skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you a self-styled prognosticator? Frustrated idea guy?

User friendliness would be a start, can you throw in what you would want to improve - I'm interested in your ideas?

"lookin 4 a technical cofounder"
In a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500301) some commenters suggest there's at least some minor bad blood between Coursera and Udacity as competing "Stanford profs turn online course into a startup" initiatives.
The biology/synthetic biology part of his post are most interesting. While some of them are more 2022 - 2032 type items and some of them don't really make sense their cadence is that anyone sleeping on biotech is going to miss everything. The current stage is something like just pre altair, waiting for the Apple II equivalent. The future of biology is, how do you engineer devices with a mind of their own? Add ambiguity to terms like genetic programming, synthetic intelligence, artificial immune system, antivirus.

Thanks to the increasing powers of computers and developments in machine learning, a bunch of things which will change society in unimaginable ways will come from biotech. Aspects including principled drug design and anti-disease techniques that will make modern medicine look shamanistic, ethics of performance and intelligence boosting therapies, blurring the line between adoption and parenthood - what does it mean to be a parent if you have tampered with the genetic expression of your child so much that they share little genetic similarity to you? Increasing ability to interface with machines. People are gonna be doing it, will you need to evolve your morals or get left behind? How do you stop people from settling at local optimums, mass producing the same sets of traits and ceasing in exploring the genetic space?

Bans and censure - some will say some things shouldnt be touched but if there's any lesson that can be gotten from fantasy novels its that having a category of black magic just gives more power to the less principled. More polarization between the haves and have nots. Security - how to defend against synthetic plagues. Technology moves on inexorably. Our ability to handle the dangers of the coming age will decide our fate. Moral dilemmas like if we show ourselves incapable of surviving, is it ok to engineer compassion, long term thinking and rationality at the expense of the ability and freedom of will to choose such?
This looks great, and now all the people complaining about Microsoft's locked firmware have a place to take their wallets.
Oldies but goodies: Data Warehousing for Cavemen
What's that color scheme?
peerguardian and it's ilk don't help at all. they make uninformed people feel safer.
I'm currently taking adult ADD meds (Adderall); it's a double edged sword, and I'd personally really prefer to find another method.

The primary problem is, during any sort of transition I would be pretty useless, and I can't afford to take that long being useless with my current job.

I went cold turkey from 25mg of Adderall XR daily, and for about a week and a half I was absolutely dead. I'd have a splitting headache due to dehydration, but I couldn't summon the energy to get off the couch and walk 12 feet to where I had bottles of water. I'm glad I went cold turkey rather than just tapering the dose, though, because tapering the dose would have taken months of feeling miserable, rather than 1.5 weeks of feeling like a dead man.

If you hear anything interesting from people about biofeedback/etc, long-term non-medicinal adult ADD treatments, could you toss me a mail at taloen@gmail.com? I'd really like to see other peoples' opinions on those routes, and I don't lurk enough on HN to be likely to see a submission about it.

(Just to clarify; yes, I'm back on the Adderall XR again, although at 5mg rather than 25 this time.)
Hard to imagine anything with a higher margin than digital. The marginal cost of selling an e-book is effectively zero.
True story... Here in Brazil I can't even buy digital music from Amazon.
I have discovered that the only real way to learn is to make mistakes. You can read about mistakes in a book, but until you actually make them and experience the consequences, you haven't really learned. Once you make the mistake, you will try to avoid the pain it caused by doing something different the next time. This applies not just to startups, but to pretty much everything.

Case in point - my first startup failed as well. We tried to do things the "right way," but we still made tons of mistakes. But we learned, and at the very least my second startup has gone significantly further than the first because I have avoided some of the mistakes I made the first time around. For example, I picked a cofounder who had skills that I didn't have on the founding team the first time around. Those skills have allowed us to succeed where we failed before.
There's always http://www.powells.com/
You can also add a way to share these badges with your buddies across Facebook, Twitter etc. It would be cool.
Ask HN: Secure, reliable data backup solution?
I am looking for a solution to back up daily trade logs. These are VERY important. Normally I would print out and keep hardcopies, but there's way too much data for that, so I will have to maintain an all-digital backup.

It should be:

- Secure (encryption, physical security, etc)

- Reliable (hopefully >3x replication -- I
currently maintain 3 copies on 3 separate devices)

- Accessible (I don't need instant access, but if I need to recall the entire database I should be able to get it within a week)

As far as price is concerned, nothing too egregious. To put a price point, lets say 2000/mo.
Anonymous exposes "identities of Officers of the Oakland Police"
The lead developer of Wayland works for Intel.
Imo, those kinds of sites are squeezed between Amazon itself, higher-profile book-recommendation services like the NY Times book reviews, and spammy but well-SEO'd landing pages that link to a bunch of Amazon books in an area, but provide little value-add ("top 25 books on [subject]" type lists, which are just automatically culled from the top-25 bestselling books in an Amazon keyword search).

Especially with the existence of that last category, it's tough going for someone who's genuinely curating book selections, perhaps even reading the books and providing good advice about them, when a lot of their competitors in the space are just algorithmically throwing together lists of books based on keywords. To a quick glance (the kind you normally get from search-engine visitors), it's hard to differentiate yourself from them. It might be possible to more slowly build up a fanbase of regular readers, though. Some book blogs have done that, which is not exactly the same format you're talking about, but has some similarities.
How can ultrasonic transducers be used to make a holodeck?
Neither this one nor the OP do fix what Defren to be the single big problem every one will have in a few years : the planned war between China and USA...I was not believing it before but last week a little 10 tee years old Chinese girl told me about it, and now I'm scared. Where are those technical barrie lifting revolutions in these lists? Where is the next Babel? Internet, wikipedia had much higher goal than these things. (written on phone)
I don't know... there is still a B&N store here and if I judge them by their selection of tech books, they are pretty poor. Worse than the now-gone Borders, which was worse than the local indy store they forced out of business back in the 1990s. Can't say I'd miss them if they closed. The people who work there seem to have followed the same trend as the books.
I agree actually, I was just pointing out that it was a bit hypocritical to hold up the oatmeal as a good example of responding to being ripped off. I'm not particularly offended by the response of DHH to curebits either.
When Science is not Enough, Appeal is Necessary
Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On
Inside Windows 7 Fault Tolerant Heap
From the paper:

"Based on our complexity analysis and a number of computers available for our collision search, we estimated that it would take approximately five weeks. As this was feasible enough, we started the actual search.
It was our fortune that a collision was found a bit earlier, namely after only three weeks."

This on a Core2 Q9550, a four year old processor. I wonder how fast this could be done using an EC2 temporary compute cluster.
>filtering chemicals out of drinking water

I encourage you to give that a shot and report back on your results.
KDE Window Manager Effects Writen in JavaScript
Techmeme Got A Brand New Look
Maybe add "do blog page a that don't break on phones", hint, removing JS or CSS tricks should be enough.
This is certainly a development to applaud, but for me, the most important feature about async JS programming is to be able to catch errors in the asynchronous code, and do it without code clutter. So I hope that if this gets accepted to mainline CoffeScript, it will provide for a working try/catch around the await/defer, along with caller+callee stacktraces capturing (at least in debug mode). At that point, it will be hard for me to not justify the use of one compilation layer above JavaScript, which currently certainly is, and even so with await/defer.

Asynchronous error handling without clutter is why I created LAEH, have a look if you want: https://github.com/ypocat/laeh2

EDIT: To clarify - an uncaught error in async handler means your Node.js is going down (unless you use the catch-all handler, which is an even poorer practice). In browser it means your callback never returns, leaving you in void (with a short an ambiguous stacktrace) to search where the problem is.
The performance seemed lacking, but more importantly, while watching the demo the concept of an "activity" confused me -- I assume its similar to the notion of an app, but it was hard to tell as the "activity" was represented as a desktop -- overall fairly confusing.

It doesnt look ready for prime time but its exciting to see the FOSS community working on it; who knows, in a few years it might be able to garner the same eminence as xbmc has in the htpc space.
well, suffice to say the article wasn't what I expected
> One Exemple is this myth, that OSX' font rendering is always better thant the rendering of windows' rendering because OSX applies more anti-aliasing to the fonts. As soon as you get to a certain font size - usually the one you use for articles - anti-aliased fonts are a pain-in-the-eyes.

It's not quite that simple, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with that assertion. It's more to do with the fact that the font rendering is done differently (regarding whether the "pixel grid" is respected) rather than more anti-aliasing is applied.

> Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).

Apple paid for their professional fonts too, even including Zapfino — simply to show off their font rendering. It's not cheaper, and they already invest a lot in to their rendering engine, which has improved in leaps and bounds over different versions of Mac OS X. Fonts that looks good on Mac OS X can come out terrible on Windows because manual hinting to every typeface has to be applied to make them look good, or Cleartype will come along and distort all the character forms.

The only reason you think Apple's font rendering is cheap is because you're not used to it — and it pervades everything you read. In contrast, to me Windows fonts look "cheaper", in that they're all thin and sickly. However, it should be understood that's it's a subjective choice, rather than one necessarily being better than another.

http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi... and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... might be interesting reading.
No sir we don't want any money from the other 6.7 billion people outside the USA!
Will the world ever see Fair Trade iPads?
No, he's saying that when a guy walks out of Walmart with a pallet full of flatscreen TVs, nobody cares about the snickers bar he also grabbed on the way out, and talking about the snickers bar is a waste of time.
I stopped on 56mg for two months and did not have any withdrawal symptoms. You may want to talk to your doctor about this, withdrawal like the one you experienced is not very common, I think.
How a 1979 Supreme Court hammered book publishing
If the old media businesses could have their way, Amazon and Hulu and Netflix wouldn't be available in the US, either.
Shortmail Opens Up New Front in the War on Email
Scary thought: Going cold turkey with coffee has had very similar effects on me (after 2 weeks of 1-2 cups a day; 2-4 shots/day).

I've also had a similar feeling of deadness when I stopped eating meat, dairy and anything with additives for 6 weeks. The first week or so I was completely useless - this could have also been due to me trying to feel my way through to a balanced diet.

So much of what we consume ends up having all sorts of unknown effects on us and the minute we stop consuming them we really feel it - it's easier to never stop.

One bonus of cutting certain stimulants out of my life has been that I've ended up feeling much better.
As someone in the gamification space (ugh, I hate that word) I always wanted to make some sort of dashboard/hud that could represent your life in RPG style stats. There are multiples companies that have attempted this for various niches (fitness, diet, checkins) but only a few for life in general. (Besides those twitter-like sites where you just sort of post that you did something.)

Perhaps it could work like D&D except the Dungeon Masters are more like life coaches. They create the quests (goals) and decide how much experience each is worth. The toughest part is that you can't really compare the players against each other since in life you really don't all have equal opportunities like you do at the start of a video game. But, people are really motivated by competition so maybe there's a way to make it work.
You could even change the search engine from Google to something else if you want. It's a field in about:config called 'keyword.URL'. I haven't even needed the dedicated search bar since I switched to DuckDuckGo thanks to the !bang commands. :)
Nintendo announces their answer to XBLA and PSN—Nintendo Network
Barnes and Noble really does have a one untapped resource over Amazon that I really wish they'd exploit. They have a lot of people who love to read working for them and building recommendation lists for their stores. If they would simply get these same employees to review their books on bn.com and build recommendations, I could see that site doing a lot better.

Of course that might hasten the demise of their brick and mortar stores or turn them into something like an Apple genius bar.
Sealed tactile switch, tact switches, tact switch cap, tactile switches
Company explaining what is a tactile switch and the difference between a tactile membrane switch, a sealed tactile switch and a tact switch. Tactile switches from different manufacturers. Also offering tactile switch caps.
Thanks. I just sent you email
For something that could break GitHub, I'd hazard a guess that they'd deploy that as a branch without merging or to a subset of servers first. In addition, their deploy tools are built off Capistrano, not off GitHub (except for the Git bits, of course).
I see they've changed the UI but it still mostly looks like a desktop interface shoehorned onto a tablet.

Beyond basic stuff like a web-browser I'm not sure what other software you could run on here.
I was diagnosed with ADD as a child, and have experienced firsthand the kind of dependencies these drugs can create. I wasn't able to stop taking Dexedrine (essentially the same as Ritalin) until halfway through my first semester of college, when I undertook a daily practice of meditation.

Now I've come to realize that "lack of attentiveness" is part of the human condition. We can make it worse by excessive stimulation and context-switching, but this unscientific idea of an "inbuilt" disability simply doesn't exist.
"To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems".
The title here is misleading; listed here are the mayor, city administrator, city council, a city attorney, and the interim chief of police. It's not like they've listed names or contact info for actual cops.
A similar tool in ruby: https://github.com/minhajuddin/taskr . It allows syncing of tasks through Dropbox.
Never Hackathon Alone
They look fine in Chrome on Ubuntu at least to my eyes.
Activities in KDE are workspaces more or less, a combination of applications and data that you use for a specific set of tasks. They were introduced on the desktop in KDE 4, but (imho) they still feel rather awkward.

You'll be seeing a lot more tablet focused rollouts in X over the next 6 months to a year, as XInput 2.2 that has support for multitouch in a standard way was recently merged. Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 12.04 both plan to include it, and Ubuntu has a fairly developed touch and gesture recognition infrastructure.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAzM...
The whole "activity" thing tends to get confusing, even in desktop KDE. It's a nice concept on paper, but badly in need of intuitive appeal.
it really is Speed. I'd be curious to see the percentage of the ADD drugs that are being crushed and snorted. As a kid, we used to snort Dexedrin and Ritalin and it's called the poor man's coke. You even get a heavier crash than bad coke. The same thing is happening with prescribed opiates. More people are taking them for other reasons than for the ones they were intended for. I already know that comment is going to go at the bottom of the page since I'm talking about experience and not scientific studies,but, it's my own experiments and empirical evidence.
This is why it is more important to have a crisp understanding of what you need to accomplish. From what I've seen, bringing a project in 'on time' is about risk management. The primary leverage point is actively slicing off the unnecessary parts of the time sinks, as they appear. The way to get a jump start on that activity is to get risk estimates along with the time assessment.

Often the primary issue is fitting a goal that is in flux into time period that is not in flux.
I don't think it's necessary to mention Bill Gates since he is one of many philanthropists. Also the Genetically Modified Foods case in Karnataka was the only specific example the author gave of using money to dictate to the world.
Made in the World
The 'Wat' talk for CodeMash 2012 explained
This is the talk that the post explains that was given at CodeMash 2012 https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
I've been blogging since before it was called a blog and get about 30k visits per month, but i can never seem to make any money or get HN front page. I guess my blog is more of a developer resource type of blog that isn't very exciting. Though I try to post more interesting opinion articles from time to time, nobody seems to notice. Whaaaa!
Give entrepreneurs room and they will grow the economy
Seems to be the standard three-pronged argument:

1) The climate isn't warming.

2) But if it is warming, it's not due to man.

3) But if it is due to man, it might be a Good Thing.

Very tidy.
Well, I had a browse. Bandcamp list under their folk tags an artist called Daughter. Daughter releases an EP called His Young Heart. Daughter has a gig at a tea shop in Liverpool on a day when I can't get there, such is life. My paypal account is £3 lighter and my hard drive 93Mb heavier as a consequence of all this.

Discoverability is the big nut to crack. Anyone here working on that? It was easier in the days of 45s and LPs and bins in your local record shop, but, I suspect there was less.

The issue is cross-silo thinking. Web seems to feedback things I 'like', and confirm other's likes (people bought this also bought...). Daughter's music is outside my normal territory but only half a football pitch, not a mile.

The other issue is images. The photo on the EP is important. The artist I suppose had some input on that.
I used to "daydream" a lot. When I would "daydream" I would no longerr see or hear or smell, but I would follow these strange patterns in my mind, always going deeper and seeking and end but never finding one. After about 20-30 minutes, I would always reach a strange point where my mind could not go any further, but I knew there was something beyond the point I had reached.

There were no clear directions, it was a very strange experience. I can't attribute it to a dimension and I did 2 years of University Math. I wish I knew what it was.

They became less frequent as I grew older and I had my last experience at 16. Nowadays, I feel like it has translated in me viewing the infinite of the patterns in this world. It's kind of more than that though, and still I cannot explain it. It makes me not want to speak because everything I say, even in this explanation, is incorrect because these words I'm using do not accurately express the thought, emotion, and experience involved at all.
Can you expand on why?

I keep seeing people say that they'll miss bookstores, but I can't imagine what they'll miss.

Bookstores are very inefficient. Ordering books they don't have is a pain. You literally have to judge a book by its cover, or at least the 5 minutes you spend perusing it. Finding books in the shelves is difficult. A lot of people seem to think that Amazon is winning on price alone, but it's because they're offering a better product.

So I don't know why people keep saying they'll miss bookstores. The atmosphere? Isn't that replicated by coffee shops?
Okay, I changed the title from what I think you expected.
I graduated with a degree in biochemistry hoping to get into the biotech/pharmaceutical industry, but was turned off by the emphasis on treaments instead of cures. Ritalin and Aderall seems analogous to taking pain killers to treat an open wound—masks the symptoms (pain) but doesn't address the cause (open wound).

With the explosion of ADD prescriptions, one has to wonder if our society/environment is causing this problem. Is it diet? HFCS? Modern parenting styles? The internet and information overload?
Here's the link to the original:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R...
Rupert Murdoch Says Apple Shares Cheap If Facebook IPO $75-$100 Billion
Review: Nokia Lumia 800: Microsoft doesn't have to buy Nokia, they already did
On a more basic level before even getting to treatment, imo it'd be useful to have more studies on what the distribution of some sort of trait called "attention" is in the population to begin with, perhaps in various common situations. That might provide some sort of baseline: if, for example, 90% of people have "abnormally low" attention by some measure in some situation, then the definition of "abnormal" is probably wrong. In that case, rather than concluding that 90% of people need to be treated for a disorder, it might make more sense to conclude that the alleged "normal" characteristics are actually quite rare, demanding a characteristic that <10% of humans naturally have. Of course, other numbers might lead to different conclusions.

Put differently, it feels like it'd be easier to have rigorous discussions about deviations from normal mental functioning if we first had a good, data-based picture of "normal mental functioning". I've looked but have had difficulty finding any such studies.