skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In particular, even the most attractive men are virtually never overwhelmed with female attention on online dating sites. (Those who are probably enjoy it.)

This is really interesting if true (which I think it probably is) because real life is the opposite, at least if you measure by sexual partners: by definition, the average number of partners for men and women (in a heterosexual population) is the same, but it turns out that the variance for men is much larger; a few many get many women and most men get few, while most women get a typical number of men.
What kind of scientist don't buy even one?

Buy one at a time and make a stock ;)
And Google Goggles is already taken. WHY?!
People might be confused or bewildered by the depth of this mans research. How does esoteric math apply to everyday life?!?!?

Well,De Bruijn Graphs are used every day to assemble short pieces of DNA into newly sequenced genomes. They build the relationships to build the genome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_graph
Curious what you found so hard about setting up Cassandra. Counterpoint: http://www.screenr.com/5G6
Why pixel advertising failed and a simple attempt at fixing it
I actually find it entertaining and fun - specially the bits about history, how they found common vision etc. It was an interesting human take to subject that could be inherently jargon-laden and boring
Same as how people are convinced to find dating sites, create a profile, and spend hours/months/years finding the right person. Downloading a program and having it automatically do complicated filters to find the right person is a cake-walk in comparison. People are motivated by money and sex, they'll climb any hurdle to get to it. Installing desktop software is not a big one.
It seems like it's an inherent in this sort of battery. I'm not sure what Tesla could do to offset this. Computer makers mostly don't offer warranties in the case of negligence or intentional damage. The same seems to apply here.
Hey all,

Stepout (formerly Ignighter), of Techstars 2008, is looking to hire PHP developers for the summer. We're based in NYC and offer a competitive salary and the opportunity to learn from the best.

More info @ www.stepout.com/jobs
All I have to say is: please, please, please let this actually happen and work even 50% as well as my imagination wants it to.
I have always wondered how so many javascript game framework authors expect anyone to take them seriously when the design, performance graphics and craftsmanship of their demos are often so poor. You might have the most amazing framework ever, but you are not demonstrating that with your demo game at all with its poorly drawn graphics, strangely behaving parallax, flickering tile seams, and a loader that fails to finish half the time.
internet access is not a human right. the crimes this guy is on trial for mostly took place on the internet...

he can talk to his lawyers on the phone.

he should be happy to be out of jail and go enjoy the outdoors!
What's the issue with the battery tech that makes it not chargable after a full discharge?
Cosmologists Try to Explain a Universe Springing From Nothing
$55.48 here
Every laptop that uses a lithium ion battery should have this problem. Oddly enough every laptop manufacture has included circuitry that cuts battery power when it reaches 5% (when the OS reports 0% it's actually ~1-5%). Tesla should have no problem fixing this, the onboard electronics will die anyway when the battery dies so why not have them die a few hours earlier and allow 'recovery' by charging the vehicle.
Here is a TED 2009 demo of MIT's "Sixth Sense" wearable computer. It's like Minority Report but operates on any wall. It's features include visual overlays of social profiles for the person you're talking with. :)

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.h...
It is for interprocess communication for Unix processes, which are often implemented in C.
That's a big idea... Although I would feel a bit bad bringing the online social hierarchy / totem pole into the real world. We already care _too_ much about Klout and Karma scores, the last thing we need is twitter gods parting the seas at tech conferences.
You could arguably say that early attempts anchored the industry (into a certain way of thinking about what a smartphone was and how it worked) until Apple came along to pull it out of that rut...
The Million Dollar Homepage - One piece of Internet history
This is why reddit needs to be OAuth provider.
Could this really not be prevented by a $10 microcontroller and a big-ass relay to just disconnect the battery if it reaches a certain discharge state?

Even my iPhone can turn turtle to protect its battery when it gets too low.

Also how much power does it take to keep the damn thing plugged in? The article indicates that a 100 foot extension cord isn't enough just to break even and the car discharges even when plugged in. A 100 foot cord of cheap 16 gauge wire can still supply almost 900 watts before the voltage drops below 100v. So it uses a kilowatt just to stand-by without even charging? That's one hell of a power vampire.

I think maybe they should spend a bit more time on the fundamentals and a bit less time on fancy bird-wing doors if they want to have a real product. The real car of the future is just a big dumb tray full of indestructible nickle-iron batteries and 4 wheel-hub motors bolted to the corners.
It's inherent to any lithium ion battery design which is why every laptop, iphone, etc that uses a lithium ion battery has circuitry that cuts power when the batter reaches 1% to 5% it can occur in your laptop if you discharge the battery entirely and then leave your battery uncharged for months (or less if stored cold).

Some kind of chemical change occurs in Li batteries when completely discharged.
Online dating is a sausagefest. It's the biggest sausagefest ever. I'm not basing this on any scientific or quantitative information at all, just my own personal experiences from online dating from 2004-2008, the end of which was when I met my now-fiancee.

The "sausagefest syndrome" is inherently why so many online dating sites suck. Guys sign up and get barely any responses to their profiles or messages. Girls sign up and get immediately overwhelmed with messages, some interesting but the rest mostly boring or creepy. Guys get frustrated at the lack of traction and leave. Girls get overwhelmed by too much attention and leave. It doesn't help when the online dating sites start using fake profiles and pictures to give the false illusion it's not a sausagefest.

I've seen friends sign up for Match.com and be like, "this sucks, they have no matches for me," and then I find they're looking for half-Asian half-Russian college-educated non-smoking dog-owners in a 2.5 mile radius, or something like that. That's almost guaranteed to not work. Unfortunately the alternative is some sort of "shotgun strategy," which if done poorly, means sending a message to 50 girls with the same copy-pasted canned sentences, which only contributes to the women being overwhelmed. You still need to aim the shotgun. I effectively had a routine where I'd spend an evening looking through profiles, only ruling out absolute deal-breakers, and then sent a message that while mostly short, at least made some reference to the actual girl. Out of 20 messages I'd get like 5 responses, which would lead to 2 phone calls, and probably 1 actual date. Rinse, repeat.

Yeah, it's kind of annoying to fill out a profile and all that, but to me that's never been the problem. I feel there's a lot more social friction to get women to sign up for these sites, because while online dating to guys is basically, "well, why not, it's another possible way to meet girls," to girls it's, "this is admitting I am incompetent at/undeserving of finding love." Until that's overcome, online dating will always be a poor experience for a lot of people that try it.

How do you overcome it? In a drunken night with friends a couple months ago, I started rambling about an online dating site that embraced the male-female disparity, and basically would pair up something like 3-4 guys to every girl, and set up dates where you'd all go out like "The Bachelorette." There's a lot of reasons why that idea would be a hard sell, but if anyone ever does successfully do it, just make sure to give me my cut[0].

[0] http://xkcd.com/827/
Jobs tried to get you to make HTML5 apps for the iPhone. He even gave you nice ways to install them with their own icon and run them offline. But nooooooo, you're having none of it. No HTML5 installable apps with access to native APIs for you. You prefer to insist there's no alternative...

http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/html5-iphone-app/
Is sarcasm always unwanted here? I actually chuckled at the beginning until it turned too serious toward the end.

There was a great TEDx talk on the (well-executed) use of humor, and satire in particular, to get points across when they would otherwise be disregarded, or to make bland points more viral: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bliss_comedy_is_translation.h...

I don't see a reason to discourage sarcasm out-of-hand, or any other form of humor. Based on the merits of the individual comment, sure.
I would love an overview of why you're moving away from using Clickpass...

Clearly people are using it (given this message), and as many of us are web developers, the thought process behind this decision would be potentially very interesting.

Do you plan to move to a different system (FB Connect/Twitter/Google Identity Toolkit), or are you happy with a standard username/password model?

Are too many people joining HN and you simply want to add some friction to the process?!

Also, clickpass will need to update their site:

http://www.clickpass.com/docs/where-you-can-use-clickpass
The HTML5 app is also incomplete and very buggy. I think it's not surprising that the more complex gestures are missing (such as pinch for new item). Additionally it took me about 1 minute to get it into a weird broken state (permanently pulled down). Not saying all this can't be fixed, just saying that assuming 1 week development time and calling it demoware may be more than a little unfair. I seem ro hear that a lot about things and then the only proof you end up seeing is some 80% mockup (billed as a complete reimplenetation) that leaves a lot to be desired.
Haha... I found that pretty funny.
I regularly use algorithms based on de-Bruijn graphs in my work (genome and transcriptome assembly).
If they're lightweight enough you could have the lenses replaced and just wear the digital pair. That's what I'm planning on looking into, once the technology matures a little.
How do I opt out of all face recognition? I have a right that my personal life not be exploited for advertising by a large company.
He Says, She Hints
Odds that he will make it to the safe harbor of Germany?
So how is he going to pay online-only bills? Are the courts going to give him taxpayer money for late fees? Or it's his own fault for not predicting his arrest?

Can he read about politics as part of his duty as a voter? Due to Internet as a medium for accessing news, he's further restricted on being an informed voter.

How is he meant to send material to his lawyers? "Mail it" So instead of sending it virtually for free, he has to print it out, determine postage, go find a postal office and then ship it. Vice versa to receive it but it takes time. Not to mention the massive phone bill because VOIP is INTERNET.

How is he going to be monitored from accessing Internet that's everywhere? Anti-Satellite jammers? Anti-Wifi jammers?

How is it possible to prevent him from giving the password to someone to start a megaupload website? Better prevent phones, mail, etc, in that case.

Since I know he's technically proficient, he's probably using the Internet as we speak. So this order only serves to pad the ego of the prosecution team, show incompetence of judge and punish honest people for being honest.
I disagree. Every single consumer 3d tech is a fixed focal length. Neither the 3d tv, nor the movie screen changes distance. there's nothing special in the glasses to change distance, it's simply blocking out images from one eye.

I think you mean something like the image needs to appear some distance away from the eye. Yes, i agree with that. There are old solutions to that problem.

You could show each eye a different image, and get a depth effect... but that has all of the problems you pointed out.
Re "why it's concave?": Concave buttons are less likely to be pressed while sitting in your pocket - waking the screen, waking some background processes, draining the battery unnecessarily throughout the day.

To solve this problem, non-concave buttons (flat or convex) live in wells. These buttons in wells carry unnecessary aesthetic weight - lots of angles and short surfaces in a small space. Apple's hardware rarely carries such adornment - they do smooth, "authentic" surfaces.

As such, the Home button simply _is_ the well - and it's rarely pushed by accident.
Thanks for this - I always wonder why knockout doesn't get more attention on hacker news, it's really great and seems to meet the same needs as ember. Plus, their tutorials are awesome:

http://learn.knockoutjs.com
A peek at the all new Basecamp calendar
I guess I see a few major differences between this and friend-of-friends. Most important is accountability - a friend-of-a-friend isn't likely to send me a creepy/sexual messages, since there would probably be social consequences for them from mutual friends. There's no such social barrier for people I don't know at all, so the only consequence would be me blocking/reporting them (and you can easily make a new Facebook account if that happens).

For members of groups who I might not know - yes, people in groups I'm in know my full name, but probably don't know enough about my life to make it worth behaving creepily towards me - and if they did, any actions would likely remain virtual. However, your service is telling people my full name, and states that it will "sort by location" - so now someone knows my name, knows around where I live, AND knows that I am single (so it's more likely that I'm not living with a male)? That's not information that I'd feel comfortable broadcasting to people who have no accountability.

I know I'm focusing on the creeper/stalking issue, and I'm sure that's frustrating feedback when the majority of your users will be using this service with honorable intentions. I'm just trying to explain why I and most of my female friends would be instantly turned off by a service that shares this information - and from what I've read, attracting female members is a huge issue in the online dating space. It's really something you should try talking to female friends/family members/a focus group of potential online daters, because I don't think it would be an uncommon point of view and you don't want it to keep people from joining your site.
Batteries self-discharge, even when disconnected. 5% is probably not enough to last months, especially if the car is exposed to high temperatures.
Damn no more pixels for sale. LOL.
Ben & Jerry's take a stand against Citizens United
author here - for those of you who don't have an iPhone, I have a video here: http://vimeo.com/37182785
I find the retail metaphor for utility computing supremely awkward.
That's an extremely crude filter. A lot of the best distributed system stuff is built on the JVM. Too many to name, but I'll name one anyway: Zookeeper
Typeface is to design what salt is to cooking. It never feels that important but it can be the difference between an average design and a brilliant one.

Usually, I use this incredibly helpful chart for choosing typefaces: http://img.labnol.org/files/font-selection-chart.png

You could also take a look at these Smashing article for some Typography essentials:

http://smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/18/10-principles-for-rea...

http://smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/24/how-to-choose-a-typef...
Agreed, and people tell me that all the time.

I think what's missing on the internet is a real feeling of just how many people your work is touching. You can see server statistics that say 10K readers, but it's very difficult to really imagine that many people consuming your content, at least for me.

In a way, it's amazing that people don't get more negative feedback. I think the reason for this is general apathy and the fact that most people don't even consume the things they surf over to.
Zuckerberg vs Lin:Who's the Better Role Model for Harvard's Undergraduates?
And Blossom.
How about internal tools? Should tool makers charge for use (which creates friction, losing the benefit of working in a large org)?
It's not solved, it's easily solvable. :)
Ask HN: Whats easy and reliable contacts importer/inviter service?
Hi,
We need to allow our users to invite friends using their address book from popular email services like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, rediffmail and also from social networks like facebook, orkut etc.
There are many sites like
Openinviter.com
Invitebox.com
Cloudsponge.com
ContactGrabber.com
GetMyContacts.comsuper-tell-a-friend.com
inviteallfriends.net
smartaddon.com
(found them by searching Google)
However, I am not sure of their reliability. Im wondering what most successful and serious startups are using to allow their users to invite their friends.
It should be reliable and easy and work with PHP/Yii. I would love it if its free but its also ok if there is a small monthly fee.
Any suggestions?
Decline of twitch shooters: blame "multiplatform" development
Tarsnap addresses the security concern of cloud backup, making it effectively as secure as on-site backup, but this article seems to stipulate that security isn't a big issue with offsite backup.
Did I just come out of a 40-day coma? What month is this?

"Android was designed for touch only, and has its hands full winning the tablet wars."

Be careful. I think Steve Jobs might've patented the reality distortion field.

"The Ubuntu desktop sets the standard for ease of use." Compared to what?

"And imagine TVs that become home PCs when you dock your phone: perfect for the emerging market where LTE will be the normal way for new users to connect to the Internet."

Great. My home connection's going to come with a 4GB monthly cap now too?

In a lot of ways this is actually a neat idea, and I could see something close to this catching on. I see a few problems though:

* As fast as my laptop is, I still sometimes wish it had a faster CPU, a better GPU, and more RAM. Modern phones are still around an order of magnitude slower and have a fraction of the RAM. They're not exactly desktop replacements.

* 64GB is an impressive amount of storage for a cell phone. It's pretty weak for a laptop.

* "The Cloud" is an order of magnitude or two slower than my local disk, and my local disk doesn't have a monthly data transfer limit.

* Normal people have no clue what Ubuntu is, and they're not exactly adopting it in droves, even without having to buy new hardware to support it.

So… neat idea, but I don't see this getting off the ground. If it does, though, I see a lot more idle sword fighting in my future.
Plenty here: http://pixenomics.com/ :P
Upvoted for the 'Virtual Light' reference. Like basically everything else online, William Gibson described this years ago.
Yes. _Rainbows End_ and _Halting State_ were the first things that went through my mind when I saw this headline. :) I personally find a lot of inspiration for my work in such stories.
I think Google is usually pretty forward about their privacy policies and letting you customize what data they store. (See those recent "this stuff is important" popups on virtually every Google property)

Here's hoping they thought of issues like: Guy wears his new "Google Goggles" to a racy late-night sales meeting, and Gmail serves how wife ads for divorce papers.
The other thing I want to add, is most companies make their money from this type of long drawn out licensing cycle. They lose money on the build, but the long period of which they "maintain" is what make the most money.

Its even at the point where Govt contractors don't understand how to charge for what the CIA proposes. Its good for the tax payer, bad for the big govt contractors and hopefully will save the govt large amounts of money.

I am happy to see it as a tax payer even though I work for one of the large govt contractors. I wouldn't consider it link bait. It is a revolution in the idea that contractors won't know how to deal with this.
This is just one agency but I think they are thinking twice about spending 10m on a product and getting locked in because it was sold as the be-all end-all. Big vendors like Palantir, and the database vendors mentioned will pay attention.
"In at least one case, Tesla went even further. The Tesla service manager admitted that, unable to contact an owner by phone, Tesla remotely activated a dying vehicle’s GPS to determine its location and then dispatched Tesla staff to go there. It is not clear if Tesla had obtained this owner’s consent to allow this tracking5, or if the owner is even aware that his vehicle had been tracked. Further, the service manager acknowledged that this use of tracking was not something they generally tell customers about."

--

That screams class-action to me if Tesla can really track without knowledge of the owner AND will mean that I have absolutely zero interest in purchasing one till this is addressed.
It is from Reuter...so a title as link bait wouldn't surprise me.
Why can't the wheels turn after the battery dies?
One github user already put the Utah state legal code on github. All commits are attributed to him, but it's fascinating watching the wording change commit by commit.

His README proposes a similar law patching idea.

https://github.com/divegeek/utahcode
Developers Should Design
14 Ebook Authors Reveal How To Write Ebooks That Sell
The article explains that it doesn't have power to turn on "tow mode" - so the wheels remain engaged to the now dead electrical system, effectively locking them in place.
Or the Philip K Dick version. Everything changes when the program has to analyze... itself.
I'm not a huge fan of the one letter method names.
There's always the paper bag solution.

Most scanners to date have been moderately vulnerable to blocking devices. Say, a backscatter laser of some sort. And if personal identifiers are based on you carrying a broadcast device (e.g.: an info-leaking phone), one simple solution is ... don't do that.

I suspect that both the technology and its countermeasures will first be utilized by government (and corporate) "security forces".

Hrm ... related query: is it possible to build a simple device which would short out RFID scanners? If it becomes trivial enough to destroy the readers, then ubiquitous, obnoxious uses might at least become more expensive.
Ask HN: Is my list missing some necessary Data Science skills?
I am creating a new blog about learning to become a data scientist. I wrote a post about what a data scientist is. I would love some feedback especially if you think I left out some necessary skills. Feel free to add feedback here or on the blog.

http://datascience101.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/what-is-a-data-scientist/
The back button doesn't make sense in Angry Birds. If an interface element is superfluous or unpredictable in Angry Birds then it makes no sense to bog down a touch interface with it.

Angry Birds may seem to be a silly little game, but it is not an edge case. It's an exemplar of interaction paradigms going forward.
I would like to see Tesla's response to this. I was going to pre-order a model X, i won't be now, until I know I won't be tracked and the car won't brick itself.
Introduction of Solid State Devices
... on a Mac
Yeah Tesla saved the guy 40k, how rude
Out of curiosity why not use a free acct for eBay photos? You get 200 shown in the photostream and the photo links keep working beyond that...