skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, pseudonymous is the right word. You can start mining bitcoins without disclosing any personally identifiable information (if you obscure your IP address or connect from a public wifi network or something), you could buy bitcoins from someone on craigslist, pay in cash and have them sent to this account, etc. But the minute you make a transaction that links this account to you, all the activity on the account is linked to you. At least that's how I understand it, see [1]

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity#Staying_Anonymous
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that :)
With very few exceptions (basically, China, Ukraine and Russia), the countries that don't have mutual extradition with the US are underdeveloped, poor, repressive, unstable, theocratic (the Vatican!), or all of the above.

I'm not sure what kind of pressure you think has to be brought to bear to get two countries to agree to extradite. Extradition treaties are the norm, not the exception. Extradition is not a product of American imperialism.
An iPetition will only fall on deaf ears of Indian Government. We should probably organize a real protest and take this to streets.

Retailers protested against FDI and forced Government to reconsider it.
Actually it is still accepted by CC companies to use the old hand operated machines that have a roller, that takes an impression of the card.
This device world be a pretty cool server if you could put your own OS on it -- kind of like a much faster Raspberry Pi with built in wif, flash storage and PSU
whether or not a submission makes it to front page of HN is largely dependent on the time of day it was submitted, not necessarily on the strength of its content. Obviously, making it to the front page is a strong indication of underlying quality, and so comments are usually quick to follow.
On a much smaller scale (one house), but I went for a walk here today:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Costozza,+Longare,+Italia&...

BTW, spinning the view around gives a nice view of the area, which is quite pretty.
Can you give any examples of specific sentences I wrote that you believe are false?
This is an interface design/hardware issue, not a display optimization issue.

The article makes the bulk of the case for pixel optimization while discussing very small icons, and that's true, but it's a red herring. Interfaces should never rely on users being able to identify or interact with icons that are 16x16 pixels. At 64px, all of the icons seen in the article can be auto scaled successfully (in gimp, cubic transform): http://imgur.com/a/DOAyW

What we really need is to stop building hardware that demands 16x16 pixel elements, and to stop building interfaces that provide them. With high dpi screens, even character hinting becomes silly (or even without high dpi, I disable hinting on my 22" 1920x1080 screen because I like consistent letter spacing).

Pixel optimization experts may still have a place in the future, but it's likely in the same boat as audiophiles and $1000 HDMI cables.
I agree that another way to look at it is "don't hate what you do" although I feel like a post about that would be aimed at a different group of people.

When I wrote this it was more directed at people who feel a little bit lost, and are wondering why they haven't found that one "thing" that they're passionate about. It's about telling them that they don't have to search so hard for it because it's probably right in front of them right now.

I think people that hate what they do are in a slightly different (though similar boat). Sometimes hating what you do can actually crystallize exactly what it is you love (because you can't do it as much anymore) and so I feel like the problem that those people face is more making the leap to spend time doing what you love even if it means taking more risk.

Thanks for sharing - I really agree with your point.
This was my thought as well, if nothing else it is $60 cheaper than the Nook Color.
Agreed. I wonder if the low orbit solution could be actually more achievable than a standard drone one. Both because it doesn't have to fight the wind all the time and because it can be powered by sun more easily. You need enough power to maintain ~6mph (depends on the area, but I believe that would be the long term average in many places). Sure, there's lift and everything, but you're going to drift in one direction most of the time.

I'm not sure about their availability claims either. "With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away". With modern radio transmitters, I think you can also quickly localise the earth-bound part of the system and either close it down, or create enough interference to make the transfer almost impossible... I'm not an expert on radio though - can someone confirm/refute this?
Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse.

In your essay, you say:

Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in
many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.

Paraphrasing the above passage, "being a really good speaker ... pushes you in the opposite direction [of having good ideas]".

These two statements seems to be in direct contradiction of each other.
Testing code is important because we know, from previous experience, that code written by humans tends to have bugs.

In this case, we also know from experience that small devices like iPads do not cause high levels of EMI. Once we have tested a dozen models on a dozen planes and had successful results on all 144 tests, there is no need to test further models. This is unlike software, where of 144 unit tests, a good percentage are almost guaranteed to fail at some point in time.
It's almost not a moral issue (I pretty much don't care at all), but it's worth mentioning: both negotiating parties in a VC deal are presumed to be sophisticated, but there's a third party that isn't: the company employees. When founders of companies with many employees take cash-out financing, they are taking liquidity that their employees do not get to access, regardless of their vesting.
Bitcoin is not anonymous, true. But with skilled and careful use, it can be made perfectly anonymous.
AFAIK, it is the only one. True?
Kind of like, but at an almost 3x the price tag.

Better but higher priced.
Ok just read wikipedia to know that ultrabook is a Intel trademark. And that it's not a beefed up netbook as i assumed.

So none of the 3 i have are ultrabooks.

And neither is the apple stuff according to wikipedia, so off you go downvoting all apple suggestions here on the same base.
So your telling me code can be imperfect, just good enough?

I can leave an extra "." in the code and nothing bad will happen?
I really like that you have taken the typing out of syntax. Syntaxes could be distilled into icons and be put out of the line thought. I'd like to code like that.
Oxygen icons (by KDE project) use SVG for all sizes of icons. Here is an example:

http://wstaw.org/m/2012/03/18/plasma-desktopA20554.png

(The icon on the left is suited for 16x16 size. The icon in right is the same icon, just suited for larger scales)

I think this scheme is supported by FreeDesktop.org's Icon Theme Specifications and other icon theme's used on Linux desktops (like Tango) use the same scheme.
It's admirable and entirely understandable that they should want to move to a policy grounded in direct empirical evaluations. Beats the hell out of the current situation, and I bet if it was your responsibility you would do the same. Some risks (hundreds of lives, hundreds of millions of dollars) are bound to trigger excessive caution.
Prosperity contributes to societal isolation
Perfection in software : the goal is the journey.
If you limit ultrabooks for the Intel trademark definition, there will only be the expensive models, of course.

But then, it will exclude the air as well.
If this is successful it would be one of the best things to happen to science in decades. It is ridiculous that open scientific collaboration is hindered by paywalls.
You also need to switch keyboards to type numbers, and parentheses are there just one switch away. Similar to those behind the iPad port of Vim I think that the slight convenience of a keyboard accessory view does not justify the reduction in screen space.
I agree, the problem many people face today is the perspective and position they take in finding what they love. If they started from the point of not hating what they do they could really open themselves to the important concepts around them.

The career we chose is also such an important choice that can change if we hate other aspects of our daily lives. By choosing a career or business that we don't "hate" it can help us all construct a stronger and more positive way to find what we love and make those things the primary things in our life.
I have a 13" Thinkpad Edge E325 and it's great. I use Ubuntu on it and everything works, 7h battery life. Cost me £350.
512 MB and USB port makes it a fantastic target for a low power server -- it'd really like to run a Linux on this. Compare it to Raspberry Pi, the first neither has a box and WiFi nor a power supply and remote control and most important, it has twice as less memory... It seems a very good hardware for 100 USD -- the major problem is probably the need to jailbreak it.
It's absolutely different from a writer, I'm asking them to behave like a collaborative engineering team, not like a tortured drunk guy alone in a under lit room.

No 2 IDE can produce the same formatting, can store the dependencies and the running targets the same way, have the same shortcuts, etc.
Therefore, you can't collaborate efficiently on the same machine.

Moreover, the only rule is that everybody uses the same, the majority can vote. Our last IDE change was initiated by a team member and multiplied the price per developer by 3
It fits most cases.. except that web applications are _constantly_ polling for information. Which may be fine, but you can implement polling with interrupts. What part of that do you not understand? Are you aware that the OS is using an interrupt-driven system to poll the server? It's just hidden from you, so you have no choice. This is just dumb engineering. And to say that it's good for "most things" is just lazy thinking. "Most things" are that way precisely because of the crappy architecture. Rationalisations.
Verizon launches wireless broadband for homes
Verizon launches wireless broadband for homes
Verizon launches wireless broadband for homesHomeFusion could provide potent competition for satellite broadband providers which are often providers of last resort for rural homes
I would say your example is not analogous. To upgrade from XP to Vista, the user has to purchase Vista and go through the install process. To upgrade from 3.x to ICS, the user simply downloads an OTA update.

The upgrade to ICS can be done by casual users, who may not even know that they are upgrading to ICS, whereas the XP user is clearly making the decision to upgrade to a new OS.
a) How many passengers are in your plane? I doubt this would be approved for Part 121 or Part 135 travel.

b) If something goes wrong with your avionics, you can turn off the iPad. If something goes wrong on an airliner, the pilot can't quite as easily figure out whose iPad is causing the trouble.
When I heard PG speak at PyCon last weekend, I hardly even noticed any 'ums' - in fact, it wasn't until I saw it raised on HN that I remembered it. I was thoroughly engaged in his ideas, and my mind likely used those pauses to process what he was saying.
There's also a Soviet unheralded hero:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev

He acted a bit later, but the same pattern: making his first computer in an estate using commodity hardware, then producing a quite few interesting machines some of which were the best in continental Europe at the time.

Sadly, it seems that all european computers are essentially evolutionary dead ends - so nobody remembers them and their creators.
Is it copyright curtains for Pinterest?
> The second thing is that while a designer can poke pixels to get an icon that looks good, so can the computer. One of the things you can do is compute the frequency 'footprint' of the image, then change the render until the render foot print is as close as you can get to the original. HP did this for their ink jet printer half-toning algorithm. In a 16 x 16 pixel space you could almost exaustively search it on a modern machine.

Cool! Do you have a link/paper/book?
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl and http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalk... for information on Plankalkül, an imperative programming language by Zuse, which, however, never was implemented on his computers.
This is a great tool. I use a spreadsheet to do something similar, but I like your implementation better. Thanks!
Thanks Jason! Great point - loving what you do doesn't mean that you love every part of it, or every second of it - saying that is usually just meaningless hyperbole. But if you truly love something you put up with the stuff that you don't like as much because doing so is the cost of producing something great, being with someone great, or becoming part of something bigger than yourself.
Separating bunk from fact in Malcolm Gladwell's performance
I am a mediocre speaker and a fairly good writer (in Italian) and I always wondered wether these two skills are somewhat mutually exclusive.
The same happens to me with learning languages (I'm good, I speak 7 fluently) and orientation (I get lost after two turns even in a city I know).
I agree with pg in preferring to be able to write well rather than speak well, as the written word is more powerful in the long term and is a better carrier of powerful ideas.
If you factor in the case + better specs, you'll find that it's a good value. I played with this idea a bit. I disabled unnecessary services, etc. Got it pretty bare ... but it's very hard to get a proper toolchain going. In the end, you'll need to cross-compile everything and doing everything right can be a real grief. It's really not worth it unless you can shoehorn Linux in there ...
Why is the first officer sitting on the left?
It's a linked list item and most of them are short quotes and comments that encourage the reader to follow the link for more. Usually the DF links posted to HN are the longer star posts.
In combination with the transaction tax (currently discussed in the EU - [1]), this is a killer tool, to get more money from citizens.

Also: how is this supposed to deal with power outages? No food, when there is no electricity?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2800790
pg, thanks for bringing this up! It's actually a really dense topic, and there are a bunch of ways to look at it. Having done an increasing amount of public speaking over the last few years, I can say from experience that there are a lot of dynamics at play.

I think you are absolutely correct, prewritten speeches, even if memorized, rarely translate well into a live speech. They usually come off as either forced, too structured, and feel like a movie that's been hastily adapted from a book.

There's a reason for the saying "it's 10 percent what you say and 90 percent how you say it." Written versus spoken words convey different things. When you're giving a talk, or listening to one, there's a sort of energy exchange that happens. A really good charismatic speaker can make every person in the room feel like they are being directly spoken to, regardless of what the topic is (Bill Clinton is famous for this). Someone who has just been in the presence of a good speaker might not remember every word in the talk, but they have a sense of personal empowerment and motivation to go do or be something.

The written word, on the other hand, can trigger those emotions, though it engages on a different level. It's an individual, rather than a group relationship. If you're in a crowd watching a good speaker, you're sharing that experience with everyone in the crowd. If you're reading a book or essay, you're sharing that moment specifically with the author, and perhaps with the topics or characters in the essay.

A lot of good speakers and writers alike will formulate a narrative that people can relate to. One of my favorite examples of this in writing is Charles Petzold's book "Code", where he demonstrates how to create a basic computer, from the ground up. The book in itself is a sort of story, where the main caricature is the advances in logic and thought over the years. He manages to take a topic that is often dry and boring (truth tables? binary arithmetic?) and creates a form people can relate to.

There's also a lot to be said for confidence. If a speaker is confidence, people in the room will entrust them with a sense of authority. If a writer is confident, I'm more likely to continue reading on. To describe confidence in a writer... if you consider a speaker's ability to sidestep "um" and "ya know", and their control either to not ramble offtopic or to quickly bring their ramble full circle back to the topic at hand, then also look at a writer's ability, rather than stumbling around with words, to grasp them and use them with a magician's mastery. That is, they've gotten past memorizing the alphabetic building blocks, and began to create more elaborate form and structures.

Ok, now I want to write an essay on this... :)
It seems to be problematic on IE9 on Win 7. The chat window is left at the bottom of the page, and if I scroll up, the chat window remains at the bottom of the page. Thus, scrolling and chatting don't go together.
Agree completely - the length of time has nothing to do with the quality of your work. I have a friend who started coding a year ago and is in YC right now as the main technical founder. I'd say I've learned more about entrepreneurship and coding in the past year than I did over the past 4-5 combined.
Not sure I really understand the distinctions here. First of all, no one actually "borrows" anything in art. Borrowing something would imply that you were going to return it at some point, which doesn't really fit with how that scenario works. I think a more appropriate way of thinking about artistic influence is through the concepts of copying and transformation.

Copying is the act of stealing without transformation. In other words, the work is purely derivative. Transformation, on the other hand, is the act of combining your influence(s) and using them as a basis for a new idea. I don't think it makes much of a difference whether this is an intentional or unconscious act. Both copying and transformation have their place in art.

Most artists start out through imitation (copying) and move on to transformation. For example, Keith Richards started out by obsessively copying the styles of American Blues artists, it wasn't until years later that he had absorbed those early influences enough to go on to transform them into his own distinctive style of playing. Same with someone like Picasso. His early work is rooted in traditional realism. Later on he would go on to be heavily influenced by symbolism and African folk art- which ultimately led to Cubism.
C has been going strong for 40 years now, and Lisp for 50, so code may look worryingly similar.

I predict that C& or C% will have an enormous industrial following, and the breakthrough of functional programming into industry will still be just around the corner.

More seriously my hope is that functions will begin to be filled in from a specification. In principle it would be great to write the test, and have the code filled in from there. It is not a problem I see being solved in the immediate future though.
Actually, people don't even think about the operating system on their computer much. They're somewhat more conscious of it, but by and large, they buy a computer and use whatever OS happened to be on it. They'll upgrade their OS when they buy a new computer.
It's not only for phonebook data. Telnic, the company which manages DotTEL, uses [1] as their main example. For more examples, see "DotTEL of the Week" [2].

By "decoupling", I mean to get away from the mindset that your domain goes directly to your content, which is what we've all come to expect when we type in the URL and press ENTER. I envision my DotCOM redirecting to my DotTEL, which has: 1) a very short description of what it's all about, 2) a link to a long description, 3) a link to a chatroom, 4) a link to a forum, whose content might be mirrored, in realtime, to one or two other forum providers, which would also be linked on the DotTEL, thus providing continuity for important material, and 5) links to any other webapp or content that I could possibly want to include. Also, I can quickly modify the DotTEL with status info about myself or about any of my links.

The bottom line is that my DotTEL becomes an anchor for all of my stuff. Of course, I don't anticipate that everyone will simply convert, as most people will come up with objections as to why their content or their audience can't or won't switch or be switched to this intermediate format, but it will work fine for me, and I assume for a good number of people who want some measure of protection when faced with the aftermath of their DotCOM being seized.

[1] http://justin.tel

[2] http://www.nic.tel/community-weeklytel.html
That is exactly the problem. The US taxpayers already "own" the toxic parts. Taxpayers are on the hook for whatever bad bets BofA has made yet there is no visibility into those bets whatsoever.
No. It just means you have to expend extra effort.
Need help rebuilding my web product
Hey guys... I'm at Stanford right now and I've been building a web product for the past few years and finally have something to show for it (users + revenue... woohoo!)

Now that I have my proof of concept and some solid backing... I've been thinking about re-writing this given my market strategy... but my engineering skills aren't what they used to be and I'm not 100% aware of all the tools and options out there given all the things I want to do (refine recommendations with, etc.)

I'd love to talk to someone who is a project manager or program manager-type and has experience rebuilding entire web products and is familiar with the full stack, and might be able to help me out by helping me think about the pros and cons of various frameworks, and might be able to help me think about the kinds of programming hours/resources I'd need to put into this

thanks!!!
You are like me, but most people think in words, not abstract micro-fast videos & kinetics.

It made learning French hard for me because people focused on English <=> French. After years of struggling I learned French in about 4 weeks actually in Quebec (northern part) where I was surrounded by actual poulets rôtis and no English translator around and everything clicked.
To be fair, if you flash ICS over an older version, stock and unmodified, it does present the "Android is Upgrading" screen.

It'd be easy for Samsung to deploy a website and make a tour of ICS, and tout it as a fully fledged upgrade.
Speaking and writing are more different than they seem. It's actually a different medium, and so a transcript of a great speech will often seem weak, just as a reading of a great essay may seem flat. Too much is lost in translation, which I think may the problem PG is encountering -- he first writes an essay and then translates it into a speech. Imagine a painter who creates a great painting and then tries to translate it directly into music -- will he be frustrated by the limitations of the medium?

To me, the power of speaking is that it temporarily creates a shared reality where the listener can actually be in the mind of the speaker. Several people here have mentioned hearing PG speak and finally understanding the sense of curiosity that produces so many of his ideas. Maybe the idea itself isn't quite as clear, but the inspiration that lead to the idea is more obvious, and that's often just as important (teach a man to fish...).