skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that a common problem for people who are proof reading documents is the brains tendency to complete patterns based on partial information. This causes a person to read not what is actually written but instead what they expect to read.

For example, if you had seen the cliched sentence "The cat sat on the mat" tens of times over your lifetime then you might tend to skim ahead and miss the mistake in "The cat sat on the met."

One approach to reduce this problem is to consciously direct your attention in such a way as to reduce your own expectations. Some common tactics include:

1. Take a break in between writing the text and editing it. The common advice for writing essays in school is to leave your draft shut up in a drawer for a few days before returning to it.

2. Examine each word in the text in a way which separates it from the context of the sentence it is written in. You could do this by physically pointing at each word with a finger/pen as you read it, or by reading the text backwards from the last word to the first.

The above might increase your ability to spot a spelling mistake but will do little to assist whole-sentence grammatical mistakes. My best advice for that task is to read the text out loud. I find it much easier to hear such a mistake than to see it.

For the problems with reading you might wish to do some research on "active reading". Reading with a question in mind can help you to properly concentrate on the material.

The question might relate to a specific piece of information, eg skimming through a tutorial to discover "What arguments does the make_widget command take?"

The question could also be focused on the structure of the text, eg "What is the main idea of this paragraph?", "How could I rewrite this complicated sentence in my own words?", or "How does the evidence introduced in this paragraph relate to the claim stated at the beginning of the chapter?"
That is a bit of a surprise. On the face of it one might expect Jevons paradox[1] to take hold, but I guess a home is a pretty closed system and there aren't too many new places to use power. More gadgets, yes, but a person can only use so many gadgets at once.

I for one find myself wanting to install more subtle light now that my power bill is so low (almost completely 10W, 13W and 18W CFLs). I started wondering where I can get creative, such as putting 0.5, 1 or 2 watt under-the-cupboard lights to gently illuminate the kitchen counters. I already have some brass wall-mounted "candles" that use 0.5 watt bulbs; they are nice and subtle night lights, and leaving them on all year round would be less than 8 dollars a year.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox (see especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes...)
If you read the release notes I believe the new pg_basebackup tool satisfies your needs.
For me it doesn't render properly in firefox. It never seems to make it into the single column mode. Chromium on the other hand, smooth like butter.
Select & Share | Yoolink
Clojure vs Scala - Anecdote
very good start. you get to see code for a tag and what it looks like right next to it. be sure to add more stuff to it.
TL;DR version - our press was positive because their is no political agenda in astrophysics at the moment. It then goes to pity climate scientists who are pilloried because politicians have chosen to use their words to enact and enforce policies that their constituents don't like.

Astrophysics was a lot tougher discipline to be in if you were Galileo. Again the science was was being perverted to show support for what the government wanted to be true, rather than what was true. I suspect that if someone could have sold the church on a way to 'fix' difference between what science was telling them, and what they wanted to be true, they would have wasted millions doing that too.

Galileo knew that no matter how hard they wished it, the planets would not suddenly stop in its orbit and the universe begin to rotate around it. No more than any amount of wishing, better behaviors, and offerings of gold could stop the seasons (or the climate for that matter) from changing.

Not sure we've learned all that much about mixing science and policy since Galileo's time.
good concept
One big problem is that usually the person with the loudest voice gets the most attention, even if they are from the fringes of science. The real climate scientist don't want to use absolute certain language as that's not what the results tell them and their conclusions are harder to whittle down into a 30 second news report. Those without so much evidence to back them up are more than happy to deal in absolutes.
Tech Writers In Denial: The Michael Arrington Case Study
It's an interesting idea to look at non-internet innovation and see a decline, but the internet provides a lot of slack in the need to do hard, physical innovation. In the case of transportation, we're seeing productivity gains because the internet provides substitutes to (some) travel.
I tried it. To me it felt like a different skin to google maps. The only difference I noticed was that it provides the icons under each place that link to yelp etc. That feature would be much more useful if it could pull the data instead of link you off site.

Google's big advantage is that I can click "directions to here", which would prevent me from switching. If you are targeting mobile devices, this is especially important.
6 Ways to Supercharge Your Business
But you don't know what's being offered in beta! Is it the whole service? Or are they staggering feature releases while testing load?
Interesting site but the navigation is a bit overwhelming and messing. It's not really clear what they are doing without digging around much. Thanks for sharing though.
Both of those teams are of the "ground-up" variety. I wonder if they have enough capital to acquire something like this.
Cisco Starts Totally Ragging on Juniper
This is why I think it was shortsighted for Instapaper to reject outside funding. As much as I like Instapaper, it is very much still a single-platform app with very limited scope (text-only), and the app hasn't been updated in several months. Meanwhile its competitors (like Readitlater and now these guys) are getting funded, rolling out features, and attacking this market with much greater resources.
Gathering device UDIDs and offering beta testers on a platter to those that pay.
Your reply motivated me to look, and my vague recollection is correct: I exchanged a couple of brief emails with the author back in 2007, when the articles did indeed first come out.

However IBM did it, they were entered into some sort of site publishing schedule such that he'd lost track of just when they were coming out.

Seemed a nice enough fellow. From the articles and his bio, I imagine (perhaps incorrectly) his motivation was more pedagogical than remunerative.
Broadcom to buy chip maker NetLogic for $3.7 billion
Misleading title. Power demand from US homes is rising. The rate at which it's rising is falling, and projected to continue falling.
B2Brev responding here. The target market is aimed more at daily deal companies and investors in daily deal sites.
The article touches on this briefly and argues that for home usage, it's usually not too correlated with the economy. "Even when the economy is stagnant, people still watch TV and keep their ice cream cold."

Oil prices are affected by non-home and non-personal energy use. In a weak economy, less industrial usage to make and transport things we buy and much less personal travel (fewer vacations, fewer flights).
Angie's List is more B2C (like Yelp).
Do you realize how ridiculous this argument is? Package management is laughably bad on Windows (not as bad as Mac OS X, but still at least a decade behind yum or apt-get on Linux). It's perhaps my least favorite thing about managing Windows systems, in fact, and the thing I hold up as an example of what's horribly wrong with Windows.

I've built and maintained a Python distribution for Windows (Python Enthought Edition, which is used pretty widely in scientific computing environments) that had to work alongside other versions, and I also maintained a Linux version for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora. I would choose a Linux deployment every time. Not because I didn't know how to make it work on Windows; I did, and it did work quite well. But, because of how awful the whole process was.

There isn't even a standard mechanism for third party package updates on a Windows system. How stupid is that? Everybody has to roll their own updater if they want to provide automatic updates on Windows. It's like living in the stone age. Might as well hand out floppy disks.
Great idea. Dragged my wife out to Lowell Observatory on our honeymoon in the US. She will be horrified to learn that I now have many more options for future trips.

My brother, father and I visited the Budweiser Budvar factory in České Budějovice earlier this year and could've watched the bottling processes and robotics at work for hours. We talked later about how tours of so many factories would actually be a really interesting experience. Auto plants, cooperages, electronics factories, food processing factories, etc. If these opportunities already exist, I imagine they'd be lost in a sea of common tourist options.
As mentioned in the article states are setting up programs to help you save energy. For those that live in MA head over to http://www.masssave.com/ and sign up for the free* audit on your house. They give you stuff and will chip in the first $2K on work they find that can improve your house and there is a 0% loan you can get for major improvements like windows, replacing your heater etc. Heard from several friends last year that did it saved a bundle last winter and just had them out on my house and expect my heating bill too be much less this winter.

* Well free in the wacky logic that part of your utility bill funds this, but ....
Android layout is so much saner than CSS layout though. The different Android layout models make it really easy to specify complex arrangements and the Android tools make wiring up behavior a lot easier. Compared to the mess that is cross-browser CSS it's a breeze.

Maybe it's just me but I also find that Java's static type checking eliminates a lot of the dumb mistakes I tend to make in JS/Ruby/Python.
Five Stars (YC W11) has really challenging technology problems.
We're a 10-month old Y-combinator funded startup. Here's a list of some challenging problems we've solved in the last 3 months:

1. Cross-platform Python software and GUI that works in Windows 95/98/2000+, Linux, OS X

2. Auto-updating our software remotely, across previously mentioned platforms, and in Python

3. Hooking and interfacing into an USB hardware plugin across multiple platforms

-----

Here are some problems we're still trying to solve:

1. Building a single piece of software that communicates via REST, across all platforms, that has an online and offline mode, and is very secure

2. Networked client software that can work with various complex network topologies, without having multiple versions of the software

3. Text (specifically, numbers) and image recognition on various platforms and interfaces, with various constraints and variables

4. Build a scalable web-backend framework that is highly available and highly redundant, and can support analytics of large data sets

These problems are in addition to the more standard (but just as challenging) set of problems an internet startup faces, such as: data and app scaling, product design, building features, testing/QA, marketing, sales, customer retention, customer support, operations streamlining, etc.

-----

-- Who are we? --

* We're Five Stars, a universal loyalty program for small to medium sized businesses.

* Raised $2.5 million in funding from first tier venture capital firms and some very prominent angels.

* Growing insanely fast (35% increase in users in the last week, 120% increase in clients in the last month).

* Rewarded Five Stars members for $1,000,000 of spend in the last 2 months alone, up from just $80,000 the 2 months before that

* Have received multiple acquisition offers, which we've turned down. We've got big ambitions!

* Have an amazingly driven, talented, and fun team. We've got a PhD in string theory, a Kiva Fellow, and everyone in between.

* We work hard and play hard.

* We've got a very spacey office in Mountain View, CA located next to an In'n'out, Chipotle, and yummy ramen.

-----

-- Who are we looking for? --

Incredibly bright developers with a knack for taking ownership and getting their work done concisely, efficiently, and elegantly. We operate in an incredibly independent environment. There's so much to be done at any point in time so developers will work across the front-end, back-end, and software. We're still building our core team, meaning you'll get ownership of the product. We foster a learning environment -- think your Javascript skills are a little weak? We have an ex-Google employee who is a JS guru. We have developers who have scaled products to serve tens of millions of page views a month. Come and be humbled, and likewise, we want to be humbled by you :)

-----

-- How to apply --

If you're interested, please email your resume and a paragraph or two about yourself to hckrjobs@gmail.com
Seconded.

I have the S1300 - it's slower than the S1500, but about half the weight and you can power it off of your USB ports, so there's no need to lug around the adapter.

Great if you're scanning in multiple locations. I use mine both at home and in the office, and am delighted by the file cabinets I'm no longer steadily filling.
This thread is relevant to my interests.

On the subject of the "diamond" planet, I'm actually surprised to see the lead author of the paper in question referring to it as a "diamond planet". I thought that was just a media label. I read the paper when it came out, and all that was indicated was that an extremely large (Jupiter-mass) extremely dense (much smaller than Jupiter) body was detected orbiting a pulsar. The density was consistent with something reasonably close to diamond, but I would have thought that there always has to be some other elements in there... and in any case I wasn't convinced that the vast majority of the interior would be cool enough to be crystalline rather than liquid carbon. So while I'm very confident that there's some extremely massive, extremely dense planet orbiting that star, I'm yet to be one hundred percent convinced that "diamond" is the correct label for it.

Which brings me neatly to the actual point of the article, on climate change. I'm somewhat out of my field here, but no more than the author is. The reason I'm skeptical about the hypothesis "burning fossil fuels is likely to cause significant and disastrous climate change in the future" is that it's all based on simulations which can't be tested against experiment. And I do simulations for a living, so I know enough about them to be very skeptical whenever confronted with simulations in the absence of experiment. Maybe it's true, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were, but I'm certainly not willing to talk about it as if it's as strongly supported as... well, the vast majority of other stuff that we mean when we talk about 'science'.

The strength of a scientific theory is (and I'm still working on figuring out exactly how to phrase this) determined by the question of "If this turned out to be false, how much experimental data would suddenly be very difficult to explain?" If evolution were false, then pretty much all of biology is suddenly very difficult to explain. If the hypothesis "big dense planet thing orbiting PSR J1719−1438" turns out to be false, then there's a bunch of measurements which are very hard to explain. On the other hand if the hypothesis "diamond planet orbiting PSR J1719−1438" is false then it's not at all difficult to explain. And if the hypothesis of significant anthropogenic climate change turns out to be false, then this makes very little difference to our ability to explain existing experimental data.
Is the replica set failover really zero-downtime for you? In our usage, it seems like it takes a few seconds to elect a new primary during which time no writes can occur.
Paul Graham on Bloomberg West
nice coverage
The problem I have with analysis like this is it doesn't take into account what Yahoo actually needs to do to grow. For the most part, the companies on the list are innovative companies, led by talented CEOs/entrepreneurs and are leaders in there sphere.

But Yahoo's revenue is about $1.2 billion a quarter, and I would say that they would need to grow that by 5-10% to even approach any sort of potential turnaround territory. That means they need roughly $50 to $150 million in new revenue a quarter, I bet you all those companies together don't make that amount of money in a year.

I think it would be awesome for Yahoo to buy innovative companies and give creative people free reign, but the reality is Yahoo buying these companies is like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. Yahoo's just too big and those companies are just too small to turn Yahoo around.
An Important Heel Tastic Review
yikes, bad karma, i was half joking with the negativity.
good iOS apps have nice animated transitions between portrait and landscape.
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Thank you very very much for posting that 1986 article which documents clearly the facts of what was been going on. It is an established documented fact that the tax changes were in fact retroactive and specifically targeted to loot and pillage him specifically.
The political spectrum is far more multidimensional than that.
maybe :) they announced it at $10/mo.
You are wrong. I won every case (~5) filed against me over ~3 years working at Tech Support. If you have proper documentation as to why you fired someone you do not have to pay unemployment insurance.
Thanks, I was just wondering about this. That attribute of the title was essentially the only reason I was thinking I might read it - that would've been a big surprise.

edit: skimmed, and actually...

>[Utility] executives were particularly surprised by a dip during the first three months of this year, the most recent national quarterly numbers available. Adjusted for the effects of weather, residential power demand fell 1.3 percent nationwide, an unusually sharp drop.
Great article, but it's also important to consider how the way we consume information is changing over time. The more interesting the article, the more likely it is to be instantly saved to Instapaper, closed, and consumed on analytics-devoid device like a phone or tablet.

This is very true for the way I'm consuming HN these days, and also very frustrating as readability parsers tend to ruin HN and Reddit comment threads.
This exists, look up MemoLane. They're a startup which is exactly like this but for your social network postings.
I am not questioning that some percentage of money collected at gunpoint by the group of men who call themselves 'government' is put back into society.

I am questioning the so called sovereignty of those with the guns.

The distinction is fine, however important.
Article could do with some more numbers.

Is the huge growth in compact fluorescent lighting sufficient to account for the difference, alone? I'm wondering whether the other factors are sufficient at all.
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The fundamentals are solid (the line height is perfectly alright, about one hundred characters per line are within the range of empirical results on optimal readability).

I suspect the font is so small because the design is so old. As far as I know it hasn’t been updated in ages. It’s old but by no means bad design.
I don't want to sound synical here, but I know a lot of people already using unemployment as seed money to try to do their start up idea sort of "off the record". If you make it legal or OK to admit it (since it is already happening a fair amount) perhaps it would make the unemployment number more accurately reflect people really looking for a job. But I could be looking at it from a perspective that is not common since I know more people trying to get their idea going than the average perhaps.
MongoDB and Software Version Numbers
Focus on the Business Question, not the Technology
I encourage anyone who is thinking of implementing convergent encryption to read "Convergent Encryption Reconsidered" from the tahoe guys: http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg089...

(tldr; there are serious security/privacy vulnerabilities with convergent encryption)
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Ask HN: Isn't Google an example of commercialized research?
This is in reference to the discussion during office hours today at TC disrupt. The exchange was something like.

PG: So this is commercialized research?

Entrepreneur: Yes

PG: Ouch!

I am currently flirting with academic research that I believe has commercial potential, but a solid market has not been identified yet.

I think academic research often inspires commercial endeavors. Is the issue in this case just that a business is actually being pursued before a customer who cares has been identified?
I've also been thinking of experimenting with subtle LED lighting around my place, and would appreciate any advice/feedback you have about different hardware.
Office Hours video: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989239

Earlier HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988407
I once tried taking one of my C++ simulation codes (dealing with diagonalization of big memory-hogging matrices) and rewriting it using scipy. It was a lot slower.

I don't have a good idea of exactly what situations you'll find scipy being significantly slower than C++. Maybe it was the fact I was playing with thousands-by-thousands arrays. But I do worry that there are folks out there burning millions of CPU hours running scipy without realizing that they really ought to be burning mere 10^5s of CPU hours.
My son (4 years old) and I are big fans of the tv show "How it's made" which gives interesting tours and insights into various manufacturing and industrial processes. He got really excited about last weeks episode: water treatment plants (not a joke - he's always been curious about flushing toilets and draining water)

http://science.discovery.com/tv/how-its-made/
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Leapfrog 21155 Leapster 2 Learn And Explore Set
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A tcpdump Tutorial and Primer
EC News adds ability to follow news tags and is now available in 20 countries
"a guy who created incremental searching of YouTube videos"

..and spent a grand total of 3 hours of his life doing that tremendous feat.
Patently Misguided
Tech recruitment: how not to do it
the problem with this theory is that deduplication works so well with file backup as the largest files we have are most often music and video, something that is highly replicated amongst file sharing users.
i.e millions of users have the same Beatles album.
Yet, when each persons album is encrypted it will be entirely different than every other persons album. If they were in any way similar it was not correctly encrypted. Thus the hit rate will be almost negligible.
So than you say OK, but maybe the block level code of the encryption of my Beatles album is similar to the block level code of the encryption of my Eminem album, and than we can save storage there. The problem with this is that encryption algorithms aim to make their input files output as close to a random distribution as possible. Meaning not only are those two copies of the beetles albums going to be as different from each other, but they will be different from any other file.
To sum it up, a well encrypted file should be uniformly random -> meaning it is uncompressible - > two different uniformly random files are still random relative to each other and when put together still cannot be compressed.