skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the actual paper now. Important bits:

The composition of excreted normal human urine, is:4 urea 6–18 g day−1, uric acid 1.8 g day−1, creatinine 0.5–0.8 g day−1, amino acids 0.12 g day−1 and peptides 0.5 g day−1. Variable amounts of lactic acid, citric acid, bilirubin and porphyrins, ketone bodies (aceto-acetic acid; β-hydroxybutyrate; acetone), and small amounts of hexose (glucose) and pentose (arabinose) sugars may also be present in normal urine. When considering the bio-available organic content of excreted urine, compounds such as urea and uric acid are not included, since they cannot be utilised as carbon-energy (C/E) sources by the microbial community inside an MFC. In total, the dry weight content of metabolisable organic substrates, within excreted urine, was estimated to be 0.78 g/human/day.4 Due to the insignificant amount of lipid in urine, this has also been ignored. Therefore, the mean calorific value of 1 g of carbohydrates, peptides, proteins or amino-acids (as metabolisable substrates within urine) has been estimated to be 2.08 kcal

Which, if I'm reading it correctly, means you can extract 1.62 kCal of energy per day from your urine (assuming 100% efficiency).

This is not a lot. Even if you collected all the urine from a city of one million people, it would be roughly 80 kilowatts.
> users of the new database are no longer allowed to combine information gleaned from the public database with any other publicly available information in a way that would identify doctors.

the basic idea of DMCA - legal prohibition of the basic mental act of analysis - gets more and more widespread. And it seems that emotions, dreams, beliefs can be legally restricted in the same way. We aren't far from the situation when your [unlicensed] believing in the mormon or scientiological god or laughing at some matter/content that the rights-holder doesn't want to be laughed at can be considered an infringement.
Geeks are a lot smarter than telcos; we'd win that battle easily. Geeks are a lot smarter than government, too, but they have big sticks to hit with; that battle requires a bit more care.
Beagle Training With Zone Method - Fast
I was actually going to search for this later tonight because I recently moved to Austin. I'd be game for a meetup.
Internet Extremo | Negocios Rentables, Posicionamiento Web Y Algo Mas
I'm from Canada. In 2002 I went to flensburg on a tourist visa. I met a guy who ran a company and wanted a LAMP developer. I applied for a residence permit which came pretty quickly and then with the job offer in hand I got a work permit for a year. I got the permits renewed once before moving to the UK.
Estrategias Link Building, backlinks.
Sorry, actually, I don't feed trolls.
A can see both sides of this story. I do want to make one thing clear. I think any public information is just that—public. There shouldn't be restrictions on how it is used other than in purposely misleading ways, which is probably how this doctor viewed the release of the information related to his medical background. I think the reporter was completely justified in what he did. I don't believe he was on some kind of witch hunt, out to destroy this doctor's career. From the sounds of it, he's doing a pretty good job of that himself.

On the flip-side, just because a doctor is sued for malpractice doesn't mean he's guilty of malpractice. I'm not familiar with the database, but if it doesn't list the outcomes of malpractice suits, it should. Simply saying a doctor has been sued 16 time for malpractice doesn't tell the full story. But in this case, him settling almost half of those cases, in my mind, does admit some level of guilt.

Do I think the doctor is right in wanted the use of this information restricted? No. Do I think he deserved discipline from the Medical Board? Probably. Do I see how inaccurately presenting information can hurt innocent people? Absolutely.

I'll go back to what I started with. Public is public. Just tell the full story. (which, by the way, I think was done fairly well in the article)
The actual facebook engagement even 5 years ago was insane: "10 million users and over 50% of them sign in daily."
http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_lib

It wasn't that people were attacking facebook's engagement 5 years ago; it was that very few people in the Valley even knew about facebook because they were lost in the myspace hype and couldn't join facebook due to the .edu requirement.
Intel’s Haswell Acrhitechture: What It Means For The Consumers?
If you've subscribed to Groupon long enough, you'll see some businesses re-appear on their rotation. While some businesses have been burnt by over-selling, it's hard to imagine completely suicidal business owners coming back to keep losing money.
Sony CEO: We’re building ‘a different kind of TV set,’ just like Apple
It just seems like there wasn't much critical thinking in this article. It doesn't give us an idea of the real magnitude of the potential energy that could be produced this way. For example, "6.4 trillion liters" is just a headline grabber (and an effective one), but if it only produces a trivial amount of energy, who cares?

It also doesn't mention that there are useful alternatives that may be more economically worthwhile for waste (see the other comments here).
However, many services won't let you make full use of it; e.g. last year when I tried to get multicast between my EC2 nodes, it discovered it was unsupported.

If you're only using ZeroMQ in tcp or inproc mode, it is nice, but in a pub/sub scenario you are wasting a lot of bandwidth and CPU time.
> It's not only unsafe but possibly criminally negligent to operate this as is shown on that page.

we don't have any laws about amateur usage of green lasers in poland, so if you don't hurt anybody you're fine.
last year we had some incidents with people pointing at planes though, but here's not the case.
Generally speaking I agree, but Google screwed up Wave so badly that the lead developer went to work for Facebook; any developer that was in the community or building products for Wave was also so badly screwed I think they'll never work with or for Google again (Full disclosure: I was among them).

I think this needs a new company. Anyone interested?
4 ways to avoid a Rick Perry meltdown during a presentation
I don't think it's privacy that's the issue here, rather the degree of privacy. By live blogging the ordeal, it unwittingly went from an argument in a Burger King in front of a few people to an argument broadcast on the Internet to thousands. I don't think it's illegal and I probably wouldn't fault most people for doing this, but Boyle's a trained journalist. He should know the ethics of communication inside and out.
Honestly, I doubt most people playing Farmville et al. care at all about the politics of Zynga and their questionable virality tactics.
I cofounded the 4 Hour Workweek meetup, which is still very active in Berlin. Check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/146524318752855/

We actually had Tim Ferriss come and speak to us, it was great.

You can also check out meetup.org, I see a lot of cool Startup Freelancer meetups there.

Lastly, check out Couchsurfing.org, there are AWESOME weekly meetups 3x / week.
How to train for a 5km Race
There you go, no problems then.
The point of an iPad is you don't have to carry around a bag, at that point you might as well just carry a laptop. I'm constantly replying to emails throughout the day so I'm all for anything that can makes that more convenient.
Digital Advertising: 5 hot trends from ad:tech
I think this is a result of applying 19th century concepts of privacy to a 21st century world.

I don't disagree. Privacy case law has mostly evolved in the context of large corporate or government entities violating the privacy of individuals, because those entities were the ones with access to surveillance and broadcasting or publishing technologies. Now everyone is a broadcaster, and their editorial discretion (and morals) will vary.
Russia has a very long history of failed Mars missions:

http://flowingdata.com/2009/10/26/failed-space-missions-to-m...

Of the 20 missions launched by USSR/Russia so far (not counting Phobos-Grunt), 14 were absolute failures that didn't make it to Mars or return any data. 2 of the remaining 6 were orbiter-lander missions, and the lander either burned up in entry (Mars 2) or went silent after only 20 seconds of data on the ground (Mars 3). Their orbiters sent back around 60 images though, so they can be considered marginal successes. Mars 4 failed to achieve orbit, but somehow gets counted as a success by people who tally these things because they still managed to do at least some science as it zipped by. Mars 6 ceased transmission after 224 seconds, and what data it did send was near-useless due to degradation in the electronics. The last "successful" mission sent by the Soviets was Phobos 2 in 1988. It got some great data on the way in, but contact was lost as it approached it's ultimate target, Phobos.

Mars 5 was the only hands-down, unqualified success of the entire program.

(The only post-Soviet Russian mission to Mars, Mars 96, is counted among the 14 failures).

14 failures, 5 marginal "successes", and only 1 mission that achieved its objectives completely.

I hope the people down-voting me didn't think I was being prejudiced or something. It's just the simple truth: with the Soviet/Russian Mars program, failure is the expected outcome.

If Phobos-Grunt is lost, I would be greatly saddened, but hardly surprised.
Well, I believe the top censorship software is American. Websense in particular.
Do you know any writers? Because the ones I know mostly have a terrible problem with procrastination, avoidance, etc.

Fulfilling a compulsion is not actually enjoyable. So unlike most game-makers, I don't see them as creating fun.
Thanks! We spent a fair amount of time polishing little UI details.

I really appreciate you forwarding it to your teacher friends. If they have any questions at all, or just need a walkthrough, they're welcome to email me: m [at] classpager.com.
with a Mac OS X dock-like magnification so I can choose my country easily

That's fine if you're in a medium-sized country like the UK. But think of the consequences for the San Marinans, the Andorrans and the Liechtensteinians, who would have to go five levels of zoom in order just to find their country.
Perhaps because they were earning their compensation and new employees would just be too expensive, since Pincus didn't want bait them with anymore (possibly no longer worthless) stock. Might as well try to squeeze it out of current employees knowing that finding a new job can be a bitch.
Summary: Details how Citigroup almost got away with paying a $125M fine for defrauding its customers $700M.

"The amazing thing about the wave of corruption that has overtaken the financial services industry is that most of it couldn’t happen without virtually every player at every level signing off on these deals. From the ratings agencies to the law firms to the accounting firms to the regulators to the bank executives themselves, everybody had to be on board in order for a lot of these fraud schemes to work.

"Judges are a part of that picture, and too often, members of the bench sign off on dirty deals made between banks and regulators when the law says that such settlements must be “fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest.”

Edit: changed Bank of America to Citigroup. Wrong bank.
If we're talking about what should be illegal, I find it hard to argue that it shouldn't be. If you hire someone on the promise that they'll get a bonus at 5 years, and purposely fire them at 4 years, 11 months solely to avoid paying them the bonus, that should be illegal. In any reasonable interpretation of the contract, that isn't good-faith upholding of the contract--- you promised them something at certain milestones, and then purposely acted in a manner intended for the sole purpose of sabotaging the milestones, which is acting in bad faith.

In most other kinds of contingent pay that's tortious: if you promise a building contractor contingency bonuses upon meeting certain deadlines, and then you purposely interfere to make them miss the deadlines so you can get the work cheaper (and admit doing so!), you're probably acting illegally. Heck, even basketball players have sued over instances where a team kept them out of a few games solely to cause them to miss performance targets.
J. Crew Holiday 2011 Bridesmaid Collection
"In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people."
Facebook to make all sharing related privacy settings 'opt-in'
The European Union has its shortcomings, but this is the one reason I don't want to see it fail, or Britain to leave.

If I wanted to, tomorrow, I could take my British passport to Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw, anywhere on a continent of 500 million people and live and work without the artificial hassles of borders and visas. It opens up so many more opportunities than being stuck in one country, and eventually it's going to be one of the things that gets us out of this boring recession.
I like the concept, applying a tiny bit of gaming to idea generation. The interaction you describe sounds a little too one-way/linear, though. I'd love to see a site takes this further and become kind of a social network of ideas where users link related ideas, vote ideas up/down, are encouraged to develop the ideas toward a goal, etc. Look at Quirky.com for an example of full-cycle idea development but for physical products.
Hit up any of the companies advertising on http://berlinstartupjobs.com/ - if you are as proficient as it sounds, you should find a company that takes you on and also pays you a salary during your internship. Feel free to contact me if you need pointing into any direction or want a second opinion.
Upgrade To Internet Explorer 9 And Microsoft Will Give You Free Stuff
I didn't check the site, but if it's the same problem that usually causes this, you can fix it with this userstyle:

http://userstyles.org/styles/54719/ctrl-plus-text-zoom-fix
I think the saddest thing is how this was on the ABCNews homepage. This was an amusing tweet-stream, but above-the-fold homepage material? It seems traditional media will jump on anything that involves traditional everyday activity (breaking up) combined with what they think is whizbang technology (Twitter, or, basically anything that is on the Internet)
It's like this guy can't help but be evil.

What are you talking about? It's the key to his success.
Thanks for the response, unfortunately I am familiar with everything 37signals.

I'm looking for this specific service because I liked their 'everything available in one screen' approach.
I live in Munich and just the opposite is true -- well, sort of. We've got lots of nerds and plenty of money but not much entrepreneurial activity. Too sedentary -- but why?
That's fair, but I don't know who has the intersection of Google's clout and incentives. Google's the only powerful force that has the incentive to fight for an open web, as opposed to a collection of closed silos.

My not-so-secret hope is that the lesson Google took from the Wave debacle was to first focus on making a product that's compelling and engaging to users, get a critical mass of adoption, and then release the code. I guy can dream, can't he?
I suppose it depends on the technical content. The session was pretty much using groan worthy euphemisms as a way of selecting a limited set of things to cover. That slice through the APIs may cover different things than other sessions that deal with more monolithic topics like 'Core Animation' or 'Core Data'.
The Apple Steps of Service, as taught during Core Training.
> If the SEC doesn't think they can win a case against Citigroup and they were settling to impose whatever punishment they could then this judge isn't a hero at all.

If the SEC can't prove their case, then they shouldn't be imposing any fine at all.
I don't think this is what was meant by the phrase. Fame and infamy are two very different things.
I keep thinking of various Smalltalk implementations and how the non-native widgets and lack of hooks into the OS make it a hard sell. It seems like Web Apps are having quite a lot of the same issues.
Never work for unethical people. If they lack ethics in their dealings with customers, they will inevitably lack ethics in their dealings with employees.

Zynga's product does not provide a worthwhile service, nor does it improve people's lives. It creates no value. Rather, it (cleverly and cynically) capitalizes on weaknesses of the human psyche to relieve people of their money, one dollar at a time. This is an inherently unethical position for a company to be in. As such, regardless of the compensation offered, any prospective employee of the company should ask themselves whether the ethical foundation such a company displays in relation to its customers will extend to employees.

A CEO who is comfortable fleecing customers will feel similarly comfortable fleecing employees. I learned this lesson the hard way in the trades, working for people who would jack up prices and sell material and services that the customer did not need. They would shirk responsibility for deficiencies, and usually try to do jobs for cash so as to avoid paying taxes. Invariably, this lack of professional ethics extended to myself and my coworkers. Cheques would be short, overtime would not be paid, and promises would not be kept.

The best indicator that an employer will rip you off is their willingness to rip off customers. When you see it, start lining up interviews immediately.
Funny story about döner kebabs---if you go to ANY kebab place, they will ask you if you want your kebab 'mit alles' (with everything). The funny thing is that (correct me if I'm wrong german speakers), the correct grammar for this question would actually be 'mit allem', but because every single kebab shop owner says it incorrectly, even the Germans ask with incorrect grammar.
Dropbox vs. Box.net
It is ultimately not about clout and incentives; it is about drive. It is just like when a lot of people know what the right thing is to do but are too short sighted to pursue it (wasn't Google just trying to acquire Zynga, for example).
Imagine your company gave you a $40,000 bonus. You get 4 checks for $10k each, dated 11-Nov-2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. If the company is still in business on those dates you can cash the checks. If you leave or quit, you hand back the uncashed checks.

Now the company says "give us back 2014 and 2015 or you're fired". What would you say?
You don't, it is automagically being picked up from npm's couchdb repo. If it's on npm then it is on node-toolbox. If the module has some keywords then the chances are that it will get categorized correctly as well.
Germany is one of the easiest places to get a resident visa in. Compare it to Italy or Spain or France, and you'll see the difference.
Your best defense against this is knowing and trusting the owners and co-founders. Ideally you'll have worked with them before, or some of your friends have. This is why I'm at the startup I'm at and not another.
I doubt neuroscience conference sessions these kinds of problems. There might be sexists, especially among older faculty. But they probably have the good judgement to not put it in their talks.
Twitter image sharing stats published
How the most massive botnet scam ever made millions for Estonian hackers
Can you build beautiful sites with Twitter Bootstrap? Hell yes
Thanks for the pointer--I'll be sure to look through the jobs posted there.
I love Berlin, but I recommend Hamburg over Berlin. Here in Hamburg, we don't have super-cheap housing, but there is one big advantage: Lots of capital. I'm currently working hard on getting more entrepreneurial and startup events going in Hamburg, because every time you talk to people from abroad and mention you're a startup in Germay, they all go "Oh, Berlin?" No, actually, we have several nice cities. Hamburg probably has the highest quality of life (compared to Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt). Berlin is fun if you like the scruffy look and hopping from one thing to the next, Hamburg is better if you want to live and build something sustainable.

And it's only 1:40h from Berlin by train... :)
There's nothing funny about deciding to end your marriage in a Burger King, in fact, I cannot think of any place where it would be "funny" to do that. This Tweeter-guy or whoever he is should have sticked to minding his own business, or maybe his life is so empty and lacking real-life relationships that he needs to live through other people's eyes and feelings. Now, that is funny.
IANAL, but I believe that wrongful termination suits are extremely difficult to win in most of the US unless an employee is fired because of discrimination, because the employee discovered an illegal act by his or her employer or a few other situations.
Honestly? I think this is the execs trying to grab as much stock as possible for themselves pre-IPO, so they can dump it and run.

Seems likely. Zynga is an obvious build-to-flip. Now is the time to cash it in at peak. The original push in social gaming was based on scaling, but people are starting to demand quality and that's where Zynga is going to die.
Excellent, thanks. At the risk of sounding like I didn't even attempt to check the obvious, I've tried sites like that before and found almost everything was defunct. If that's not the case here then I'll certainly take a look!
What Apple could learn from Enterprise Rent-a-Car
What I'm talking about is two people who really care about each other.

That is only one type of relationship.

Every night thousands of men and women meet at bars and end up sharing a bed without necessarily the expectation that they each "really care" for the other. So this is the other extreme.

Between our two extremes lie all the other shades of gray.
I already discover most new content via Facebook and the only missing piece is search. If Facebook builds a search engine and integrates within its core experience sooner than Google takes to get G+ to work and scale, it would be a good indication of who might eventually win. From the social perspective, Facebook already has the mental association at a massive scale that may be tough for G+ to get to, especially considering Google is perceived to be "more utility than fun" across its user base.
Why is a simple auto-complete input doing 100+ points on HN?

It seems to me they are just selling their $78 report on checkout usability.
Thanks for reading it! It would take a lot more than 80 kilowatts to even collect that much urine, much less actually do anything with it.

This is such a non starter I wonder why they even thought about it for longer than it took to lookup the composition of urine.
Regla 1 en un Plan de Dietas Rapidas y Efectivas
And I always thought "Allem" was a special turkish spice that they sprinkle on top at the end
Maybe they forgot step 0 in Perry's case: have an actual plan that you're actually working on, rather than speaking from memorized bullet points.
Arvind Narayanan (who is also on HN as randomwalker) has published papers and given many talks about this fundamental concept: "the level of anonymity that consumers expect—and companies claim to provide—in published or outsourced databases is fundamentally unrealizable."

It sounds like this is an example of that principle. It's not feasible for the public database to be both useful and preserve complete anonymity of the doctors. You can check out much more from his two websites: http://randomwalker.info/ and http://33bits.org/
Even in the most filthiest rag of a tabloid a story like this would get no more than a sentence long aside buried in the middle pages: "Man and wife argue fiercely in Burger King."

That this fella thought it a good idea to give a blow by blow account merely suggests he is too unscrupulous even for a red top. I don't find it offensive, just immensely disrespectful.

Either that or incredibly sheltered if the witnessing of a relationship on the rocks was so exciting to him.