skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazing how good smartphone cameras are these days, I remember taking pictures with one of the first Nokia phones equipped with VGA cameras, and you couldn't see a damn think on them.
>But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM...

In regards to pre-lease, A bit of a stretch calling what Valve does DRM.
The pre-release stuff is straight up encrypted. It's a convenience for the end-user to pre-load the data. Once the game gets released you don't need to contact valve's servers for decryption keys every time you want to play.

Steam itself will install any game I own on any machine I log into. Steam competes directly with The Pirate Bay, and wins.
British Holiday cottage Redecorating
Thank you for this comment.

I wrote a comment on HN before, about privacy policies and why current solutions suck. Here's the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911830

The reason why we didn't launch the product yet, is that we are not ready. We are working really hard with our beta testers to improve it, and to solve some of the problems you mentioned too.

Now, instead of a bunch of useless words, can I ask you to watch a demo of what we're about to launch? Skip if you want, but take a look at the real product and tell me what you think:

http://f.cl.ly/items/3Q2600072w2w3a0V3B3B/Screeny%20Video%20...
EDIT: It was rightly pointed out that I directed my comments to music whereas the topic was games. My thoughts drifted due to the more common association with piracy. Everything I said still applies though. To have a fair discussion, we need to be clear on who is screwing whom and how. And we need to be clear on how they can stop, and whether it is actually within their power to stop.

Original post follows:

Who should stop screwing the customer? And how should they stop?

Any discussion of fixing the music (EDIT: or gaming) industry or stopping piracy needs answers to these questions.

One of the advantages of piracy, one of its conveniences, is that you can get anything you want in one place. But no one is in a position to provide this legally. Spotify (and others (EDIT: such as Steam for games)) would like to, but they can only legally provide what record companies (EDIT: or gaming companies... I think I can stop with the line by line clarifying now; the point is that this applies to all pirated digital content) will provide to them. And they will only provide what it is cost-effective for them to acquire and license. They aren't going to have truly independent artists, because dealing with artists rather than labels isn't cost effective on such a large scale.

The only way to overcome this I can think of is a compulsory license for distributing music, akin to the compulsory license for playing covers. But there's no way I can foresee the unintended consequences of such a fundamental change in how copyright is understood.

But whether or not such a compulsory license is a good idea is not the point. The point is that "stop screwing the customer" is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
Well, I am not doing an off the shelf whole house fan. Clearly some of the issues you mentioned are very real. Dust can be easily handled with filtering. My summer long experiment proved that you can cool a house and avoid using the AC unit for a whole summer. This is at least true where I live.

The next step is to come up with a plan for next year. Since a fan outside the downstairs kitchen window worked just fine, I don't have to rush to put in a commercial system. I can use all of next summer to experiment and find a better solution.

You can cool my house during the summer for about $10 per month. That's the baseline from which I'll judge all other solutions.
How can you go wrong trying to connect with your customers as a business owner. I think this is a great strategy to follow and even beyond the 1000 users, you can still grab x number of new customers to email personally. People want to feel important and personally communicating with the founder is one way they can do that.

I can recall a time when I received a personal phone call from the CEO of a marketing blog I followed. When he introduced himself, I recognized the name, but was sort of shocked he was calling me. The guy ran a very successful business with tens of thousands of subscribers, why was he calling me? That was my initial thought. He wanted my opinion on a few things, that was all. Wasn't trying to sell me anything. My answers were lame at best cause I was caught off guard (literally shocked), but after the call was over, I had to sit down and take in what just happened. I never forgot how that call impacted me. It did make a difference. I ended up buying several of his products after that, not because he called me, but I believed his products were good and felt comfortable buying them from him.

It's simple, really, after looking back, he was just building relationship and rapport which translates into trust which translates into relationship which turned into sales. When your product has a lot of competitors, who does your customer turn to first? If you have established some sort of rapport, it will be your business. It works...
Excel vs SQL or awk.

Because Lynx (except for its dump mode) and Pine address characters on the screen in two dimensions, I consider them to be graphical programs. They are just very limited graphics. There is a difference between a program which displays text on the screen and a program which prints its output to stdout.
It is truly amazing what we can do on cell phones these days. That said, this isn't any better than anything on the market today. The video is simply better produced than many of the engadget video-walk-around-the-block-while-holding-the-phone sample vids we often see. Also note the choice of lighting - outdoor shots that are mostly shot during the golden hour ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hour_(photography) ). Very smart of them to release a well produced video like this though, as the common user will assume that the shots will always look this nice.

It's a lovely video, but it's not a real world scenario.
All for german founders
Why doesn't Mint introduce this to their service? Having financial info in the same place as my digital receipts just makes sense. It would also allow better classification of purchases.
I can't get over the extremely negative connotation I have with the word lemon. Not "lemons," which sound nice and zesty. But a "lemon" which sounds like a regretted crappy purchase.
GitHub open sources Hubot (chat bot)
Holodesk prototype puts life in computers (w/ video)
I would love to see the results of a similar test case for PyPy.
wow - I really like this and would be interested in beta testing for a small store that I'm involved with. Online sales is something we've wanted to do, but never had a good enough store front.

In general:

* ebay - big, bloated, complicated, high shipping costs

* craigslist - too scammy/spammy

* shopify - considered it, but seems overly complex for non-geeks

* etsy - what we were going to try next
In flyover country where I live (St Louis) I should be happy that we even have digital coin-op meters and not ancient clockwork models. A couple years ago they put pay-and-display meters in a few neighborhoods, only to inexplicably get rid of them and replace them with coin only meters.
I used CakePHP exclusively for many years, wrote several popular articles and contributed several components. I stopped baking primarily because I grew tired and frustrated with the community more than anything else.

CakePHP is the only open source project I was involved with where the core developers mailing list was private, new major versions were developed in private repos, and inline documentation was banned (because "inline code comments often go out of date").

It's a critical realisation that often the health of a community is more important than the product itself.
I think GUIs and CLIs can both be "valuable tools for expression".

But Photoshop is an example of something that's particularly good for the GUI. It's not representative of most things that people do when they're interacting with a computer.
It seems a bit silly to use a video clip created with a 1k slow mo dolly and another 1k in video editing software. For some reason I just don't see the average user using that equipment....

And even with that....it doesn't really look that amazing?
Yes, at the moment they are all private. We're introducing public features some time in the near future once we get the bare minimum product right.
Refinancing Plan Likely to Spark Partisan Debate
Diamond Hunter
I am a bookmark heavy user. I have paid evernote account (7212 bookmark) and google bookmark (37852 bookmark) right now.

Here is my story.
I used to have delicious account long ago (close to 30000). Because Yahoo shut it down, I have to move. I used a ruby script to auto submit to google bookmark. It took me three days. After that I thought everything will be fine. However, I define tagging a lot, google bookmark can't do heavy sorting (it always crash my browser).
Then when I found evernote, I like the way they have app for iPad and Android phone. However, right now they also have tagging sorting problem. Currently I have 7212 bookmark in Evernote, 2341 tags. You can imagine the browser basically freeze to wait for the loading.
Tagging/hashtag is very important to me. I rarely use google to do research because I always look back to my tag first.
Surely, the world needs some computer scientists ;-).
Equity grants are based on risk, not ability.

Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants.

A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity:

* Founders have by definition committed to the idea before it had any traction at all. More risk.

* Founders have spent more time at the company than employees. Each day spent at the startup, in addition to accruing compensable effort, carries opportunity cost (not to hop ship to some other company) and thus more risk.

* Founders have often worked, at least for a time, at zero salary. More risk.

* Founders that can get their companies funded, accepted into YC, or bootstrapped to market traction can presumably do that again somewhere else --- again implying they're accepting the opportunity cost of committing to one startup instead of starting another. Most employees, regardless of ability, can't say that.

It's important to remember that founding teams have drastically different compensation packages than employees do; it's almost an apples/oranges comparison. You want to remember this not to empathize with the founders but to keep in mind how different their incentives are from yours.
I've had that particular problem with an old thermostat before. No wifi or anything, but when the batteries would run out, it would get stuck into AC mode, no matter the previous settings. Getting back from vacation was like a meat locker. It seems weird that the "failure" mode of these things seems to be make the plants think it's winter.
Wow, what a post. Thank you very much.
It's also interesting to see how piracy builds a market in third world countries without the companies even being present there.

Like their example, Russians were pirating games and software long before Valve or other companies had a presence there, and as soon as they came in, they already had clients.

It was the same with Microsoft's Windows and Office - people got so used to them, for example, in Poland, Latvia, Romania, that they just bought licensed versions when they became available (government orders alone must've made them hundreds of millions in revenue).
I also find it amusing that many great iPhone4S videos are edited on device with iMovie, but the Nexus video needed a $999 program to get a well-edited clip.

If all he did (as stated) was speed up the video then edit the transitions his choice of editing program is really moot.
If you click Config there's a small payments panel. So far you can enter a paypal address to receive your payements and it will integrate with the cart, or you can simply accept your orders via email. We'll integrate with further providers later on, too.
I think the text inviting them to upload a photo is fine. It's simple and obvious (though as I mentioned elsewhere they might want to offer an affordance for drag and drop).

A stock photo might introduce more problems than it solves. The user might not realize that they can easily change it, it might be slightly irritating if the image is 'wrong', and they'd have to find a set of images that are free/cheap and safe for commercial use.
Mere agreement is information, but it is not information that's important enough to merit cluttering up the discussion. If you're going to encourage that kind of logorrhea, expect a lot of comments along the lines of "I just farted" and "'Assent' is a really cool-sounding word. You ever think about it? Say it to yourself — 'assent, assent'. LOL"

Some information is just not that essential.
Yeah, so you are agreeing with me and disagreeing with the author. His analogy sucks.

GUIs and CLIs are for expression.
Fun note, OS/2 Warp 4 support was discontinued on December 31st, 2006; ten years after its release.
Having a good resume with skills A,B and C: 5-10pts.

Interview confirms that your resume wasn't full of BS: 10-20 pts

You can perform skills A,B,C on a whiteboard or laptop interview session: 20-50 pts

1 year of seeing you exhibiting skills A,B, and C under real world conditions and interacting with other people: 100-300 pts

No matter how unfair this seems, if you have the same skills as someone in my network, they have an almost impossible to overcome advantage in my hiring equations.
Spot on! We made this after reading 37s' Rework and very much admire the "how can we do less" mindset.
I have an OmniProII system, but have scaled back what I am using it for. In many cases though it makes a very nice security, HVAC, automation and audio platform.
The TSA maintains a secret watchlist and black list. The fact that this list seems to be arbitrary and disconnected from intelligence agencies doesn't make it better.
I've been working as a freelancer, so I know I love to do that.
I think a StackOverflow style app would be powerful, and yet I don't want to add yet another "knowledge base" style application on top of, say, an internal wiki, ticket tracking systems, git commit messages, et cetera.

What do you use to tie these things together, and how do you decide what goes where? The line seems to blur between Q/A-style like Coordino and a wiki, in particular. Does anybody integrate these different knowledge systems well?
We could go downhill with (almost) no power too, if only we could coast-run fast enough (and could handle the shock in your leg when your stride becomes so long you fall several feet with each step)
Really nice job. Have you considered auto-posting to craigslist?
I'm sorry for ranting in a mildly off-topic fashion, but the visualizations linked in the /. article are just horrible. A jumble of widgets with hardly a caption, and no analysis. They even have those USPTO-style gauges. Data so important deserved much, much better.

And I love the disclaimer:

The information contained in this web site is for entertainment and information purposes only.

You wish, SAP.

Edit. And then, there's this:

United States of America
Total Population: 313,089,333
% of Oceania Population: 90.08%

—sigh—
When a smart small company hires a recruiter, part of the goal is to have recruits never really realize they're talking to recruiters. Presumably most YC recruiters aren't randomly cold calling people; instead their job might involve a lot more of "setting up circumstances so that the right person in their company is likely to end up talking to Colin Percival".
It can take days or weeks to get a result back from AFIS (fingerprint database). 15 minutes for a national face recognition system is mindblowingly awesome.
Perhaps this then...

if ($network=='at&t') {
$initcwd=1;
} else {
$initcwd=10;
}

I think a reasonable increase in initcwd for mobile makes sense. I imagine most mobile pages are smaller too. The way I look at it, I want to increase initcwd to fit the page size in it.
Some people put way too much weight on such names.

Try the app first - then make up your mind - I am trying it now - but I am currently in Nome AK - and the inet latency is incredibly high.
maybe something universities could do to differentiate themselves.

or individuals? I'm horrendous at selling myself and (now that I've been unemployed for >6 months) would gladly pay a ridiculous amount for someone to coach me through getting a job. I keep telling people that I'd like an agent. Everyone takes it as a joke :/
This is great, thanks GitHub! I've been procrastinating on writing my own Hubot, now I don't have to!
Or a compromise,

Invite them to upload an image or click to suggest one from a catalog of images (maybe search Flickr for cc/commercial use images).
Symantec identifies 87 short URL services operated by spammers
Tried that advice a few months ago, but the local credit union here (and there's only one in this entire province sadly), offered no better interest to my savings account, and wanted to charge me 3-5% more interest for any existing loans and credit cards that I wanted to more over. Guess they weren't hurting for customers too badly.

As for what bank, it's one of the five in Canada. Doesnt' matter much as to the name, they're all the same here really for anyone that isn't a millionaire.
I think focusing only on programming skills and what will help you in your first jobs out of college is short-sighted. Being a college dropout entrepreneur may be some sort of badge of honor in your 20's, but unless you do something extraordinary or make FU money, its not something that will help you later in life. Will having that MIT CS degree help you get that lucrative job when you're 40 years old with a family, mortgage and other responsibilities (i.e. not so easy to do risky startups)?

You also learn other skills that come in useful in your career, though I agree some can be worthless. I hated some of my classes in college, particularly the writing class requirements, but even those are helping me today because almost everything requires some sort of clear and coherent writing.

Its only 2-3 years if you work hard to graduate early, during which you'll have many opportunities to try out various ideas and meet many of your lifelong friends and likely, cofounders. If you don't have much money, excel at a state school and graduate with a manageable amount of debt, or better yet, work hard and get a scholarship.
Cheat Sheets For Developers
Those people who don't go to college just go get a job instead. (If jobs need training, they can apprentice or otherwise learn-on-the-job, but they won't be spending half that time learning french literature or what-have-you) Since people are doing something more productive with their time than sit in a classroom, their lifetime productivity improves, hence the productivity of the economy as a whole improves.

Given that college is a bad investment for most people, we'd be better off if fewer people did that. (Though the optimum is probably that some people go to college, not all or none.)
The IRS, at least, accepts digital copies of receipts: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p552/ar02.html#en_US_publink...

I've used Shoeboxed since 2008 to keep all my receipts, so I don't have to physically store anything. I don't actually like Shoeboxed. However, it syncs with my accounting application (Outright) and there's no better option which does this.

I hope Lemon works on their integrations—viewing receipts with a single click from your accounting application is the killer feature.
There is a vast difference between hiring a great recruiter and the kind of recruiter that you describe. So the best solution is to find and hire a great recruiter. Like most "best solutions" this is far from easy, much like most of the work you will have to do to make a successful startup.
"getting publications"? What does that even mean? You think academia has to be convinced to pump out papers?

If the standard is an open-access site similar to arXiv, that's where the papers would go. No effort needs to be spent there, and there would be plenty of motivation for people and institutions to meet its modest funding requirements without a massive drive.

The primary costs are support/technical staff and equipment, that would not change.
Does anybody have any research to suggest that this would result in less energy usage with a boiler (baseboard water heating)?

From what I understand, frequent fluctuations in temp settings with a boiler result in more energy usage, as the boiler requires far more energy to go from 65° -> 68° as it does to maintain a steady 68°.

Thoughts?
The audience for this metric isn't consumers choosing whether to get an iPhone or an Android phone. It's developers choosing whether to support iOS, Android or both. For that audience, this is a very relevant metric. It's also a fairly objective one.

(Of course there's a second-order effect: users will choose a platform partly according to how well it's supported by developers. But anyone choosing which phone to buy now on the basis of this metric is betting on a longer term than they'll probably keep that phone for.)
Husband and Wife Team File for Occupy Wall Street Trademark
Here's our ruby campfire chatbot, developed for our office. Many more plugins! Ruby!

https://github.com/markolson/linkbot

edit: for comparison, our google image plugin: https://github.com/markolson/linkbot/blob/master/plugins/ima...

vs. theirs: https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/script...
I've got a Galaxy S2 and it looks just as pretty. Only problem is the battery life is just awful. I would recommend iPhone
Very well done! This is awesome.We have an inventory management system (bizelo) and we'd love to work with you. Drop me a line!
Well, your entire paper hinges on a definition of identity that is completely internal, yet your measurements are external.
Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL
Once someone with AML gets a marrow what does their 1 year prognosis look like? I computed cancer "yield" a year ago based on cancer data from the state of New York, and Leukemia is (unfortunately) a pretty devastating cancer:

http://d0j.blogspot.com/2010/05/cancer-incidence-and-state-o...
How To Get Facebook Timeline In Just 3 Steps?
Middle of the road vs. which devices? Seems as good or better than any mobile device output I've seen so far. Maybe other 1080p devices (this isn't the first) are comparable, I just haven't seen it.

And the bit about shaky shots seems like a misplaced criticism of the cinematography. I don't think Google is trying to put this up for an Oscar: they're showing of their phone. But agreed: it's hard to hold those tiny devices steady. :)
The best book and perspective I've read on population, the environment, the economy, technology, and how they all overlap is Limits to Growth, the 30 year update. It takes a systems approach to these related issues, not looking at just one in isolation, though recognizing you have to make assumptions.

I'd love to talk to people about it but I've never spoken to anyone in person who has read and understood it. I've read some commentary on the web, but most of it is filled with politics and preconceived notions (often the case of any discussion on these subjects) that detract from it.

Has anyone here read it? I blogged briefly about it here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the_best_book_on_the_environment_eco....

The Amazon link -- http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193...
Google takedowns around the world: lèse-majesté yes, police brutality no