skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Science is also not the unqualified saying loudly "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU". In many cases he's simply dead wrong, but people listen because what he says is more pleasant than the truth.

We're running out of resources (not just oil. Copper, platinum, I belive... indium? are all going to be in short supply in a short few hundred years). The climate is changing. We don't care if it's man made or not, it's harming our living conditions. We're still polluting our lakes -- the great lakes have large segments of horribly toxic sediment, for example. (although cleanup is going well, and costing only a few billion dollars.)

And yes, I am a physics student taking some extra classes on analyzing human damage to the environment, and a number of my professors are researching or otherwise involved with this stuff, from attempting to create efficient solar cells to cleaning up the great lakes. I'm not an expert on our environmental challenges, but I think I have a somewhat better-than-average grasp of the situation.
Ask YC: Feedback on a side-project -- Sportsify
There's a tutorial here:

http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/doc/learn/tutorial.html

These days synthesizers, samplers and whatnot are naturally just software. If you want to have fine-grained control of how synthesis, sampling or other sound manipulation is done, it's often useful to have a programming environment specifically made for that. The competitors that I mentioned to ChucK in my last comment are the best known environments for such.

I personally use ChucK mostly to process MIDI instructions and reroute them to a separate synthesizer or to send control signals to a sequencer. For instance, in one case I wanted to play a pattern of notes at an increasing tempo stretched to the track's tempo using a specific function of time so that the notes would be in synch / out of synch with the original in a predictable pattern. Doing that was reasonably easy to hook up with ChucK.
A problem is an opportunity.

Mr. Market suffers from some rather incurable emotional problems; you see, he is very temperamental. When Mr. Market is overcome by boundless optimism or bottomless pessimism, he will quote you
a price that seems to you a little short of silly.

Warning: you can only tell if the price of a particular stock is silly if you have some idea of what its price should be (with a margin of safety).
The idea: A Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes for sports picks and power rankings.
I'm personally tired of "x Considered Harmful" articles. Not only are they terribly cliche, but most of them are about complex, highly debated issues and do not really prove their point.
And watch Warren Buffett. Is he buying? Is he tap dancing?
No, then you're in the content business. And students won't like you for profiting off their work.
Chase's savings accounts are about 0.25% around here, so you'll probably get that. I recommend moving to ING Direct or similar.
More interesting reading: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Basically shows that nuclear is the only viable alternative to coal and oil.
+10 if I could. This is much better than selling to students. I know a couple startups selling to schools, and there are difficulties there too (like actually closing the deal), but if you want to monetize, this strategy is worth a shot.
Have you seen textmarks.com?
I expect the community to take care of quality that way

Have you seen Reddit? This doesn't work.
And you're very shortsighted! As are many people who believe that throwing money at the problem is the answer.

This will just allow these unscrupulous lenders to maintain business as usual (assuming the companies are re-sold a few years down the road, which is the plan). That $700B will have to come from somewhere, and that place is nowhere. This may be disastrous for the economy.

And you misquoted me, leaving off "entrenched" in "entrenched poor." If you can buy a house, I have news for you, you are not a member of the entrenched poor. The middle and lower-middle classes were able to buy real estate like never before, and they will be bailed out.

Why, I ask, is rescuing new homeowners a priority now, when the third-world poverty of the inner city and rust-belt country is viewed as some incurable ailment? We know damn well why: Because this coincides with saving the bankers' asses.
Exactly. It's kind of annoying to see that omniscient overlords are censoring people's comments -- but the people being censored get the idea that their comments aren't welcome and then they either shape up or go away. HN has stayed pretty readable as the once-enjoyable Reddit has become the biggest cesspool of stupidity I've ever had the misfortune of reading. (Can you guess by my tone that I used to really love Reddit but it's just not good anymore? It makes me sad.)
yes, actually he does.
Unfortunately, the company has consistently had trouble with producing complete and useful documentation.

"Producing complete and useful" documentation is a huge amount of work - a nontrivial fraction of writing the software in the first place. It gets exponentially harder as the software gets more complicated and crappier.

Actually, "complete documentation" is an oxymoron. The only complete specification of what code does is the code itself, so it will always be possible to find gaps. I'd be interested to know the specific inadequacies being cited here, but don't have time to follow the links. (If anyone else does, please post your findings.)

Most developers find Microsoft's API documentation to be pretty good

As someone who endured it for a long time, I'd vociferously dispute this. Their documentation is wildly uneven. The real problem, though, is that the APIs themselves are mostly terrible - way too complicated and not designed for the programmer who actually has to use them. (Portions of the .NET framework are an exception.)
"Only if these percentages are in series. Since we're talking about the same power plants, it seems that 1/3 is all we get."

To quote E:TS again:

"Without any major breakthroughs, vehicles that are little different from today's could use one-third the energy per mile, says John DeCicco, Environmental Defense Fund's specialist in automotive strategies. That alone would radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If those cars ran on a biofuel made from renewable feedstocks with one-fourth the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of today's gasoline (Amyris's biogasoline, for instance, or Verenium's cellulosic ethanol), then the emissions per mile would be one-twelfth what they are today, a reduction of 92 percent. It was the feasibility of such options that, in September 2007, caused Vermont U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions to reject manufacturers' challenges and rule that they could meet California's new standards, requiring carbon dioxide emissions in new cars to be cut about 22 percent in the first phase (2009 through 2012) and 30 percent in the mid-term phase (2013 to 2016). Given the expected doubling by midcentury of vehicle miles traveled in the United States, however, California and the rest of the country will have to go much further--reducing automobile emissions about 80 percent." (p. 229)

The book lists a whole boatload of other ways to save massive amounts of energy with today's technology, many of which are listed in my notes of chapter 9: http://alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The sections on weather prediction, clean cement, carpeting, and fans are insanely cool.
The color/font scheme is horrible - just copy HN!

I signed up, regardless.
Y Combinator Challenge - Mission Accomplished
Are you looking to own your own home, or make money investing in real estate? If you're talking the former, and you can afford it (20% down-payment, non-ARM, comfortable monthly payment), then I'd probably do it personally.

If you're doing it as an investment, I'd hold off unless you have a lot of money invested already and are looking to diversify. "They" are saying that home prices may slide for another year or two at least. Of course, "they" are often wrong...
Alt-energy contrarians very often make the same argument: "We'll never be able to supply all power needs from renewables. Therefore the whole alt-energy movement is a doomed, loopy pipe dream."

Has it ever been the goal of serious alt-energy boosters to replace all power with renewables?
is this alex p4n1c that hacked the AiD forum?

It would be good to hear from you.
Use the form on the forum...
http://www.buddhamind.info/aid/forum/profile.php?action=user...
Tips for Building Your Personal Brand : East Coast Blogging
I felt the same way, until I tried coding on Mac.

Believe me, if Apple ever got big enough to warrant government inspection, they'd get torn to shreds. Have you ever tried to see how OS X works under the hood? Hooked into the OS at boot level? Tried to modify low-level procedures?
>>"Producing complete and useful" documentation is a huge amount of work - a nontrivial fraction of writing the software in the first place.

this is definitely true, but does that somehow mean that bad documentation should be the norm or otherwise excused?
Thanks for all the great comments and support throughout this series of posts. Besides the enjoyment of brainstorming through each of pg's ideas, by far the best part of this experience was the chance to discover the Hacker News community - you guys rock.

Also, I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know which (if any) of these ideas you think might be worth pursuing. Someone posted a comment here a while back suggesting that after the challenge is over, I take the next 30 days to take the best idea and actually build it out. It might be a fun project to take on - contact me if you're interested in helping out (kleneway at hotmail).
no problem. if you're worried about complexity, you could always open it up to people as they see themselves fit/ready.
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I thought it would be about sparse web design. :)

This is awesome and three cheers for LP!
Money is freedom; it can't tell you what to do but if you know what you want, it can make obstacles just go away.
"If you are not bringing the heat, get out of the kitchen. Passion was the common thread amongst the most inspiring talks I saw at the conference."

I find this interesting in light of what I've seen with a lot of serial entrepreneurs ... it just seems too ... game-ish. I sometimes wonder how that plays out in the world of investment where you've got inexperience as the downside for new entrepreneurs, with overbearing enthusiasm as a positive.
A lot of people say that things could get as bad as the great depression.

That is true in the absolute sense, but wrong in the relative.

What I mean is that we are today much richer then people were just before the great depression.

If the economy dives deeper and stays down longer we would still be much better of then people were during the great depression.

That's not my opinion, that's fact, because it is what happened in Japan.

Japan had a cheap money, stock and real estate fueled boom and then a true depression which was deeper and longer then the great depression.

But because they were much, much, much better of to start with, their bottom was still far above the great depression's bottom.

The same principle would apply to America.

As other people have mentioned cash is king in a recession/depression.

Keep in mind cash can lose its value if the fed is trying to stimulate spending by inflating the currency.

Gold is a good hedge but gold is taxed at very high rates (22%, not sure) but government bonds are tax free.

It's probably a good idea to hold both.

And if the fed is attempting to save us by printing money, debt IS a good thing to have.

Inflation is the debtor's friend.
Yeah! Down with Python! Wait...
Forgive me in advance for stirring the pot yet again, but I thought this site was called "Hacker News" because it's meant to carry news of interest to hackers. In which case it makes sense that this will ebb and flow between tech, finance, politics, et al. in keeping with the stories of our times. Right now it's finance, but I'm willing to claim that this is temporary in light of what's going on in our world.

How does one determine the boundaries between financial markets and venture capital, politics and net neutrality, etc.?

Whatever we do, please let's not make this site into another one of those inhospitable "I'm moving your post to the Financial News discussion forum" types. In other words, is there a plan in anyone's mind to stop people from submitting financial posts to HN?

Btw, cool site, nickb.
So basically if you use hardware identical (or almost identical) to what Apple sells, you can build a machine on your own that runs? Maybe it's just me, but this seems to be more of an exercise in how to stick it to Apple, rather then a legit reason (is there any?) for running osx86.
indeed, corporations are in legal terms considered with legal equivalence to an individual, and a public traded company is legally bound to maximise shareholder profit, we have basically created a legal psychopath, they're (the board, ceo etc) legally bound to do anything within the law to generate profit/growth. As you say, hardly surprising that companies with mottos like 'do no evil' end up censoring bloggers in the PR of China.
I like the concept of it but the layout of the results page is...well... not so good. I, like others, was impressed by the results I got for my search, but it was hard to tell what I was looking at for a minute. I didn't instantly know that what I was looking at was in a certain category and so on and so forth. It looked more like a bunch of random text about X topic thrown up on the page in an unstructured manner with hyperlinks to who knows where. I think with a little bit of work on structuring the results that it will be a pretty decent system. Not that I see it rocking the foundation of Google anytime soon, but that doesn't mean Microsoft ;-) they are only 6% after all.
This is the stupidest caricature of women I've seen in a long time. Who's voting it up?
Yup, just pray it doesn't get rapidly downgraded like wamu, lehman, bears, AIG, etc.
No, I haven't. And I take your point that things usually aren't any less chaotic on the other side of the fence. The vast majority of code everywhere is a mess; APIs only reflect that. It's a wonder that things work to the extent that they do.
I will probably wait ... I have to disable the last Silverlight Plugin in Firefox to avoid some Silverlight based websites from crashing.
This is nice, especially as a side project. Here are a couple of quick comments/suggestions:
- If possible, it would be interesting to see a ranked list of the sports writers who had the highest accuracy. The writers would probably be interested in that, and the top guys might even link to you (Hey, check it out, I'm #2 on Sportsify!)
- Minor bug: the menus for NFL and NCAA Football are really touchy. Unless I do it just right, I can't move my mouse down to the second item before it disappears.
- Ability to sort by upsets. For example, it's interesting to see that 100% of commentators picked USC over Oregon State.
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My wife is in school for design, and she was telling me about one of her professors. Whenever someone says that they have been "playing" with an idea or a design, the professor will interrupt and lecture the student on how "we are professionals, we don't play... we do serious work..." ad nauseam. I think this woman is, like anybody who thinks that everything they do is "serious business", really insecure in her profession. Sure, doctors and bankers can't "play" with their work, but anybody whose work involves the synthesis of something (whether it is creative in the traditional sense or not) can and should play with their tools and materials.

I also like how this post touches on the fact that school is broken. People learn so much more from real experiences (play being one kind of real experience) than from pre-packaged curriculum in age-based compulsory school.

If we are going to move forward as a society, we need universal education. That doesn't mean universal school. It does mean, in part, a new attitude towards industrial design, where building education into an object is just as important as usability and aesthetics. Deliberately building the capacity to play into a gadget is a great way to do that.
Wow. I really like this.
Their technology and research is also in my opinion some of the best out there. They're one of the most underestimated brain-centers around in my opinion. It's like a playground for ways to present and monetize a million different kinds of data.
No it doesn't, and my intention is not to make excuses (least of all for MS) - just to point out that the people ordering them to produce this probably don't understand what it is that they're ordering, that the task itself is either unsatisfiable or nearly so, and that it will probably consume orders of magnitude more resources than people expect. It's one of those things where you can't ever be "done" - especially if the other party has an interest in picking holes.

Personally, I'm fine with MS having to lie in (or document every molecule) of the bed they made. The sooner we can all move beyond what they did to our industry the better.
I think it's being upvoted for the lulz.
The people that make things work are the same one's that have no problem with reading through the code. It's no coincidence.
I'm looking to own my own home. I've got 10% down, non-ARM and semi-conformable monthly payment (relies on two incomes).
Yeah, exactly. I was picking on electric cars because they only address a subproblem; other technologies are certainly more promising.

...

"Another innovation came in the carpet pattern itself. The company's top-selling pattern, called Entropy, mimics the disorder of a forest floor with its strewn leaves, pebbles, and twigs. That randomness means that the pattern needn't match up from tile to tile, but can be laid out in any direction, eliminating the huge amounts of scrap normally generated at installation. It means few tiles are rejected at the factor: imperfections get lost in the wandering variations of color. It also means the carpet lasts a long time, because worn or stained tiles can be swapped out without replacing the rest." (p. 215)

Sounds like a good book.
I actually like the font/color scheme for the most part; it reminds me of a copy of the WSJ or NY Times. The edges on each side are a nice touch to top it off.

The only thing I'm not a fan of is the color of the upvote arrow. It's still a shade of red which makes me think it's bad to upvote something. Though it does a good job of making someone think before they blindly upvote something without reading I suppose..
Yeah, I don't think it's evil, but it does seem counter-productive.
Yahoo BOSS's terms do not require attribution though: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ . I don't think most users would care as much either; we hackers care a lot coz we're baffled with "how in the world did this one guy do this?!". (Even with BOSS being used for some results, this is still very impressive.)

Although it might help the service get more credibility by mentioning that Yahoo results are also used.
I think there's a very big difference between enthusiasm and passion. Enthusiasm is ephemeral. Like with dating, it's easy to be enthusiastically in lust with the romantic idea of start-ups early on. Enthusiasm can fade after a first anniversary. Passion is in the blood. Passion is what keeps you married to your vision even after it gets a little older, has put on a little weight, and delivered you a nest egg or two.

I haven't met any successful serial entrepreneurs who aren't passionate about what they do (whether specifically technology or entrepreneurship in general). Just as well there are passionate entrepreneurs who fail (most of the successful ones did originally).

Enthusiasm dries up. Passion doesn't.
And the famous eboy posters including Web 2.0 at http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/index.php
What's wrong with C? Essentially all the speed-critical code on your system (think: the kernel, stuff like openssl, libpng/libjpg, audio & video codecs, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ruby, perl, python, php, apache, nginx, memcached, ...) is written in C, and it works great.

There's a strange disease among modern application programmers where they seem not to be able to "see C" even when it's driving the very engines of their success. If you just look a tiny bit more deeply, you'll discover that it's not nearly as hard as you think it is.
It's the long term goal. The short term goal is to do more.
Just wait 'til passion cheats on you by kicking you off the board to get the bigger ring or the Series C funding...
C++ is probably the hardest widely used language to parse. See the "FQL" for more:

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-2

(Note: I use and like C++ for a lot of things, but there is a lot of valid criticism of it and the FQL rants are at least well-informed.)
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How does this compare to Pd (Pure Data) and Max? It's "real code"?
Google Patent Could Kill Off Cellphone Contracts
Actually, given call/cc (http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/callcc.html), it's not a big deal. I think Termite (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/841) is implemented in Gambit with call/cc.
You only receive activity from the people you choose to follow.
HTC Touch HD Unlocked
There's a front-facing VGA camera for video calls, 512MB of ROM and 288MB of RAM. HTC expects the 1350 mAh battery to score you 390 minutes of 3G talk and 450 ours of 3G standby, with 120 minute video calls just for kicks. The phone measures 12mm thick.
I thought it was going to be about the nonsense rumor from a while back that Google could save the country $HUGE_AMOUNT of electricity by changing their background to black.
Unlike Firebug and TamperData HttpFox does not change behavior of the browser cache, and correctly reports what is being served from cache and what goes on the wire. Unlike TD and LiveHTTPHeaders it has a convenient user interface for examining HTTP conversation post-factum, including timing, cache info, etc. The interface part follows from it being a direct, if not yet complete clone of HttpWatch, an excellent commercial product for IE. Unlike tcpdump/tcpflow/wireshark it allows convenient capture of SSL traffic, and is quick to use.

In summary, HttpFox is the a great tool for HTTP optimization under Firefox.
So you must be a trillionaire now?

Seriously, take one of the ideas and run with it. Ideas are easy. Execution is what counts.
I'm offended by this article as a man.

"Macho superiority contests are generally boring to women, and let’s face it, they’re dumb"

"Women don’t like to “blow their own horns”, but they love to be appreciated, and they’ll do more work when they are"

"Women like working cooperatively, they don’t just tolerate it"

"Even if women do have the control they need to install development environments, they generally don’t want to waste as much time “fiddling with the tools”, and want fewer obstacles to simply getting the job done"

"Pairs programming is a very “feminine” way to work"

I've considered using a female name online just to avoid being stereotyped like this. Apparently my Y chromosome makes me a macho horn-tooting uncooperative tool-fiddling loner.
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