skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been an angler (mostly fly) for almost my entire life, I've seen things like this fairly often.

Fish are very attracted to surface animals in the water due to their relative inability to escape once in the water. Ducks make easy prey and watering birds in the shallows are only moderately more difficult. Probably one of the most voracious shallow-water predators is the Northern Pike, which I've seen catch birds, mice and other animals many times while fishing in Canada. At my Dad's house in northern California, we see Bass suck under small ducklings many times a year.

Unlike the Catfish, Bass, Pike and other shallow water predators have specific behavior for lying in wait. They will stop in the water, use the pectoral fins to hold stable and then curl their tail to one side. This allows them to rapidly straighten their bodies and blast forward in one swift stroke to seize prey. Note in the video that the catfish do not employ this - they make a snapping/sucking motion with their jaws to draw the prey in.

One of the largest Bass I ever caught was hooked using a fly I tied, made to look like a Robin. I had seen a 14+ lb. Largemouth attempting to eat robins that were landing on lily pads. I tied the fly over about 1 week and caught it on a gorgeous Sunday morning just after the sun came over the trees :)
Honestly, it's hard to say exactly how much money the government has given someone. If I agree to a compromise where my taxes go up by $10,000 but I now get to deduct my frobozzes and so they go down $1,000, am I being given $1,000?

Or, if the government decides to tax everyone at 100%, but then gives out a series of "tax breaks" that lands everyone at their current tax level, is whatever government people get to keep welfare?

I don't want to go to far in the other direction. It's 100% possible for politicians to spend money via tax breaks. So neither worldview really works, but you have to have something between them.
Honestly not trying to be an ass, but $200 (nook) + $150 (touchpad) is more than the current entry level iPad mini at $330. I think most would say there isn't anything that either of them can do that the iPad can't...
1) Brand new language inspired by Haskell's syntax, but it is really much closer to ML (strict evaluation, no type classes). More info: http://www.testblogpleaseignore.com/2012/06/21/why-elm/

2) That is totally true! The idea is quite general. I think it works best in a strongly typed language like OCaml or Haskell, but it could work anywhere. FrTime is a Scheme/Lisp/Racket version of FRP. My personal opinion is that it works best in Elm though :P
Thanks! Will check this out.
"Built for speed from the bottom up. Check out some benchmarks." from the frontpage of snapframework.com

"When we originally wrote Heist, speed was not our goal." from the link submitted here

Feel like a contradiction, couldn't they just say that it turned out fast enough on the first try?
Do you have an opinion on which platform is better for projects that need to connect to the internet over wifi? Other than the networking issue, Arduino is more than powerful enough for my purposes. I don't really want to shell out $80 for a wifi shield, so I was thinking it might be better to just switch to RaspPi + a cheap usb dongle. Any thoughts?
A new startup accelerator that’s looking to change the way we travel
My local library observes "coffee shop rules." People sit with their laptops and take phone calls from wherever they receive them. Even the librarians are loud. It's fucking bullshit.
What’s Cooking Inside Nokia – An Android Phone?
What prevents anyone from submitting your website on your behalf? Do they use some kind of "put this HTML file in your root folder" or something similar?
The problem may be down to their poor conversations.

We have both wide ranging general knowledge and focused technical conversations in my office involving groups of people and I would be sad to lose that.

Talk about something that can deliver value or engage people and then the conversations are worthwhile.

"
Sarah Houghton 10 Dec 12

The ironic thing is that as a librarian, I can tell you that for the last decade (at least) most libraries don’t enforce “library silence.” We encourage people to talk, to collaborate, to discuss. As long as you’re not annoying the hell out of the people around you, we encourage a low level of conversation and noise.
"
Sadly, at least for Americans it's not irrelevant. In the USA paleontology, especially dinosaur paleontology, plays a huge role in the continuing political struggle over whether evolution should be taught in science classes. As a result the sources from which people learn about paleontology can often be quite partisan. A very large number of Americans learn their paleontology from sources whose approach to the subject is markedly different, which does play a part in the perpetuation of scientifically discredited ideas such as this one.

So while many of us would agree that the comparison ideally shouldn't be relevant, certain cultural realities mean that it is. Though it's definitely still tangential in this case.
Apologies for being dense, but I don't fully understand your metaphor.

Is 37s also annoying because they do something similar? Or, are they solving an annoying problem which you're describing?
I've seen lots of Bass and Pike go for ducks :)

As a note, the vole or mice flies are fantastic for Trout streams, Bass and Pike. Big rainbows or Brown Trout will snap up a mouse fly on the surface - draw it past with a very rapid staccato motion to make waves on the surface.

Then watch their wakes rocket to the fly. Total blast :)
> What prevents anyone from submitting your website on your behalf?

Nothing.
>>>Altruistic systems don't scale (see communism).

Altruistic systems don't necessarily scale. GNU, Linux, and Apache would like to tell you that it absolutely can scale.

>>I just can't believe that you think that big budget software like say an operating system could be funded through a threshold pledge system and then distributed for free. It seems rather naive

I completely agree with you that it seems naive. I wouldn't believe it myself if I wasn't using it to send you this comment.
I always think about the MUA when anyone says "Elm": http://www.instinct.org/elm/

I guess that means I'm old.
Ha I actually pay for BrowserTexting, which does this. Mostly because I want to be able to text at work without having my phone out.
Missed one type of person

- People who believe it is unethical to pirate content

Nothing to do with fear, or interest, or deciding to support the content producer.
I'm not sure what I need less - another programming language (elm) or another mobile platform...
UK Pirate Party threatened with legal action over Pirate Bay proxy
Which do you like better: receiving tweets from a nice lady who's begging to buy you lunch with as much dessert as you want, or managing the fixed assets of a construction company?

No wonder kids aged 6 - 12 preferred the Wii U.
Somebody messed with The Oatmeal, again.
8-bit NES Legend of Zelda Map Data
Relevant: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Kiosk
"Ownership doesn't intrinsically preclude you harming others."

How can I have property rights (ownership) if you can simply damage my property through your "property rights"? Property rights can not exist in this case.

It is intrinsically implied that people can not use their property to damage the property of others.
I feel that this finally shows what are the key factors to Apple success, by successfully copying the success with use of those factors.

It does not seem to be innovation, or genius. It's just specific marketing of a just decent product.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying. I think copying is how science works. When you are confronted with phenomenon it's not ok to just sit and admire, you should try to replicate eventually finding minimal and sufficient set of conditions for phenomenon to occur.

Some people might be disappointed at the loss of uniqueness of their act but all people progress thanks to it.
Nike's startup accelerator
Someone please do this
I have an idea: Wouldn't it be better if there was an app for touchscreens that predicts which letters are least likely to be typed next and shrinks them!
Read the study?
Splendid post Neil. In essence a lot depends on where in the world and how in life one is.

Paul's essay [1] on 18 mistakes (be known that these may be challenges for some, not really mistakes) that can kill a start-up discussed these issues very nicely.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Making open source software
FYI- the signup email got stuck in my spam folder in gmail.
Good point. I was only addressing the predictability that comes from the flash memory simply wearing out. There are plenty of other ways that drives can fail. But I don't think they introduce any new worries for RAID users the way that flash memory wearing out after so many writes does.
News Thieves: Am I Over-Reacting?
Object databases and ORM were trying to do that from at least the 90's.
While I agree it isn't necessarily an obvious move I disagree on the reasoning. The volume and total value is there but margins are small and the existing products are already physically stylish and offer a lot of features (although there is room to improve on the UI).

If Apple could come in and get their usual margins and take a noticeable market share it would be worth it.

http://bgr.com/2012/07/23/samsung-lg-lcd-tv-sales-market-sha... - first useful link googling TV market size.

44M TVs in Q1 (low season in Europe and US but quite a big one in China due to New Year) of which Samsung took 19%. If we assume average price of $500 (maybe 50% of that number are small 24" and less cheap TVs) and a conservative total of 160M TVs annually it is about an $80BN market. If Apple could get 5% of that it is still $4BN annually or about what they get from iPods or 2/3 of what they get from Mac desktops. And if they go for it I'm sure they would be aiming for at least 5% of the market.

The other bonus is that maybe half of that share would come from Samsung who is not only the biggest manufacturer overall but winning at the top end too. This would hurt Samsung more than a billion dollars from a lawsuit.
I'd rather give Google $2bln to spend than any government. More likely to have a positive impact on your life.
What's the best gift for my designer / developer employees?
I love everything about the holidays except for trying to figure out the perfect gift for friends, family and especially employees.

So, if you're a designer and/or developer, please let me know which of these gifts you would like the best...

A. SOL Republic Headphones
B. Tickets to a trade conference
C. Amazon gift card (of equal or greater value to everything else) - boring to me
D. Gift certificate for software (of equal or greater value to everything else) - also, boring to me
E. Subscription to some online training / learning course (eg. Treehouse, Code Academy, etc)
F. Music subscription (eg. Rdio or Spotify)
G. Other (if other, suggestions would be awesome)

Any and all help is extremely appreciated.

And I hope your boss is getting you something cool because I'm sure you deserve it.
He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon.

I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the top winning teams actually built anything -- they just presented business plans. Unless you want to work on a business plan for 48 hours, stay away...
This was possible long time ago: feedbackroulette.com.
Score one for Negroponte:Ethiopian kids figure out OLPCs with no instruction
At my old company, before we moved into a bigger, modern space where all developers fit in the same huge room, we were all split into 3 or 4 different spaces. At first I was in this room with another 8-10 developers. We would have conversations through the day. Sometimes technical but offtopic, sometimes about our infrastructure (someone helping someone else fix a bug) and sometimes just plain offtopic/fun. For some reason I moved to a different room with different developers around me. Soon, I learned that that whole "talk normally while people beside you are working" thing wasn't the norm there, so I stopped, and it was quite a "library rules" place to work, to describe it using the article's words. Now, I was sad to lose all those conversations, but I became a heck of a lot more productive.
The war on drugs looks to be in full swing.
Feature branches just got better
Uh oh. I added my website (http://www.pisoftware.com in case you want to look it up) and did a review of another site. Signed up for email alerts, got no confirmation email, and I can't see the page for my site anymore. Something no bueno.

That's my immediate critique of a website critique website called Criticue. It's like Inception.
Sometimes I've wished for this, but I think it would ultimately stifle collaboration. Instead it would be nice if more open floor plan offices had study carrels -- places you could go when you need quite to focus.
Yes, with all these barriers to entry, I think people will still want it. I would be happy to pack up my tapes and disks and put stamps on a package if I knew I would never see it again and my memories are safe.

What services are out there that do this? I can only find a handfull of conversion companies, but none which offer online access. These services seem to specialize on either video or audio, but what about both? What about documents or arbitrary digital media which I would like to consolidate?

And yes, I would trust a trendy startup with this task, much like I decided to trust Dropbox about 5 years ago. I doubt I am the only one who could be convinced with a nice website and a decent video.
I read that as simple exasperation with a very unlibrary-like environment, myself.
I think he's just complaining about his workplace.
Be careful about A/B tests, from what I understand Amazon relies on the extensively and they have helped it produce its Amazon website.

Enough said.

If you have two choices one bad and another less bad you will chose the less bad, when instead you may just want to step back and ask is either choice the correct one.
The trouble with dynamic terrain--and especially walls--is that it's hard to place a cost on destroying walls to get to where you want to get. A* is simple enough, but adding tactical considerations to it is much harder. It's a balance of "I will have a harder time hitting the opponent" vs. "I get to do damage right now, before my opponent gets to do any more tricksy maneuvering."

C&C was particularly terrible with walls; if there was any path at all, it wouldn't destroy walls, which made it easy to ambush.
If it looks like duck typing, and it sounds like duck typing, ... that's good enough for duck typing.
As an argument for reduced copyright terms, it's even more valid than before.

Why does a poor person from a developing country have to pay $10.00 for an eBook from 1923?

Was the Author really thinking "I won't write this book unless my third generation heirs get royalties".
Mark Shuttleworth Answers Your Questions - Slashdot
> (I realize these people are mostly charged with felonies it seems.)

That doesn't necessarily make them more guilty.

It shouldn't cost any money at all to defend in a criminal case unless you wish to bring your own lawyer, and court provided lawyers should do better than they usually do.
wow, just wow...
Apple Fixes Maps Snafu Dubbed ‘Potentially Life-Threatening’ by Police
I guess it's redundant for me to reply here and say no, since I'm the one saying that on the forum thread you link to also. :-)
The past present and future of bionic eyes
An iOS user migrates to Android
The LCD interface appears to be compatible with the serial module displays like this one http://adafruit.com/products/358 from the adafruit folks.
Andrew from Crittercism here -- excited about this partnership. Funny enough when our company first launched we had two products: crash reporting and an in-app support forum (competitive to UserVoice!). We quickly realized our core competency was on the mobile performance monitoring side and decided to open up our platform on the support side.
Why git rebase can save hours of work
how do you disable it, that's the question.
Scientists create artificial brain with 2.3 million simulated neurons
I could be way off on this but I doubt meth addicts are as discriminating as you think.
Impact of Major on Career Path for 15600 Williams College Alums
I'm surprised that the author didn't capture what I consider to be the most important component of HDD/Flash/Memory Balancing - frequency of access.

The rule of thumb that I've heard thrown about is, "If you touch it more than once a day, move to flash. If you touch it more than once an hour, move to memory."

While we can debate where that actual line falls based on both the price and performance of the various media (And, as the price of flash drops, it may be more like, "once every couple days) - it's important to note that frequency of access is critical when determining which media to put your data on.

We have some 50 TB+ Data Sets that are queried weekly for analytics, that don't make a heckuva lot of sense on flash storage. Contra-wise, our core device files are queried multiple times a second, and so we make certain those database servers always have enough memory to keep the dataset in memory cache, even if that means dropping 256 GB onto those database servers for larger customers.
I use a password manager, and I have a unique password per site. I generally try to use an MD5 hash resulting from a "ps waux | md5" at the time of registration. I've encountered sites that rejected this due to lack of upper characters (oracle.com, which then allowed me to use "Abc123"), having no special characters, being too long (often forcing me to down-size to 16 or 8 chars). The worst are sites that silently truncate long passwords (I'm guessing due to code errors), so your password is invalid the second you register and must immediately proceed with a password reset.

Big sites are generally good about allowing long/strong passwords. Many mom-n-pop sites are often hit-or-miss.
Depends on the city and the makeup of the attendees but in NYC (where I organize them) we usually have an even split between devs and business (slightly fewer designers as well).
I prefer a loud workplace to a quiet one.

A single noise grabs your attention in a quiet workplace.

In a loud one, it all just becomes background noise and is easy to ignore.
If you absolutely have to have WiFi, then you might consider the raspi, since it is cheaper.

But...cost on it is going to be ~$50. ($35 + $12 for a wifi chip). That's getting close to the cost of the wifi shield, and if you already know the arduino platform, then I would stick with it.

I don't know, for instance, if PWM is yet support on the raspi (or ever will be, since it's not an RTOS)
Note he didn't say 10% premium for the same capacity. It's possible for cloud providers to replace $50 hard disks with $64 SSDs today.
How Smartphones Are Making Wallets Obsolete
It's weird this is would even be seen as a negative. AS3's ecmascript-based language isn't even bad. It just had some brain dead runtime decisions (untyped arrays), and a horrible editor. Most people I know would gladly work with the AS3 language over javascript. Haxe looks closely related to AS3, but trust me, it is far easier to work with.

Also just wanted to mention that Haxe3 is just around the corner...
pay $20 ?
What I want is a a way to prototype on an Android smartphone. When the design is finished order a custom board based on the particular sensors and parts that are required.
Thanks for that. Would make a lot of sense if this were true though!
Wouldn't that destroy the muscle memory involved in learning / remembering where the keys are on your soft keyboard?

Nonetheless, if you believe you could make this work, why not do it yourself?
Is there a Rotten Tomatoes of web app reviews?
It depends on what software you want to use, what software you want to write, how much power you have available, how many production units you'll want, etc.

If you want to do a one-off and have AC power, use the Pi. If you want to make a billion of these and fit them in a tiny box with 4 AA batteries, the AVR is going to be a better choice. But Linux + Python is easier to program than AVR firmware, so it's going to take a lot of units before the AVR pays for its difficult software development with its reduced parts cost. (Really, you should be using ARM, not AVR. It costs the same but it's a modern architecture.)
Taken to extreme, your argument is also one against trademarks as they are a form of intellectual property. Do you think anyone should be allowed to build a laptop and stamp the Apple logo on it? If your answer to that question is "no", you should consider approaching the problem with a more pragmatic/consequentialist standpoint.
Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring
I've been using a free Pingdom account for a few years to get notifications when different websites were down. I wanted to get SMS notifications (in addition to email notifications), but the only way to do that (besides paying for a relatively expensive full account) was to add my cell number's SMS gateway address [phone number]@sms.att.net. I did that for a while, but wasn't satisfied with the experience (each notification comes from a different number, and is formatted strange). Also, while Pingdom covers every scenario imaginable, I just wanted to be able to make sure a few web pages were responding with a 200 OK, and my main servers were online.

After surveying the landscape of monitoring services, I noticed few did everything I wanted (notify me when my site is down, allow me to track a few sites, and send me text messages and emails) for less than $30-50/year. So, after doing a little research, I found I could offer the exact service I wanted for around $10-15/year (that's $1.00-1.50/month) if I did it on my own. And so I built Server Check.in.

Server Check.in uses Stripe for payment acceptance (leagues beyond PayPal in terms of UX and DX), Twilio for SMS notifications ($0.01/message is bearable, and means there's room for a small profit), and Drupal on a LAMP server. Drush ('DRUpal SHell') handles most of the back-end (processing queues, checking servers, etc.), and I built the responsive HTML5 theme using Zen. Three custom modules drive the site, and integrate the notification and payment services. I have a post that explains the architecture with more detail here: http://www.lifeisaprayer.com/blog/2012/server-checkin-websit...

I stuck with what I know (a LAMP stack) for this project, though I'm dabbling in Python and Node.js to see if I might want to move more of the backend services away from PHP and shell scripting. I hope the service will grow large enough that I'll need to expand horizontally, but right now there's plenty of room for an initial batch of users.

Also, check out the 404 page; I made a little easter egg that I hope I can make more interesting over time :)

I'd appreciate any feedback; especially any ideas for improvement, or ways I could make it a more enticing service for other developers.

If you'd like to sign up, here's a coupon code for 20% off your first year: hn_twenty_off