skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Home ownership strikes me as just a symptom of another more fundamental sacrosanct value in society, that of stability and security.

The author alludes to that in the article, but I think he needs to play it up more. For many people, this seems the real default, and buying a home is just outward evidence of that. Buying a home is a statement of commitment, that you will be there for at least as long as needed to make up the closing costs and what-have-you. Whether the house is just a byproduct of that attitude, or meant to directly project it, I don't know. But I don't think that everyone should make that sort of commitment, or that we should disproportionately laud those that do.

This is not a critique against people who desire security and stability, this is a critique against the attitude that you must be secure and stable to be worthy. I've seen it make a lot of people around me become depressed, because they simultaneously desire a more interesting life but fear being branded as flighty and irresponsible. Maybe this is their own problem, for being unable to reason their way out of this internal battle, but it is ubiquitous enough that it indicates a more fundamental brokenness.

I also wonder about the reported psychological benefits the author mentions. I wonder how much of this is induced by the belief that home ownership is meant to make you happy. If it doesn't then there is something wrong with you, not with your decision to buy. Not that there aren't happy homeowners, but that there are unhappy ones. It's the same with a lot of defaults; everyone else seems happy enough with them, why aren't you? Perhaps one of the biggest defaults, and the one that drives a lot of this, is the belief that those who follow the defaults are happier deeper than the image they project.
I totally agree! I've been waiting for him to open source TTPhotoViewController for a while now. I've tried to replicate it, but always ended up having weird memory leaks.
No, because, theoretically, anyone could and several will.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves :) Nothing is ever one-click.
I found that if you search for bikini, then adding an imgcolor really hurts the quality of results.
Digital River dubious upsell busted by BoingBoing.net
In the early days of windowing systems, there was competition between the "overlapping" approach (i.e. what everyone uses today) and "tiling", where visible windows carve up the screen.

Inevitably, the overlapping approach won but it's a shame that all the benefits of tiling have been largely ignored for so long since a hybrid model is so easy to imagine.

I question the wisdom of Aero Snap expanding on Windows' notorious modal maximize behavior. The only benefit it offers is remembering the position of your window before you maximized. That same functionality could be captured by simply keeping a history of all resize operations and having "restore" step back through the history. This would be far more intuitive and more powerful.

For more info about tiling and utilities that let you do it in Windows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager
I'm confused: given the quota problems and serious constraints of the real App Engine, why would I want a clone of it that I also have to maintain and manage myself? Isn't the value-add here that I get SysOps and all that for free with GAE? Isn't the cost-savings of GAE coming from its scale, and if so, how could a private AppScale cloud running on Eucalyptus or similar garner the economies of scale to make it cheap enough to be viable? As well, don't you have to have the expectation of servicing a large number of applications of the type that work with GAE to even consider something like this? (something that a typically enterprise is not going to need)

In short, I'm really confused as to what the big deal is. Can someone elaborate on the above questions?
I don't think it would be too hard to attract a 'name' if you got a little bit of headway. If you chose, say, mountain biking, it wouldn't be that hard to get some endorsement from whomever the mountain biking celebrity du-jour is. In niche fields like this the top guys are pretty accessible.

Mountain biking has a solid fan base, worldwide, and the guys that are into it aren't afraid of spending several thousand on a bike, plus all the bits and pieces that go with it. They're also generally young, single and male, which dovetails nicely with an internet demographic. After all, you can't go out at night. That means there's ad dollar to be made. There's also a vast amount of technical know-how that goes into the sport, both from a how-to setup your bike, how-to do particular techniques, and where to go. A lot of this is currently buried in forums with crappy interfaces and broken searches.

A niche area like this isn't going to get you bought for 10 million, but a couple of talented guys could make a nice living doing something they love, which isn't to be sneezed at.

There are so many other niches that spring to mind crying out for a better problem-solving model than forum postings, which is really what SO is. It's true that Yahoo answers could enter any of these markets, but with branding and endorsements, a dedicated site would outstrip Yahoo answers without much trouble.
The Tata Nano Arrives: People's Car for India
My wife now spends a lot of time in front of the TV breast-feeding the recently-arrived kid #2. So, I got her a Netflix Roku box. She was skeptical at first but is now quite pleased. If all movies were available this way, I think she'd forgo renting DVDs. Quality isn't as good as Blu-Ray, but it's better than an old-school DVD.

How can Blockbuster compete against Netflix when its business model is based on the retail distribution of physical goods? Netflix is working hard to cannibalize its dvd-by-mail business and will end up with a much higher margin business as a result.

IIRC, a few years ago, Blockbuster was telling investors that consumers loved the experience of going to the video store to pick out rentals! Don't worry, nothing's rotten here folks.

BTW, the Roku works really well. Other than its screwy menu scheme (ok once you readjust your assumptions), it's a beautiful simple device.
Glubble
This is seriously great. Because of the crazed iPhone goldrush that's going on, there's a lot less community sharing than you'd expect -- everyone's trying to get an edge on the other 80000000 apps, so they're keeping their cards close.

This is a great step in the other direction. I'm hoping that once the noise dies down, we'll start seeing more of the good kind of serious iPhone apps.
If you don't want to read through 5 pages of article here is the relevent portion: "But one bee virus stood out, as it had never been identified in the U.S.: the Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV. This pathogen was first described in 2004 by Ilan Sela of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the course of an effort to find out why bees were dying with paralytic seizures. In our initial sampling, IAPV was found in almost all though not all colonies with CCD symptoms and in only one operation that was not suffering from CCD."
I only finally purchased a house in an attempt to get away from a series of noisy apartment neighbors. I'd had enough trouble with noise in apartments that I was unwilling to make a purchase commitment in a similar environment (shared building).

If apartments and condos were quieter, I would probably have continued to rent. Being not "settled down" at this point in time, the flexibility and lack of hassle dealing with ownership issues (especially maintenance) are definite pluses. Or I might have purchased a condo or coop unit.

As people natter on about more efficient living, I continue to wonder whether there is a model that could incentivise the construction of apartment units that make a serious attempt at soundproofing. I guestimate 10% - 25% additional construction cost, depending on degree of soundproofing and on economies of scale. Hopefully toward the lower end, even with good soundproofing, particularly if there were a significant amount of such construction occurring.

(I don't know about retrofitting, although I am skeptical as to its being effective in many situations.)
I didn't say "Python and Ruby are fast because they can call C code". I responded to your claim that people using Python or Ruby for their applications don't have performance checklists, which is bullshit - part of that checklist (towards the bottom, hopefully) is refactor important bits to C.
It doesn't reduce water consumption, it reduces energy consumption required to heat water.

Now, of course, the missing calculation is how much energy is required to make a stainless steel heat exchanger, install it, and perform maintenance. If that is more than 40% of the energy I spend on showers over the useful life of the device, then I'm not buying either a cost savings or an environmental improvement, I'm buying an image of myself as "environmentally conscious".

I'll have to admit, though, if I were the manager of the gym (which has 25 hot showers in the men's room kept between 34 and 40 degrees Celsius running for probably in excess of 1 hour per day each), this might be pretty interesting to me for economic reasons.
It's about lock-in, or removing lock-in in this case. Previously the cost of switching away from App Engine was pretty high; maybe now it's still not zero but it's a little lower.

And who says AppScale is just for private clouds? What if Yahoo starts offering AppScale hosting?
If you fear being trapped sharecropping on Google's land -- that they might arbitrarily change the GAE rules, or prices, or capabilities, or even cancel the service entirely -- this gives you the possibility to migrate elsewhere.

Migrating elsewhere might not be better along any single dimension (price, speed, reliability, etc.) at any particular point in time. You might never need to do it. But having the option is gigantic. It makes GAE a much, much, safer platform on which to develop. In a pinch, you could port elsewhere in short order without reengineering your service architecture.

This is a very impressive move by Google. It removes my number one fear of using GAE. I'll be watching AppScale closely.
Linux 2.6.29 Released
This is one of the most important points : the enforced savings plan and relatively illiquid asset. For many people, the enforced discipline of putting money away by paying down their principal pays off for them. Of course you can refinance or trade homes every 5 years and get nowhere. But if you stay put for a long period of time, buy wisely in the first place, and maintain the property, it will pay off. Well placed property is uniquely inflation proof because it normally contains intrinsic value.

You can achieve the same thing by renting and regularly putting a portion of your income away into quality assets : but the temptation to liquidate part of your portfolio always will remain strong. This is where people come unstuck.

The danger is in this advice/thought process being taken to apply to all property, regardless of location. I can foresee far-flung suburbs with long commutes continually falling in value as people factor in the cost of transport to their overall living costs.

The government should exit the property incentive market. No tax deductibility for renting or buying. No incentives or guarantees for high-risk mortgages. Let the free will of the people decide what is the best for them. The only laws in place should govern the quality of the property, and against unfair eviction/foreclosure. And there should be laws in place to allow for longer term tenancies. On any commercial property, it's easy to get 10-12 year leases on a property. It's rare to get more than a 12 month lease on a rental property : probably precisely because it's easier to evict a commercial tenant than a residential tenant. The more government controls are put on tenancies, the worse the overall effect for tenants (like rent control, which results in a good deal for a few tenants, and a bad deal for most)

If you could sign a 10-year lease on a house and be allowed to modify the interior (paint, floorcoverings, etc) then the merits of onwnership vs renting could be more equally compared.
This line didn't add up for me: "likely your most energy-intensive daily household activity". I think overall temperature control for my house is vastly more expensive than this, given that my gas bill drops to $45 in the summer but touches $300 in the winter. I also run the dishwasher every day and do an average of one load of laundry per day (kids!).

Not a bad idea for new construction, but dialing back your hot water heater to 120F from the 140F they list probably saves more energy overall.
It's an unbelievably simple statement that is applicable to many different situations, not just computer related stuff.

For example, right now I'm detailing some design principles for a project I'm working on.

I realise there is a limited amount of time to be able to complete the project effectively and to make it look decent, so in the process I've come to make some hard choices.

I've found the trying to be creative with less is working out well so far and in the end it should pay off.
I don't think it would be a real currency, it would just be a broadening of the current basket the IMF uses. We'd use an expanded form of special drawing rights as reserves, and the SDRs would be based on the broader basket of currencies.
Well, from what I read in the FT article, they are actually implying a shift from US dollars to SDRs, which already exist and are well established. SDRs are effectively a currency in the ways that matter, at least at this (international finance) level. Since the SDR is defined in terms of the US dollar, the euro, and a couple of other currencies, the SDR is potentially more stable than either the dollar or the euro alone.

Another thought: Changing from one reserve currency to another is kind of a big deal - you can't just go to some currency exchange window and say "hello, I'd like to exchange this $372.4 billion in USD into Euros please". Throws the markets out of whack. So perhaps another reason for choosing the SDR is that they are less likely to need to change it in the future. Say thirty years from now if conditions change, and the euro starts hyperinflating and the USD is solid again, the SDR value will be relatively stable.

I'm at best an amateur in these matters, so I could be mistaken. Not to mention the fact that I did not read the original article (at http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english/detail.asp?col=6500&id=168 - the page will not even render readably in any browser I have). Anyone who can read Chinese care to comment?

Edit: I threw around a little jargon above... SDR stands for "Special Drawing Rights", and can be viewed as a kind of pseudo-currency used by the IMF. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights
I don't doubt that making something awesome is about removing the unawesome parts. But what most people are missing is the sense of what is unawesome and what is awesome. This trait of having excellent taste is what most are missing... at least from my experience of interacting with others.

The people who are really good at something have an evolved sense of what they are willing to accept. For example, I knew of a guy named Rod Weckworth who was/is really good with relationships. And I think he was really successful because he had a sense of what level of a connection he was willing to accept with people. He wasn't okay with having an okay relationship with people. He makes sure to write thank you notes, call on birthdays, etc.

So more than just not letting shit stay, you have to have a nose for detecting shit.
Could you point out some historical examples of fighting over the Rio Grande please? I can't think of any real war or major fighting that happened strictly because we wanted to control the Rio Grande to gain water.

Maybe you mean fighting along the Rio Grande, during the Manifest Destiny era? But that took place because we wanted land. The Rio Grande just happened to fall on land we wanted. That it is a large body of water was largely irrelevant.
"The longer you try and deshit something, the less shit it is."

Not true for the 20%, but true for the 80%. Software is a good example : all 1.0 versions are crap. The trick is to get to the next n revisions and still be interested in the project. You may end up with none of the original code, but it's the act of revision and correction that makes it better.

All those who say you can't polish a turd, I say look at Windows. From version 1 to version 7, there's a gloss in the side of that nugget that you would not have believed possible 20 years ago.
You can combine the face search with color: http://images.google.com/images?imgcolor=purple&hl=en...
Beautiful. This guy needs to put up a tipjoy button.
Any hackers in Denver?
Hey, an fellow hackers here in the Denver/Boulder area?

Do any of you meet up regularly? We should get something going.
Ask HN: What would an ideal online learning platform look like? 
Imagine you have limitless money and can create an ideal online learning site. What would it look like? How would it work? What features/tools (e.g., grade book, discussion posts, wiki).) would it include? How might it disrupt our current educational model?

Think about any online learning experiences that you have had. Common experiences may include: reading comments on HN, editing posts on Wikipedia, watching educational videos, or taking online classes using a learning management system like Blackboard. What features have stood out to you as particularly helpful? Why?

We at www.nixty.com are working on building our own ideal learning platform. I’m reading Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? And figured I’d post the question to HN. As always, thanks for making this a great community and for helping us think through things.
Ask HN: How-to make solid profits from niche websites?
I often see newspaper articles and current affairs television programs, which tell the "success stories" of niche website and/or blog operators who earn six- to seven-figures each year directly from their sites.

I (and I think many HN regulars) would love to do something like this full-time and have some good ideas for sites but don't know where to start...

O learned HN gurus, if someone tasked you with starting a successful niche website from scratch, what would you do?

Any advice or links to relevant resources is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

P.S. For the purposes of discussion I define successful as: good enough to provide you $100k+ annually for working 40hrs per week on average.
Download EtherPad for Your Own Server
chances are the useful life time of a chunk of steel with a couple holes in it is as long as the rest of your plumbing
That's really good information. Thanks. I may try the Delicious button for a while and see how that works.
Throws the markets out of whack

It's important that we adjust what we do so we don't break the system that models what we are doing. /nods sagely/
No. For the most part, it isn't scarce yet.

Sorry, this isn't true - water is an issue in numerous regions of the world.
Funny, from personal experience landlords need to get pushed by tenants constantly to make repairs.
My high school had amazing math textbooks. The books had been written by the faculty over the course of many years. Each page consisted of 10-12 word problems and nothing else. There would be no explanation, no section introductions, nothing but problems.

The problems were designed to be just hard enough that you could solve them by making a little bit of a leap from your previous knowledge. After solving a series of leading questions, you would make one last leap, solve a problem, and the book would tell you: "Congratulations, you have just derived the Law of Cosines!"

Because the difficulty was set just right - not too hard, not too easy - doing math homework was like playing a game of Sudoku. ( well, the difficulty was right for me, students who had less aptitude for math tended to hate the books). Also, because you learned by figuring out things as you went, the knowledge stuck the first time. No tedious drills or memorization were ever required.

If I was to design the perfect online education system, it would be like those books. No reading and memorization, just problems designed to be in the sweet spot between boring and frustrating. Online you have the big advantage that you can dynamically adjust the difficult level of the problems. This would actually solve the major problem with the textbooks.

The textbooks are all online here: http://www.exeter.edu/academics/84_9408.aspx

If I was creating an online learning site, I would try and license the material from them. Then I would put the problems online, make the difficulty dynamic, add hints and helpers for tough problems, etc.
How about, no country with a major army has lost access to it?
I'd suggest reserving it for pillar content. When I say pillar content, I mean "If I had a CV, this article would be on it." Otherwise you encourage blindness of it in your users. (A major problem with ShareThis, etc.)
Worth reading for me just for the brief remark that vaccines cannot be developed for invertebrates -- that was interesting.

I don't understand why your remark was downrated, though; I had the same thought. Seems like a messy diagnosis that will not necessarily have a quick solution.
It's hard to see how that kind of basket would work. If you don't have fixed pegs between the currencies, then you have not increased the stability of the system. If you have fixed pegs, then each member country must cede complete control of its monetary policy to the international bank. Otherwise the temptation to inflate would be too great.
In many ways, the SAAS world is worse for free software. First, have you lost freedom 0. How many times have you heard about someone being kicked out of Facebook or Twitter, for example? You have lost an unstated freedom - the freedom to control your data as you see fit. (It's a lot easier to reverse engineer software that has your data than pull it off of a company's servers who have a vested interest in locking you in.)
Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing Workshop
Where?

On their site, I see some Ubuntu packages which would probably work. But once I get to the point of "probably work", I might as well install the gem version.
I use chrome primarily. I used to be a firefox user, but when 3 was released I was really turned off by both the bug with the profiles that caused it to be the slowest thing I used in years, and the general emacs-ification of what was once a fairly light browser.

It was easier to download and give chrome a try than to try and figure out how to fix FF3.
Nader in conversation
Dude. Sound proofing is exceedingly cheap. I was trained as a structural engineer and met many building engineers and architects throughout my time. There are materials that cost less than a dollar per square foot that can reduce sound to nearly zero. Think 1% not %10 to %25. Thing is, sound proofing isn't even on the constructors radar half the time because it doesn't sell units. That is the problem.
That sounds great. I would have loved to learn maths like that
I thought that China moved to a basket currency a few years ago?