skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the helmet issue I'm ambivalent. There was a study a while back that indicated that drivers drive more aggressively around cyclists wearing helmets...giving them 6 inches to a foot less space on the road. I imagine this is probably less pronounced in places where there are lots of cyclists, as I suspect the brain finds a regular niche for them rather than analyzing each cyclist as a new event. I would think it would take more brain power to make the "Wearing a helmet?" assessment each time and that it would eventually be optimized away by drivers that deal with cyclists every day. In SF, for example, I've found that drivers have no hesitation in driving 6 inches away from me and my bike...so I think they're only giving me the "wearing a helmet" margin, no matter what. I'd obviously rather the niche go the other direction, and drivers would give every cyclist a reasonable amount of space on the road, but that doesn't seem to be what happens. I'm probably not going to convince drivers in Mountain View to respect pedestrians in cross-walks either.
Interesting; why do you see Clojure as more geared towards that goal than Arc? Although I haven't used Clojure, it seems like more of a compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM than a language designed to last into the next century.
It's also not obvious that helmets are a universal help in another way:

By design, bicycle helmets are only effective only at very low speeds (< 14mph). Any deviation from this and a bicycle helmet can actually increase the severity of injury [ref]. For example, an off-center impact on the oblong surface of a helmet or having the air vents catch on something can violently twist the head and neck, leading to a potentially fatal neck injury (pp. 173-174, The Art of Urban Cycling by Robert Hurst). Recent research on brain injury adds further confusion, suggesting that the major causes of permanent intellectual disablement and death may well be torsional forces leading to diffuse axonal injury, a form of injury which helmets cannot mitigate (The efficacy of bicycle helmets against brain injury, Curnow, WJ. 2003. Accident Analysis and Prevention: 2003,35:287-292).

- http://www.lobv.org/15reasons.html

This isn't the first place I've seen that claim, the site I was looking for had brain scan images and such as well, I think.
And a good, standards-compliant-yet-innovative one at that.
I'll bet that there's more demand for GAE on AWS.
30 seconds that changed the world: how Apple's Macintosh changed computer screens forever
First impressions: Site wide design is good, banner looks a little 'Text Generated'. The flashy ad up the top is a little annoying. Mayby try replacing it with static text, or put adwords in between the products listed.
In short: do whichever lets you explore the important effects faster. Sometimes a spec will make you faster and sometimes it isn't worth it. You can generalize from these two examples, but the more data points you have the better you will be able to tell when a spec will probably be helpful and when it won't.
From the Entrepreneurs Roundtable to Modular Innovation
Hey ballpark, I wanna help you out. I just wrote a rock solid contract for my web dev biz.. Email me and I'll hook you up - graham@somethingpretty.ca
That's vastly out of date - DGUX anyone?

I've started on a modern RHEL / Ubuntu / Powershell Rosetta Stone in my own time. Let me know if you want to see it.
Maybe you could sell them to vacuum salesmen.
Also, why should one be looked down upon for not always choosing the safety option? There are costs to wearing a helmet as well. You can argue that they aren't worth it, but you can't dismiss them as non-existant and pretend it's merely about "how hard it is to put on a helmet".

Your head will get sweatier even if the helmet has vents, so your hair will end up less presentable at the other end of any journey of length.

You need to carry a helmet around with you wherever you are going since you can't lock it up outside and trust that it will not be damaged.

You need to be careful with it, since they are fairly delicate and prone to damage that isn't obvious - no stuffing it in a bag and throwing the bag around carelessly.

You need to own one - shop for one, find a fitting one, have somewhere to keep it which isn't annoying to get while getting your bike out or annoying to put away, change it every few years.

(Some people) take care while moving around with it on - it makes your head unusually bigger so you're more likely to bash it on doorways/cupboards/other furniture, and if bashed they usually recommend replacing them.
You're paying temporary contractors, not retaining permanent employees.

There's a big difference.
> Since the US doesn't have bonds in anything other than dollars, this situation wouldn't happen today.

Not so fast. While one can pay off a bond with inflation as well as revenue, both have costs that a govt might choose to avoid by defaulting instead. (Yes, default also has costs - my point is TANSTAAFL applies to bond payoffs.)

Also, some bonds have "inflation protection", which makes inflation less useful in paying them off. If bond-holders become concerned about inflation, they're more likely to demand such protection or higher returns to give them real return over expected inflation. Both responses make default a more attractive option.
I gotta disagree about "what the fuck" being the right way to say it. I am not concerned about the rebellious nature of cursing, but I am bothered by using words that contribute so little to the meaning. I've heard arguments that they serve to express things in a more emotional manner. Like anything, they've been so over used that the emotional enhancement is diluted to simply being a socially rebellious expression.

Edit: On this topic, I think people, at some level, are aware of this. That's why it's not as commonly found in written word vs. spoken word.
You should try to buy a sewing machine.

Singer has probably close to 30 models that each differ by just a few features. It is very hard to figure out what is best for my purposes.
Pope launches YouTube channel
Well because most of the data needs to be referenced in my case I force users to include a link to their source helping minimize time spent. Data accuracy is essential on my site though and without it my site would just be another unreliable source on the web.

I haven't completely opened my website so I can't say how big of an effort it will require in the future. But I plan on possibly using Mechanical Turk or some other similar source paying penny's for accuracy verification.

I'm interested to know what your working on. Do you have an email address I can contact you at?
I'm glad that Paul is making some cash from his blog, but $1600 a month is peanuts for a 3 year old site. A blog 1/10 as popular in a lucrative niche with some decent search traffic would make 10x as much.
I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting for real patterns in this.

Then this guy needs to revamp the system. It sounds like it is horribly broken.

Having said that, you have to look at the cost-benefit ratio of both false negatives and false positives for any kind of discrimination engine. Life isn't black and white. If Fred Smith has a nuke and is somewhere overseas (and we know he'll use his real name), I'm more than happy to carefully watch all the Fred Smiths overseas that are making any kind of travel or shipping arrangements, civil liberties have nothing to do with it. That is traditional intelligence, as it applies to foreign citizens.

And this is where the conversation breaks down. Criminal law has no allowance for any kind of false positives (it is not tolerable for anybody to go to jail when they are innocent). Intelligence, on the other hand, is always dealing with probabilities -- you never expect to know fully one way or the other.

There's a fundamental incompatibility with both systems such that when they interface the language doesn't work any more. It's not going to work to try to force the concepts of one world on the other. We have to have a reasonable discussion somewhere in the middle.
ooh I really like this one:

>* DIRECTED TAXES -- Software gains allow a certain portion of taxes to fall to the discretion of the payer. John Public can assign X amount of his taxes toward one service, to the exclusion of another. It's a second vote that politicians watch closely.
What I'd really like, though, is deaths per mile with and without a helmet.
I got the link from http://bc.tech.coop/blog/030920.html which got this description from a LtU blog (now dead). I figured if I didn't know any better, keeping the original description would be best.

And looking at it, I'm still not sure it isn't the original (or rather, early descendant of). Late 2005 is only the license change; the first revision I see (in this folder) is 1999-01-29, and the first version of some files says "initial checkin for source reorg" (remember CVS?).
also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445075
Maybe not:

Visual Basic, the great-great-great grandchild of Microsoft Basic for the Altair, the company’s first product, is the oldest.

/crosses fingers
A proxy?

Build your own ssh or ssl tunnel through another box you control?

The possibilities are endless.
I'll second that - France is another place where people seem to be born with bicycle attached. I spent two months last year cycling around France and was constantly amazed at the skills employed by cyclists I saw.

You see groups of cyclists whizzing along chatting as they go, effortlessly maneuvering around traffic (including you or me). It was incredible.

One time I was tiring near the summit of a mountain in the pyrenees and an old man reached into the back pocket of his cycle top and handed me a sugar cube whilst overtaking me on the way around a bend. The gradient we were on was about 10-15% I think. I nearly went over the edge trying to take the cube from him.
Ask HN: anyone in SF need a kickass frontend developer?
My current job is pissing me off. Most of the people I work with don't seem to have a clue as to what they are doing. I'm given a "must do next-day" priority, then the next day they change their mind and I'm off to work on whatever else they think is important today. We're a community-focused site and yet there's little care shown for site size, future extensibility, best practices, building for the future, etc.

I have spent over a year trying to improve the situation, promoting better development practices, evangelizing community oriented features, and more. The other frontend developer and I are constantly ignored and major frontend decisions are being made by the lead of engineering who is a straight "Java expert". Frontend dev is a completely separate team with our own manager, and yet nothing is done to respect or even solicit our ideas and opinions.

I'm just tired of regretting waking up each morning and slogging uphill through a mountain of mud and not having achieved anything at the end of the day.

I want to work on something important, where we can build and iterate fast and where I can have a hand in shaping the future of what I'm working on.

I do a lot of side experimental projects ranging from better CSS and javascript techniques to building around public APIs and experimenting with new languages. For example, I've been working pretty heavily for the last 2 months on implementing a server-side javascript environment based on V8 and got an API proxy working in Google App Engine 2 nights ago in a few hours. (I've never used nor touched Python before that). I released a Twitter promo tool on Google Code a couple weeks ago (http://code.google.com/p/fathomer/). I want to be in a place where if I am working on something cool on the side, there's a chance that it could be used and further adopted by the business.
can anyone else not find the link to the actual site. I can't. I tried http://HTFITIP.com

what's the url?
Global is the new private
I don't think helmets are important enough for me to wear one. Luckily I don't live in the "land of the free" (lol) so I can ride a bicycle without a helmet without the police punishing me for it.

Why is it anyones business if you wear a helmet except for the cyclist him/herself?

I come from Denmark and used to live there. The traffic culture is better for biking there. I live in South America now and only feel comfortable biking on the few dedicated bike lanes, that are separated from car/motorcycle traffic. I also lived in Portland, OR, USA for a while, but the traffic culture and the roads aren't as good for biking there either. If I think the conditions are dangerous I'd rather not ride a bike at all than wear a helmet and pretend it makes me safe.

A UK study suggest drivers are less careful about not hitting cyclists with helmets.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528621/Wearing-a-helmet-put...
Crazy, the exact same thing happened to me recently.

At one point David Lynch wanted his DVDs not to have scene breaks, just a play button. I get it, I totally do.

I'm at work so your preamble is firewalled, but I'll get to it this evening.
For a company with 50+ employees, $2500 per year is not a major expense, relative to rent and payroll. Still vastly cheaper than MS Office.
I forgot that the Kennedy administration was especially fond of govt surveillance. I'd be surprised if Nixon wasn't.

Is there any reason to believe that a govt won't do surveillance that it has the capability to do?
I couldn't agree with this more. It goes back to the "should Twitter be taking usernames from people?" discussion we had here a week or so ago. Twitter is free. You're not paying for it. It doesn't owe you anything. Plan accordingly.

On the flip side, this begs the question "When is Twitter going to start charging to use the API?" It seems clear that there is some demand for it.
I got to see the author present this the other day at the San Francisco Ext JS meetup. Pretty impressive stuff and a great presentation.
Google would give you the answer if you just type any such phrase.
There's a static demo at http://herecomethelizards.co.uk/mu_captcha/
(via reddit comment)
Nice layout and idea. My girlfriend spends an inordinate amount of time online "browsing pretty things" so I think you may be onto something here. Reminds me a bit of a more-visual and more-female version of Thrillist.

How are the items selected? I tried clicking the "Suggest" link in the menubar, but it's linked to #.

The "Buy it" link for the first item on the home page (Art Noveau Portrait Bag) takes me to a page that says, "Online Ordering is temporarily unavailable. Please call (312)698-8685 for availability and to place your order. Thanks!" Could be a frustrating experience for end-users, and implies that you need somewhat better feedback from the merchant about what's featured (or maybe vote up/vote down functionality for users).

Also, I agree with the previous comments about the ads - they're visually jarring. If they're required as part of your business model, maybe there's a way to better integrate them into the site design?
Is there? What exactly is the difference?
I've been in a situation similar to this, where management just did not get it. They would ask for our input, but then never act on it.

You are on the right track by looking for a way out. The company is doomed. I left and it has worked out great.
Forex Trading Articles, Audios, News and Tools - Freeforex-tips.com
Not when you are deciding whether or not someone should be let go. Every employer should know whether a developer is doing an acceptable job.
I even have a thousand bills lying around of such an alternate currency that I considered starting a few years ago. The nominal value would have been held constant by inflation-adjusting the exchange rate to legal tender. But the actual bills would expire after a year and would have to be renewed against a 5% fee. (That fee only accrues once a year and is in line with what credit card companies charge merchants --- for each purchase.)
Obama Is “Failure” At Google, “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo
I think there is a market opportunity. Google has basically abandoned Feedburner. They have been doing a "migration" and my experience with that was terrible. It basically blew up and lost subscribers. And I'm not alone. If you look at the Feedburner "help group" http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-statistics/topics?... you'll see a ton of people complaining about lost subscribers and there is not one response from anyone at Google.
NakedTube.com Launches Video Discovery Engines
Free Site Recommends Porn Based on Individual Taste<p>Tampa, Florida January 23, 2009 -- NakedTube, Inc., a Florida corporation, launched the beta version of its flagship product, NakedTube.com today. The launch includes powerful search and recommendation engines that enable users to discover videos custom tailored to their unique tastes.<p>The search and recommendation engines were born out of the idea that each individual has unique video preferences and are offered as tools to discover videos matching those preferences. By using the search engine, users can specify exactly what is wanted in a video and a list of matches is instantly returned. The recommendation engine works conversely: It learns the type of videos users enjoy and recommends new videos with similar content. Recommendations are unique to each user and are based on their unique taste.<p>NakedTube posts fresh content daily, but before a video appears, is given a unique video "DNA", or detailed "map" of its content, which enables the search and recommendation engines to hum. It's akin to how music sites recommend songs.<p>In addition to its revolutionary discovery engines, NakedTube also offers tags, RSS feeds, favorites, and the ability of users to upload their own content.<p>A slew of new features, as well as a redesign of the entire site are slated to happen in the first half of 2009.<p>Entry Page: http://www.nakedtube.com<p>Search Engine: http://www.nakedtube.com/search<p>Recommendation Engine: http://www.nakedtube.com/recommend<p>###
One theory why eBay's profits are falling
startup may be one of your option, join one or start one and be ready for low pay, high fun and may be some equity ... :-)
that is too funny
Monty Python Puts Free Videos Online, Sells 23,000% More DVDs
Most people don't 'downgrade' their shopping tastes, so eBay isn't benefiting from higher-end consumers. People just buy less of the same stuff.
Hacker news directory - find hackers at your school
I’ve been feeling lazy lately so go ahead and implement this if you want. Should be an useful tool.

There's no such site now. He wants someone to write this because he thinks it will be useful
Maybe another good "Ask HN" topic would be: "How would I 'bridge the gap' from programming computers to programming other physical devices?"

Wiring certainly looks like a cool language that goes in that direction.
To the home government. And while self-defense typically connotes imminent grave bodily harm, it is also typically plead only when one is accused of inflicting the same. In a country with rule of law, in non-imminent situations one is expected to seek the help of authorities rather than take matters into his own hands. But when that expectation is clearly unrealistic, then you have an interesting case.
Teach English Abroad
ESL and EFL Jobs in Thailand, Japan, SouthEast Asia, Latin America, Europe, China, Korea and the Middle East.
Interesting asymmetry. Suggests Google is harder to spam than Yahoo.
Children give your head a rest??? Either you have eerily well behaved children, or you do not have any children.
"I pay them to get their jobs done, they do, and I could care less what they do with their own time."

That's one of the best answers yet. Anything else is entirely unacceptable. (And reminds me of amazon, worst place I've ever worked.)

If they're getting their work done, then you as an employer have no right to complain about what they're doing with their own time and equipment, end of story.

Stealing IP is a different issue altogether, of course -- and that's never acceptable.

However... the main reason that I pursue side projects is that my work fails to offer an intellectual challenge for me. I get my job done, and then hunt for intellectual exercise in order to keep my brain in shape.

Unfortunately, I rarely find that at work.
Git allows my workflow to be "stateless" (or more advanced features of git)
Intel chairman Craig Barrett to resign in May
Internet population passes one billion
That would be an interesting experiment to conduct, although I fear the outcome slightly.

It would truly suck to not have any army should the need for one properly arise. As well, culture must lose in some form without galleries for art and dance, for instance.

Wonder how long it would take to set up a web app to test the theory...
I really miss those dynamo generator things. One thing I really liked about growing up in Germany was that whenever I had a wacky "green power" device I wanted to try to build, I always knew exactly where to get a little generator.
Only see submissions from selected HN users.
While the initial function mappings could be quite simple, I see the future of this being a bit like Google Translate for computer languages. We just need a Mechanical Turk wiki like process to get the longer snippets code translated. I used to work with ESRI ArcView software and its Avenue scripting language. When they changed their internal scripting to Visual Basic for Applications, there was a lot of work to be had translating scripts. (Now they support Python as a scripting language as well.) I wonder if for any given JVM language (Java, JRuby, Jython, etc.) you could write a decompiler for the bytecode that would take you back to a different source code language.
Is there any reason why the whole publish+subscribe Blogs / RSS complex hasn't settled on a reasonably easy to implement standard similar to SMTP that allows organizations to run their own microblog server?

Its really disgusting to think of twitter (or any single vendor) "owning" this kind of function and preventing simple things like allowing text indexing.
Hear, hear.

I can't believe that anyone worth anything would choose to work for a company that believed that it owned them even after hours.
is anyone going to this? I'm kinda tempted, although my primary reason is to support GitHub in a fun way.

Would be cool if other hackers were going :)
Objective, concrete, quantifiable metrics are the unsolved problem. Every one that I've ever heard of can be gamed by the developer. The only exception to this that I can think of is the metric of product success in the market. But it's too large-scale to be useful in measuring individual employees.

Subjective metrics are quite common and effective. That's how good programmers such as <insert favorite hacker hero here> are regarded as good.
Stop going to work.
right now, access is limited to users who have .edu accounts only. please sign up by clicking "login" above.

glad there aren't hackers outside US schools.
Cool, but .edu is almost exclusively used by U.S. schools only.

If you whitelist @uwaterloo.ca, I know that there are a few uwaterloo students on HN.
Why don't we just use carrier pigeons when our favorite message boards are down, too.
SSH Tunnel is your best bet - you're a hacker, use your initiative.
There was a Firefox plugin that did this, but it's not 3.0 compatible.
Sorry, but this is such non-news that I can't believe someone took the time to write all this up.

The whole SEO "failure" thing around Bush was kind of humorous, but it mostly underscored the way that search engine results can be (relatively) easily manipulated if you just put a little bit of coordination into it.

Anyone with a tiny fraction of self-confidence would not be the least bit bothered by this.

I would also suspect the whitehouse.gov page is going to undergo several changes and updates, and this issue will manage to correct itself.