skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Making a separate follow-up reply here)

I've now read the whole thing. It's delightful! Thank you. You should make a separate HN post out of it. It might attract interesting discussion, though that's mostly the luck of the draw.

What she's saying does have parallels in software. Being able to know why something is designed or coded the way it is is critical to good software work. That for me is the connection. I consult this kind of intuition all the time. For example, I had a massive breakthrough yesterday - something I've been banging my head over for months suddenly yielded to a simple solution - but the most compelling thing was that it was a moral solution in Cheng's sense: I can look at it and see not just that it works but why. Finding this solution brought a tremendous feeling of relief. But without the "moral" aspect, I wouldn't have felt nearly as good; I'd have seen the tests passing and things appearing to be correct, but there would have been less relief and more of the uneasy sense that it might fall apart with the next test case.

The material about social proof is reminiscent of De Millo, Lipton, and Perlis on the Limits of Formal Methods, which is also worth reading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554556.

Also, one of the most delightful things in the (Cheng) piece is the quote from Hume, showing that as so often, Hume got there before everybody else and said it best.

I still don't think it has the least thing to do with design patterns, though :)
Weekend project: How to build a Star Wars TIE fighter
I honestly wouldn't target startups as contract customers - many who have gone down that route find out the hard way that startups are volatile - one day they are on-board with you and the next day they are short on funding, changing direction, etc. I'm sure there is opportunity but managing the process and churn could be a really tough challenge. Just my 2 cents.
Not to mention viroids - tightly balled RNAs of only a few hundred (220!) nucleotides which, due to the shape they form, coerce replication machinery to reproduce them. Definitely on the very edge of what can be considered "alive".

Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.
Imagine a device with Android as the OS and RIMs amazing, bullet proof, indestructible, long life batteried hardware.
I will explain what I think from the point of view of an engineer: none of the companies inspired me to apply for a job to work for them. Probably the problem is that I'm not smart enough to see the grand vision: the vision of these companies is just not clear for mortals like me.

For example, I was hoping to see something like Word Lens on iPhone: I can see how they can rule the world. That is something frighteningly ambitious.
> Something I would love to have is a debugger for an interpreted language which visualises the program's state as a graph, say, and you can wind time forward and back.

see "debugging backwards in time" by Bil Lewis (yes, one "L" in each word.)
http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/AADEBUG_Mar_03.pdf
i use bing because they basically give you money to use it. (bing rewards -> amazon gift cards -> weeeee). It works out to like 2.50 a month at most, so it's only worth it for penny pinchers, buuuuuuuuut, for just switching search engines, money is money is money (rewards is giftcards is useless-shit-i-would-have-spent-money-on).
That's a really good point that I've begun realizing more frequently in my work. People are blown away by most things, and there is almost no correlation between how difficult the problem was and how amazed they are. In fact, I frequently find that the easy stuff tends to impress more (simple UI tweaks, small jQuery animation).

I try to get my highly technical kudos from my technical friends, because my non-technical co-workers begin to glaze over when when I really want to talk about something tricky and fun I did.
Does Bing not track your searches?
Apparently the current svn sources of googlecl work with more recent versions of Python gdata.
I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago.

I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens.

[1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and this is where the pageload errors occur: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
CIA Chief : We will Spy on You Through Your TV
I don't know if you're just trolling or not.

There were UNIXes that ran on desktop hardware as far back as the early 80s. In particular, the certain TRS-80 models were sold with Xenix -- a port of UNIX that Microsoft did which later was passed on to SCO (the original company in Santa Cruz, not to be confused with the notorious Utah company that ended up owning the name)
Implanon is hormonal birth control, how does it avoid the general problems of hormonal birth control?
> Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.

Amen. One begins to realize that the serious upside of a monolithic product (e.g. the iPhone) is that your reputation is tied to a single product. With Android, there is no single company to blame for poor software support or constrained upgrade path (Google? HTC? AT&T?)

My sense is that Google is giving OEMs far too many options. The message should be, "Hey OEM, here's the Android project. Do a git clone and install it on your phone. Then you can call it Android. If that's not good enough for you, do a fork and call it whatever you want, but don't you dare call it Android."

I think that the tacit assumption when you buy a "Google Phone" is that it will have an upgrade path similar to the iPhone, and so free of the dysfunctional interplay between Google and the OEM (and, thanks to Google's weight, maybe even the carrier). But this has proven not to be the case. (Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4).
Job posting: Systems Infrastructure Developer
Someone at Reddit pointed out something interesting, in response to a different article covering much of the same information.

Back when Circuit City was around, Best Buy was aggressively responding to Circuit City opening new stores by trying hard to put a Best Buy near that Circuit City. They would do this even if there was already a Best Buy within a few miles of that location.

Now that Circuit City is gone, Best Buy is left with quite a few stores that really have no reason to exist--they are too close to another Best Buy. These are a major contribution to the list of stores they are closing.

Closing these stores is not necessarily a sign of trouble.
Done with the app with 2 minutes to spare. Vid is not optional; had one in the vault :)

This was great, btw. No over-thinking, just busting out the responses as they came to me. Maybe simple is better sometimes.
New Law Raises Funding Hopes For Startups, Worries Over Fraud
I think the notion of programmer/investors, as you put it, is mostly wishful thinking fueled by a basic lack of experience. Until people get burned, they don't realize that what you can get for $1500 on elance.com will, when it fails, end up costing you more than what you'd get for $15k from a skilled developer. If you flip the equation, you could say it's the clients who are naive until they've actually managed developers a few times and seen what they can expect for their money.
'The Fourth Dimension' for iOS: learn to see in 4D (hands-on)
Ask HN: YC applications are up. Did you submit?
Does anyone else think it's weird that the principal seemed to have authority over where she could go to secondary school? Was that standard? Is it still true today?
Cheap beats by dre
The singularity is coming: 3 chips that meld man and machine
Is that misleading? Advertising for 19.99 but charged at the rounded up 20.00.
Apparently fascist is even worse!

You know what - if someone, anyone, can tell me why it's absolutely necessary to persecute racists and fascists, yet utterly and completely wrong to persecute communists, I'll go whole hog and buy the R-word. Operators are standing by...
Its singular goal is to be an awesome language for writing next-generation browser engines.

Well, per the FAQ: (https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-project-FAQ)

What is this project's goal, in one sentence?

To design and implement a safe, concurrent, practical, static systems language.
Box Shows How The Freemium Model Is Growing Up
I stand corrected then. I was under the impression that nix was a hog until the 90's.

The place I read that from probably was trolling.

(Then again, IIRC the original V6 source code was 10K or so lines, which doesn't really match up with that statement. (That it was a hog.) I figured it was just written in a way that needed lots of memory.)

Thanks by the way. Filling little gaps in my knowledge like that is always a treat.
What Is Blu-ray Disc and Some Basic Information about Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc(BD), also known as Blu-ray is an optical disc storage medium developed by the Blu-ray Association(BDA), and it is developed to supersede another storage medium - DVD format.
Mark Harbottle: The Internet and start-up success
Yes. We just decided to submit today, and finished our video about 7 minutes before the deadline.
You know that's exactly the same thing that's involved in a vasectomy, right?

Except with a vasectomy you have the risk of chronic testicular pain.
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Bagi para kaum wanita, nyeri haid merupakan sebuah masalah yang sudah tidak asing lagi di telinga. Setiap wanita memiliki kadar rasa nyeri yang berbeda-beda, ada yang tidak merasakan nyeri sama sekali, bahkan ada juga yang merasakan nyeri yang sangat luar biasa, sehingga membuat para kaum wanita rasanya ingin sekali berdiam diri dikamar dan tidak mau melakukan aktivitas apapun. Rasa nyeri haid, jangan dianggap remeh lho..karena jika kita mengalami nyeri yang tidak wajar, dikhawatirkan itu merupakan tanda atau gejala adanya sesuatu yang tidak beres di tubuh kita, misalnya pertumbuhan polip atau kista di ovarium.
Konsultasi –>> 08521 9946 055 atau 0853 2237 9603 [tlp/sms]
According to the announcement of the 1998 Free Software Award:

People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds,
who have already received other awards for their
contributions, were not eligible for the Free
Software Award.

Source: http://www.gnu.org/award/award-1998.html
Don’t show me the money: Why eliminating cash may be the secret to prosperity
Cheap E-Book Reader
eBook Reader - The official website for eBook reader information, eBook reader reviews, specs and more!Supports music playing, photo browsing, video, voice recording, FM radio, electronic dictionary, counter, notepad and calendar function ,built-in some classic games.
Just decided to apply 40 minutes ago. Submitted with 2 minutes to spare. Liberating to not over think it. Good practice in any case.
That link is worth its own HN submission.
I'm currently in Toronto (I'm from Melbourne, Australia). We submitted our application as well. I'd be interested in meeting up with some like-minded people!
Looks like schiffern answered that an hour ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3774010
I'm all for Best Buy and Circuit City going under. I just lament that there is no good brick and mortar.
The newspaper headline doesn't matter; what they're aiming for is controlling the message that's shared over coffee between friends, at the water-cooler, on the office IM feed, etc. In that context, all anyone will talk about is cutting the penny.

If this seem familiar, last time around it was changing the words to O Canada (http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/music/story/2010/03/03/o-canada-...).
It was 8:01, am I late? 
I'm curious how strict the deadline is, if its after 8pm PST is the application marked as late?
I find making videos brutal! We get so focused on not screwing it up that we screw it up!
I don't know the details about the bill but it is a given that there is going to be fraud, I think the big issue will be if they set the amount that a person can contribute low enough the system should not cause that much damage, conversely the advantages are numerous the fact that people can easily get funding for ideas will generate a good deal of innovation and super charge discovery of new feasible markets. A lot maximum investment and the sheer numbers of distribution of risk will help insure the system from the eventual fraud that will arise. I think the benefits for all involved far outweigh the risks. I mean even a small $100 investment in a formative Facebook would reap substantial reward for the investor. I look at it this way, it sure beats buying a $20 scratch off, their odds are probably better and it helps generate revenue for a lot of hands along the line. I think it is one of the better pieces of legislation that has been passed as of late.
返利淘吧
I have another rational question for you: if an Ashkenazi family adopted a Pygmy baby and raised her, how smart would she be?
This app is being reviewed / hyped by every MacBook/ iOS site. No matter how good the UI is, they have pulled off a massive PR coup. How did they do it?
He's not going overboard. When you don't know anything about cars, it's really hard to find a mechanic or car repair shop you can trust. One reason I always try to help people who ask me any question about their computer is that I just think of how ignorant and defenseless I've felt when my car breaks. I do what they do: find the person in my life who knows the most about it and cling to them like a drowning man.

If the Your Mechanic guys can solve this problem, they'd be rewarded with fantastically loyal customers (including me) in a big market. Actually I'm a little bewildered why anyone would see this as an unambitious idea. It sounds hard to me.
"the bottom line is that it’s never been more difficult for filmmakers to get an original story made"

On the contrary. With affordable HD gear and computer editing, it's never been easier for a filmmaker to make their movie themselves. Compare to 20 years ago, where Kevin Smith could barely afford to buy and develop grainy black-and-white film on a $30 grand budget.
Show HN: Eureka Map visualizes where scientific papers are being published
I think it's more accurate to say it's never been more difficult for filmmakers to get an original story made that requires 10s of millions of dollars to bring to life.

Studios have definitely gotten more conservative on the upper end, and the middle is nearly non-existent compared to the past.
That policy is a bit risky. That might diminish the use of other things that reduce significantly the spread of HIV, like condoms. It's still unknown how effective the gel is: maybe 90%, maybe 5%, condoms are 90% effective AFAIK[1].

[1] http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/416
I believe he clarified later on that what he meant by no drastic change needed was that selling the company was not on the table. However, I think his position on that may have changed now anyway.
Maybe they should charge a membership fee, like Costco, and sell their products close to cost. Especially once Amazon has to start paying sales tax, this might be enough to make it work.

Although, I had a gift card or something which required I make a $25 purchase (batteries) in person at a Best Buy, and the experience was horrible. I'd pay 1.2-1.5x as much to buy from Amazon and not have to deal with an icky store, obnoxious salespeople, and painfully slow checkout process.
Supermassive swirling solar tornado 5 times the size of Earth
exactly, if they do it 100 times, they should get a very pointed distribution and they should know which distributions are hard for humans to read based on the way the skewness is and the approximate location of the number in their GPS database.

They could get a ton right and very, very few wrong with this system.

The real question is, how does their system identify numbers in the photo without actually knowing what the numbers are?
There is a serious flaw in this analogy. It costs tens of millions of dollars to make a Hollywood blockbuster, and you don't find out if it was money well spent until opening weekend. But a couple of unemployed software developers can test out a startup idea for a few thousand dollars, and very plausibly get to millions of users or ramen profitability in a few months if the idea is good.

The incentives are totally different. So even if we agree that consumer media internet startups are becoming formulaic (I sure don't), this isn't the reason why.
the point of YC is to put fingerprints on the maximal number of successful startups

One thing about YC that doesn't get enough attention is that by coming up with a model and articulating it (and generally doing everything) in a way that makes sense to hackers, they have grown the total number of startups. That is, some people who wouldn't have otherwise have founded a company have been inspired to do so. YC have made the pie higher! http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bljokebushpiehigher....

In my opinion all sorts of social and macroeconomic good may emerge from this.
Interesting to read a thoughtful write-up from him, since so much of his public persona is "I'm doing wacky things... invest in my Kickstarter and I will give you a prize of a plastic shark!"
Amazon charges sales tax in NYC, and I still prefer them to Best Buy. The problem is that Best Buy never stocks high-end items, only overpriced low-end items. So there is just no point in visiting unless I want to pay $60 for a shitty USB cable, which I never do :)
That is it. I loved it, I still like it, but with scale comes inevitable problems. Another reason is that I like something niche. At 13M users, it's mainstream and not for me.
female to male transmission rates are really low in general.
Submitted our app. Hope they look at our demo more than our video, lol. We're not telegenic people.
The incisions are very small, made under local anesthetic, and recovery time should be quick. Doesn't that sound less frightening than hormonal birth control?
So many interesting languages, so little time :(
返利
It's a shame that that's kept you, and probably others out. Honestly I think it's worth it to have some small barrier, but whether it's helping much is debatable- there's still been a pretty bad downturn in the quality of content in some areas over the past couple years.
Patients Are More Than A Vessel For Billing Codes
Australia plans tough national security restrictions on telecom operators
There's another party! And yeah, she's pretty centrist too.
Announcing App Engine Research Awards
I'd guess that they can detect that it's a house number (look for oval shapes, or stuff that looks like characters in the usual spot on a house, etc.) but not be highly confident what the exact number depicted is.
> If they're successful, many futures apps (mobile or desktop) will sit on top of Dropbox

This sounds like a great vision for Dropbox to follow, but I just can't shake the feeling that the future is going to ultimately look a lot more like what Google is doing with docs, and eliminate the need for most offline/native apps at all. And if in the best case, Dropbox is still going to be dependent on offline apps, I guess it just feels a bit limiting.

I'll admit as much as the next person that the current wave of web/browser-based things (games, operating systems, phone apps, etc) feel seriously lacking, but given enough time, I just can't imagine how this isn't the direction the future is heading. Dropbox makes it amazingly easy to backup, version, and share files right now, but if all the apps you use would already be doing that for you, what would be the point? Or rather, how would Dropbox pivot to account for this?

I think Dropbox is awesome, and that vision you're describing is great, but I would imagine that there is a very specific window of opportunity for when they would have to take action if they want to see this type of 'endgame' have any real impact.
Submitted. At the very. Last. Minute.
Joel on Software vs Paul Graham (2001)
It's often networks providing advertising or analytics services that want to identify devices. Not the app/service itself.
This is unrelated, but I started Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality today and I can't put it down, so thanks!
From:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/health/11patient.html

> about 527,000 vasectomies were performed in this country each year.

I have a vasectomy and would have preferred this.
Platform to put the plethora of education apps into use
Apple Invents a Killer 3D Imaging Camera for iOS Devices
Maybe they're not, but man was the SXSW show floor depressing.
Tes
test
I'll take the cash. I'd never do an incubator anyway (I have a family and responsibilities, I can't just run off and live somewhere else for a few months). There's no reason not to use some of the cash to support my next handful of startup ideas, either. :)
Ask PG: Are you backing anything that will capitilize on the crowdfunding bill?
If you are at liberty to say, I would love to know if you are, or if you know of a company, that is positioned to take advantage of the passage of the bill, by providing a platform that brings parties together.

The reason I ask, is that I have a piece of software that I am working on, that I think would be easier to fund via this model. I would love to know what organizations will be ready day one. I know of Kickstart and a few others that could pivot into the market, but I have not seen anything that definitively states that they are going to.
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爱情连连看安卓
Special-casing local Blogger domains?
Recently, Blogger started redirecting users to local domains (e.g. blogspot.com.br). Should HN special-case this to match existing submissions and avoid duplicates?
Empire Brautkleider
Most stores in the US don't include sales tax in the listed price, but some do. Examples include vending machines, Starbucks and other coffee shops (but not usually locations inside book stores and supermarkets), and concession stands at concerts, sporting events, and fairs. They probably do it because they don't want to deal with pennies. Concession stands often go further and use whole dollar amounts, since the prices are high anyway.

IIRC, some post office vending machines will take pennies, because they can sell stamps one at a time.
He gave a talk at google on the subject, it's a great watch: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3897010229726822034
The problem is that, often times, much of the technical work is front-loaded, leaving most of the initial risk disproportionately in the technical person's lap. It's only after an MVP is built that the business side of the operation has to perform. Equity split should reflect the assumed risk.
All sexual transmission rates are pretty "low," if Wikipedia's sources are accurate. Even anal intercourse is under 2%.
Convert MOV Video with the Best Mac MOV Video Converter
Does anyone know of anything comparable for CS? I have a BA in another field, have been an entrepreneur since my mid-20s and am now a self-taught programmer. I generally don't contract or work full time for other people. But I would like to get a CS degree for personal growth. I can't really justify it being too disruptive so it would have to be:

1) Flexible.
2) Not terribly expensive.

Currently "questionable" accreditation would be ok since I think people's opinion of online schooling is likely to change dramatically over the next decade.

What I'm looking for is an extended CS-related challenge with some manner of official closure at the end. For my own personal satisfaction I would like to say I finished a second degree as opposed to saying I finished some free MIT courses online.

Anything worthwhile available out there?