skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love Lorem Ipsum and remember when you guys moved a few years ago. (I used to live literally across the street.) I enjoyed buying used books at your store and that you would sometimes haggle over the price. But I doubt I have spent more than $80 there.

I don't know anything about the bookstore business except that it is tough. I was sad when Quantum Books closed, and their books were a lot more expensive than yours, and they were right next to MIT and sold a lot of textbooks to students.

Do you know the proprietors of Brookline Booksmith or Harvard Bookstore? I assume they are still making it, and maybe there are some ideas or principles here that would help that you guys could learn. They have a lot of readings and signings and events that I imagine help get people in the stores.

(I do sort-of-know Ken and Frenchie, the proprietors of the "banned in Boston" outdoor free book table that sometimes sets up in Harvard Square, but I'm guessing that introduction would not help you...)
In terms of kickstarters for adult stuff, there's 2 already.

http://offbeatr.com/
http://www.passionateproduce.com/

And companies like lovepalz (http://lovepalz.com) and vibease (http://vibease.com, where the hell ARE you in this thread, Dema! I know it's like stupid AM over in Singapore but get on here and market, damnit :) ) are co-opting the "kickstarter look" even though they aren't running as actual crowdfunded projects.

In the end, you don't see a lot of products make it to market for 2 reasons. First, making hardware is difficult, but that's been covered here a bazillion times over. The contextual issue with sex tech is that people are scared to install a damn printer on their computer. Putting their private parts near it? Yeah right. If you can't design a user interface for an OS that someone is comfortable with, something as intimate as sex is sooo far off your damn radar.

I've seen 10s of companies come and go without ever getting a product to market since I started tracking this in 2004. There's a ton of factors that just aren't thought about yet.

If you want to see the state of the industry circa 2007:

http://vimeo.com/451452

That's a presentation I did back then. A lot of the info still holds, though there's many new players in the game now. I did an updated presentation in May, will see if there's video around. Or if anyone wants a presentation at their meetup of choice around the Bay Area, just lemme know.

I'm working on an article about sex tech startups (failed/succeeded, and current) that I'll hopefully get posted sometime this week.
I understand what you're saying. Is that kind of magic that makes effortless the making of these simple things. And that's what's expected in a framework. But you are right, when compared to other smaller python frameworks django turns out as more complex. But let's say, compared to other frameworks like .NET for example, django stays in a lower which I like and I don't need more.
The biggest failing of the Mac OS UI is forcing all apps to share a single menu, which remains glued to the top of one screen. This effectively turns your entire monitor into a single window, and encourages developers to spawn a flotilla of floating child windows. Thus you can't minimize or resize the application's UI, because you're herding a bunch of independent windows around.

Not to mention the annoyance of rolling up to the menu and opening an item, only to find that it's not the menu for the app whose UI dominates the screen. If you "quit" Mail by dismissing its UI and revealing Xcode behind it, the menu bar is still owned by Mail. Goddamned stupid.

It also contributes to this asinine mania for keeping apps running, even though you've "closed" them. When I dismiss an application's UI, I want it GONE, not wasting resources.
ET-312 software interfaces are some of the most advanced out there right now, too. The community at http://smartstim.com is absolutely amazing to watch.
Studios would much rather a terrible cam copy gets on the internet, so people get pissed off and go to the cinema.

It has been proven that once people have an inferior version of something they are more willing to pay full price for a good version.
But how much do you think the average consumer cares about that (or is even smart enough to think about it)? Sure, we all understand the ecosystems because we're developers and we follow that sort of thing, but I'm not sure that the average consumer would see it the same way. If anything, they might be swayed by the whole "Oh, that will work with my iTunes account!" factor.
Thanks for the ideas. Last I looked into this (a few years ago now) it was the binding part that I didn't know how to do.

I'd love to find someone who wants to get involved and do just what you describe.
My progression was similar, and my thoughts similar, except for this one divergence: Right around the same time that Unity the window manager came out, I needed to start working with Unity 3d the game development platform, which is only available for Windows not Linux. So I installed Windows 7, and now I don't have any more quarrels with Unity and Ubuntu 12. Problem solved! I still use a Mac and a Linux box via combinations of ssh and Synergy. I don't like Unity (the window manager) either, but I'm honestly mystified why so many people fall on their swords over this instead of just getting back to work, or using a different distro.

I installed Lubuntu on an old machine to use on my TV, and it's just like old times on the Window manager, except it uses up to date packages. Why all the trail of tears? The author is willing to install Cynagenmod 10 on his phone, but he's not willing to just install a different flavor of Linux on his desktop? That's just silly. I conclude the author doesn't know about Lubuntu or many other seriously good alternatives to make the pain go away.
I've long thought that the single most underrated aspect of universal healthcare would be the increase in job-churn, an extremely beneficial economic phenomenon, would be much higher with people not afraid to leave their jobs and therefore lose their healthcare.

I, however, would feel extremely remiss if I didn't mention that it's likely unwise to consider Ayn Rand a hero of any sort. Besides being a wonderful writer of pulp fiction, she is a worthless thinker and an absolute unabashed crazy person.
Maybe I'm weird, but it seems like netflix has got worse over time. It used to be magical, now it feels a bit clunkier and the selection might be getting bigger, but it's not getting any better.

Most of the time now I redbox anything new, hulu what's on current tv, and only worry about netflix for when I want to burn through an older show.

Maybe it was the price hike or the whole period of bad PR that ensued after that, or maybe it's that Amazon Prime keeps looking more appealing every day. Either way, Netflix feels like it lost whatever it was that made it magic in the first place.
Looks like to start of a book that will be written.

The book will be full of bullshit and sell like hotcakes.
A concept that works very well in college areas that I've seen is called "Snakes and Lattes". Basically a coffeeshop that has plenty of seating for playing board games. I've seen it work with bubbletea places as well. Seems to drive a lot of traffic by word of mouth due to its cooperative nature.
cough http://www.github.com/qdot/libtrancevibe

There's been open source trancevibe drivers since 2003. :)

There's 3 toys based on the protocol.

- The original Trancevibe (ebayable, surprisingly powerful)

- the Drmn trancevibe (http://tim.cexx.org/projects/vibe/), no longer sold

- This weird one: http://www.harnett-tech.com/search.php?act=search&SKU=US...

I wrote the original Second Life trancevibe control layer in 2005 (i.e. click on virtual genetalia, real vibrator vibrates), which was later integrated into in-world genetalia by one of the larger virtual sex object manufacturers. After the Drmn trancevibe went off sale, they created that last one to sell to customers.
Probably because when women write about masturbatory experiences it's "awesome" and "liberated" and when men write about masturbatory experiences it's "gross" and "sad". So that commenter probably observed that double standard and questioned whether a, say, Fleshlight hacking article would be well-received or soundly mocked.

But since women are universally disadvantaged in absolutely all aspects of life, it's simply rude to try and discuss the double standards biased against men. Because they are fictitious, of course.
Coding is much the same way as writing to me; they are both forms of thought development and refinement. But then I write research code, not production code, so life is a bit different for me (prototypes vs. products). If you are applying and checking in a bug fix, you don't want to do that in your off hours. If you are building a compiler/interpreter/editor for a new language from scratch to explore some design ideas, then off hours are useful in pushing things along since there are lots of unknowns that require time to mull over. Also, you get something to sleep on.
In summary, binaries compiled with GCC 4.7 shows better performance compared to binaries compiled with GCC 4.6, on most benchmarks.

But I would like to see a deeper analysis of the benchmark results that are actually worse with the newer compiler.
If I want to buy a book, i'll go to Amazon and buy it. With kindle, i'll have it in 10 seconds. If its not available on Kindle with Prime i'll have it next day. You can't compete with Amazon. So its not worth trying.

If you want to run a remarkable book store today, don't sell books. That's a loosing battle. This is where i'd start if I was trying to think of ways to innovate in this space. I'm sure you're familiar with Porter square books. They for instance have built a pretty remarkable community around the store with book clubs etc.

Other then that, i'd like to say good luck! I live in Boston, so i'll try to visit the next time i'm in the neighborhood.
I used to use fastmail but switched to google as their interface fell behind the times and I wanted features they didn't have. Perhaps I should look again.
I'm surprised how useful 3D printing turns out to be for this kind of application.
There's the Roku, but that's not a solution from Amazon. It's half the price of Apple TV though.
That's not true. Using insider connections is also effective.

What's pretty much impossible is getting support through the recommends methods - forms and email.
I have a coffee shop / book store hybrid near me, I think it's brilliant. I don't always buy books there, but when I do I've usually purchased a latte as well and spend part of the day reading it there.

One of the keys is having a lot of comfortable chairs (like B&N used to). I used to go to B&N all the time, read half a book and purchase it.

Places for book geeks like me are shrinking quickly.
This is being worked on as we speak, actually. There's a few companies (and, uh, me) working on biometric interfaces for sex toys. I reverse engineer biometrics stuff as well as sex toys, so there's a whole range of sensors available, and it's honestly the best interface we're probably going to get, since it doesn't require manual controls. :)
Sure there is, a quick look shows:

Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs
Machine Learning: Neural Network vs Support Vector Machine
Suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design

But you are right that there is a lot of link-baitiness on HN. Doesn't mean we can't wish for better.
Two things to note here -

1. The concept of "blackface" does not exist in Israel.

2. Looking at the picture, it was taken at the Dead Sea - where people go to put black, mineral rich mud all over their body (faces include). So this wasn't even someone pretending to be black, it was just someone putting mud on his face, taking a picture, than making a lame (private?) joke when uploading to Facebook.

Not only a non-HN story, but also just a non-story.
How does this work in the presence of recording equipment in people's pockets? Was he even a real subway officer?
Fixing bugs in widely used Unix software, maintaining compatibility with the existing related components and promoting cross-platform portability, for the benefit of thousands of future users, and documenting the experience as an educational tidbit for others, is not dumb.
For those still following, it turns out that Uber has nothing to appeal because they never submitted an application to the PTB. The PTB did not reject a request by Uber.

It now appears that the PTB barely knew that Uber existed until they started getting hate-mail from angry users.

(The same is true, incidentally of the City of Vancouver. Uber doesn't have the business licenses required to sell bicycle courier services in Vancouver, never mind limousine services.)

The limo drivers and companies who worked with Uber, however, are being hit with fines and other enforcement actions.
Have you perhaps considered a book scanner? You can then sell books and for an additional fee turn the book into a DRM free PDF the user can read electronically. You don't sell digital copies online just give the reader the book they bought in store. This way the reader can read the book physically or by a tablet.
Namib Desert beetle inspires self-filling water bottle
Sounds very similar to what is written in another drug smugglers book.
http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Nice-Autobiography-Howard-Marks/dp/...

Maybe it's the same ghostwriter.
Getting started with CSS custom filters (CSS shaders)
The juxtaposition of

> unchecked privilege

and

> says when they've got nothing left to argue

so ironic.

The problem with your argument at the bottom is that black people actually are at a disadvantage because of discrimination. Whereas society treats men poorly in some areas and women poorly in others.
You don't need to buy one, there are lots of mail order printing services, and local services in big cities.
And Larry Page was just bored and wanted to customize search results.
Translink is completely and totally irrelevant to this story. You'd as accurately blame the New York Yankees for Uber's problems in Vancouver.
I get your point but I don't think you articulated it effectively.
Obligatory XKCD comic reference: http://xkcd.com/1049/
Have you thought about adding coworking space? I would kill for a bookstore environment with coffee and decent chairs. As it is, I do most of my work in a Barnes and Noble, and my back hates me for it.
No. THIS is rubbish. Did you even read the article you linked, or did you just scroll through the pretty pictures?

> typical usage

Are you serious? This pretty much affirms my point that you didn't read the article, unless you consider constantly refreshing web pages at a fixed interval with fixed brightness 'typical usage'.

> If you disable LTE it will be even better.

Apparently you didn't look too closely at the pictures, either. The article contains an entire paragraph (that I'm not going to repeat) that explains why LTE provides better battery life in this particular benchmark. In fact, if you look at the exact same chart you're referencing the iPhone 5 is at 4.55 with LTE disabled, a mere 0.40 more than the Nexus 4.

Your blatant Apple propaganda is getting pretty old.
qdot, you should write a script that automatically inserts (nsfw) after every link you paste.
Google Maps' Indoor Floor Plans Hit the Web
That sounds cool. Apparently "Snakes and Lattes" is a cafe in Toronto with this theme, whereas I was thinking of it as being a weekly event.

edit: Overall, I think selling coffee would definitely be a good idea, though this would require someone with that type of experience in order to deliver a valuable product.
"My friends call me Beth."
That Courier FUD article does not list a single specific complaint with the specification (well, other than the version number ;P):

Um, that version number issue is pretty significant I think, and it really calls into question the competence of the IMAP committee at the most basic level:

In 2003, Appendix B of RFC 3501 identified over a hundred corrections to RFC 2060. Observe that RFC 3501 does not define a new version of the IMAP protocol. It's the same version. This is a “revised” document, which attempts to clarify and address numerous issues and inaccuracies in the original specification (some of which I noted publicly).

And, to make things even more interesting, as of this date there are already several reported errata to 3501. Furthermore, RFC 3501 actually changed the IMAP protocol, adding several new requirements, but it kept the IMAP4rev1 version. In other words: the protocol has changed, but it's still the same protocol, officially. Figure that one out.

Isn't updating version numbers when you change the protocol the most basic job of any standards organization? Is this really the sort of thing that we should be failing at?

If you still insist on using an inferior server, the result will be weird and will be, well, inferior ;P, but at least it will work.

All compliant client implementations have to be designed to deal with these "inferior servers" because they still exist. So client implementers cannot rely on usable persistent UIDs (if they want to be standards compliant, which is apparently very important to Crispin). And I'll note that you still haven't given me an explanation for why this feature exists in the spec at all: was the IMAP team really so shortsighted that they believed that no one would ever make a real IMAP server datastore?

that doesn't make it an accurate description of the state of affairs, nor certainly does it indicate anything about the design constraints of the protocol.

OK, what is inaccurate about it? And what are these mythical design constraints? Shouldn't they be written down somewhere?

the original IMAP protocol was highly asynchronous, and simply streamed protocol state to the client whenever things were updated so that the local client would have a live-updated display.

This seems insane to me. Live updates are all well and good, but why on Earth do we need live updates WHILE THE CLIENT HAS AN OUTSTANDING REQUEST?

Can you name other protocols that adopt this gloriously unstructured style? I mean, lots of protocols could in theory benefit from this 'ultra low latency' trick, right?

The result is that the protocol, to a very real extent, doesn't even have "command responses"

Then describing the protocol in terms of commands and command responses seems a bit absurd, right?
It sounds to me like you really just want someone else to pick a window manager, some tool bars, text editor, keyboard shortcuts, programming language, package manager, IM notification icon, etc, and then never change those choices. That isn't going to happen. Here's the good part, you're already on Linux, you have a bunch of good choices for all those things and the only other thing you need to know is that your weird hangup on a desktop being 'future proof' makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. What is your concern? That you won't be able to sit down in front of someone else's Mac OS 10.n Big Cat alpha and figure out how to open a window without seeking help? If you've been using anything but that for any amount of time you'll probably be a little lost, even if you've been using the current stable Mac OS. Apple, MS and now Ubuntu have all made drastic changes in the DE between releases and that's their choice, it is what it is, someone else picking shit for you, take it or leave it. I suggest going minimalist for a while and figuring out exactly what YOU want. Arch Linux is a good starting point if you're interested. When you find out what you actually need and don't have to work around other peoples choices, you will love your desktop again and it will be a deeper love, a love only known by a parent for it's chi... uhh... Just quit letting people with their own agendas pick what you work with for such a large chunk of your life.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hedwig+and+the+angry+inch
Badly. What are you going to do, take him to the Hague? Let's remember, this happened in Italy. Not sparkly clean, really.
Competition is the answer. If Apple isn't interested in your particular content, put it on Android.

The article is a great example of why developers should be cautious of the iPhone: The developer invests substantial resources up-front, and it's a crapshoot whether your app gets accepted or stays accepted.
The article relates that kids are essentially using whats in front of them. These kids are not yet brand aware and so they use whatever device has some shiny.

These kids however will become very brand aware as they grow up (school is all about social status) and once they are brand aware many do choose Apple because they're "cool".

Apple is only in trouble is those that are brand aware start to pick differently, and there's no evidence to suggest that Apple has lost this market.
Text only cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Tech Startups Documentary
Day Job is a film that follows the grueling process of five startup teams in Toronto's Extreme Startup Accelerator. Day Job tells the stories of these teams going through the 12-week accelerator program and explores the hardships and sacrifices every individual makes to build their ideas.

On top of that, it's also a raw and realtime documentation of our process of creating Day Job and building our own startup. We've turned the camera on ourselves to capture the hardships and obstacles we face everyday to make this film happen.
It's her middle name. Not uncommon to go by one's middle name.
As someone who doesn't pretend to understand the conflict over there, the IDF's social media efforts have come across as terribly crass; this picture and caption could explain a little bit of the immaturity of the person behind the social effort
If you restrict the depth of the circuit, you can in principle represent any function, but you need a really wide (exponentially wide) circuit.

Are you sure it's exponential ?

If you look at binary functions (ie. boolean circuits) any such function can be represented by a single layer function whose size is linear in the number of gates of the original function (I think it's 3 or 4 variables per gate) by converting to conjunctive normal form.

Of course it's not obvious that a similar scaling exists for non-binary functions but I'd be a bit surprised if increasing depth led to an exponential gain in representational efficiency.