skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I've never used Freshdirect, I can't imagine it's quite as fast and easy to browse products there as it is to just visually scan across a huge wall of products. That's the advantage for the consumer.

The advantages are bigger for the seller. You don't have to rely on people remembering "Oh yes, I need to do some shopping" and going to your website. Instead they'll be walking through the subway station, remember "Oh yes, I need kim chee" and buy some. It's as good as having a store in the subway station, except that the store takes up no room and costs way less.

I can really see this store-on-a-wall thing taking off, and not just in Korea. If you can be the middleman who standardizes the protocol which lets anyone buy anything and get it delivered to their home, just by scanning a QR code, you'll make a lot of money.
> he can raise his rates to $80 an hour and be swamped with takers right now.

I think it's late enough that I'm not diverting the thread here.

Any suggestions on how a developer can get himself noticed in this on-fire market? I'm competent, but nothing special by HN standards. Typical biz app type stuff that wouldn't impress anyone here. As far as I know I have no serious red flags: I have a modest portfolio of completed work, I'm friendly, responsive, etc.

My local economy is huddled up in turtle mode, there's not much going on locally. I find work sometimes from my personal network, and sometimes from Craiglist ("scrounging"). My former clients like me, but they rarely have any leads for new work.

(Note, I'm not actually a RoR developer. Looking for general advice. Also, I can't relocate, and I typically work remotely.)

I read comments like yours, and I think I must be missing something important. I know there are a lot of freelancers who have cracked the nut and have work coming to them. However, there's also a lot of other ones like me that can't seem to get any momentum going.

Any general advice for guys who'd like to be on fire, but somehow seem to be damp wood?
I personally don't have such a problem with eliminating some customer acquisition costs from the picture. If you are rapidly expanding, and spending $100, to acquire a customer that is worth $300 over the next two years, then clearly the business is going to be profitable. If the buiness is in the early phase of rapidly expanding, and building the brand with super bowl ads, the core business could be really profitable, but just be on a point of the growth curve where it is not profitable. The ACOSI metric was designed to give a flavor of the run-rate profits assuming the company was no longer in hyper-growth mode. It actually makes some sense.
How can we default on dollar denominated debt most of it which we own ?
someone please explain to me how we can default on dollar denominated debt ? S&P decision makes no sense.
Mistake or deliberate market manipulation?
Do you mean from the creditor's viewpoint or is there some economical concept or theory I haven't heard of?
Emulation should be the last resort for things that are so dependent on their environment that they need an exact replica going forward. Video games are great examples of this.

For everything else, such as the collected notes of a writer, or musical notation, etc. the goal should be to transform it into a well understood format (for example, images of handwritten pages in PNG format, rather than the physical pages themselves) and keep that replica as an archive.

Also, good use of integrity preservation tech is key - keeping copies of the digital files with hashes of their contents so you know they're not corrupted, and moving to new physical media periodically, or distributing the content so that all the copies aren't lost.
OPTING FOR A TOP QUALITY AUTO TRANSPORT COMPANY
It's their second downtime this year as far as I could remember. Hope they solve this soon.
good points raised by cuban, but i have to say, he's offered zero solutions to the problem, just gripes. i don't think anyone's come up with a good solution yet for patents probably because there are an over-abundance of them (millions, possibly billions pending), you can't just do away with the system suddenly, hell i think i have 1 or 2 myself.

but let's just play devil's advocate and say that the government refused to grant anymore new patents and grandfathered all the current patents, you would still need something else to take its place, perhaps say the latest trend of open source licenses, though some of the issues with some of these licenses seem to be on similar bad footing of corporate abuse.

i don't have any solutions myself, but i think china's ip laws are relatively lax and a good example of what would happen if there weren't patents or at least very poor enforcement. basically you'd have a bunch of companies competing against each other possibly reverse engineering or out right stealing things, at the end of the day, you, the consumer, would possibly have a better set of choices and these companies would be innovating to compete, not necessarily strangling you financially with patent litigations.

my major gripe with patents are the same as cuban, these big corporations are using it as a new line of business/revenue stream and are throwing their weight around with the protection of another big corporation (a.k.a. the government), this a major loophole in the system, what was meant to quite possibly protect the little guy, the small company, has now backfired and become a major liability. e.g. nobody in their right mind would file a suit against ibm, they would surely find some infringement in their arsenal of patents and make you hurt for a good long time. you're suing ibm for using your algorithm, they'd turn right around and sue you for something along the lines of using the bathroom on an airplane (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-961803.html).

the problem is truly systemic. when governments/companies/countries become too powerful, it really becomes easy to abuse/manipulate the system, absolute power corrupts absolutely. that's why there needs to be more refinement of government to handle these things, to make sure that the system works.
yeah, as you can see in the article, he's talking about the Mac App Store. For iOS i can agree with your view. It is absolutely fine, to sell a $0.99 App without any trial or free version. But for $9.99 or more, it is a pig in the poke situation.
> Top Gear's rebuttals from the Tesla issue were weak, whiny and largely ignored Tesla's complaints, this situation with the leaf only serves to show they really are trying to make electric vehicles look bad.

Tesla's rebuttals to the Top Gear complaints were largely the same. They said the brakes didn't fail despite being broken. Power assisted brakes in any vehicle ARE broken if the power assist fails. It doesn't make the car undriveable, it does however make it untestable. You can't have non-power brakes on a high-performance sports car.

IIRC they did use the other vehicle. Because the Tesla needs time to recharge, whilst other vehicles just need a fuel change, one vehicle was for testing and one was for filming. This would provide them enough mileage for the one-day filming they do for a review. However with one vehicle down they used the 'test' vehicle they used to get a feel for the vehicle. This put the car into the recovery mode, which the Top Gear crew made fun of.

Tesla wanted a review. Top Gear isn't a non-biased program, they don't advertise to be. Tesla's vehicle had failures, they got exploited for a show KNOWN for being satirical, humorous and exploitative in its reviews. Tesla gave Top Gear a match, and Top Gear used it to burn them. They supplied their own failure, simple as, because ultimately they provided vehicles that failed. You review the material you have and not some idealistic bullshit green-freaks want to see.

Top Gear has a viewership higher than the population of the US. If you're reaching that many people, get your marketing and advertising execs to fork over some money to give additional vehicles when you're not able to fuel up the vehicle.

Tesla was dumb. Tesla got burned. Sucks to be Tesla.

Edit: Note that Tesla failed to recognize that they had almost a 5-minute spotlight on their vehicle, in front of an audience of approximately 350 million simply for the use of their vehicles (that is top gears only condition, is that the vehicles are provided for testing).

If you think the review is harsh, go watch reviews Top Gear has done for Hummer and for the F150. They make fun of the impracticality of vehicles.
10-year-old hacker finds zero-day flaw in games
How many combustible cars have you seen on the road over the past couple of years?
Thanks for spamming HN with this (your?) blog, by the way. Your submission history says it all.

It's remarkable how little was said in the blog post.
Ask HN: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
After an initial (and failed) attempt at reading ZTMM I've spent the morning reading more about Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality and Philosophy in general.

I will freely admit to being somewhat ignorant in terms of philosophy but would love to broaden my horizons and have been told that ZAMM is a good introduction.

What I would like to know is are they any good accompaniments to the book or other writings that would ease my journey into the world of philosophy?
I think coca-cola is a trade secret, not a patent
"You are gravely mistaken if you take hackers as downright nerds. Actually some of our favourite and insanely popular iOS hackers and jailbreakers were spotted at DEF CON 19 in Las Vegas. Doesn’t make sense for a couple of nerds to be hanging out in Sin City, does it? As we said, don’t ever take a hacker for a nerd."

Uhhh, what? I don't think showing up in Las Vegas is some kind of magical badge of anti-nerdness. Especially you, long-blonde-hair.

In other news, the overloading of the word "Hacker" makes headlines like this very hard to interpret without reading the article.
S&P decision makes no sense.
Since everyone, including the author of the article, is just tossing out hypotheses with no data, I'll join the party:

This is a chart of productivity that arises from factors other than changes in "number of machines or labor". So if manufacturing raises productivity by making stuff smarter, it shows up here, but if we just hire more workers then that doesn't show up on this graph.

What happened around 1973? Well, the employment-to-population ratio started going up:

http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
Quick, which tech powerhouse's flagship mobile product came out dead last in a systematic survey of the openness of eight open-source software projects? You'd be forgiven for saying 'Apple'...

This makes it sound like a comparison of iOS and Android - which it obviously isn't, because iOS is not open-source (and therefore inherently less open than Android). An old, well-established product like webkit is not comparable to a new product (Android) being constantly beset by patent disputes and so on.

An excellent mix of misleading hooks and unfair comparisons.
Oddly enough, people are starting to question the whole shoes thing; apparently with good results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_running
I agree with your "incompetent bureaucracy" analysis, except I would point out that the government is the biggest and most burdensome of all. It would be interesting to chart the number of regulations companies have to follow or risk being dismantled as a function of time. My bet would be since 1900, the number of regulations has increased constantly and dramatically. Every new regulation is a new barrier companies have to cross before being able to exist, and thus they greatly limit innovation.

Note that the government is largely responsible for our education catastrophe. The government should be removed from education, like all other areas of human life. Allow people to have choices in a free market, and the revolutionary innovations would eventually rise to the surface. But for right now, the revolutionary innovations are muffled before they even have a chance.

I'm not so sure I agree with your moral/ethical analysis. People, if anything, are more moral today than 100 years ago. However I'm not really sure how to measure this and I'm open to the possibility that morals actually have declined.
No it can't, that's the whole point! Are you trolling?
I don't see what Nissan's complaint has to do with the Tesla episode.
Hmmm, thought I was right, but I suppose not - thanks. What about trademarks - you have to defend those, right?
I think a lot of trademark law could just as well be replaced with existing law against fraud and defamation. The fake Apple stores in China which sell inferior knock-offs are defrauding their customers who bought thinking they were buying a quality Apple product but instead ended up with a product merely masquerading as an Apple product. So the customers would have a fraud action against the fake Apple stores. Also, by selling inferior "Apple" products, the fake stores are harming Apple's reputation. This would give Apple a defamation case against the stores.

Such a scheme would have the added benefit of encouraging quality products to the point that companies producing poor-quality goods could lose their trademarks to quality companies. So if Dell began producing their own line of "Apple" branded computers, Apple could only sue Dell if the Dell "Apple" computers were causing harm to Apple's reputation. If Dell's computers were actually better that Apple's computers, Apple would have no cause of action. In time, if Dell could show that Apple's computers were actually causing harm to Dell's reputation, Dell could force Apple to pay damages for using the Apple mark.
That's not the only meaningful statistic in deciding whether or not to buy an electric car.

What's the farthest the average person needs to drive in a given month? I bet it's more than the range of an electric car. That presents a problem.
It will be the realtime data, exactly as how I receive it. I will start with NASDAQ first, mainly because their contracts are the easiest to digest (and because their turnaround time is generally awesome). To familiarize yourself with the format, check out the ITCH 4.1 specification. It quite literally shows every event as it happens (their internal timestamps have nanosecond resolution and they send a message every time a person sends an order, cancels an order, or induces a trade. They also have special messages for trades against hidden orders, trade breaks -- when the exchange decides a trade was invalid -- and other miscellaneous information that you may choose not to use :).

I should note that I also inserted my timestamp (so you can see when we received the data)
pip & virtualenv saved me a world of hurt upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion. The upgrade completely wiped out any global packages I had in Python/2.6 - so I did lose a few packages that I needed to rebuild, but not many.
ZAMM is a terrible introduction to philosophy. Fun story, bullshit philosophy. I'm not actually sure whether the author believes this "metaphysics of quality" stuff or whether he's just putting it into the mouth of the character.

If you want to learn about philosophy, start with Russell:

http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Ru...
This is why I stopped watching Top Gear. None of the "tests" in Top Gear are serious, and most of it is just great entertainment... until it becomes malicious.

When it comes to subjects like electric cars, or environmentally friendly technology in general, Top Gear has the same ethics as one of Rupert Murdochs tabloids or Fox News.
haha, yeah, sorry. Maybe too subtle.
Cringeworthy describes the feeling very good :)
Guide Download News
Guide Download News
all about information and pdf for you, it is free, you can search more file here
There are some caveats. This, for example, would not work as expected:

foo()
[1,2,3].forEach(bar)

Automatic semicolon insertion wouldn't work here, because the bracket could be a continuation of the last line. The same goes for parentheses at the beginning of a line.

Source: http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an-open-letter-to-javascr...
Funded startup wa.tt seeking co-founder
I am looking for a co-founder for my cleantech startup wa.tt.

wa.tt is the "mint.com of energy", we give users a free energy audit to get a detailed look at what their energy costs are, what fuels they use and emissions associated with their usage over the past 12-24 months. Users can then play with their energy portfolio projections to see how changes in usage and purchasing can reduce energy expenditures and increase clean energy consumption.

We are raising a $25k seed round from the GreenStart accelerator and mentoring program and looking to fill the roll of lead technical co-founder.

GreenStart is a new y-combinator like program run by: Dave Graham, Mitch Lowe, Dillion McDonald and Rachel Barge. Mentors include: David Perry, Ben Kaufman, Michael Marks, Stewart Alsop, Marc Tarpenning, Steve Wilhite, Jim Matheson and many more (http://www.greenstart.com/about/mentors). The program runs from September 12th through December 15th in San Francisco. At the end of the program there is a demo day to pitch investors.

We are looking for a co-founder who is interested in cleantech and is able to move to the Bay Area for at least three months for the program. You will be a true co-founder/CTO with full input into the direction of the venture. Code monkeys need not contact me.

I am offering 30% equity and all expenses paid for the length of the program, terms to be discussed.

Please contact me ASAP if you are interested: james@wa.tt
I tried to find where Groupon was "hiding $180 million of actual online marketing spend," but it was really tough. Unfortunately, Groupon's financial statements include that allegedly hidden number.

The author of this piece is not especially familiar with the daily deal market. OpenTable has consistently said that they don't want to be in the daily deal business, for example; they absolutely don't want to be a Groupon competitor. The author is also unfamiliar with developments in capital markets in the last ten years: it's gotten harder to IPO, but there's a lot more capital available for growth-stage companies. So it would be surprising and unprecedented if investor cash-outs didn't shift to the pre-IPO stage.

Finally, this is old news. This kind of article and analysis showed up when Groupon first filed their S-1 with GAAP financial statements (i.e. statements that would allow you to completely ignore CSOI). Calling it the next Madoff is a boring rhetorical trick. Groupon is not a great business, and I would rather be short than long at the projected IPO price. But it's also a real business that could be structured to earn a decent return for investors. Everyone can see that Groupon adds some value, and the real question for investors is whether they're right about the market size and the economics of the business.

Calling Groupon a ponzi scheme is amateurish.
This is a trite and insulting article. Saying an individual "doesn't matter"? There are very respectable people in that list, and they've all reached a very successful point in their careers. They definitely all have a lot of power to do good in the tech world, and try really hard to do so.

Maybe it's just a semantics thing...but I find saying someone "doesn't matter" is way over the top.
I suppose this is a good bit of posturing, but it seems disingenuous. The White House and Treasury should know better than anyone else how broken our political system is.
I hate it when students whine about the unfairness of their lousy grades and how they really deserved a higher one.

It's even worse when the Treasury Department does it.
"You don't have to rely on people remembering 'Oh yes, I need to do some shopping' and going to your website."

In that sense, the wall scanning is a bit of a gimmick; the critical thing is to remember you want/need to buy something.

FreshDirect, for example, does have an iphone app, but without the visual reminder, you may forget to order.

"If you can be the middleman who standardizes the protocol which lets anyone buy anything and get it delivered to their home, just by scanning a QR code, you'll make a lot of money."

That's an interesting idea: tie a QR reader app to someone's credit card or banks account on one end, and to an automated shopping cart on the other (assuming the QR links back to a specific product, of course).
What podcasts do you recommend?
An anaphoric-macro-defining macro
One could argue the two are not mutually exclusive; I think the timing of the downgrade was selected by S&P committee to encourage a QE3 push. I think the facts of the downgrade (less revenue then spending for the foreseeable future) have been true for a long time.
Groupon still growing like gangbusters.
Configuring logging for Clojure applications
Nothing wrong with talking about it, but reading the comments it seems like everyone is piling on.

I get it, people don't like Groupon, but some of this is less based in rationale than in emotion/personal disdain for the product.
How We Choose Ideas
MBT Sport Mens White
A lot of the comments here are saying that Top Gear is an entertainment show, and should not be taken seriously. Yet that seems to avoid the main point of the article which is that it's on BBC, yet not adhering to BBC standards of reporting. The article claims they are not held to these standards because they make entertaining TV that brings in big bucks for BBC. Should Top Gear attempt to follow BBC standards, or should they get away with it because they have a great tv show?
It's odd that there's so much emphasis being placed on short-to-medium-term numbers when it comes to bond ratings in the first place. Especially at current interest rates, it has relatively minor implications for debt sustainability: $4 trillion in debt, at real interest rates hovering just above 1%, is maybe $50b a year extra interest in real terms. Surely the federal government's solvency doesn't turn on questions of +/- $50b a year, so the bond-serviceability picture is pretty similar whether you move things $4t one way or another.

He's a bit of a partisan, but in this case I think Paul Krugman's analysis is basically correct, that real questions of debt sustainability aren't +/- $4trillion in the next 10 years, but longer-term insufficiently funded liabilities in healthcare and pensions: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/the-arithmetic-o...
my biggest concerns - why people want to _not_ use semicolons? Does it improve load speed may be? or make code more readable or help with something else?
Uhh, neither. The Treasury claims it was a "mistake", but personally I can't see how anyone could possibly still consider US bonds to have the highest possible rating.

However, if for some reason you did think that, then Hanlon's Razor would apply.
If you'd rather not have to mess around with stuff, and have $5 to spare, we can help: https://wonderproxy.com/signup/vpn

It was a huge pain in the neck to get native support on Mac & various windows flavours. But our normal clients needed a good solution for testing flash & silverlight apps.
I'm no man
I have only been stiffed once (and that for a very small amount of money that the client said was not worth his time to write a check, so he just thanked me - not the result I wanted!)

So I lack direct experience related to your case, but even with a 12 year time span of not having problems with customers paying, I still ask new customers for a small up front payment (they know who I am, but in many cases I don't know them), and I invoice frequently. If anyone ever wants to pay every month, I tell them that I enjoy getting paid frequently: it is always nice getting a notification of a wire transfer, a check in the mail, or PayPal payments.

Sorry about what happened to you - that is a bummer!