skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a grad student and I regularly run across this quote of Feynman. What strikes me about the quote is that unlike Feynman, I can't always just drop whatever project I'm currently working on and start doing "cool new stuff". I have responsibilities and commitments to my adviser and my colleagues. Even if I'm at a point in my research where starting something new is possible, sources of funding, adviser's expertise and interests etc. still constrain what I can possibly work on.

I guess you can do whatever catches your fancy if you're Richard Feynman. For the rest of us mortals, the challenge is in finding interesting stuff to do within the constraints of the environment we're working in.

The lesson that I take from the quote is that you've got keep yourself interested in whatever you're doing. If getting up in the morning and turning up to the lab seems like a chore, then something needs to change until it isn't.
I'd say Ocado is good! Would love for them to have an API though..
Selectively block FB tracking cookies in your browser
So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.

It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored. Which is not a bad thing, noisewise, it natural and to be expected, but that's besides my point.

My point is that you will always have a default friend who wants to hear everything you share, a friend who will never mute you, never block your Zynga Blogville updates. No, it's not me, nor is it Tom Anderson; your default friend is Facebook itself. FB will always listen to you and will always want to know about everything you do.
It doesn't. Noscript blocks scripts and plugins from executing on the page and AdBlock blocks a specific list of ads.

Ghostery blocks a list of trackers such as google analytics, KISSmetrics, and facebook social plugins[1]. Ghostery generally won't affect the page at all except in invisible ways, but it will remove Like, Tweet, +1, etc buttons to prevent requests from being made to Facebook/etc.

You can also fine-grain set Ghostery to allow certain trackers, like Google+ buttons, while still blocking all the others.

[1] The tracker that this article is about.

P.S.: Watch out as Ghostery doesn't actually work on Chrome. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034093
Ugg pas cher
I'm digging the site / idea, great work :)

Turn this into a chrome extension, or a Mac / Windows Live Wallpaper, and it would really fly!
You have too many tabs open. This has been a public service announcement.
http://www.fancyhands.com/
It's not very realistic, but my body health status API would be awesome: see what vitamins or minerals does it lack, body temperature, level of cholesterol, blood pressure, levels of hormones. That would allow to create insanely useful and impactful applications!
Just a note: Neither Ghostery or Disconnect work in Chrome, since Chrome doesn't have any kind of ability to block requests from being made. The experimental webRequest API should help with that, but it hasn't been released yet.
The article is also missing something vital: medicine shuts down so many options. By the time you're down, you're so indebted that residency is the only thing that makes sense. Penelope Trunk gets this: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/30/the-best-alternativ... , but few others do.

I'm dating a newly minted resident, and she's inspired me to start my own essay and why not to be a doctor. Her, and a lot of the freshmen I teach who say they want to be doctor.

If you want to work in medicine, be a nurse instead. If you're the sort of person who'd like to see a draft, send an e-mail to seligerj [AT] gmail ((dot)) com .
The problem is that it is not only facebook. I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed at another level.

Facebook is definitely the most of evil of them all, but Google is also doing it.
pretty cool, would be nice if you could make the widgets movable (drag & drop)
In the context of the Post, these are excuses. They even admit that their site loads more slowly than all of their competitors. What does the Post's site do that the New York Times, Guardian, and Reuters don't?
Am I the only person who has a virtual machine which is used only for Facebook?
Do you worry about being replaced by computer software? You said you make $800k a year, and for that amount of money you could higher 2-3 PhDs in machine learning and computer vision for each radiologist. Do that maybe 5 times over and give them 5-10 years and productivity and costs for CT scan analysis will probably go way down.

After all a radiologist armed with software that prescans each CT scan looking for interesting areas could work way faster then otherwise.
Yes, this! For years I have been complaining about how silly it is that I know far more about the day to day condition of my vehicle than I do about my own body.
Indeed, seems like the classic sharpshooter fallacy. Given the variability in the market there will always generally be some random betting strategy that's better than everything else within a short time period.
Fellow android dev here.

Have a look at OpenIntents (http://www.openintents.org/en/libraries), it's likely on the order of what you're looking for.

Not a whole lot of listings there, however, and unfortunately, it doesn't seem to get updated very regularly. Not much of a crowd that's sourcing the content, I guess. (That said, I really do appreciate the work that the people involved with OpenIntents have done. Kudos.)

Given the various technologies in Android that support developing frameworks (like being able to create a library project! not to mention services and intents) it's a bit surprising there aren't more resources available for finding useful libraries. Especially little teeny-tiny microframeworks that take away some of that boilerplate we Android devs have to suffer through.

As developers I think it would be nice if we were able to go to the Android Market and search for libraries and frameworks. (Yes, i'm looking at you, Google, Amazon & other app market makers.) Don't care if it's a separate market, so as not to avoid confusing end users who are just looking for apps. I'd just like a better alternative than manually having to do a search across the web and wade through the results until I find (or don't, as usually the case when searching for Android libraries) what I'm looking for.
That's it? So if I rationally weigh my cost of having to watch where I click and find it to be significantly less than the benefits from hanging out with friends online, I'm a victim of an "abuse"?

It's a sad day for HN when thoughtful discussions have been replaced by such obvious sensationalism nonsense. We can compile kernels but Facebook's super-complex privacy settings reduce us to wimps.
Hire The Hackers [Ted Video]
Antitrust Lawsuit Over Medical Residency System Is Dismissed (2004)
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I've read many quotes by a variety of famous people about persistence (see below). But none of them have had a tenth of the impact of seeing this artist's 9 year effort compressed in to a 17 minute slideshow. What he has achieved, how far he's had to travel, how hard he must have had to work, and how persistent he clearly was is nothing short of inspiring.

----

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." --Thomas Edison

"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

"enough shovels of earth, a mountain. enough pails of water, a river" -- chinese proverb
That's the point. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it isn't worthy of discussion. Only flag something if it violates an HN policy.
I'm dating a resident.

Also, anyone thinking about medicine should realize how little autonomy they have. When my girlfriend explained how residency works, I was shocked: it sounded like a circumstance ripe for an anti-trust lawsuit. Turns out it was the subject of a lawsuit: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/us/antitrust-lawsuit-over-... , but one that Congress and President Bush granted an anti-trust exemption. So residents can't even negotiate outside the match. The legal barriers to medicine help explain why it's so miserable.
Facebook Privacy Woes (Chain status update rebuttal)
86% of "people" dislike Facebook changes, 55% of IT workers "like".
The fact that you call Mark Zuckerberg 'Mark' in an internet post tells me pretty much everything need to know about you, him, and facebook as a whole.
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Sounds like the WaPo site has ceased being a website and become a bikeshed, instead.
Thanks for the info. 500K is a big deal. Are these for simple CRUD operations? Or have you seen such numbers with complex operations also?
This title is mis-leading. "Pwn" is used in a humiliating sense, like hacking a website. Pwning has never meant to become the person who helps the most people.

However, kudos to this guy. I like when companies reward volunteers for their hard work. Even if it's just a small token of appreciation. I wish more companies did this.
I submitted this in part as a response to something missing from the residency discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3032403 , which is how the market for doctors is screwed up by regulation and an anti-trust exemption.

EDIT: See also the law itself here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/usc_sec_15_00000037---b... .
Paul Mitchell Flat Iron
I'm perplexed. If you find Facebook's privacy settings arcane and its UI complex, how do you get around Linux or Photoshop at all?

I totally fail to see how it can ever be a good business model to encourage users to share embarrassing stuff. Pretty sure, as a private entity who looks out for their own interest, they work to reduce this happening otherwise people would be leaving in doves.
Yeah.. Totally Agree.. Geo Location is like absolute file path (absolute co-ordinates on the map), but, relative path (relative to the user) is more sufficient here..
Or one day Facebook could overstep and piss off it's common user permanently.
In a few years, phones will likely be powerful enough to displace laptops for their ability to run a full desktop OS. The transition will be seamless -- you just wirelessly connect your phone to your keyboard, mouse, and monitor and you'll be able to use a desktop OS like how you're using it today. The Metro UI gives existing Windows users the option to make that transition.
Interesting post.

While I have nothing against making it easier for people to share their lives or interesting things they come across, I want these things to be opt-in, not opt-out. Facebook has a history not really giving a crap about user privacy. And honestly, Facebook isn't a company I want to trust very personal information to. That's why my FB profile is pretty much only bare bones stuff and a few pictures.

I prefer Google's approach with G+ - your information is only shared with those who you explicitly allow sharing to. And they never automatically share something. You're in full control. If you're making an online identity, that's the way it should be. There shouldn't be opportunity for things to get out of your control. And I fear that the general public won't realize this is an issue until it's too late.

I'd like to point to another article that was posted here earlier: http://public.numair.com/2011_fbfool.html

Now, you can just dismiss the guy as bitter or whatever, but he does have a point. Facebook isn't the company you'd want managing your online identity. I have no problem with competition, but I have issue when one of those competitors acts sketchy and doesn't have the users' best interests at heart. It's even worse when the people either don't care or don't realize it.
127.0.0.1	facebook.com

127.0.0.1	www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1	connect.facebook.com

127.0.0.1	fbcdn.com
Thanks for the feedback. That explains a lot then. I always preferred to use the command line, so that I could either make scripts, or at least screen shots, of changes made. Thus, my utter lack of concern about the admin GUIs. PostgreSQL has a kick-ass command line tool, with online help, GNU readline (including auto-complete), annd good output formatting options. Contrast with Oracle's sql*plus tool (yee-UCK!). I seem to remember mysql having at least readline, but not sure about the rest (probably comparable, but who knows).
Everything is a Choice
I really like that it's instant and super lightweight. Those are valuable traits.

You might want to consider carefully how you change the time input. What you have now is the minimum possible input to specify a 24 hour range. You might want to take input like 115, 10 20, and put effort into parsing any input, rather than fixing the input at something that involves, say entering a colon (shifted character and harder to input on a phone), which might look more professional, but is actually a giant step backwards!
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What ever made you think anyone would want this functionality, other than the sleazier, spammier publishers?

Why would any person _ever_ want to automatically broadcast on Facebook the URL of every web page they read on a particular site? What is the benefit, to them? "How do I publicize a big chunk of my browser history" is not a problem any real person has.

The problem with this feature has nothing to do with disclosure or opting out. It's that it seems designed SOLELY for the benefit of publishers, who get more clicks and promotion, and of Facebook, which gets more social content.
Gah! Only an hour left - does anyone know if/when these talks will be posted online?
You can't get something for nothing, eventually we'll have to pay some price for these services and we're finally beginning to realize what that is.
I heard about that on a forum a while ago, but my point was that when you find a novel way to profit from the stock market you keep your mouth shut.
> If I remember correctly, the exact wording of the app permission request was alarming enough to get my full attention ("I, the application, can post as you" or something like that), so I'm worried less about a user missing that part.

Users don't read such messages, they press confirm buttons. Even if they read them most users will not understand the implications. It would be interesting to hear if you have done any user surveys related to this.
Thank you. There are practical reasons for me to learn python and django, but I'm finding RoR to be very accessible now.
Here's an extensive takedown of the paper; it has lots of flaws: http://blog.someben.com/2011/05/sour-grapes-seven-reasons-wh...
The Dehogaflier: Skywalker with FLIR Thermal Camera
HTML5 PushState is dangerous. And you can't do anything about it.
Thanks, Brian. It's been a great experience, and I'm glad for anyone who wants to share in that experience too.
Kind of have to disagree with this blog post. He predicts that the PC will be a relic of the past. By saying this, he fails to take into consideration the huge end-user market, PC gaming, and that pretty much all businesses use desktops running on Windows. The tablet market is undeniably booming but it's not going to replace the desktop. The tablet is meant to have as a device of convenience and casual use.

Source: 400 million Windows 7 copies sold thus far
That was absolutely awesome.
Ask HN: How I could start my Startup from Iran
I'm from iran and I have a new idea for web startup,
but I'm from IRAN.
Google have a problem with iranian, PayPal have a problem with iranian, I could not have a Bussiness Bank Account.

What I could run my startup with minimum problem?
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I had my privacy settings set to "Custom" for wall posts, photos, and some other profile elements.

I excluded a list of people from seeing posts I made and posts other people put on my wall.

When I used the "View my profile as," I wouldn't see the excluded elements.

Once the new design launch, I realized that all these settings were lost - I can do "View my profile as" one of the people on my excluded list, and see the stuff I didn't want shown.
Sigh.

Thanks.
Not sure that this really counts as an API, but I'd like a converter between things in my life which require polling and a push sort-of interface. Here's an example: I ordered some things from eBay, and I'd like to confirm that they arrived in one piece. After clicking "buy it now", I have to somehow remember to confirm within a couple of weeks that the items arrived. I used to add a calendar task N days out with a note like, "ensure delivery of XYZ". However, I've fallen off the wagon on this of late. The fundamental problem is that there is no ebay-originating tickler event which lets me know that it's time to validate delivery. As an analogy, I think I'd like a way to add cron jobs for my life. Imagine your phone asking you, "Hey, did your package arrive?" If you affirm delivery, nothing more happens. If you say no, a task gets added to your todo list to figure out what went wrong (wife mis-placed package, etc.). You can also say "bug me later."

I'm not sure that I've done a good job articulating what I want, in part because I only have a vague notion of what would help me out. I do know that keeping all sorts of "polling lists" in my head (or even in a calendar/todo list) is very stressful. I'd love to offload the work of remembering this stuff to a trusted assistant.

What other things in life are missing async callbacks?

- Cancelling X service before it auto-renews next month/year/whatever
- Generally, any task with the word "confirm" in it
- Audit-related tasks such as making sure my client writes me a check for the amount I invoiced.

One could implement basic "tickler" functionality at first without any back-end integrations and then build one-off interfaces for common use cases -- for example, use the eBay API to observe purchases I've made and add ticklers based on the auction's stated delivery dates. Maybe this service also grabs tracking numbers and digs a level deeper for you. "Remember to grab your package from the front porch -- there's a 90% chance of rain tonight!"
They will be posted to: http://youtube.com/startupbootcamp at some point.
I was amazed too. Also at this public sneer from an editor: Won't developers feel responsible for this?

They again, they include javascript files with a copyright from 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/sites/twpweb/js/wp_omniture...). They source javascript files of 5 lines of length. They forget alt attributes on navigation images. And they wrap their stories in this soup:

#wrapperMainCenter, #wrapperInternalCenter, #container, #pagebody, #pagebody-inner, #article, .blog_entry, #c-main-content, #center, .content, .hnews hentry item

That can't be result of a single developer, or even of a single project.

There currently is nothing to fix when - to keep advertising and tracking going - you are faced with over 100.000 bytes of third party javascript code (I stopped counting).

Next to a complete redesign, a mentality change would be needed. Sure, you can asynchronously load a single compressed and combined core javascript resource just before <body> close. But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I wouldn't even know where to start bothering with this massive site. There must be 10+ projects with different developers all working over the years to build things like the Sports Section, the classifieds section etc. All using their own javascripts and style sheets... Perhaps a good CDN to patch this oil tanker.
Jim Dalrymple: Apple Village Idiot
How do I protect myself from my tenants? The greatest single step to being a landlord is picking the right people. I list my extra rooms at just under market prices with above market amenities and then select the best people. They provide me a month’s deposit and they sign a sublease that clearly states that non-payment of rent for a single month without prior written approval results in automatic cancelation of the lease and eviction (avoiding the long drawn out civil court system).

This approach works with consulting and picking clients. If you go for the highest rate you think you can get away with you end up with fewer clients to chose from; sometimes you end up with the one client to chose from.

If you price your rates lower you'll (generally) get more potential clients giving you a better choice of who to work with. Caveat: People are funny, and price sensitivity is funnier still.

BTW, it's been years since I had any dealings with NYC housing court, but if it's at all the same then all bets are off even if you have a signed contract regarding eviction. My recollection is that the courts were very reluctant to evict people, even when they've skipped paying rent for many months. OTOH years of Bloomberg could very well have changed this.
Chrome Privacy
Actually I think direct links to petitions shouldn't be allowed (much like posts with subjects like "Vote Up If You Like Cookies").

Links should exist for the benefit of the reader, not the benefit of the submitter.
Is this -really- what hacker news has become? Really?
I was actually thinking the opposite thing: that TDD gives you another excuse to model your problem instead of moving towards solving it; it's an analysis paralysis trap.

I also think, however fair you want to be to TDD methodology, that it's hard to get around the fact that Norvig didn't do intensive formal testing on his solution. Jeffries presumably applies TDD to lots of problem domains where solutions are obvious ("what's the cleanest way to wire this form to this database table"). TDD has to do more than "not prevent you from discovering solutions"; it also has to demonstrate value.
In an ideal world this information would be stored in an OpenID attribute.
Heh. This is exactly what Infosys/Wipro/TCS do. If you've ever worked for a big financial services co or IBs and meet tons of Indian IT folk day in and day out and wonder hey where do all these people stay and how do they afford to live in this big city...well, the company rents hundreds of 3 and 4-bdrm apts in NJ, NYC, Atlanta, Charlotte, Sunnyvale etc etc... you get on a plane from Bangalore on your B1 visa and land at one of these apartments for your 90 day "onsite", after which you leave and the next Indian takes your place. I've been to several of these apts. Typically its 3-4 Indians to one apt...you take turns cooking, cleaning out, buying groceries. Weekends you take in your Hindi movies & your pirated bollywood DVDs :)) Its a phase I guess...if you are an IT professional in India, I heartily recommend it. Fun lifestyle, like living in a dorm & getting paid the market rate...At some point you grow up and file your papers and become an NRI & get your green card & the your US citizenship & say goodbye to shacking up with 3 random programmers...but it is fun while it lasts, and keeps the US real estate market humming as well.
Fortunately he didn't ask where I spend my time in Chrome.
A human lifetime is obviously too short to learn to do everything well.

But many people waste a lot of the time they do have in their life -- playing mindless games, reading/watching absolute trash, surfing the web or any number of other absolutely useless activities.

It's very difficult to really dedicate yourself to getting better even at a single skill over many long years. There are always distractions and a lot of boredom and self-criticism to overcome. It's painful and hard, and many people just don't have the willpower to do it.
Salman – Katrina split made official? -  Free Press