skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've lived in Canada for 5 years, I have seen most of the country (that means, wherever there are roads) on road trips.

Canada is poor, possibly very poor. On average the amount of money available per square kilometer of land is low, lower than some 'real' third world countries.

This means that outside of the bigger population centers the infrastructure can be seriously lacking.

Trade wars with the US (under the guise of infected beef, logging rules and whatever else the US can come up with to avoid real competition with Canadians, and that all in spite of 'nafta')) have wrecked a good part of the Canadian economy.

One reason Canadian banks are in such good shape is that they have a captive audience, there is hardly any competition (there are very few banks in Canada and they all have - coincidene ? - roughly the same tarrifs for their services. They rip off their customers every chance they get, where else are you going to go ?

Canadians are pretty much enslaved to their banks, I have no other words for it. The amount of misery caused by those 'healthy' banks that I've seen first hand is nothing short of unbelievable and I really would not wish the Canadian banking system upon anybody.
Google 1968
Anyone interested in this or similar projects and based in the UK should come along to the next HomeCamp (http://homecamp.pbwiki.com/FrontPage).
<fx: blush>
Handshake closeups, women with glasses wearing headsets talking to 'customers' on the phone, and cute, racially ambiguous twenty-something women sitting in grass being happy.

This is the visual equivalent of How To X, 10 Ways to Y, and The Secret That Z Doesn't Want You To Know in the field of copywriting. They're used because they work, in many circumstances. Ridiculously well, as a matter of fact. Cosmo has forgotten more about to write headlines than you or I will ever know, and they keep using 10 Ways to Y despite the fact that every time I see one I want to burn all paper in the vicinity.

I so wanted to make a mini-site devoted only to girl-in-a-headset photos, because I thought a) good for a laugh and b) there are some easy affiliate commissions to make there, and the [girl in a headset] SERP can't be that tough. But I held off because, eh, not quite enough ha-ha in that joke to motivate me to do it.

Then somebody actually did it.

http://www.headsethotties.com/
Although it's a later submission, it's on Google's site, and doesn't require registration.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474808
Measuring energy consumption with this level of granularity could be one of the most effective ways of reducing it. My only complaint is that its coming from Google, who already has enough of my personal data!
Cloned Debit Cards Used in Worldwide Scheme
The FBI is looking for suspects caught on video cameras who allegedly used cloned payroll debit cards to withdraw money from ATMs in a multi-city crime spree late last year, according to the Chicago Tribune.
I suggest an on-site visit to the DNA Lounge. Music as lively and as good as ever.

[The DNA Lounge also has web audio broadcasting]
well, in this instance you could upvote the dupe in the hopes that more people will see it on the front page. on a slightly related note, i've noticed these days that the posts with higher numbers of votes depend not only on the quality of the content, but also the reputation of the submitter.
I use my AppleTV every day. My freaking bill attests to that. I only rent movies and buy tv shows. I wish the hard drive was bigger. The other big part of it is the access to podcasts. There are a number that I watch that I wouldn't otherwise. In most cases the quality of video podcasts is better than tv shows. I have my xbox360 and while I have used the netflix streaming a couple times, the quality is horrible compared to ATV. I'm sticking with my little white box, and may cancel the cable tv completely.
'If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.'

This is kind of ironic. You are in internet as a company to make business, but you don't want to use paid services yourself. How do you expect companies to make money if people isn't willing to pay? What makes you think that they will pay your service, if they don't want to pay for e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Obviously Dell would be a bad example here since they sell hardware, but I think this could apply to a lot of internet companies/start ups.
You're right, Canada's GDP growth in 2008 was 0.7% less than the US GDP growth. However in 2007, Canada's GDP grew by 2.7% vs. the US 2.2%; and the IMF predicts that in 2009 the US GDP will fall by 1.6% while Canada's GDP will only fall by 1.2%.

These numbers fluctuate from year to year, but if you look at the long term trend, you won't see any significant difference between Canadian and US GDP growth.
"Everything else about pop music is highly synthesized and scientifically produced. Why not the vocals?"

I sense you think this is a bad thing... Are cars made by hand any more? Does being made by robots make a car any less fantastic?
Why do you say "supposed depression?" Do you doubt that the economy is in trouble?
phew, I'm relieved. I always use '12345' instead...
I saw one of these in an Irish tavern in Ghent, Belgium. The beer-selling business knows about this!
The first link seems to be an argument against planned economies. I think pj was suggesting something much more modest - something along the lines of a government run version of YCombinator. It seems to me that a group of experts giving many small grants or loans to a wide variety of startups would be a very good idea. (It seems to be working pretty well for pg et al.)
They'll hire a thousand low-wage, just-fired americans with PhDs (would probably be indians or chinese, a couple of years ago, no?) to read every profile daily and click a button 'mark as business' when they see fit. Like Nike, Dell, Coca-Cola or Obama...

Oh, of course they'll need to raise 10 million from VCs for that. Because you know, "real time search is da bomb, dude!"
"You can't spam on Twitter."

OK, Here's one dead simple way to spam on twitter.

1. Create *another* twitter client
2. Get lots of people using your twitter client
3. Once you have enough users details, start spamming using all of the login details

Nothing is immune to spam.
A design professor of mine highly recommended these.
They seem like a nice reminder (that you can bring into a meeting) of all the ethnographic methods available.

BoingBoing just linked to a scanned version, although I'm pretty sure it's not authorized in any way.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/ideos-deck-of-method.ht...
I wonder if Google has managed to circumvent the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or will the act of measuring energy usage actually increase it? :)
Amazing zoomable photo of Obama inauguration
All I ever needed to learn in business, I learned drinking - and watching other people get drunk.
Yup. Aleph one contains aleph zero (that is, "everything") between any two points, no matter where you look.
Awesome - thanks. I'm working on a Forth-like myself at the moment :)

Also - Stack machines generally end up with more compact code, which I understand was one of the key the motivation with Java (first, as an embedded target in the very early days, then as a downloadable target when Java Applets were the rage).
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I never got any spam on Twitter. Get a dozen follower invitations once in a while, when I post something, from people I never heard of (spam bots, probably). So I just ignore them. Don't even bother reading their profiles to check if they're actual interesting people or just bots trying to sell me stuff to enlarge specific parts of my body...
Any explanation as to why?
Is that graph for real? They have a program that takes a power consumption time series, and generates a chart with those sweet explanatory annotations automatically?

Please - can I just have that program? That'd be really helpful to me in lots of my work, and to others too. Making it easier to visualize and understand data rules.

Giving us that program will save power too by increasing productivity.
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Ask HN: Critique my Mark Cuban submission
I submitted an idea to the Cuban idea request. Be interesting to get feedback on it. Thanks for any.
Common Futures Trading Mistakes
If you want to be a successful trader, you must train yourself with consistent habits to avoid some common pitfalls. Lack of planning and discipline are bad habits that must be broken early. When entering a trade you must have both your exit routes already mapped out. You should simultaneously enter your stop-loss and your limit order to exit. By assessing your risk, and knowing exactly what your risk is on any particular trade, you can create a profitable trading system for yourself.
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I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that you "love" your big house, expensive car, and extravagant purchases in the way Tennyson meant "love" in that quote
This is brilliant. Great for improving home efficiency and will probably have a knock-on effect in the home white-goods/electronics market, as people are able to review products based on their energy consumption in the home, as opposed to manufacturers claims. I can see the mash up already: product reviews with average reported consumption, facebook app "check out my daily energy consumption!" etc....
It's about time! I wonder what kind of premium services they'll start offering...perhaps some blend of analytics, Twittersheep, TweetRank and MrTweet...or perhaps even my old idea of paying people to be marketed to: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=217 (BTW, I have stopped doing that until recipients start getting paid for it).

Anyways, I'm ready to pay, where should I input my CC data @ev? ;)
2 weeks?

Call me a pessimist, but I think the era of getting funding and building a product with two weeks labour investment from one engineer isn't going to continue.

Quite apart from that, building the business is a much bigger concern than two weeks, there's a lot of boring business stuff that has huge lead times.

It's been done before, but it's like winning the lottery.
A free competitor that doesn't charge might get the business of lots of businesses. So now you -- J Random User -- have: (1) Twitter, where all your friends are, and (2) Fritter, where lots of online marketers are. Which are you going to use? Hmmmmmm, difficult decision.

And then all the businesses on Fritter notice that no one is reading their freets (frites?), and either give up or go back to Twitter and pay the twax.

Doesn't really sound like that promising a business plan, to me.
Where is "I am feeling lucky" option? :-)
$2/hr? Is there such a thing called minimum wage anymore??
This is a great initiative but:

There are a lot of services being created right now that somehow graft on a centralized component where none is needed, just to get information about the users.

Anything this project does could be done just as easily - if not easier - by doing it locally, that is, at the location where the person who should have access to the data is living right now.

No central service component needs to be added on to this to make it work.

I've lived off grid for several years and it was one of the biggest eye openers in terms of where your utility power is really going, and you'd be surprised with how little power you really can get through the day.

Start with switching off that AC unit (unless you're in a datacenter, in which case it is probably a career limiting move).
The Government should do things when it's not going to happen otherwise. Like the military. Or arguably providing free health care to everyone.

But when the Government isn't needed, then it shouldn't be used. Think how inefficient Microsoft is. Then realize Microsoft isn't actually very bad as big companies go. Well, the Government is an order of magnitude worse than the most inefficient huge companies.

The Government is bigger, has more layers of management, rules, and paperwork, doesn't have to worry as much about making a profit, and there's less accountability and responsibility for decisions. If a normal company messes up, it pays for the mistake; if the Government messes up, the tax payer pays. Those are bad traits that should be avoided when we can.
Do you have a non-scribded version, for those of us who don't use flash?
that flash crashed my browser. Arguably that's a firefox or an Adobe problem, but just in case you have critical data in some other browser window save / submit it first.
definately not the direction to be going for all-purpose all-terrain locomotion :(
I know your comment is in jest, but where to start with how little sense it makes even when you interpret it as humor.
I suggest trying to talk to potential customers and possibly making your first sales for even less than the full $12K in proposed startup costs.

For example: rent the camera for 1 day. Take the photos on foot, on a couple of residential blocks and a couple of commercial blocks. Approach occupants door-to-door, or via a low-res mailer with followup call/knock. Ask for a higher price -- but be flexible, you're trying to learn the right price.

If response is positive, there are lots of ways you could fund expansion beyond just Mr. Cuban -- including grants and investments from 'social' or 'green' enterprise groups.
I wouldn't use Ocaml (and, to a similar extent Haskell or Erlang), for anything beyond research projects or small prototypes. These languages are research-driven, not community driven, and they have plenty of features that nobody wants except the maintainers. In the case of Ocaml, just take a look at crap like camlp5 and polymorphic variants.

Language shootouts are poor benchmarks for the quality of a languge. Better metrics are community activity and the quality of the libraries.
Oh, I have some feedback for scribd. In case anyone there happens to read this. I loved the signup and upload interface.

However, it took me close to an hour (at 4 in the morning) to figure out how to get a pdf file that was readable in scribd. My pdf looked great on my computer, but 90% illegible in scribd. I finally figured out I had to tell my pdf program to embed the fonts in the file. I was using a latex program to create the pdfs (LyX).

Sorry to say I now have a fairly negative view of scribd. I suspect anyone else going through this would also. After all, scribd is all about pdfs right? Why can't it recognize when this happens and provide help? Why can't it display pdfs that look fine on my computer?
Piano Etudes: Garage Band, Piano Style
:) But when this community thinks startup / new business we instantly think google/facebook/twitter without looking at other alternatives.
I don't think it looks good saying "I don't know" about possible costs [GPS licensing]
Is there a written version of the speech somewhere?
Do you think twitter has such a huge population now that another startup along the same lines does not have a chance of succeeding ?
This is so true. South Africa is in the same situation – its banks are extremely strong (the majority of the UK Barkley Bank's assets is its stake in a South Africa bank).

The reason why SA banks are so strong is that there is simply no competition. The banks ask what they want to and have an unspoken rule not to compete.
Could you explain why you say that margins are decreasing for voice calls? My mobile bill hasn't changed much over the last few years.
Facebook unveils its Like feature
Or, "How Facebook could kill FriendFeed overnight".
http://drop.io/cubester

I think that should work. Doesn't scribd have a download pdf option?
Top 9 Lies of Venture Capitalists
In an OOPL I have to choose some base object in which I will define the ubiquitous data structure, all other objects that want to use this data structure must inherit this object.

Obviously not if you use composition and if some objects are just your wrapper for your data structures.
The Apple rumor game: how to separate facts from fantasy
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473356
Ask YC: What to do when co-founder won't take plunge
long story short, my co-founder and I are finally nearing a public beta of our web app, he founded idea with me, but then had "personal stuff" for 3 months so I've done 90% development of current iteration.

I'd love to walk away from our day jobs, I'll put in ~$10k and we'd work till its done -- I've built a great network of contacts (in the biz world mostly) so I'm semi-confident I can get some form of angel investment if needed.

But he won't join full time -- blaming the job market, the risks are too high, etc etc.

You might wonder why I don't do it solo -- I'm not a coder by trade -- I coded to learn rails, but my main skills are business & UI stuff (studied UI degree and love business in spare time)

What do you think? Should I walk away from co-founder and find someone else [any advice on this stuff?], continue trying to tempt him or go solo?
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450432
Why Walmart succeeds
Given the marijuana-detection side of thermal imaging, I have trouble imagining that you could pull this off without spending a decade in court defending yourself against invasion-of-privacy lawsuits.
I'd only do this if I got Cuban backing. I have other ideas I wasn't willing to post online.
That's surprisingly candid.

A few more:

- we have to think about this for a while
(that translates as 'no')

- we'll sign a letter of intent first
(that translates as 'you'll be on the hook, but we won't be')

- let our lawyers do the work, you concentrate on your company
(that translates as: You should let us write the contract, you just sign it)

For the best review of your chosen vc / group of vc's go and talk to people they've already invested in, especially the ones were there was a bad leave. Not to get a negative viewpoint, but to help you to avoid the same mistakes.

VC's are in it for the money, pure and simple. They are - with a very few exceptions - not your friend and should be seen as a very savvy business partner that could very well kill you to protect their investment, as they should.

Think of them as a powertool, used right it may get you fantastic returns, used wrongly you will end up hurting yourself.

Don't be afraid to make the rounds, even if you feel you have a good contact with one VC, look around some more and take your time. Not to play hard to get, but simply to learn the lay of the land. Pretend you're looking for a spouse, and take it that serious.

Oh, and do get your own lawyer, even if you can't afford it. Pay them from the investment you're going to get :)
Summary: I don't understand programming much, I don't understand OO, I don't know how to do OO properly, and so I think OO sucks.

This article is Not Even Wrong. It's not close enough to even being wrong to warrant a thought through response. The author needs to go and learn how to do OO properly before making wild declarations about "Why OO sucks".

================

Edit: worth clarifying this as I've just realised that this guy is supposed to be the author of a programming language (quite worrying if he is!)

As I said, this is too far from even being wrong to be worth really debating point by point, so I'll just poke a few holes to demonstrate that I'm not just flaming:

1) functions and data structures belong in totally different worlds

Anyone who's even glanced at SICP knows that the distinction between data and functions are vague at best. Certainly they are tightly coupled concepts.

------------

2) Functions are understood as black boxes that transform inputs to outputs. If I understand the input and the output then I have understood the function. This does not mean to say that I could have written the function.

How does that have anything to do with the age of the captain? Not only the author's main point doesn't make sense, but he feels the latitude to make tangents about unrelated things that don't really have an impact on his obviously controversial main point.

--------------

3) The "time" example that he gives...

In this example, he basically creates an ad-hoc object made of methods that return data. The only difference between this and proper OO is that this structure doesn't benefit from all the advantages of OO. But it's still a tightly coupled structure made of data (the values) and functions (the methods to access those values).

--------------

4) In an OOPL data type definitions belong to objects. So I can't find all the data type definition in one place. In Erlang or C I can define all my data types in a single include file or data dictionary.

So now language design should be driven by whether you have a decent editor that allows you to manage more than 1 file? Seriously, the "Everything in 1 file" anti-pattern is not even worth arguing about... When someone makes such a dumb point, how can you take the rest of the article seriously?

--------------

I could go on, but I think I'm proven my point. Either this article was not written by Joe Armstrong, or it casts severe doubt on the sanity of Erlang, or he's written it to troll the OO community.
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
A massive stretch. My intention wasn't to suggest that I/you/we/them 'loved' our houses/cars/jobs but that you could substitute loved for your activity/goal of choice and the idea still holds true.
The Canadian regulators are very reluctant to let Canadian banks or indeed any financial services firms be acquired by foreigners. Monopolies (or oligarchies) cannot exist without government support.

Not that they're in such great shape now, but Joe (or Jacques) Canadian would probably be a lot better off if RBS, HSBC, Citibank and Santander had been allowed to roll up the regional banks.,
>> Wouldn't it be so much easier if there were something cleaner and simpler that would make all the problems and uncertainty go away.

"Simple" at what level? The principles underlying evolution are fairly simple, but have resulted in the astounding richness of the biosphere.

What is taxed, punished, or regulated you will tend to get less of. What is profitable or encouraged you will tend to get more of. You can't understand all of the world from that, but you can understand a lot of it.

I don't claim to be an expert on macroeconomics. I do claim to be an "expert" on that principle.
The DEA already does this from helicopters as far as I know. I don't think there's any privacy issues with that.

On the one hand, I don't really care if people grow marijuana, so I'm not sure I'd want to sell that data anyways. On the other hand it might save the gov money.
Google’s Trojan Horse (or Why Location Based Services are not a Business)
If your co-founder is showing such resistance, it's probably futile. It's an issue of mindset rather than actual risks. Even if you're able to get him to join you now, the issue will probably come up again when things get even harder (because they will).