skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something for everybody to keep in mind: The US is a huge IMPORTER of crude oil, but a net EXPORTER of refined petroleum products! The amount of crude we make will have an impact on petroleum prices, but not as large as one would think.

Oil's a bit like diamonds. It's artificial scarcity in the US to keep the price high.
Yeah... no so sure about that one evo_9. I personally will not be buying one, but I'll sit back and watch them reel in a whole slew of new customers. There is a market for this product, and the price point may not seem appropriate to you, but when you look at the specs, it makes a lot of sense.

Perhaps you should create some competition? I'll lend a hand... ;)
In my opinion, a professional web site is one that may use the following (no particular order):

- Good balance of page elements, such as copy over graphics, etc.

- Legibility of text (this is the visual spacing of which text can be read, font-size, colour, line height, line length, kerning, etc, etc).

- Readability of text (does it make sense when you read it?)

- Professionally written copy. Forgets saying "We are the leading company in ..." - yeah you and everyone else. Tell me why you're better, not that you are better, and why it's important to me, not your "thousands of other customers".

- A strong value proposition (why am I here and what do I get out of it)

- Strong images, such as good photography with people in it (pictures of people do wonders to user engagement). Also have them looking at the product or where to go next as it guides the user.

- Page load speed - I don't want to see the non-essential elements be rendered first all waiting while those adverts and analytics are loaded before I get to do anything useful.

- A business identity - professional web sites are run by professional companies who don't mind talking to you over the phone, so show the phone number.

- Clear navigation with no confusing terminology that makes me wonder if I'm in the wrong place.

- No tacky animations, just non-obtrusive complimentary motions that support my visual comprehension of the action I took, rather than it just trying to look flashy.

- If it's a service (such as MailChimp), then don't be shy of what other big brands use your product. It gives more credibility.

- Consistency. Keep navigation, fonts consistent with their purpose.

- Be honest. When it comes to pricing, don't hide it and make me call. Otherwise I think you're up to some shady practice to hound me in to spending more.

Okay, that's all I've got time for.
How to monitor Garbage collection in Java
would anybody like to give a TL;DR synopsis?
According to my works content filter this is NSFW
It's like this for every major product launch - gives the techbloggers something to talk about. Give it a few weeks and they will be bemoaning the next IOS / Android / Ubuntu release. I put this kind of thing into the "Bad News Sells" category. See http://pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/NewsInterest1986-2007.pdf
My Scala vs. Clojure Impression In Pictures
This man speaks with special authority, given that I have sometimes publicly flogged his employer too.
On T-Mobile in the US, my 3G (HSPA+) frequently sees 13Mpbs down and ~5Mbps up with latencies of <50ms. That's higher than the average broadband connection in the US, AfAIK (for reference, my home wired connections is 6Mpbs up and down).
It's because of the "run naked" post I wrote a few months ago.
I wonder if being proactive and adding a message board on your site where people can vent would mitigate some of this.

Here is a great example from a radio personality I used to listen to:

http://mb.clarkhoward.com/forumdisplay.php?7-Clark-Stinks!
They could send a large number of recruitment e-mails crafted like that at negligible cost, not specifically for that one guy, and see who catches it. A little far-fetched but within the realm of possibility with a company known for geeky stuff.
Although this is good news am I correct in assuming the boot loader is still closed source? I was hoping that this would enable an official OpenBSD port but if the boot loader is still closed source this probably won't happen.
Maven Tips
Yes, in particular these statements come to mind:

"I’m not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen" - before ipod had video

"We didn’t think we’d do well in the cellphone business." - before the iphone was released

"There are no plans to make a tablet" - before the ipad was released

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is...people don’t read anymore,” - about kindle, before launching ibooks

Either he was very good at misdirecting competitors, or he was good at changing his mind.
Depends a little on what you run on the Kindle. It's perfectly possible to run 100% open source. Amazon isn't exactly making it super convenient, but they're doing very little to prevent it. Stock, of course, they retain the ability to do so but on the other hand A) sponsor the hardware and B) provide updates and very good support.

I consider it a pretty fair tradeoff. They're not stopping you from churning your own butter, so to speak, but do count on you deciding it's easier to just run their stock stuff. Like a lot of semi-locked hardware, it's not like they'd be such floozies about proliferating the hardware if they weren't making a lot of it back in book sales.
No offense, but I really dislike that sort of phrasing about people being "famously against things before (they were) for them". I can't help but think of all the problems caused by stubbornness, and the recent article on HN about how Jeff Bezos said the people who were right often were the ones that would change their minds. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4674270)
Posted by Patrick Mckenzie almost a year ago:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b...

I haven't tried it but it seems to be a good experience for some people.
Using ssh, screen, and a prgmr instance, I can access my stuff and have the same state for almost all of my dev work anywhere I can use a chrome browser with the ssh plugin or any ssh terminal app. That is pretty close to what he's talking about I suppose. As of now my iphone, ipad, and laptop can all jump on my little instance and I'm good to go.

That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet, but we're getting closer.
Very interesting, wish more of this would be applicable in Germany, especially the virtual assistant part, most of which seem to be English only. Although in the case of FancyHands, it's not due to English being more well known in the former colonies, for once…

And apparently Steve uses 10 Q-Tips per day.
That's wierd - I show a cpu usage of about 48-52% on one of my four threads (2 cores) when I have the tab open, and under 5% on all with the tab closed.

This is on Firefox, Linux.

A side note: I started involuntarily humming the star wars theme to myself as the text started to scroll... I dare say: George Lucas has hacked my brain!
Steve showed us the way with the Gourd, and all who claim the Shoe are heretics.
I completely agree. If I follow an interesting link, read an interesting opening paragraph or two, and then hit a paragraph that completely changes the subject with something like "Paul Steve, a little hobbit of a man, sits before me sipping a glass of warm tea as he gazes out across the morning Texas plains", then I scroll way down to verify the page 1/10 before getting the hell out of Dodge.
Hackers stole Credit Card details from 63 'Barnes & Noble' stores
The main problem is that you need to add proprietary HSM interfaces to every application which uses much data. I'd be happier if that was standardized.
Agreed, it's not rocket science.

Some of these articles from 'so called' techies over the last week or so are really starting to feel like a bit of a click through bandwagon.
Are Forecasters Liable for Failures of Prediction?
More related news about HackRF:

- A radio for all frequencies to rule the airwaves
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/10/hackrf-...

- HackRF Jawbreaker Could Bring Low-Cost Wireless Hacking to the Masses
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hackrf-jawbreaker-could-br...
Haven't had any experience myself but found a couple of resources recently that might be of interest:

* "10. PCB Stackup" -- <http://www.hottconsultants.com/tips.html>; (or as PDF: <http://www.frontdoor.biz/HowToPCB/HowToPCB-extra/PCBStackups...; via the "Route" section of <http://howtopcb.net/>)

* "The Ten Best Ways to Maximize the Emission from Your Product" -- <http://www.hottconsultants.com/techtips/maxemission.html>;

Both deal with the design factors that impact EMF radiation.
This is the exact blog post that planted the seed of my interest in WPEngine.

I read it again before I signed up with them and googled around for reviews. Everyone was very positive.
Well obviously every NFS setup is going to perform differently. I personally benchmarked WPengine which is how I got the 2.5ms number.

What you are saying is 1.25ms on your network (5000/4000). That's twice as fast but still significant.
Google's Street View Goes Into The Wild
Apple just doesn’t get it anymore
>The magic of Steve Jobs was in taking something complicated, utilitarian, ugly, and confusing to the average person and making it accessible, beautiful, and enjoyable to use.

That and a fucking massive reality distortion field that is STILL around.
Back when I believed the hype, I made the same mistake with materials from Google's recruiters. They gave me driving instructions from SJC which left me in the wrong part of the valley on a Friday night during rush hour (this was before smartphone navigation). I figured it was some kind of test. It wasn't.

I called it my "cleverness attribution error" and wrote about it this summer: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/06/19/attrib/

I've run into it in a few other places, too.
The Challenge of Attaining Wikipedia Links
Fair point - but the whole idea is to create a light-weight CRM system without the tabs (and indeed without deals, pipeline etc). We keep it lightweight enough to be wizard-friendly which means that it's usable without investing too much time in setup. And we still use a traditional CRM for rev. forecasting etc.
The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time.

As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month. They are guaranteed to lose money on him, and the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become.

This is the reason you have a "refund" button on the customer page of your admin console. A quick email apologizing for not being able to meet the needs of his unique setup and a refund of his payment, as soon as it became apparent just how impossible things were about to become would have solved this completely.

Or at least one hopes so. The tough thing about dealing with toxic customers is that they grow on you slowly and you don't notice at first. Then one day you realize you've spent four hours just digging into issues and writing emails to this one person who you're probably going to have refund eventually anyway.

I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.
Can you go to any other Microsoft Surface and see exactly what you saw on your own, including (but not limited to) your programs, data, and configuration/profile? Also, will the state of that other Microsoft Surface be exactly what yours was when you left it?

That is, will your browser window located at (314, 159) with 6 tabs open and an HN post written in tab #2 appear on this other Microsoft Surface exactly as you left it on your own?

If not, then the Microsoft Surface may not fit the bill. This is what you get with Plan 9 and a shared file server.
Want to trip like a rockstar? Check Want Me Get Me
With such an open stack, could the Pi be used as part of a GPU password cracking cluster?
I actually got my Pi from Element 14 Singapore in just two days. I’m surprised when I got the package. Maybe it's because the demand in my area (Hong Kong) is low.
Eat less meat. Exercise. Take plenty of naps. And have lots of social interaction.
Because like it or not, Siegler and Arrington are irreparably and intimately tied to TechCrunch.

Do you honestly expect Average Joe to go to a TC article written by Arrington (aka the Founder of TC) and not associate him with TC? Not conflate his opinions with TC?

I don't care what they preface their columns with... there's nothing they can do to avoid people associating their opinions and positions with TC, even subconsciously. Even as independents over the past couple months people still associate what they say with TC.

Of course, AOL knows this perfectly well and went ahead anyway.
First off, great article! Although, it's just a few quick tips, there was some solid advice in there and some new tips I had never heard. For example, maybe I've been living in a cave, but Amazon Subscribe is new to me, so I appreciate the great tip there!

I, personally, had a bad experience using "Fancy Hands" and cancelled my subscription just the other month. Although, I do admit it was mainly because I just couldn't get the $25/month out of it (like you did).

I am curious, how did Fiverr work out (quality wise) for your proofreading? I have debated using this service before for proofreading, but had not yet actually tried it.
Fastest != Most appropriate

You're advocating revenge. I'd just like discussions to be discussions. Not attacks.

The blog post read (to me at least) like an attack on a company with some obvious growing pains.

There are ways to write a complaint that doesn't involve pointing out Cohen's self congratulation. The way the post is ended wreaks of jealous hatred. That is not the way you constructively criticize.
Stop and Frisk
Microsoft Surface: I'm extremely disappointed.
My personal thoughts about the Surface.
I also wish Mech Turk was available to providers outside the US. But thankfully oDesk is, and I've found it's possible to find great VAs there with some patience and trial-and-error.
Everyone can, I do not remember but you might need a certain amount of karma before the down arrow appears. I do not know about posts, I don't think they can be downvote them.
It will matter. As the unofficial family tech guy, I promise you, it will end up mattering to the uninformed person who thinks they know something.
The easiest way to live past 100? Use your father's birth certificate.
I think you have to be pretty silly to think that people, in general, stop being motivated by money once they get a lot of money. The only two high net worth individuals I can think of who obviously stopped being motivated by money are Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
HNCache: For those times an article's been knocked offline
"if Windows 8/RT can run their legacy apps, that is a big win."

Except Windows RT cannot, and Windows 8 can...
It certainly appears so, though that didn't stop Liz from spreading misinformation as usual when one of the developers of an actual open-source driver for an ARM GPU correctly pointed this out: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221#comment-34981

The RasPi foundation is staying as classy as ever.
Thanks, just saw it as the top story on HN, so I guess you're right.
For sites that are large enough/can afford it, I cannot say enough good things about WordPress VIP - we have 20+ sites on VIP and could not be happier with it.

Since they 'are' WordPress they can make pretty much anything that does not modify core, work. It's not for everyone, but for the right sites (high traffic/high availability/generating revenue) it's fantastic.
I did not read the article, but doesn't the Surface uses Windows 8 which is compatible with all the Windows 7 applications? If you mean metro apps, I can understand but still I do not really care, there is more out of the store.
Thanks! Fiverr was great. I had FancyHands find me a high rated proofreader on there and ask him if he'd be willing to do a 62-page, 15,000 word doc (the guy normally was doing 1500 words for ~$5). He said sure, for $50, and that the turnaround time would be two days.

Two days later, I had a fully edited and proofread copy of my document, above and beyond what I expected to get for $50.

Mechanical Turk was way cheaper (even though $50 is already pretty cheap) but the quality varied greatly... from super-low to super-high. I would love to build an automated, nearly real-time proofreading tool that harnessed MT, though.
Google has done this kind of stunt in the past. Remember {first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com?
> the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become

Then just tell him that the service isn't for him at that price, like Page.ly did.
Why new iPad owners can ignore the iPad 4
It's possible to splice into the current blob by using /dev/mem to access the GPU partitioned memory. This lets you hot patch the VideoCore firmware (quite tricky as its running ThreadX OS), or you can hunt down QPU fragments generated by shaders.

I have a plan to release an Architecture/Programming guide and will be recruiting more hands shortly for tools like LLVM etc. But today let's celebrate the great work the foundation have done opening up the user land!
The Standard American Diet causes illness and disease.
On the "we only sell to 'developers'" angle, there was an interesting talk that addressed this--apparent myth--at the recent Open Hardware Summit.

"Agency Compliance and You: An Introduction for Small Manufacturers of OSHW" -- <http://summit.oshwa.org/agency-compliance-and-you-an-introdu...;

Slides: <http://summit.oshwa.org/schedule/oshws_presentation_fcc/>;

They don't seem to have the edited video online yet but you can look at the schedule <http://summit.oshwa.org/schedule/>; to find the session in the recorded live stream: <http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ohs2012>;
I also assumed systems like BART were considered "light rail". Below is a definition for others who may also not know the difference.

The American Public Transit Association defines light rail and heavy rail respectively as follows:

Light Rail is a mode of transit service (also called streetcar, tramway, or trolley) operating passenger rail cars singly (or in short, usually two-car or three-car, trains) on fixed rails in right-of-way that is often separated from other traffic for part or much of the way. Light rail vehicles are typically driven electrically with power being drawn from an overhead electric line via a trolley or a pantograph; driven by an operator on board the vehicle; and may have either high platform loading or low level boarding using steps.

Heavy Rail is a mode of transit service (also called metro, subway, rapid transit, or rapid rail) operating on an electric railway with the capacity for a heavy volume of traffic. It is characterized by high speed and rapid acceleration passenger rail cars operating singly or in multi-car trains on fixed rails; separate rights-of-way from which all other vehicular and foot traffic are excluded; sophisticated signaling, and high platform loading.

Reference: http://metro-cincinnati.org/?p=1566
Ask HN:How much is too much competition to enter a market?
Competition is good but how much is too much competition to enter a market?

I had an idea for a business with a relatively small number of barriers to entry and knew of a couple competitors. In doing more research, there are 5 national competitor with big contracts already. Sure there's nothing like it locally but why would someone take my product over that nationally available product once they realize it's available?

I've talked to many random people and they love the idea and have no idea about any competitors. is it ok to work on a product and investor pitch making it clear the plan is to be bought out by a competitor?

EDIT: we're having some good comments here, can we get this out to more people? I greatly appreciate the feedback so far.
Multisite networks are not an edge case.

It is part of the mainline code for Wordpress. It is present in the base installation.

WPEngine specifically advertise that they support it.

Also ... since when did we start considering people who expect to get what they were promised by the sales copy to be "toxic customers"?
1. Random anecdote.

2. Lots of exercise and healthy food and many friends even for very old people, on average results in a long life.

3. Joke about the guy from the anecdote, apparently all his American doctors died, while he is in his 90s on his little Greek island.
Hehe, I did the same thing 2 years ago [1], hooked up the mousewheel and also made it so the text could be selected and modified. Back then the browsers implementation was still very early and the text would disappear. Glad to see that it works properly now.

[1] http://mrdoob.com/lab/css/starwars/
Agreed, as acme makes much better sense when you're equipped with a 3-button mouse.

For anyone interested: You may want to purchase an HP DY651A. It's an affordable 3-button optical USB mouse (and, yes, it's a real 3-button one).

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2545791
I think added physical display size would also prove useful.

Those 1080p beasts should be pretty big, right?
Well, since my baby left me/
I found a new place to dwell/
There's infinite capacity at Hilbert Hotel/
There's always room there, baby/
There's always room there/
There's always room there for one more...
Collaboration is fine but you need to start with the design, not the code. No one cares what the code looks like.
Collins - Infrastructure Management for Engineers
I'm suggesting the market for tablets is well proven, as demonstrated by the 100 million plus Apple and Android tablets out there. I have no doubt that were it well done, a Windows tablet could be a success. I'm not, of course, saying I have any confidence that will ever happen.
Under-fire Huawei offers access to hardware and source code
excellent movement! "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." - Van Gogh
Metro and Unity Are Teenage Girls With Fluorescent Hair
Yelp screwed up by failing to expand its coverage outside the US for years. Qype isn't even very good, but for a long time they were the only thing around.

That means all the cool restaurants in Berlin have Qype stickers outside. And even I, a big fan of Yelp in the US in the mid-2000s, wasn't really aware that they had very slowly gone international over the past few years.
The Truth About Chargebacks And Disputes On Digital Deliveries
Only hear good stuff from ZippyKid, but haven't used them yet. I've tried Page.ly before and just had too much downtime over a number of different months. Have reverted to hosting myself.
From philosopher to software developer in 6 months
The source for Impala is available at http://github.com/cloudera/impala

To get started with Impala, head over to https://ccp.cloudera.com/display/ENT41DOC/Installing+Impala+...
The article up to that point was great.

However, that sentence "But the government of Iran probably could" made the preceding paragraphs appear to be a vehicle to deliver a meme (like a shaggy-dog story). The rest of the article could have been great, I just stopped reading.

The journalist could have made a neutral statement about what entities have the resources to crack a 768-bit key. But they or their editor chose not to.

Instead, everyone that reads the article will go away with the meme "Iran, if they wanted to, could crack 768-bit keys". Which is, by common definition, propaganda.

It might be unintentional, i.e. the journalist is riding a wave of popular opinion, which they should not do; or it might be an attempt to load the article with link bait.
This mirrors my experience for Element 14 in the UK; ordered on the 11th and received on the 18th.