psutil.Process(pid)
sshc.get_connections()

It allows you to upconvert process ids, and it has its own wrapper of Popen that returns Process objects. It also seems to have well thought out windows compatibility, if that matters to you.

:D <- My face when I found it.
But don't take it to the extreme. Do talk a little bit 'What is the problem officer', 'Do you know why I pulled you over? -- No", "Am I free to go?" when it takes longer than it should and a little politeness can go a long way when your pulled over for a minor ticket. Shut up in all other situations, detainment, questioning, asking to search and especially once your arrested.
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This.

In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files. Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word.
The head to head test vs. a cash register is a fantastic idea, thank you! Basically, from what I've seen thus far, cost-wise I'd like the webapp to be the affordable solution, 'cause most of these POS setups can get really pricey from the get go.

Speed is pretty snappy right now, but this can vary once it's running with a couple of actual clients on, so I'll have to look into it a bit more carefully, start caching whatever's possible to, and so forth, so thank you for that suggestion as well.
To carry this too far, I think the analogy demands that language/grammar/punctuation are the ingredients. They end up in the customer's mouth. The tools, be it edlin or a pear peeler, only make the chief/writer's job easier. You have to use good ingredients, but the tools are a matter of efficiency.
I think this essay makes a good point but largely misses the mark.

Much of what the vast majority of people do with their brains is a biproduct of training, and little of it can be attributed to intelligence.

In most fields there is some combination of motivation and intelligence necessary for success. It is my view that an IQ of 110-120 is more than sufficient for abundant success in nearly any field. 40% of the population falls in this range.

So Azimov's "discovery" that his mechanic possesses intelligence even though he lacks education just illustrates Azimov's own biases. I'd argue that the mechanic, if properly cultivated, would likely have been able to excel in a wide variety of careers thought to require far more intelligence than being a mechanic appears to Azimov to require.

Also, Azimov's description of the mechanic's work style suggests that he found it oddly crude but appreciated it in a mystical sense, as if it was so far removed from his own abilities as to be unfathomable, which is absurd.
I've got a headache just thinking about trying to go cold turkey.

I drink 6-8+ cups a day and I have pretty severe sleeping problems.

I love the taste as well, but I certainly don't get a 'buzz' out of it anymore. I just.. drink it.

The advantages seemingly to give it up as a daily habit is the ability to sleep better, and to actually get a kick when you drink it.

Maybe I'll give kicking it it a try, ugh!
No. Sorry, I should have been more clear. There are other drugs often demonized that have much less stressful effects than caffeine on the body and have lower lethal doses. While there is a lot of scare-mongering about meth as well, obviously meth is not an example of one of those drugs. I apologize that I didn't make that distinction clearer.
I'm not sure what they mean by "set aside", but back in the 90's there was a huge buildout of fiber as part of the dot-com bubble.

It's refereed to today as "dark fiber"; fiber optics that are not active.

However, I don't know that using that dark fiber would improve our internet. The backbones are already extremely fast; it's the downlinks and uplinks that are slow, and I'd guess most dark fiber is not routed to homes.
Agreed. In the case of computer tools, I think the difference between someone productive using Word and someone using Scrivener is going to be pretty small in most instances. For the novel I'm working on now, multiple people are speaking (like Tom Perrotta's Election or Anita Shreve's Testimony), for which Scrivener is pretty useful. But for anything else I've written, I don't think Scrivener would've been a huge advantage. I'm not even sure it would've been a small advantage.

Still, if you're curious about this sort of thing, I wrote in more depth about it here: http://jseliger.com/2011/08/11/how-to-be-a-faster-writer-don... .
I would argue that the gap between programming tools, languages, and platforms is vastly, vastly greater than the gap between various ways of processing words.
I'm not sure if it's ever been tested scientifically. Apparently the advice comes from Jonathan Ott though, in case that gives it any extra credibility.

In general though plant-based medicines have tons of different compounds, so it's important to change the strain every so often or else it A) stops being as effective and B) is more likely to cause side effects. E.g. if you keep smoking the same strain of weed then eventually it is more likely to cause anxiety then if you use a different strain each time. Essentially you want to prevent your receptors (and neural network) from adapting to what you're doing to them, and the best way to do that is to not do the same thing repeatedly.

N.b. this is not the same thing is polypharming, which is generally something to be avoided.
You know who used php? Hitler.
Or, you could do what Verizon did: Build a large fiber optic-based network in several metropolitan areas and, for the first time, give Comcast, Charter, and Time Warner a run for their money. Then, turn around and dump several "second-tier" markets (Portland, Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue, most of North Carolina, etc) onto a company that is actively trying to persuade customers not to use that network.

Sometimes large telcos just baffle me.
Jetty's HTTP client is pretty decent.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Tutorial/HttpClient
To be noted: this is written by Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple executive and founder of Be Incorporated, which was at some point very close to be bought by Apple before Apple bought NeXT to get the foundation of what is now Mac OS X. (which also brought Steve Jobs back to Apple…)

I'm bringing this up not to say that this is insider's information or that it is thus more likely to happen, but just because in this case, the author is more significant than some rambling from a random blogger. That theme is not new, so it's interesting that he would bring it up.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e)
If you have infinite runway you don't need to listen to Eric Ries or anybody else. Build whatever you want. Take as long as you want. Give the stuff you built away in your will when you die. Or, have your executors burn it all in a massive bonfire.

Most of us do not have infinite runway, however.

And even if you do: There is an optimum pace at which to create any given work of art. Working on it too much can be just as bad as working on it too little. The momentum runs down. The zeitgeist changes. The authors become too familiar with the product to see it afresh. The fanbase gets bored and stops paying attention. And the stakes get higher: The longer you work on something, the more of your reputation is tied up with that thing.
It isn't. I just hopped on over to their website and bought a pair to clip to by backpack when hiking. It's just a bonus for me that the company happens to care about the developing world.

What is idiotic is that there was a whole article about them and it still took a google search before I could figure out where to buy one.
Florida Used Cars - 2002 mercedes cl 600 2dr coupe,v12 45678 miles,ex cln
The Evolution of Lisp
You realize that this is a terrible way to do a poll, since vote totals are hidden?

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
"Drink coffee and then take a 15 minute nap.". Advice like this makes it hard to take this article seriously. It's also a little thin on the data. Sure, it's an article on caffeine, so it'll rank on the geek sites, but do you feel richer or empowered after reading it?

I used to drink about 5 cups of coffee a day. I stopped cold turkey and life didn't seem worth living. So I scaled back to one cup of really really FUCKING good coffee every day. Jamaican Blue Mountain roasted beans, $40 a pound. That's right bitches. The only thing more expensive has passed through the asshole of a small cat-like creature. You already know what it's called because you're a geek and you're smart. Hey, I like pussy, but that's taking it a little too far.

So I take my one cup of blue mountain black, no sugar, milk or other evil pollutants. Fresh ground, French pressed. And then it's tea for the rest of the day to segway from my morning caffeine kick in the ass to a righteous l-theanine zen buzz.

Drugs are good. Smart drug use is better.
Take a look at Vend:
http://www.vendhq.com/

They are a cloud-hosted, browser-based POS system with full offline service. And they've just announced series B funding so others also believe there is a market there.
OP, care to share an email? I have been floating this idea around for a long time, and have a ton of experience programming/installing PoS systems etc.
21 days cold turkey here.
The real risks of being a geek
Headline: Man with extraordinary high IQ becomes extraordinary author.

I'm not sure what his point is. Intelligence, by even the crudest methods of measurement, is the core human trait, and will help determine every important thing every human does. He assumed a mechanic was stupid because he seemed low-rent. Headline: The mechanic probably wasn't stupid in the first place.
It's a patent on a hardware device. Its a whole different animal. Unlike software, they couldn't just patent "solar light that charges during they day" they could only patent their particular solar charging light.

If someone were to disassemble their light and make molds of the parts and just start cranking out copies, they could stop them. It never even crosses their minds that they might try to use the patent to rent-seek everyone else on earth who wires together a solar cell, a battery and a light source. Ya, it's that different.
Your algorithm has an error that renders it unexecutable on existing hardware. Here's a corrected version, which appears to be the one the police are using based on their statements:

LBPD policy: "if apparently x: then y"

Report: "apparently (but not actually) x; y"

If have the ability to upgrade police officers with psychic powers, I'm sure they'll be happy to switch to your fork.
My two thoughts:

1) Before you attempt to deal with a 'caffeine addiction', look at whether you have sugar addiction - which is far more dangerous for your health and more complicated to address.

2) Many of us don't get the amount of sleep we really need to function. Unless you sort that problem out first, you will just end up feeling sluggish and unproductive without the caffeine.
For writing (and programming, for that matter) getting a really good tool should be pretty easy. Give me a credit card and google.com and I can buy any number of quality text editing/word processing programs in about 5 mins.

Writers figure out what works for them and stick with it (my wife used AppleWorks forever; George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar on a DOS machine.) Programmers similarly establish their preference (which is why over-30-year old text editors like emacs and vi have such strong adherents).

The original off-topic message in this thread was about how people continue to write poorly, even after they have great tools.

That doesn't surprise me at all. The hard part is learning the craft. For most people, it's also not a lot of fun. It's a lot more fun to "look for the right tool."
I think it's more like scaffolding. After a while you find the symbols are just fine but why have such a steep barrier to entry? Fell-man wasnt too happy with Feynman diagrams - he hated them for ,bringing computation to the masses,.
I think learning maths visually would greatly increase the pool of future math-literates in the world. Not all of us want to be professors at a university
Prototype 3G Macbook Pro hits ebay
Apple went from being a company with niche product and small market share (that I loved) to a worldwide juggernaut that many thought would save us from the anti-consumer duopoly we have with AT&T and Verizon. While we did end up with better phones and software, developers just answer to a new master. While I find the closed model of iOS disagreeable and anti-consumer, what is worse is that Apple is taking the closed model of iOS and spreading it like a virus into the Mac. And since Apple, the company beloved by “all” can do it, it clears the way for everyone else.

So no, as bad as the current duopoly is, I don’t think Apple becoming a carrier will make it any better.
In exchange for less regulations, the FCC had private companies build out fiber networks in the 1990's. Most of it was never used, though, as companies instead focused on increasing bandwidth in copper wiring.
Emacs users intrigued by the idea of an always centered cursor might like to try this mode out. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el
Hear hear. These posts are getting lame.
Ask HN: Startups working with Physics
What are some startups that use Physics in their work? I'm interested in Physics and I'd like to incorporate it into my career, but I'm not sure what companies will let me do this.
It certainly is an interesting possibility that quantum entanglement could play a role in the brain, but my understanding is that a member of an entangled particle pair would still need to be mechanically transported to a different location in the brain to really take advantage of any entanglement effects, right? Also, if I understand correctly, you can only "use" the entanglement once, so there would need to be a constant production of entangled pairs and transport of them to appropriate parts of the brain.
Chrome isn't the only browser that works:
- Safari 5.1 (released with Lion) works if you enable WebGL in the developer menu.
- Firefox 6.0 works with this demo. 5.0 tells me a feature is missing.
- Opera's WebGL preview build fails in the exact same way as Firefox 5.0, which indicates to me that a newer build might work.

WebGL is an emerging standard supported by FOUR major browser vendors (Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla). Microsoft is the only one not currently adopting. It's a continuation of them doing their own thing without a care about inter-operability. Silverlight 5 implements GPU-accelerated 3D so Microsoft likely considers WebGL to be a competing product.
Totally agree, immersion (plus interviews & observation) is often essential to discovering insights, especially for changing behaviors and solving latent needs.

I've learned first hand immersing myself in communities like East Palo Alto with http://muralmusicarts.org and in nations like Myanmar, South Africa & the White Mountain Apache tribe with http://extreme.stanford.edu.
Actually, most of my college friends rarely use Facebook anymore. They haven't for years. Many have terminated their accounts.

I think that you're right that some aspects of houseSYSTEM's design hindered it. However, it was never officially sanctioned.
When a member signed in their hostname was recorded in the database with a timestamp. The Apache logs, database fields and database timestamps match.
I observe an even stranger illusion... When staring at one of the yellow dots, I see a blinking cross in the middle, instead of a blinking green dot.
rvm is easier to type than rbenv. i know aliases exist but whyyyyy? roarrr
A startup with 42 million (which is a lot for most 1-3 year startups) in capital and 40 programmers would eat up their run way in less than a year, not that practical.
If I create a cure for cancer tomorrow, I will suddenly be very prestigious. I cannot imagine whose status it would really degrade. Competing cancer researchers would at worst be in the same position they were in before my achievement, and some would probably be better off if their work contributed to mine. Cancer patients would probably not lose face by being cured.

On a basic level, status is just recognition of your deeds. There are very few fields so glutted with great deeds that doing something new will necessarily lead to somebody else's status dropping. Pure socialites are sometimes in such a field. You probably aren't.