skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: 2009 Calendar, to help hackers with networking.
Hi,

I am two timing between a start-up and grad studies. This is my holiday project. I put together some photographs that I made during 2008 that align to a theme as a calendar for 2009.

This is for sale now. The deliverables are hi res ( order of 3000 pixels ) copies of these files which can be printed at your favorite local print shop. ( or home if you have good printers ). I will also customize each copy with your business name/contact information.

What good is this ?

1. Think of this as purchasing an ad space right on your clients table for a period of one year. What is that worth to you ? Calendars lie around for a year, and when people ask about it your company name( or your name if you are a freelancer ) comes up in the conversation a lot and that is a good thing.

2. This is a great way to start a conversation going with those cold contacts in your clientele. This new year I will give you an excuse to start a conversation with a potential client and leave a favorable lasting ( for one year ) impression on their table.

3. Since this is not mass produced your gift will be unique.

Mail me at [s n a t h a n (at) c i s e (dot) u f l (dot) e d u] if you are interested in this product.

Wish you all a productive new year filled with excitement, learning and building.

http://www.senthilgandhi.com/calendar/index.html
Er, what about all the other people who might be following you and who won't get anything out of it because you don't make your replies' contexts clear? What about the person you reply to 2 days later who won't remember what the heck you're talking about?

The lack of this kind of "cleverness" is a big reason why Twitter is so versatile.

Simple tools encourage complex behaviour. Complex tools encourage simple behaviour.
Great article. It's good to note that "The warm fuzzy feeling" is not unique to consulting. It is important in any area of business. This includes dealing with customers, investors, and even co-workers, employees, or supervisors.
"Characters are relatively easy to learn for a child."

Which elementary reading textbooks have you been looking at from what countries and what periods of history?

To reply to your assumption, by "sound-indicating system" I was referring to something like the Japanese kana syllabaries. They are inscriptions that have been found through rather recent archeological work in China from around the time of the founding of the Han Dynasty in which Chinese characters are used strictly for sound value, in disregard of their etymological meaning. It is, of course, possible to write any language strictly by writing out sounds--just as people are able to talk on the telephone, without clues from writing in the air or gestures.
Why then are we talking about "carbon credits" and "carbon sequestration" and limiting CO2 output when methane is so much more of a greenhouse gas? I haven't heard any politicians talk about reducing methane output, or methane caps, or methane sequestration.
Hey, Nice shots! What camera do you use ?
That's arguable, but it's not arguable that all these horribly inconvenient seat licenses, keys, DVD zone codes, etc., are a result of pirating.
Thanks!, Nikon D300.
Which major open source releases are you most anticipating in 2009?
...and why? What makes you look forward to them?

Similarly: what do you think were the major open source releases from the past year? Not necessarily in immediate impact (Python 3 will probably have a long term effect for example), though anything that caused huge downloads right away ought to be on the list too (such as Firefox 3).
It's interesting how they used to be the anti-IBM company too. Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
Twitority launches authority based twitter search
Rich people throughout the world, and throughout history, have had good housing, leisure time, and a sense of security. They've had the opportunity to socialize with other successful people, a group which includes politicians, entertainers, etc. Poor people have lacked these things even in extremely affluent societies like USA 2008.

The question is just too hard to interpret. "Standard of living" is very complicated and can't really be reduced to "purchasing power", nor to "purchasing power plus envy". There are a lot of things which money can't buy, or which money can buy but which are scarce no matter how affluent the society is.
I did not read that book, though I do know prevailing cosmological models say that the universe is expanding continually. If it keeps it up, eventually, no galaxy will be able to see any other galaxy, because the distances between them have increased so much. Later, galaxies all collapse into mega black holes. Still later, these mega black holes all evaporate over a very long epoch (10^60 years or something like that) via the process of Hawking Radiation. Once this happens, there is nothing left in the universe except radiation, and various short-lived "quantum vacuum" particles perhaps. Nothing but a homogeneous soup of particles that are not even atoms. Penrose has recently argued that this state could trigger another big bang, and start another "cycle" but I don't know that that view is very much accepted presently. The general thinking is that this final state of scattered radiation is all the fat lady sings.
i'm on the side that its expanding. I reason that if big bang was an explosion that created everything, then the blastwave or whatever is still expanding indefinitely
"Business is a sport. Except there’s no seasons, it's 24x7x365, and there's always someone out there trying to kick your ass. - Mark Cuban

I'm trying to work out the math here. 24x7 is 168, and is presumably the number of hours per week. Why is that multiplied by 365?

Maybe he means 24x365 (and gets a day off every 4 years), maybe he means 24x7x52 (which gives one day off a year, 2 in leap years).

Who knows. Perhaps he gives 700%. Maybe being really, really rich means you don't need to make sense. As Pedro Guerrero said about sportswriters

"Sometimes they write what I say and not what I mean."
"there is no snow"

It was 60 F in Chicago yesterday. That's non-typical for the middle of the winter.
Careful with ING. In November they closed my account with no advanced notice and no chance for me to make any arrangements for my money. I couldn't access my savings for 2 weeks while I waited for a paper check. I also had to wait for a paper paycheck since it was too late to change my direct deposit. When I called they said that I had taken advantage of too many of their "free" services and my account had become unprofitable. No one there, including the ombudsman, cared that they had cut me off from my money for 2 weeks or that my bills would be late.
Keyword: Politicians.
The team who launched iFart is an example of how the success (you can call it that - $0.99 is perfect price for people seeing it in AppStore on their new iPhones - will be very difficult to unseat iFart) was probably not an accident.

http://friendfeed.com/joelcomm
Oh, I just had another thought here. I would so very much prefer it if the Hoyle steady state theory were correct, the idea that as galaxies expand, new matter is created in the inter-galactic spaces formed by the expansions, and this new matter makes new galaxies, ad infinitum, so there would not be a big bang (a beginning) or a final state of dissolution into radiation that one finds in the eternal expansion model (an end).Also it is a clean, beautiful theory mathematically. But as Kepler found, when discovering that the planets use ellipses and not circles when orbiting the sun (circles were thought more "perfect" aesthetically at the time), the universe might not much care what we like or prefer or find to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. :-) In the case of steady state, it is hard to see how that can still be viable, given the microwave background radiation discovered in the early 60's, and the more recent discoveries of quantum density perturbations in the background, which is consistent with the big bang model.
Why is this linkjacked? Link it to http://tweetree.com/ instead
Amex Gold.
Nobody is saying companies would lower their prices just to be nice; they're saying that if the market for a piece of software was broader, because it included the people pirating it, prices would come down naturally as the vendor addressed the market to maximize their return.

As it stands, there is no point to making Photoshop cheaper, because even if it cost $200 instead of $500, a huge portion of home users would still just steal it.
is anyone from scrapy here, i have some tech questions? is there an irc group?
It is awkward to carry your laptop with you to the loo. Sometimes you can trust someone when you ask them but think about what a frustration it would be if you came back and it was gone.
December is missing!
Yup, working on it. It will be the image that is currently up on my homepage. One other month is missing too, all will be up by end of the day.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you repost your comment, but in a way that a person who is not a language expert would understand?

For example, what do you mean by

"used strictly for sound value"
"etymological meaning"

I've been looking at chinese characters, and the simplified characters are pretty easy to learn. The old chinese characters are somewhat more complicated, but the difference in learning to read such a text is minimal - they are more difficult to write, but reading is not more difficult.
>And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so.

That figure'd be a lot more useful if we knew what the usual piracy rate is.
A start-up founded in 2002 beats Lockheed Martin and Boeing for $3.1 billion NASA contract
5 paragraphs about country doctors notwithstanding, it costs more to constantly acquire new clients than it does to continue servicing a steady client. It also makes your pipeline more predictable, and it generates word-of-mouth business. Companies continue to do business with people they like doing business with. Customer service is a win.
Global warming is big business wrapped in a blanket of goodness.

Definitely a good business to be in!
i'm always wondering why people feel the need to dress up the return keyword as a function.
He's got a car in his garage too. What it it fails and crashes into stuff. Someone could get harmed. He's got a lawnmower, chainsaw, weed-eater...

I used to find irrational fear of that "sciencey stuff" merely annoying. Its starting to do real harm. Its disturbing that the police have only ever seen chemistry equipment in reference to meth labs and therefore jump to the conclusion that wherever there are test tubes, there's meth.

All the labs normally have emergency plans for such cases such that nobody get's harmed. He probably didn't.

He very well might have. I bet no one asked him.
I'm curious as to why that isn't more common, although you get a similar compatibility issue with your choice of vmware, xen or virtualbox; and there is some overhead; but yes, it sounds like a good idea to me.

http://www.rpath.org/ does something like that for server side software, and I know vmware supports that model.
You had some good points, but it felt to me like everything you said was repeated 2 or 3 times.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain
Main Cards:

* LOC linked to a visa cc through a local credit union (highly recommend going this route.)

* Also a citibusiness cc. (pretty good for a multinational)

* 3 other credit union cc's.

Also have 2 other business loc's and many other credit cards not worth mentioning.

I used to be a very Amex heavy business. Luckily I had my other options available so when I got Amex f/r'ed last year, I was able to cancel all Amex and switch without any major cash flow issues.

I was very lucky in this respect, as Amex has jeopardized many businesses with their f/r, cdl, and verification practices. There is alot to say here, but to keep it short: If you rely on Amex for operating your business, go ahead and setup alternatives that can be switched to "just in case".

Amex is the greatest when everything is peachy, but if they decide otherwise (and this does not require late payments, breaking your cl, or any other negs) they can and will shut you off until you work with them through it. I decided this type of unreliability was not an acceptable type of relationship I needed for my business financially. Their points & cash back programs are still the best I have encountered, however.

Best of Luck!
Activity is an awfully vague term.

I know of one company that's hired professional actors to act out different scenarios, in the hopes that they can distill the essence of suspicious activity, and thereby automatically detect it. I'm not optimistic about their chances.

However, it's relatively straightforward to detect people tailgating at security entrances (using one passcard to let two people in), or walking the wrong way into the exit gate at an airport. In both these situations, though, the environment is controlled, and the difference between proper and improper behavior is well-defined. Neither of these things are true on, say, a street corner.

Human interaction and body language is complicated. I expect we'll have a good way of automatically detecting behavior sometime around when we have general artificial intelligences, and not before.
If you click your back button when you're on the documentation page (not the loading page), you'll send yourself into an infinite loop with their login system. Heh.
"I think that the only sane way is .... the most difficult approach and usually impossible to make."

Sorry, but that doesn't sound very sane to me. :)
But I heard the guy made a million dollars.
Maybe it's all a cycle in the sun's output and in 100 years we'll be burning more coal and feeding our cows beans so they will fart more to prevent an ice age. Meanwhile the prudent course is to assume it's our fault and reduce our carbon footprint.
Amazon PR learned a lot from the Bush administration (K.R.) about how to fool them. State things as though they're established facts. Typical lazy editors won't insist that the facts are checked.
So is any insurance when you look at it from a certain angle.
I suppose it is but now they have set a new thing--when sending a message the default is set to use 100 points everytime by letting you know when the person has read the message. I once had 1564 points--now I have 864 because of the new default. I complained and they restored 200 but what about the rest? I don't care when my message is read but if I did, I would click on the box so that I WOULD know. Another way to rip you off, huh?
When I worked at a fairly large "adult dating" website, we would:

1) Up the code from our development environment to our staging server.

2) Personally test the shit out of it. We didn't have any QA people, so have fun finding your own bugs after looking at the same screen for X minutes/hours/days/weeks.

3) When all is good, have one of the senior developers run our sync script which would rsync the code off of our staging server to our master production server into a directory called something like: live_20081228.

4) Log into the master production server and run another sync script that would copy the code from the folder created in step #3 into the live directory. Sync script would then sync that directory to all of our other production servers.

5) If there's problems:
5a) Immediately roll back
5b) Pray that you still have a job.

The process, overall, was pretty terrible and allowed for a lot of problems to arise (which happened regularly).
are the monthly fees worth it for AMEX?
CO2 is one Carbon and two Oxygen atoms per molecule.

CH4 (methane) is one Carbon and four Hydrogen atoms per molecule.

If you took an equivalent weight of CO2 and CH4 you would have more carbon atoms in the CH4 container.

To draw the line between these elementary school facts and the use of the term carbon when referring to greenhouse gas mitigation in terms even a certified scrum master can understand; the carbon atom is the common factor in the two most prevalent heat trapping gases involved in atmospheric chemistry.
How much do you pay for it a year?
Ostensibly near zero heavy industry, unless you over-leverage your GNP by 4 times and need to pay back your international debt in something other than your now devalued currency.

Also, you're right about economic opportunities that don't involve the environment, but "green" refers to technologies that replace or amortize polluting analogs, not just anything that doesn't contribute much pollution.
Random thoughts on software piracy and open source business models
"climate change" is ridiculous though. It's not like the climate has been static for millions of years and now suddenly everything is changing. The climate is always changing.
I was part of a team that created a similar platform years ago. We knew, even before we launched, that it could be an enabler for evil as easily as it could be an enabler for good. Private social nets are as useful to neo-nazis as they are to parents of children who are terminally ill. And it wouldn't hurt if someone from Ning would acknowledge that instead of making Ningland sound like the land of milk and honey where sugar ferries dance on-top-of candy coated clouds.

When our service was finally shut down by the company that acquired us, our users we generating 20 million+ page views per day (back in the year 2000 no less) and I can tell you one thing for sure: most of those page views were not generated by church groups, little league clubs, fans of pop singers, or people wanting to change the world in a positive way.

The amount of spin going on around Ning these days has my head spinning!
In response to being down-modded ...

Clearly someone thinks that my comment was a waste of time and space, and is non-constructive, but I offer you this observation: One of my customers is my customer because one of my competitors said they would give 120%. My customers expect accuracy, not exaggeration. They appreciate clear communication.

OK, it's one of my personal hobby-horses, but I invite you to consider how your customers, or clients, or colleagues, perceive you through the language you use and choose.
Indeed, the core idea is to use a contra-flow heat exchange so that you can still have some ventilation. They are talking about 90% heat recovery. What the technology buys you is ten times as much air flow for a fixed heat supply.

How do you want to use that? The article pushes the idea of small, stuffy house that uses the technology to push the heat requirement down towards what is given off by the occupants and their gadgets. More generally it lets you live in a better ventilated house in winter, because reduces the heating bills associated with air changes.
Suppose when playing live poker, your hand always holds up, but you can only play pocket aces. Suppose even that no one else at the table ever figures this out. Would you take that deal? I bet not.
> Can we all promise not to kill each other and try to be nice?

Sure we can. However, if you don't do/think/say {whatever} the correct way, you're not being nice and "good people" will be forced to kill you.....

The phrase "not justice, no peace" expresses this concept. Some of the things that are considered "justice" are "interesting".
american express platinum.

no monthly/yearly fees, doesn't have to be paid off every month, and it does the whole reward point thing (i've used them to buy flight tickets).
Social status is a zero-sum game, so if happiness correlates strongly with it.... Then an egalitarian policy could be the best choice even if everyone would individually be worse off.

I think this is a crucially missing point from most analyses about the income gap.
Ask HN:The basic wardobe?
I only seem to use 20% of my clothes and wonder where do you invest most on clothing and what would you consider would be the basic wardobe
If you work at a newspaper, any XML output of any kind is called an API and spoken of as equivalent to, say, the Amazon Associates API.
Not when that course costs several trillion in lost economic output.
Well, think about the time that you could spend in testing and debugging each platform and the time that you can spent in only one.
Internet backbone Level 3 is offline
I don't know if anyone reads the follow-ups to these, but I went out and test drove a MS3 yesterday, and I ended up buying one this morning!

Thanks again for the tip to check it out, I hadn't really thought about it; and it was the perfect solution to my problem - Still fast enough to be fun, but I can also put things in it if I need to pick someone up from the airport or go buy a chair or something.

I'll be out driving!
How to Compete When All You Do is Solve Problems
A colleague was asking about internet-based backup systems. He uses GNU/Linux, but his wife uses Windows, and he wanted them both to be able to use the same backup system.

I was about to recommend that he take a look at Tarsnap, until I saw it doesn't support Windows.
Given a timetable by their VC perhaps? Interesting. That would explain a lot.
What the post really says is, if your big business really depends on the results of days of computation, do your software in the language most efficient for the developers and throw money at hardware, because the value of the results is way more than the savings in hardware costs from using the most efficient language. He is arguing the case of lisp vs FORTRAN in the context of oil exploration in Norway.
Oh. So that's why some sites were loading, and others weren't.
Context: In Chicago, it was -3 F at the beginning of the week, 38 F (high) the day before yesterday and now it's back to 31 F (current). It also snowed for most of the past week and a half and there was still a thick layer of snow until it melted yesterday. Chicago's weather already has a relatively large swing from season to season, but it also has flukes like yesterday from time to time.
But given the possibility of suits like these down the line, why would a startup even risk it at the outset by using mashup data obtained through scraping, etc? Isn't it asking for trouble? Although geeks prefer the algorithmic approach, building business partnerships from the start and stating one's intention about sharing data seems to be the only viable starting point for a mashup startup (from a long-term view).
By calling work my life
The latest theories say that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating due to the effect of dark energy which overcomes the attractive force of gravity over cosmic distances. There are competing theories that don't involve dark energy.
No worries. Wasn't pointing the finger at you. Just thought the article was kind of pointless. It's good that you clarified, though - thanks.
the text on that page doesn't fit properly inside the horizontal lines on firefox/unix, so it doesn't inspire much confidence in it as a css framework.
That's not "learned from the Bush administration", that's PR 101. Go read pg's essay on PR, which is only news because it's being explained to people not in the PR industry, not because it was actually new information: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The press hasn't been in the business of checking facts for at least two decades, and it just gets worse and worse.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=412018

Where did this come from all of a sudden?
Get that raise: Would you settle for time (vacation) not money?
Wow thats scary. I have almost all my savings in ING. What "free" services are you taking about?
Starting to get better now, but if you click 'last 4 hours' you get a lot of pretty colors (which are bad)
Ask HN: Do YC Startups Lack Spine?
By that I mean the kind of business instincts that are needed to really make a killing in the marketplace.

There seems to be an abundance of admirable nobility in the aims of YCers but not a lot of ruthlessness.

Maybe this is a function of the relative youth and inexperience of most of the groups that apply.

Would YC be more profitable if they were more open to older entrepreneurs that are ready to rumble?