skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"They just need to upgrade their lines those greedy bastards!"

It sounds nice, but it doesn't solve things in the long run. Yes, ISPs should upgrade their lines and I think the government should sit on them a bit given their oligopoly or monopoly status.

So, let's say that you want to download a TB each month. Let's say that the majority of people want to download 10-50GB per month. If the ISP has no limits or tiered pricing, all of those small users subsidize your large usage since the ISP would need to get multiple T1 connections to cover your personal bandwidth usage. So, most people cost the ISP $13/mo and you cost the ISP $543 (fake numbers, but proportional calculation). Shouldn't the people using less get to pay less? Should we likewise subsidize people who want bigger homes or fancier cars?

"But they already charge less for lower speeds!" Yeah, I might not download much in terms of quantity (with my connection being idle most of the time), but I want to be able to burst to 15Mbps whenever I am actually using it. That's the wonder of a shared resource like broadband. We don't all use a lot at the same time so we can get a lot when we need it.

Would you object to usage charges in the way that electricity is metered out? Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable. It accounts for ISP costs and users that use more, pay more.

Would you support an all you can use electric plan or an all you can drive gasoline plan? Should the electric company just add more generators to accommodate me on a $40/mo plan that gives me unlimited electric as I make my house an igloo in the summer?

Yes, broadband companies should increase their capacity and we should be sitting on them to do that, but they currently have little incentive to do that since they don't get more money from more usage. Maybe do like wireless companies have for voice: usage charges at the lower levels coupled with an unlimited plan for $100 for users that know they'll need it.

It's just not so simple as yelling at ISPs.
That's the problem - all the restaurants on the site were entered manually by me (and my friends).

Taking a quick look at the Yelp API TOS, it looks like you might be able to use their data. (but of course I'm not a lawyer)
Hackers attack credit card processor in massive security breach
This is my iPhone, this is my gun...
Why do people who get kicked out of The Apprentice think they can go on to advise start-up businesses? Coming fifth on a reality game show surely doesn't qualify you??
IPO Drought Hides Bigger Tech Woes
Part of the problem with all the Programmers are the same as Foo comparisons is that programming styles are so numerous that any one can find similarities between their style and some hobby, it's just that no one ever compares it to say knitting, crochet, scrap booking, gardening, etc. because those all strike people as a step down in terms of "leading a meaningful life"

The only thing I can find in common with musicians is that both are incurable gadget nerds.
Well technically they are oligopolies, but I completely agree. Our politicos are either sheep or paid shills for the telcos and cablecos.

Oh, and let's not forget the fact that we have the highest mobile data rates in the world (or very close to it)
100 Free iPhone Apps That Will Make You Smarter
This list of 100 free apps will prove to you that it’s also an outlet for learning other languages, playing games, discovering new music, being more productive at work, and a lot more.
Most of the contestants on that show have pretty prestigious backgrounds. They either went to great business schools or started businesses of their own, or both.
Was this due to the recession or was this due to Google not conducting the right research?
Hahaha....who would have guessed a name like that would be a porn site though?
Innovation Doesn't Take a Vacation in an Economic Downturn
You default to Austin, Texas. Why not detect the user's location from their IP address? Even if it isn't perfect, it's better than always guessing Texas.

Also, it would be nice to see more about a restaurant than just a name and a rating. I can't really trust the ratings when there's only one or two per restaurant, so give me something more to base my decision on.
I think it's simpler than he proposes.

1. Everybody likes music

2. Music making is very accessible (offhand, I can't think of any condition which would prevent one from playing music at all)

3. If you have the dedication to get good at making programs, you also have the drive to get at least half-decent at making music

Result: good programmers tend to be musicians. Alan Kay was once a professional jazz guitarist; I don't find this coincidental.

The problem I have with music-anything analogies is that "music" covers such gigantic scope that you can make all kinds of generalizations about it, and they'll be true for some kind of music. Individualistic? Collaborative? High-tech? Low-tech? Intricate and exact? Improvised and free-form? Notated? Oral tradition? Hey, we've got that, too! My field is just like music!
PowerShell ABC's - U is for Unraveling
Condo ownership or a co-op are in the middle, with varying degrees of trade-offs on the freedom/responsibility line.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Esperanto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto). It's a meticulously systematic language with a wonderful spelling system and intuitive grammatical structure. I speak a few languages, and was able to pick up Esperanto at a conversational level in around two weeks rather than the customary 6 months to a year.

Plus there's the bonus of the Esperanto travel network, where people all over the world allow others who speak Esperanto to stay with them for free/cheap.

Definitely recommend it anyway - and good idea.
the trans-equatorial railway express, of course, ol chap!

but, uh, (slightly) more seriously, if one big transmitter is the problem, then isn't the solution multiple small transmitters in the the same orbit, repeated at increasingly closer-to-earth orbits? then you could just run a wire up to a transmitter in geostationary orbit.
What a dumb title. Its like saying "the MacBook Pro outsold Linux 10-to-1!" It doesn't make any sense. They're really talking about the G1, not Android.
You're on to something here, but I've never been able to get a browser to send a form POST with a custom Content-Type. Maybe something AJAXy gives you more control over the headers.
Tracking Clicks, Building a Clickmap with PHP and jQuery
The NYTimes website held up great. I'm on an old school T1 connection and I only experienced a few pauses.

Also, a bunch of people were in the conference room watching it on a TV and at some points I could hear my stream was actually broadcasting ahead of the TV.
theres always this: http://midtownlunch.com/blog/restaurant-index/
I don't think that's true of the UK version - if you look at the career histories of the people on the most recent series, for example, they're pretty average.

And then there's their performance on the actual show...
Tutorial: Utilizing CSS in WordPress Plugins in 2 minutes
Improvements:

- Seperation of content and presentation. The benefit should be obvious if you remember having to use FONT-tags rater than CSS to style your content.

- You don't have to give a degraded user experience to disabled users. I know many don't consider this a big deal, but all things being equal, wouldn't you prefer not to annoy disabled users?

BTW. It does not require identical amount of markup as tables, due to the concept of anonymous table elements (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/tables.html#anonymous-boxes) which allows you to use only the minimal amout of markup necessary to delimit the elements you want to style.
1. "...data mainframe..." what's that?

2. Wasn't Google running on commodity (x86 comp.) GNU/Linux clustered machines?
Ask HN: Dealing with fraud and liability?
Hello! We're a YC group (in the latest batch) building a tool that has potential for abuse. For example, a spammer might find our stuff helpful for running a mail server.

Anyway, is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from people signing up with fraudulent credit cards, racking up a bunch of hosting fees, and having the financial liability fall back on us? AWS must have this problem all the time, any idea how someone like them deals with it?
it should ideally be:

uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help --help

Displays help about help.
Three years undercover with the identity thieves
Clinical trials: Unfavorable results often go unpublished
So mean.
Dude Gets Arm Replaced Just Like Luke Skywalker
I know, but several of them seem to be quite modular and easy to generalize in useful ways.
Hmm, not sure what you mean.
do you mean the front page is not clear enough?

It pretty much says:= "there's this competition, I'm suggesting we turn the competition around and put it to a good cause, come in and support me and/OR put up your own ideas and thoughts".
Just speculating, but the "some reason" you speak of may have been for private or friends-only articles. Unless everything you published was visible to the googlebots, you were pretty much screwed when JournalSpace went away. :'(

Looks like somebody's bought it now though, and hopefully have designs on getting it going again. I meant to follow the auction more closely, but does anybody know what it actually sold for?
Why wouldn't it be a pure win-win? I see no way that we could 'magically' eliminate fraud, so getting rid of or reducing fraud would simply be the result of the "forced innovation" you're talking about.

Disease forces innovation as well. The eradication of polio in much of the world is not a lost chance for innovation--it is a success story.
This is a great site for a sad day.
(Cheered me up already)
this is for calling, this is for fun...
But but but.... DAMNIT, my backups are ON THE CLOUD!!!
My sister can tell you how little a democratic voice matters from 18 years of getting outvoted by my brother and I. The Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Chinese in Malaysia, and the Sunnis in Iraq might also disagree with you about the legitimacy of mob-rules democracy.

I really don't see why people think they have some "input" in democratic decisions, other than decades of conditioning in schools run by a democratic government. Try submitting a story and getting it to the front page of Digg. You have approximately zero chance. Your influence over public policy is much, much smaller.

Once you realize that there are more than two choices for any given policy decision, in fact there are almost as many choices as there are people, then you realize how incredibly farcical your "democratic voice" is.
We are looking into it.

The thought on this tho would be after we are finished building the site where you can put games, would we want to expand it or move on to another idea...

Once all the problems and bugs have been fixed, do we stay and develop on it for another 3 or 4 months or do we move on?
Kind of unfair to the company which invested the resources into building the infrastructure, isn't it? I agree monopolies cause problems, but I personally would be upset if I invested tremendous resources into something and then was told that I must give access to all these others who profit from my investment.
Javascript tag? Who's going to spend the 82 hours it takes to make write a piece of javascript that works on IE6? ;-)
I think the sci-fi version of this in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is about the best -sounding- version of this sort of scheme.

You regularly make 'backups' of your brain and if you die your last 'backup' is loaded into a clone.
You (the new you) of course, don't remember anything that happened after your last backup. Made for an interesting plot device as well.
It's using the file system as UI! The only place I've seen this before is version control systems, and I'm now sold that it's a great paradigm.

A game like this would be a great way to get children into programming.
Ex classical musician checking in. One other possibility that has been hinted at indirectly: many good musicians are rather introverted (singers being the notable exception). You have to be -- or at least not be overly extroverted -- in order to lock yourself in a practice room for many hours a day. It's often lonely. This thus makes musicians temperamentally suited to be programmers.
I find it easy to express myself through music and relax a bit when my head is full of binary trees.
Steve, Get Well: Drop Steve Jobs a Get Well Note
IE and or any old browsers can support canvas tag when you use ExplorerCanvas http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/

So IE not supporting canvas tag 'officially' isn't really a problem.

EDIT: Just found that ExplorerCanvas has a new home at soundforg. Download here http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=163391
Well, although Bell was broken up into many "smaller" pieces, those pieces appear to be simply re-merging, and re-congealing back together again, slowly but surely.

I suppose the initial break-up however is good, and would stimulate a more competitive environment, and allow new start-ups to join the game.

But eventually those pieces are simply drawn back together again... It's like when you break a magnet into many pieces -- they reattract back together.
2008 Global Temperature Distribution
because Steve is so grateful when he recieves attention beyond keynotes
While you may be hoping that the event appeared larger, these satellite photos were actually taken at about 1100-1130am, which would be pretty close to the peak attendance at the Inauguration.

Using this map that utilizes the Washington Monument as a sundial, we can estimate the time based on the shadow provided by the monument:

http://sundials.org/links/local/images/washmon.htm
The DrinkingFor.com logo at the top and the bottles on the left side
It's probably true.

http://i39.tinypic.com/k2n8n.jpg
As a recent Django convert, I think that'd be insanely useful. Shoot me a line if you'd like some assistance (barry.meltonATgmail)

Having played around with a few of the pluggables recently, are their standards for block areas? E.g., in some of the pluggables I've used, they use "TITLE" for the HTML page title element, while some have used "PAGETITLE" and another used "HEADTITLE".
NYC teams up with Google to launch its own citysearch
While their state mission might be "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible", I'm pretty sure public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders. In this case, I think they were trying to make money ;)
Create an account:

"Internal Server Error"

Boo :(
When in Cambridge, Chilli's always calls to me....
Three Years Undercover With the Identity Thieves
Have to change things like ZIP... Not enough characters permitted for UK postcodes.
Yeah, I second categories. I think there should be a few: top games, type of drink, by game type (movies, speeches, skill games, etc), size of group.
Vast majority of these patterns are from desktop apps, not web apps. Majority of the example screenshots are from desktop apps as well.

While desktop and web apps share a lot of similarity, they're not the same. Web and desktop apps have different limitations and as a result have different evolutionary paths. Also, people expect them to behave differently so you can't present a UI to the user that doesn't behave like they expect it to behave.
IPod touch: the hot accessory for your sniper rifle
Go read 'Halting State' and find out about intelligence agencies in the EU sponsoring a game called SPOOKS that essentially turns citizens into spies.
That's not how Canada works.
Well, downvoting works.
> public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders

I hear this a lot. Do you have a reference for that, particularly one which explains which definition of "best" is used?
A large part of the problem is that while (nearly) everybody would benefit from IE6 fading away, there's a strong incentive for individual parties to still support it (especially if they're the only one): blocking IE6 means losing a relatively large amount of customers. It's a prisoner's dilemma-esque situation.

IMHO, the best solution I've heard is to offer a discount for customers who are not using IE6, and politely but clearly note that the cost is greater because IE6 is so old and buggy that supporting it requires a lot of extra work, "but switching is easy...[links].". Testing the user agent string is probably enough -- people who know how to change their user agent will know how to install a new browser, but probably can't because of e.g. IT department policies).
If I had to pick one thing in our society that worries me the most these days it would be this mentality of "what I believe is more important than the truth so that makes it ok to bend the truth to fit my beliefs" I really began to notice it during this election season and even made a post on my blog a while back: http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Why-I-Dont-Trust-Polls-(and...

(please excuse the inadvertent plug, I don't think there's any way to post images here)

To me this news about medical studies represents the same mentality but at a much more dangerous level. People willing to twist medical facts in order to support the conclusion they went in trying to prove.

I think our culture needs to really look at the value we put on "truth" and start judging those who try to hide it much more harshly.
What is this Putnam test?
Email Marketing Physical Products
Ask HN: What software do you use to make screencasts for you product?
What software do you use to make screencasts for your products? Are there any good tools on Windows or Mac that are available for free?
Like design patterns, you should learn them so you can both use them intelligently when appropriate, and make fun of people who overuse Singleton or the "Column Browse" template.
Don't companies that stick to their mission make more money than companies that try anything to make a buck?
Like the military coups in Latin America that said they'd only be in power "for a certain period of time" until democracy is restored.
The big challenge for online video is staying up in a crisis. I remember on 9/11 the web failed and most of us resorted to TV & radio.
Dan Ingalls and Avi Bryant both look like great talks. Also I would like to see what discuss might occur between the two of them.

Leah's talk sounds interesting as well. I totally agree with the little paragraph about putting yourself in bad situations.

I once heard that the word for crisis and opportunity is the same word in chinese. I don't know if that is factually correct, but i like the way it sounds so i choose to believe it without doing any fact checking.

You gotta rock the boat, put yourself in impossible places and force yourself to become better than you are. When things are going well for too long, time to mess them up!

I miss CUSEC (wish i was in montreal now), what a great conference. I don't see Dr. Peter Grogono listed as a speaker, that's too bad as he is a great speaker and quite funny.
This is the worst part about academic publishing too. Researchers should keep blogs to record results, and the RSS feed is the publication.
I used to play the violin for my high school orchestra. I wasn't great, and I often wondered how professionals could practice for hours on end. Now I realize that it may very well be asked how I could sit in front of a computer programming for hours on end.
further study: Vantage Point, (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443274/
It was a strange mix of humorous and clever and 4chan-ish waste. The Xorg.conf-like entry for an LCD w/ five dead pixels was a highlight for me. It sort of mocked the slightly bygone era of having to know your syncs and refresh rates and hand-enter them amidst warnings that, in theory, being very wrong could destroy your perfectly normal monitor.
Newspapers print ads that contain information, if Google could optimize the ad placement relative to content that would be a better organization.

The biggest problems with this seems to be that it is not measurable whether you really improved placement or not.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289420

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436523

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133349

all found with http://searchyc.com
This issue also concerns studies with non-results in all scientific fields. The pressure to produce "results" causes two types of problems:

1. Massive fudging of data to achieve (statistical) significance.

2. Inefficiencies due to researchers repeating failing experiments because they can't learn from the unpublished non-results of others.

It's fundamentally a problem of human psychology (reputation/face saving), and of organizational design, which sets up the rewards context (universities, tenure process, journals, etc.) The system is pretty outdated and broken for the modern pace of information production, imho.
Chasing the landspeed record with entrepreneurship, innovation, and education
Not a lot of meat here, anyone have some background?
Everybody starts somewhere.
Then be shocked. This app was present on a rifle at SHOT 2009 and interest was taken by many professionals, including the "quiet" kind.
Oops. I missed that your comment was about widely varying pay from one country to another...
A stretch at best. When the secret service is doing their job right, the sniper gets stopped before he even gets to the event.

And what's a guy going to do at an event like yesterday's, pull out a sniper rifle and shoot from his seat? People aren't going to notice that?

If he's in a surrounding building, then where are these crowdsourced photos coming from?

Maybe more than a stretch....

Although that PhotoSynth tech is pretty damn cool.
Isn't it time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of listed companies?
You're obviously not working at companies dominated by engineering (cough, Justin.tv, cough).
If you like these, you may also be interested in this flickr collection of search UI patterns:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/collections/7215760378...
I'm glad you asked - I've been wanting to compare notes with others on this for a while...

I use CamStudio. It's free, and easy to use. It doesnt have many bells or whistles, but I don't need it to. I get it to output a very high bitrate avi file. The real issue for me is how to then encode and stream the video. Here's what I tried, and where I'm at now:

1. Use the SWFProducer app that comes with CamStudio. It produces an SWF that is nice and small, but it doent not allow progressive streaming, which is a big no-no for me..

2. Use FFMpeg to convert the avi to an .flv file, and then use FlowPlayer to allow users to watch the video online. Works, but .flv isnt great quality for the file size.

3. Use FFMpeg to convert the avi to an H.264 .mp4 file. Then either use FlowPlayer to allow users to watch the video online, or post as an .mp4 and allow users watch it using QuickTime plug-in. It Works, but it doesn't allow progressive streaming, which is a big no-no again...

4. (What I'm using today). Use FFMPEG to convert the avi to an H.264 encoded .f4v file (the new flash video standard). Use FlowPlayer to allow the user to watch it online. Allows progressive streaming and is decent quality.

5. (What I want to get to one day..) Encode using a codec designed specifically for screen-casting. I tried the 'Flash Screen Video' codec in FFMPEG and it produced a very nice quality file, but the size was ~2.5x the .f4v file, so I decided not to go with it. I'm hoping there is a better codec out there somewhere...

Using (4) my video is:
650x620 pixels
24 fps
~700 kbps
(includes a 320x240 video - so a screen casting codec may not do the trick anyway - maybe I need a hybrid?)

Looking forward to learning about what others are doing.
Dead Simple Ruby Daemons Using Looper
Especially since what's "best" in the short term is different than what's "best" in the long term.
I wonder if the double blind model can be applied right into the publishing stage? Or perhaps journals could have some requirement, 50/50 positive/negative results.