skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zed writes:

> Now, I know that when I drop the f-bombs and do crazy shit like disagree with people they get their panties in a bunch and call it trolling

Actually, no, folks DON'T tend to take simple disagreement as trolling.

However, it's crucial to Zed's self image as an "outlaw rock-and-roll biker" that his opinions not be accepted, and that he be a renegade, so he has to remind us each and every time he posts "hey, look at me - I've got an opinion. Isn't that just so DARING of me?"

Yawn.
It seems like this probably would have been more accurate if terminal velocity had been mentioned. I'm not sure if Mario would hit it on the scale they were working at, but if he does, that would certainly skew the results.

Also, it is interesting to note that the characters in SMB2 don't seem to have the same amount of gravity on them. (remember Luigi?)
Move over Kindle, here's World's first colour e-book reader
No. 1 thing about Django that annoys me(1) is that the Admin-interface, in all it's awesomeness isn't modular and pluggable. I want to put CRUD+filtering lists on the non-admin part of the site, and can't seems to find a non-hacky way of doing it.

(1) The list thins out a lot after than. I agree with Zed that the apps-in-a-site structure is very cool.
I'm a student, so currently I'm probably at about 95% learning and 5% productive coding.
Dino's slides: http://nchovy.kr/uploads/3/301/D1T1%20-%20Dino%20Dai%20Zovi%...
Damn. The day after I claim he's been doing nothing for the past year, he goes and posts a fairly interesting review of django.

Now, lets quote Zed:

"Read it, and take it as a chance to discuss pseudo-macho speech online, and whether you really are only listening to perceived strength rather than reason."

I did some searching, and the highest ranked similar post I could find is this one which currently has 31 points:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404309

Want to bet this article gets more points? :)
but pertinent information needs to travel both ways.

for example: a company ceo might decide that say building a new box which does 3G access with deep-packet-inspection etc might be a very fruitful area to get into. most likely, he doesn't (shouldn't ?) know innards of say http/pop/imap etc etc.

grunts need to implement that. do you still feel you don't need someone closer to the worker-bees who can translate one lingo (techno-babble) into another (mgmt-speak) ?
> Are their full names Mario Mario and Luigi Mario?

According to Wikipedia, yes.
What can Tata's Nano ($2500 car) teach Detroit?
Seems like a very naive version of an idea presented in "Predictably Irrational", which is that relative positioning sells.
But Mario's terminal velocity might be much lower.
May as well link to the original source:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/brainwashing/
Yeah, terminal velocity is relevant over a short drop if the acceleration is high and the terminal velocity is low (both true in mario)

Looking at the table they made, most of the falls are about half a second long. I'm too lazy to go test this but a lifetime of experience playing mario games makes me feel like this is far more than enough time to reach terminal velocity
Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago off British coast
Oh yeah, it looks like they mention it on the entry about the movie. I don't see any mention of their full names on any of the game-related pages though.
...the poster is asking about stimulants and shows an interest in cognitive enhancement. He talks about being easily distracted. I'm not diagnosing him; that's up to a physician. I'm saying that if he's interested in these drugs, it's as easy as talking to a doctor because he probably could be diagnosed with ADHD if he is interested in stimulants. I take care to use the phrasing "meets the criteria for ADHD" because I don't think ADHD actually exists in the vast majority of cases, at least not as a disorder. Concentration and focus are a continuum, some are better at it than others and stimulants improve concentration for everyone

See an online ADHD inventory like this one: http://www.addresources.org/article_adhd_questionnaire_amen..... Western medicine has a very generous definition of adult ADHD -- if you get distracted easily as an adult, and had behavior problems OR organizational problems as a child in school, a doctor is likely to diagnose you with ADHD. This doesn't rise to the level of disorder in my opinion, but when the diagnosis is handed out so freely, stimulants are a safe, reliable method of cognitive enhancement. I am generally against our society's overmedication of children with stimulants without their consent, but as adults, we have the ability to make informed, rational decisions about the substances we put into our bodies.

This Nature article discusses some of the ethical issues behind cognitive enhancement in the healthy. http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a
I have the same problem with Google Earth. What labels, points and such it shows seems to depend on the position and shape of the moon rather than on the position of the screen and the zoom level. Sometimes I want to see something (like a village's name) that I just know is there but I have to center the screen on something next to it and then try a couple of zoom levels to see if I can make it show up.

Also, Picasa with its smooth scrolling. I try to scroll somewhere by dragging the scrollbar or clicking it and instead of scrolling where I drag or click it, it scrolls smoothly (read: slowly) at a top speed of maybe three pages per second. Aargh!

Oh yeah, Google Earth has this too: when you click the N on the compass to realign your screen with the cardinal directions, they thought it would be neat to make it turn really really smoothly. And it seems the closer your screen is to perfect alignment, the slower it turns.

The frustrating part is that Google should know this and make it configurable. I have no idea why they refuse to do this all the time. (Though I haven't used their stuff in a while so I have no idea if it's been fixed by now.)
Something similar is known as the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer where you have a monotone environment and then give customers something to focus their attention on.
I request you to look at it differently from all the other posts.
This resistor is a constant current sink. Albit a mediocre one. but its just a penny [a paisa in india]
This thermister needs to sink a constant current in order to produce a temperature dependent voltage at its bottom leg. Normally, about a milliamp does the trick.

A resistor is a meiocre surrent sink because its own voltage drop is current dependent.
these would be better choices [lot more expensive, but hugely more accurate]
http://octopart.com/search?q=constant+current+sink

avishak, new delhi india
Why be sarcastic? You are not different.

Except that these days we don't fund many things that way.

But it wasn't always so, in the past if you were not a patron of the arts (which also meant science), you were nobody. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

Effectively that was a way of funding exactly the type of thing you describe - you just had to explain how what you did helped society. For example look up the Balmis Expedition, which was funded by the King of Spain.

I'm trying to say, it's not really so strange to fund things that way, it's just that today it's limited to certain types of institutions/programs.

The main reason it's not as common these days is the flattening of the income curve. You don't have such extremes of wealth and poverty. People can usually afford the things they need. But when they can't, this type of funding does come into play.

This explains why expensive universities get donations, but cheaper ones don't.
The article doesn't say if it's e-ink, but it looks like it could be judging from the picture. The screen has that same grey background. The colors don't look very vibrant. I'm not sure if it's the screen or the colors they chose. Either way, this is great news for anyone who reads ebooks-- no matter which reader they choose.

$1000. Ouch. At that price it's still probably safe to say that color ebook readers are a few years away from being generally accessible to consumers.

I'd really like to see the Kindle Store open up to other readers and see competitors to the Kindle Store open up as well. For me, that's the killer feature on the Kindle. It would be really great if I could choose from a few readers when the time comes to upgrade my Kindle and still be able to reader what I've already purchased and continue to buy from Amazon.

[edit]
The article took forever to load. It may have made the front page somewhere else. Anyway, here's the coral cache: http://www.theage.com.au.nyud.net/news/home/technology/world...
Despite the question in the headline of this article, there is very little actionable advice. "Get closer to the customer" is about the best teaching the author can come up with.

There has been a lot of talk about this $2500 car, but everything I've read (in articles with actual data) indicate that there is no way to sell the car for $2500 and cover the cost of raw materials plus assembly/shipping. This is even with the concept of the dealer doing some of the final assembly. Then you have to offset R&D costs, and the other overhead of trying to run an automaker.

A car at a sub-$5,000 pricepoint might work in India, where the regulations are much less stringent than in the US. But, to imply that there is any great new innovation here that other automakers (I don't see Toyota with a $5,000 vehicle, either) have missed is somewhat of a stretch.
Are we addicted to starting businesses?
You can't MapReduce everything
IBM has its own business interests to contribute to FOSS, it would be interesting to know what interest FOSS could be for companies like Infosys. Open source contribution requires dedicated interest and a sense of community, which cannot be developed as a temporary option to work on while on bench. The people who might have already worked on FOSS stuff might be able to make some useful contribution, working on new stuff as a temporary option are unlikely to produce useful results
Combine those two ideas and you can do "Your washing machines energy profile has changed for the worse, perhaps you should get it serviced?"
As pointed by business week(via trak.in), the innovations made by Tata Nano are:

1. The car was built from ground up.
2. The supply chain was simplified by making the suppliers partners.
3. Shipping the whole car as kits for the downstream distributors to assemble, thus reducing several costs.
4. The key success factor for Tata Nano project was price. The price was fixed and everything else just worked around it.

Agreed, regulations are less stringent in India. However, price is an innovation. I can argue that a retrofitted Tata Nano will cost no more then $5000 for US market. So, there is ample room for innovation.
BlackBerry Pearl 8110 Red WITH GPS
The BlackBerry 8310 has a refreshing display with a resolution of 320 x 3240 pixels. It comes with a flash memory of 64 MB and has a microSD (TransFlash) card slot.
Thank you - that was interesting and beautiful.
You Should Learn The Real Concept Of Online Money Making At Home
Long live Rapira!
The Different Kinds of Done
Would Twitter have made it as a YC applicant?
...
Sounds great in theory, but I can buy a lot of paper for $1000...
Yeah, in an ideal world we would all use "common" for the one concept and "ground" or "earth ground" for the other. But in practice we use "ground" to mean "common" and "earth ground" to mean "earth ground".

I remember, when I was a beginner, being completely confused about what all those ground symbols meant. That was one of my first big stumbling blocks in electronics. The answer is that they're usually nothing but notational: They save you drawing some wires (every ground symbol is assumed to be attached directly to every other ground symbol by a very-low-resistance wire [1]) and more importantly they define your reference voltage (once you've drawn a ground, you can say things like "this point in the circuit is at 3.2 volts", instead of "this point in the circuit is at 3.2 volts relative to Point X".)

---

[1] There are times when the connections from ground to ground have too high a resistance, or when you pour so much current into ground that the ground-lead resistance can't be ignored anymore. Those are called ground loops, and are topics for advanced class. I have a nasty ground loop when I connect my stereo system to my cable TV. It manifests as the sixty-hertz hum from hell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_loop_(electricity)
I don't know. I saw Coraline in the theaters in 3D and am pretty sure I would of liked it just as much in the 2D-Glasses. As for the dorky black glasses, I just like pretending I'm Buddy Holly while walking around the theater.

But I do agree it's not going to save Hollywood. If they thing William Castle-esque stunts are the only thing getting people to the theater, it'll only lead to more problems in the future.
It's because ivy-league schools are too expensive for the average student, so they get donations, but the cheaper schools are not, so they don't.

See also my other comment, elsewhere in this thread.
I can't fathom any use for this, but it looks incredibly cool.

I can intuitively grasp what the code must look like - detecting window size and positioning - but it still looks impressive once it's implemented.
Lead Nurturing Continues From Where Email Marketing Stops 
Sometime well before Nurture even started taking shape, I was working with inside sales for technology products and services, we would use microsoft outlook as our primary email client and for a small startup company, it wasn’t a bad solution to send out small email campaigns to a set of prospects although not ideal for larger campaigns. I think the most impressive feature as an inside sales rep was that you could be notified when the email was delivered, when the email would bounce and that all important read received notification. As little as that notification can tell you, it is inteligence and helps you make a better informed call. It helps you say “Hi Jeremy, I’m calling to follow up on an email you probably received yesterday” knowing full well he did receive it. That was something!
America's Big 3 automakers have been lazy and complacent for years. They haven't made substantial increases in fuel efficiency in decades, and preferred to sue California to fight the zero-emission vehicle law rather than sell more electric cars. They take tons of handouts from the government (hydrogen research, hybrid research, bailout money, etc.) yet lose millions per day.

Bottom line: they don't deserve to be in business.

Even if Tata's Nano is $5k, I would buy one.
Rivest stresses multiple times that the process he describes is "not encryption" because the cryptographic primitive being used is an authentication one. Therefore, he says, his process can be implemented using software that's approved for US export -- this was back when that was a problem, of course.

Well, yes, kinda. But:

1. The whole process most certainly is encryption by any reasonable definition, especially if (as he suggests) you do it by authenticating two versions of every bit, only one of which checks out. It's basically an obfuscated version of the following scheme: you take your message, you exclusive-or it with a stream of random-enough bits (the bitstream, or enough information to generate it, is your shared secret key), and then you replace 0 with 01 and 1 with 10. So, as with Rivest's scheme, the ciphertext -- oh, excuse me, the plaintext with added chaff -- is basically an interleaving of the plaintext and its bitwise complement, and you need some secret knowledge to know which bit to use from each pair.

2. Sure, you can implement Rivest's scheme using a cryptographic building block that does something other than encryption. But if you build software that does this then that (see 1 above) is surely encryption software, so (back when Rivest's article was written) you run into the same problems with US export as you were trying to avoid.

The Alice/Bob/Charles scenario is bloody clever, though. (And the ability to do this sort of thing, rather than the claim that the process "isn't encryption", is the real point. What Rivest has done is to find a way of decomposing an encryption+decryption process into a small number of parts each of which can somewhat plausibly be claimed not to be for encryption.)
I really like Sebastiaan de With's stuff. If you read his blog he sometimes explains the development process he uses. Here's a post he had on an icon he made for Hyperspaces.

http://blog.cocoia.com/2008/06/13/faster-than-light-making-t...

Icon Resource is also a good place to get information.

http://www.iconresource.net/
It is bigger than the woman holding it. One of the success factors of Amazon's Kindle is the ease of manipulation in a normal human hand.
Making it four times larger than a regular book seems like a mistake to me. Kindle goes anywhere a book can. This doesn't.
Perhaps because investing in Apple early was amazingly lucrative?
A One Stop Online Shop For All Kinds Of Pet Supplies
www.TheCatMarket.com is a leading online retailer offering a wide range of pet supplies online or kitten supplies at a price that you can afford. Whether you are looking to add a cat as a member of your family or you already have one, you are surely going to need some cat accessories.
www.TheCatMarket.com is a leading online retailer offering a wide range of pet supplies online or kitten supplies at a price that you can afford. Whether you are looking to add a cat as a member of your family or you already have one, you are surely going to need some cat accessories.
some people may have noticed that only Elon Musk features on the frontpage for Paypal while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are not.

Apparently there is a lot of politics behind this, with Thiel and Sequoia having been at odds over funding, the IPO and then selling to eBay.

Also, supposedly one of the big motivations for Thiel and Founders Fund was to compete and out-do Sequoia.

Sean Parker from Plaxo also isn't on the front page. Moritz had him locked out of his Plaxo office by changing the locks, and then fired him. Funnily enough Parker now works with Thiel at Founders Fund.

Funny what you can learn from that webpage.
depends on who else applied.
This is great! Another aspect of electronics that one must get used to is that there is usually more than one way to interpret every part of a circuit. And this current-sink point of view is quite useful -- as you point out, it immediately suggests a way to improve the circuit: Put in a better current sink, like a transistor.
Maybe not. I got a Sony Reader and one problem that was immediately obvious was the screen was too small for any kind of document with diagrams or code listings.

Works great for novels, though.
The English language is certainly one of the most flexible ones, on the positive side, and one of loosest ones, on the negative side.

In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself.

So, it would certainly be very exciting to have e.g. a perfect programming language, expressing itself in say Arabic or Hebrew; but, on the other side, computers and real intelligence (or: AI and Real Human Intelligence) are so far away from each other, that it really doesn't matter how 'stupid' the programming-language-language is...
How VCs Determine Early-Stage Valuations: Winning The Deal
That's cool and all, but cores are practically growing on trees now. Is there something out there that'll let me efficiently do tons of active objects (coroutines with data that can make sync or async calls?) but scale out across processors and machines (hi EC2, I love you) also? I can do without shared data.

As it stands now, unless I had a big need for bazillions of contexts, I wouldn't touch stackless because I've already got to use other mechanisms to get work running on a lot of different cores / machines at once anyway. Since I'm already doing that, it's nicer to stick to the one mechanism and design things to work within it (keep contexts <1,000).
Although it was only recently spotted on aerial photographs, an armchair archaeologist could have discovered the trap on Google Earth.
Tell HN: I think I'm quitting my job today
So, I think I'm quitting my job today. I've always valued the discussions that take place here, so I thought I would solicit your input (though my mind is pretty much made up).

See, if the economy were in any other state, I wouldn't even give it a second thought. I'm pretty well-qualified for many jobs, so I think I could get another one if I needed to. But still, I have several friends who have been applying and interviewing everywhere and cannot even get a job. Yet, here I am quitting the relatively stable job I landed just 8 months ago.

I feel that it's just something I must do. I've grown very discontent (bordering on depression) since I've worked here. Though I graduated at the top of my class with Mechanical and Electrical degrees and a solid 2 1/2 years' industry experience, this company misrepresented my position pretty significantly, telling me all the cool fascinating things for which I'd be responsible. Instead, 8 months later, I'm not much more than a glorified tech support, making much less than I should be, and tolerating somewhat intolerable work conditions (like abiding by a lunch bell (yes, just like in high school)).

Anyway, the point of this solicitation is not to rant or bad-mouth an employer. Rather, it's simply to ask, am I off my rocker for quitting in these hard economic times? I've been working on building a web-based company for the past couple years. It's really close to taking off, but not quite paying the bills just yet. I also have a web development company to help fund the startup. Recently, a (really cool) friend who owns a bigger, more successful web development company, approached me about contracting their extra work out to me. As it turns out, they have enough extra work to keep me busy for at least a few months (probably much more), and I'd be making more than I make here. In addition, I've got a couple months worth of expenses already saved up as well.

What do you guys think? I think I'm ready to stop hating 5/7ths of my life, regardless of economic conditions.
> Google lets you see tons of articles online as search results

Can anyone here who works for Google tell us if all of these results are actually loadable from the Google campus? This seems likely, given how they are indexable by the search engine but are blocked to anyone else save paid subscribers.

Google could easily put a stop to this abuse by declaring that it will publicly cache anything it finds to be loadable only from its own IP range.
I'm trying to report them to Amazon, but Amazon.com's contact page isn't loading for me (perhaps because I'm in the UK?).
Create a Rails Template and Build an App in Seconds
Cisco acquires maker of Flip Video camcorders
Clean tech entrepreneurs vie for funds, fame
"If You Don't Trust People You Know, It's Over."
39 points within an hour or so. I'm not really sure what to take from this tbh.
If I don't trust someone, I make an effort to distance myself from them. The people I know == the people I trust.
The DailyMail is not a legitimate news source.
It's an India-only car. It would be a death trap on American roads, and so Detroit has really nothing to learn from them. Detroit always had well-staffed marketing departments to tell them what to do, and for the most part it worked. The problems were always elsewhere. It's just a liberal fantasy that Americans want caskets with wheels.

2500 dollars will get me a decent used car.
Redcar: Textmate-ish programmer’s editor for Gnome with bundles support
Strange... without the undo feature you will need to send another e-mail to that person or another time the same e-mail to the right person. In this way google will display more ads and earn more money... maybe it will be a 'pay for undo', or a 'this undo was sponsorized by ___'