skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your points for the 90% of software that is pre-packaged and ready to install on your choice of distro. I'm more curious about the remaining 10% of apparently problematic 3rd party software that are 'hard' to install on Linux, and how much work it would take someone knowledgeable to create packages for and compare that with the time someone wastes on Windows with more mundane deployment issues.
Why would anyone downvote this guy. It's sourced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Toxicology
The deflation of the Great Depression and the ensuing unemployment resulted in the election of the dictator FDR, the destruction of the old republic, and creation of the modern American civil service mega-state. If you could go back in time, and put yourself at the head of the Federal Reserve in 1930, would do you anything differently?
For one thing, because it would give you an incentive not to receive mail at gmail.
Pitfalls of Data Analysis
I don't think there is a way to do this automatically, but I've been using the super stars in GMail for this. I use one of them to mark emails that I'm waiting for a reply on, so I can follow up with people if I don't hear from them for a while.
Rundle: there is no bigger issue than net censorship
All they need to do is not enforce voiding the warranty, or make it possible to undetectably undo the change.
Nobody I know quit smoking by "reducing" it. It's always either you do smoke, or you don't.

I am 28 and have been smoking since I was 16, have "quit" two times counting something close to three years combined, but have obviously returned to it later. Both times I quit I simply:

1. Threw the cigarette box I had with me.

2. Did not lit a cigarette, no matter what strange ways my brain took in order to seduce me back to it.
Cross-posted comment on FMF:

This is really short-sighted advice...Ramit has only explained the first fraction of the story.

This is great advice, but only for the first few months of freelance work, when you're trying to get to the point where you're paying your bills. Beyond that, things like business cards, blogging, and networking events absolutely do matter. Back when I was freelancing, most of my clients said they hired me over some other guy because they read my blog and felt like they knew me. I met many clients and fellow entrepreneurs at those "worthless" networking events that are still bringing me clients, investors, and other valuable contacts today. And I still remember feeling embarrassed when people would ask me for a card and I would explain that I didn't have any on me.

Get out there and start working to make money, but if you actually want to build a business, you're going to have to spend some time doing stuff like this.
The article is just toooooooo long. If want to develop my brain in some other way, I can always read some real literature, instead of newspaper articles. Or I could even visit some art galleries with paintings, sculptures and so on.

And even if the article is useful after all, if it's written badly, in a non-interesting way, people won't read it. That's why Joel is so popular. Because his articles are a joy to read.

Anyway, if I really wanted to know more about how people think, I would study Psychology (or Sociology) and spend more time with them in real life. Some people just aren't meant for this kind of stuff. The last universal man was Leonardo da Vinci.

P.S.: I loved your last sentence.
Vizeddit: Live Reddit votes and comments from the Reddit API visualized in pure javascript
This is something I'd very much like to see.
Thanks! I've added my vote for Zope.
That's true, although recently I've been hearing a number of so called important people saying that the whole computer/internet thing is done and is settling down to incremental innovation at about the pace of the rest of the economy from here on in.

Now of course the answer is that no one really knows what's coming but recently I have started taking that point of view slightly more seriously and have stopped taking the next big web cycle as such a given.
Wow, good luck.
Open source hardware bank: P2P lending for hardware hackers
If it is a script that is placed on a web site, surely it can find it's way into a script kiddie construction kit.
They've taken $95MM over 5 rounds starting in 2002, much of that before they had compelling revenue; between liquidation preferences and the equity bite that implies, I wonder how big a payday this is for the original founders and for the current key contributors.

If you aren't familiar with the company, an interesting sidenote: these folks spent a couple years being a perennial hardware hacker target. Their business model was getting cameras into people's hands way below cost, and charging "for real" when you returned the camera and developed your pictures. Which (a) didn't work and (b) provided anyone who could read a pinout and write some Python with an $11 digital camcorder.
Deflation didn't bring gas prices down, a decline in economic activity did. A smallish drop there drove a huge drop in oil prices, since auction markets are very sensitive to small changes in supply and demand.
He and Seinfeld :-)
No browser implements 100% of any of those specs. Some of those standards aren't even (close to) finished.
Are you considering the journal sharing databases the schools subscribe to?
At Pitt I can go to the library's website and request journals they don't have access to, I get an email the next day with a .pdf of the journal article requested.
Why Management is Not a Profession
It's more complicated than that. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but the best artists also admit that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. A piece of music that I am not allowed to "use", other than passively consume, is worthless to me - as worthless as watching TV 24/7. It might be entertaining, but in the end I would wish that I had not wasted my time in such a way. In that sense I wish the "closed source art" would not even exist, because at the end of the day it is just a pain in the butt.

Take photography, for example: say there is a really nice building in a street, an architectural marble. Fine - only now I am not allowed to take a photo of my girl-friend in front of the building anymore and put it on the internet, because the architect has the copyright. I'd rather live in a world where I can take a photograph without having to consult a lawyer first. Ultimately the art is interesting to me because of it's meaning, not because of it's commercial value.

I am not at all against artists earning money, but I don't think TheSixtyOne is a piracy site, either.
filters run
Yeah, but you still had to start it with your name, and it's really difficult to make correct sentences that start with your name in some languages (it can even be difficult in English depending on what you're trying to say).

You can tell that this update had a lot to do with simplifying localisation, in fact. A lot of text is gone. Instead of saying that someone was "tagged in 4 photos", it just says their name and shows the photos.
I really liked it. I read the whole thing in one shot, which isn't like me. I actually started re-reading because I was afraid I may have missed details at the beginning when I wasn't yet aware that it deserved my attention.
I don't really see the logic in this. It seems like the typical workflow they're imagining goes something like:

1. Compose email to A-list investor
2. Hit send
3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
4. Kill self

So now they're trying to make this the workflow:

1. Compose email to A-list investor
2. Hit send
3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
4. Hit undo and fix problem

All well and good, but step #3 requires you to look over your email and realize you made a mistake. Why not just do that before you hit send?
The Ass Wiping Business
You Create Your Fate - Li Ka Shing
you've got some reading to do.
America's Great Depression
http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf
This is real literature, its writing in the purest sense.

Yes it is long but probably worth it. The last page itself is good enough to justify the article.

Studying psychology only gives you an understanding of the workings but not a feel for humans. Psychology mostly searches for patterns in humans, and often times misses the big picture.

Its tricky to understand but after reading that article and getting to the end to hear about what happened to create the person you read about in the beginning you feel like, or at least I did, you know him. You see that it takes a lifetime of experience to create any one person and lucky is the person whom gets to truly know someone.
The Social Security and Medicare systems are simply a means of making a younger generation pay for an older generation's retirement, since both of those systems are pay-as-you-go. Obama amd Congress have signed us, and especially young people, up for the largest debt burden in US history, both in absolute and relative terms. The debt accumulated in World War II doesn't even come close to what's being signed into law these days.

Still, we of the 60's generation are thinking of you. And we when head out to the golf course while you're heading to work to pay for our benefits, I swear we'll wave to you.
I'm certainly just a single data point. The difference between Pylons and Django could have been documentation alone, and could have been unique to me.

I kind of doubt that though.
The poll was most likely done by that application that had you add it to vote. Hereby giving the application your information and an open door for advertisement.
Also, they actually paid someone else (MindTribe, a former employer of mine) to develop the Flip Mino, which was at one point their flagship product.

You can see the Mino in MindTribe's portfolio on their website: http://mindtribe.com/index.html
Words cannot describe how happy this makes me. My pet peeve is being addressed!

I dream of the day when I can learn science, as a non-university-affiliated citizen, by simply surfing from primary reference to primary reference via inline links.
I've read it. Rothbard is dead right about the dangers of fractional reserve and the need to avoid inflation in the first place. But he's dead wrong about what to do once the crisis hits. I do not buy his arguments that Hoover's actions after the crisis caused the severity of the downturn. It's very unlikely that Hoover's cajoling was the cause of sticky wages. Right now we are seeing businesses across the economy choose layoffs rather than wage cuts, even in non-union, non-regulated sectors like tech. Furthermore, the major cause of the unemployment was businesses going bankrupt. Businesses went bankrupt because when the money supply shrank they could no longer payoff their debts. The debts were all nominated assuming a much greater money supply. Deflation caused the unemployment.
I was responding specifically to nikblack's comment about finding it more effective than caffeine when hacking. I didn't mean to imply it's all puppies and daisies.

Amongst other things, nicotine's a vasoconstrictor. Long term exposure may not be the best thing for one's cardiovascular system, even leaving out the tar, volatiles, and plutonium that come with tobacco smoke.

Then there's the whole dance it performs with neurotransmitters and multiple addictive centers in the brain. I recall some researchers speculating that it may be so addictive at least in part because it activates multiple centers associated with addiction, whereas most drugs only activate one or another of those centers.
Zope's main problem is one of branding. Zope3 is really an entirely different beast than Zope2, but the sins of Zope2 (chiefly a monolithic and deeply intertwingled codebase that meant you mostly had to swallow the kool-aid to use any of it) have continued to plague Zope3's acceptance, even though Zope3 doesn't have the same problems.

Still, Zope3 requires a bit more mental overhead due to the infrastructure it contains meant for handling extremely complex application domains and use cases with relative ease. For example, none of the other frameworks has an authentication and authorization implementation that is anywhere near Zope's in terms of pluggability and flexibility. Very useful if you need to build an intranet app that gathers user login credentials from several systems, and their permissions from some other system, but almost entirely useless if you're building a Web 2.0 app where content is strongly owned by an individual user who only needs to grant viewing permissions to other users.

At least, until you want to add group permissions, role-based security rules, or need to alter permissions based on workflow state, and be reasonably sure that your solution is actually secure.

The Zope universe is full of reusable optional libraries that solve problems that are this complex, and the framework itself has to have some additional complexity in order for it all to plug together in a reasonable way. This extra level of complexity is represented in the Zope Component Architecture (primarily zope.interface and zope.component). To handle the 'plugging together' part as configuration rather than code, we also have an XML-based configuration language called ZCML.

To people who think that they don't need that complexity because their problems are simple, Zope seems like overkill. But then they end up re-inventing wheels such as access-control-lists, and not necessarily doing it well at all.
"In my experience," I told her, "freelancers try to do 50 things, and they end up doing a 5% job on each of them."

That's the kind of math I expect from a site called Free Money Finance.
SSDs perform striping internally, so storing data on "contiguous" sectors will still give you parallelism.
Poll: What do you think of the Facebook redesign?
no opinion
dislike it
To link this thought to ryanwaggoners - it's not about whether to have a business card / whatever - it's just when it becomes important.

At the front end of a start-up, I agree it's procrastination, and in the very early stages of your business (especially if it's driven by your energy) anything more than the ten minute design is probably wasted.

BUT, eventually some of these things will pay dividends (as Ryan found with his blogging). My company had basic business cards for six years; then we decided it was a priority and invested. My business card now has a baby on it, and doesn't tell you what I do (business coaching).

Those people that get your 'plain black font' and put it in their pocket; they stop, examine my card, and start asking questions. It prompts a conversation. They remember who I am, and - now that I'm past start-up and don't need clients frantically - that's worth it.
If privacy is an issue, then the government shouldn't be collecting the information in the first place. That's where the privacy issue should be examined -- otherwise, they're saying your privacy is for sale if the bid is sufficiently high. And that just isn't privacy.
Not scientific, but it will be interesting to compare the results to the other poll:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=523760
They are parallel, but an individual flash chip is so slow that even eight of them in parallel is less than ludicrous speed. Also, Intel claims that they are limited by SATA in some cases.
Enable keyboard shortcuts. Hit `z'.
And of course, this is the same writer who just got the "leaving babies to die in the car" story published, which just made the rounds:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...

There's definitely a rhythm and a way of developing characters in common with all the stuff I've read from him so far.

Or how about this:

THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather's back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man -- his name, as I recall, was Boris -- would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day's local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

This guy is a genius.
I see this all the time on morning 'news' shows and evening 'current affairs', most of which require voters to dial a premium phone number.

They say "87% of you agreed that poor Mrs Jones was harshly treated by the courts."

I hear "Even 13% of the people who were really passionate about this story ended up agreeing with the vast majority of you who realised Mrs Jones was an angry junkie with a chip on her shoulder who deserved what she got."

</the rant of an ex-journalist>
wow. you're the first person I've run into who has a strong grasp of the facts.
I would argue that debts nominated during a time of a much larger money supply led to businesses that were predicated on artificial demand. when the demand shrunk these businesses went bottom up. The great depression is an almost perfect example of economic latency. Those workers did eventually get assimilated back into productive industry, it just took a long time.
Very cool.

Slight bug with the refresh counter. I clicked the TweetBOSS logo to refresh the page when the counter was at 0.2 min(s) and the counter updated to "Next Refresh In: -0.1 min(s)". ;) (Subsequent refreshes showed the correct countdown.)
So, in Haskell, each function is pure. If you want to modify the state of the world, you thread the world through your function.

Just as a thought, it'd be interesting to see if Haskell could use a memcached backend to memoize the values of old function calls.
Ask HN: What's the purpose of the resistor in this circuit?
I understand what circuits do a lot of times but I never understood why there's always a resistor even on simple circuits. And how do you decide when to use one, how do you know what resistance to use when designing a circuit?

This really simple circuit illustrates my confusion.
Macbook Hacker Charlie Miller: "I have a new campaign. It's called No More Free Bugs."
These are beautiful! It would be fascinating to see a similar set of visualizations for HN.
I understand what circuits do a lot of times but I never understood why there's always a resistor even on simple circuits. And how do you decide when to use one, how do you know what resistance to use when designing a circuit?

This really simple circuit illustrates my confusion.
is it me or is their approach stupid as hell?

wouldn't it make more sense simply not to process sending the email for a specific user-specified time?

i.e. automatically you don't send email for 10 seconds, but a user can go to preferences and setup the undo feature for 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min etc.

I mean 5 seconds is pretty much useless...its more or less the "oh shit, I forgot an attachment", but there is really no difference for user between 5 seconds or 5 minutes, and I'm fairly sure most people, given the choice, would select the 5 minute delay.
Gmail Gets A Panic Button
Free stock photos
Free stock photos for your use can be found here. There are a few super cheap paid sites too. Whatever you need as far as stock photos and images, you should be able to find it here
you are absolutely right about creating social situations. has gotten me laid plenty of times.

queue classic vonnegut: girls who smoke, fuck:

http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/RICHH/karen/Smoke
yeah I noticed that, thanks I will fix now.
Ah, you mean programs compiled by ghc, not ghc itself.

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a `memo` function that memoises its argument using `unsafePerformIO` and memcached. There's no need to modify ghc.
The title should be: Trying to Earn More Money? Stop Wasting Your Time. Write a Book.
The point is that even with institutional access (including interlibrary loan, shared databases, etc.), a lot of electronic information, which is readily deliverable, is not readily accessible.

On top of that, many people do not have institutional access, and are thus cut off from research results funded primarily or solely by their tax dollars. Or another way to look at it is that many "prestigious" journals will claim exclusive copyright, giving researchers the unfortunate choice between prestige and open access.

I'm still learning about this, as some people I know are pushing in the open research / open access direction.
Is apple retarded? http://apple.com doesnt work, but http://www.apple.com does
It's a pull-down resistor.

Without it, when the temp sensor/thermistor was at infinite resistance, the Arduino pin would essentially be floating, and you'd get erratic readings.

A pull down resistor is usually proportionally very high resistance in relation to the sensor or other device that is the variable in the circuit.

If it were tied to Vcc, it would be a pull UP resistor, but same concept.

The idea behind it is that the pin is never just left "open". If there is no voltage coming through the sensor (temp sensor in this case), then the resistor pulls the pin to ground and you would get a reading of zero volts.

You want the resistance of the pull-down (or pull-up) to be high, 10K-100K are typical values. Voltage drops across all elements in a circuit, in proportion to that elements resistance in relation to the total circuit resistance.

If the temp sensor ranged from 0K to 10K, and you used a 10K pull-down, then you would have a range of 5V-2.5V for readings at that pin. As you scale up the value of the pull-down resistor, you will get less voltage drop across that resistor, meaning that you have a wider voltage range at the input pin for the same temperature variance, which results in more precise readings.
I dunno... maybe I'm retarded. But I tried it from multiple machines, so I'm guessing they screwed something up
Perhaps there was too much currency in the system, but I think the actual, real wealth of many people did decrease too. They were better off than they are now, their wealth physically went down. They don't have things now that they did before. The output of the economy decreased, while the resources stayed roughly the same, so less wealth is being created. This is true even if you completely forget about the existence of money.
The Daily Me
The demand was not artificial. For example, before the crash people bought a lot of cars. After the recovery, people bought even more cars. So why was it necessary to go through 5-10 years where nobody made or bought cars, factories sat idle, and laid off autoworkers went hungry? There are cases in recessions where the unemployment is beneficial. For instance, "financial instruments" have been overproduced, and it would be beneficial for Wall St. workers to be laid off and then find more useful jobs. But a depression is marked by lots of collateral damage - people get laid off in industries simply because of instability in the banking and moneterary system, not because they were not being productive.

Let me ask this question: Imagine a gang of thieves slowly slipped counterfeit bills into the money supply for a long period of time. Eventually, half the money supply was counterfeit bills. The thieves had long traded their counterfeit bills for wine and women. The bills were now evenly distributed across the economy, in every home and business. Suddenly, the crime is discovered. Now no one will except the counterfeit bills. The money supply drops in half. Businesses with debt and wage contracts created before the counterfeit money was discovered start to bleed red ink.

What is the proper policy response to this scenario?
I guess you could form a complicated theory like that. Or you could try smoking a cigarette and notice that it relaxes and focuses you.