skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I accept your argument that "you HAVE to" is too strong and for many businesses is actually false!

Of course it's a literary device, not meant to be a mathematical statement. I'm not sure "stupid and irresponsible" is quite right either?

But thanks for the response -- you're right that when reading stuff like this you always need to filter it through your own lens.
because you think it MIGHT be incorrect ('to the best of my knowledge')

I've heard no indication that eating pork is suspect in the outbreak, or has been indicated as the means of transmission in any case.

There are actually a lot of contradictory reports on this but that isn't the point.

This is entirely new to me; the post I responded to gave no such evidence (however suspect the evidence might be). But I suspect your evidence is also made up.

The fellow I was responding to gave me no reason to believe he wasn't just making stuff up. And, a quick googling reveals that he was, in fact, just making stuff up.

From the CDC:

Can people catch swine flu from eating pork?
No. Swine influenza viruses are not transmitted by food. You can not get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products.

Reference: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/key_facts.htm
Agree with both of you! :-)

Ignoring it is like ignoring the Internet, but you still have to be cautious with new technologies.
Better than expected. Out of around 35 sales, 3 came from TrialPay, pulling in $75 in revenue. That's $14 less than if my four customers didn't use TrialPay, but I could've made the MAP (Minimum Acceptable Payout) higher if I was really that worried.

I think it's a good option for those potential customers who are iffy about making the purchase.
@16software: I took a look at your site. A couple of things are broken and you should fix them to improve your sales.

From your home page, the link to "our products" doesn't work, it stays on the same page. So I'll never know what products you have!

Your CSS template needs a refresh. The single-column layout looks like it's from the 90s. Just add some kind of right column, a few frames with light-colored backgrounds, and it will look much better.

About piracy: forget about it, it's not as big a problem as you think. First, those who use pirated software would most likely not have paid for it in the first place. But more important, people on pirate software they want. And if you found a niche that people want, then you'll get plenty of legitimate customers.

Last (you are bringing up so many interesting points, I have to stop somewhere): marketing is very important. I sort of covered that point on my blog (http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/03/11/the-great-startup-id...), but I'll probably repost something more specific.

Just because you wrote an interesting program doesn't mean that anyone will ever know or use it. How disappointing is that? Marketing is not about fluffy balloons and pink super bowl ads. It's about being smart and figuring out where your customers are and how to reach them. You can do a lot of marketing on a null budget, if you spend some time. A good rule of thumb for a programmer is to dedicate one hour a day on marketing activities.
Given how correlated these trends are, I am not sure what is changing is the desire for any particular item, but the actual interpretation of the word "necessity". I suspect what is happening is that when financial security is low, necessity is applied as a term close to its actual definition, whereas in times of financial plenty it starts wandering up the scale towards "want".

That said, I boggle at the clothes dryer rank.
Also check out unladen-swallow -- they aim to remove the GIL from Python (among other goals):

http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan
Custom compiler for Linux kernel? It could happen
"I find it rather plausible that machine intelligence will very soon be capable of doing things we humans cannot do. In fact, that's already the case to some degree (and I don't mean just doing things faster)."

What can today's computers do that a human couldn't do given infinite time, patience, pencil and paper?
Text editing on the keyboard also drove me crazy for a while. You do get used to it. My lingering complaints: the insane placement of Cmd for Cut/Copy/Paste (talk about a Vulcan Nerve Pinch!) and the mental shift required when switching back and forth between the GUI and the shell. (Mainly that's remembering to switch to/from Control/Cmd).
Register domain names with Twitter
Rails Server Setup + App Deployment Using Moonshine
This is particularly hilarious, and I recommend that people take a glance at this.
You can specify the exact size of the div, but you won't know for certain the font being used. Yes, if you know your audience well you can get it right for a lot of them, but I think that misses one of the strengths of the web. Instead of spending your time optimizing for a particular configuration, optimize for a design and layout that looks good in many configurations.
You used a swear word on HN. :)
You can switch the stoplight coloring on the buttons via system preferences to all-grey. That worked for me. Also, you can switch key bindings.
This seems like a great product, regarding links you should provide some options (like amazon.com does) and if you can come up with a system to pay a commission from every sale its better.

I would also spend a litte in 99designs to put some design and logo on the page. After that you should try some ads maybe Google, also I think this can be easily PR to magazines and top blogs.

Anyway its a great product, good luck.
The Language Instinct should be required reading for all hackers.
So it took more than just a first rate university and rich people to create Silicon Valley.
The iPhone works, because it's small enough to hold with one hand, while you type with the other.

I can't see anything much bigger working TBH. At some stage, you need a keyboard to type on, and to hold the screen at a good angle. And then it's not portable so you may as well have a netbook/laptop.
(I'm the author!)

Yes I'm including "blogs" in social media. I'm also including things like having customer-driven reviews. It's sensible because "social media" general means things like going where the customers are and giving customers a strong (perhaps primary) voice in your own public persona.

I accept your criticism that Facebook and the link-sharing sites don't fit the mold nearly as well, nor are they the primary drivers behind those success stories. (Although in the case of Facebook at least examples do exist.)
If it aint broke...

As I say, 2 1/2 years on OS X, and I don't miss linux on the desktop one bit.
And here: Why many developers are not switching to mac.

1. Abysmal window manager, not replacable. Pixel waste, clumsy (long list here)

2. Mandatory Click-to-Focus and Click-Raise. Showstopper.

3. No home/end keys on apple laptops and other wierd layout choices.

4. Nasty BSD gang-rape under the hood. Yes, OSX has it's own "windows registry".

5. Idiotic shareware culture that makes you pay for the smallest things. $10 for a sane Macbook trackpad driver that should be in the OS in first place.

6. Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, meta-key nonsense, Apple+Q.

7. Menus only on context-sensitive titlebar, sub-problem of #2

8. Single mouse button idiocy.

9. Finder.

10. Equivalent PC hardware can be had for 60% of the apple price
Have you even read the article? Your first two points are mentioned prominently.
I wrote http://www.mibbit.com - so none of the above. I get to decide what I do, and so far it's worked:

http://tinyurl.com/d8nqu7 (Traffic growth)

If you work in the corporate world, then totally. You probably have to bend to IE's every whim.
The problem I see is that most useful applications don't want to be tied to facebook.
Reading list for the Secret History series is here:
http://steveblank.com/secret-history/
I think this comment says more about you than a Mac about its owner. ;)
"His battered old canvas fishing hat"

Sans-comma Questions:

Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?

Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?
There is a great deal of basic scientific research that is not immediately profitable, but is still "worthy" of doing. Such research requires an non-profit-seeking entity to fund it. In an ideal libertarian paradise, individuals who choose to fund unprofitable research could band together and select projects, but if the government stops funding research tomorrow, what makes you think individuals are going to pick up the slack? How much unprofitable research is funded by private individuals today?

Public goods merit public funding.
> I boggle at the clothes dryer rank

Some American towns actually forbid residents from hanging clotheslines.
Free eBook: "Confessions of a Venture Capitalist"
On the topic of ssh/dealing with other computers, doesn't PuTTY do that pretty well on windows? Though I may be misunderstanding the advantage you're pointing out.
The fact that 50% of people still believe things like a TV, Microwave, and central A/C are "necessities" means we have a very long way to go. I guess I can be happy it dropped from 60%.
I very much enjoyed the answers to this very question on Digg (oops sorry I mean Reddit):

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8f4dk/any_progr...
I was thinking it should read Abort, Retry, Fail.
Theoretically the answer is probably nothing. What I was thinking about is the kind of structure that is the internet for instance. Could humans collectively _be_ the internet? Could they simulate it, very slowly, without computer programs and hardware other than pencil and paper? A single person could not.

Another thing are parallel algorithms that include random factors. I don't think humans can think like that, consciously and rationally, even though the brain might work like that underneath.

Or could a human sift through massive amounts of data (even given an infinite amount of time) and do something similar to a data mining algorithm? I doubt it. He wouldn't be able to remember enough of the things he had seen and looking them up in his notes would take so long that he would have forgotten where he was when he started. The overall picture of a particular rule or pattern just might not form in his mind.
Just like there was no market for a touch phone before the iPhone, or no market for portable media players before iPod.

By no I mean, lesser, much lesser.
There is an ~$50 filter which sticks to the Air's display, converting it into an approximately normal (non-glossy) one.
This is an excellent article succinctly describing all of the issues around municipal broadband. I hope they succeed so it spreads to other communities and dissolves the federal government sponsored monopolies we have now with Time Warner, Comcast, and others. Go Wilson, NC!
True, but it's usually a neighborhood association rule, not something that applies to a whole town.
godaddy has them available now ($6)
A more informative list, straight from the source, is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-A...

I'm pleased to see thinkers like David Shaw & Eric Lander included.
This is a brilliant and cheap political win for Obama. Consider the economic black hole our government (including the past administration) is leading us down; he can leave alone (or even reduce) the number of dollars spent on research and still claim an increase by percentage of GDP.
Yes, I have read the article. Yes, they are mentioned in the article... alongside another dozen Macintosh features which have little or no bearing on the reasons that developers specifically buy Macintosh machines compared to ordinary users. Unless, of course, you honestly think developers are buying Macs because of Quartz or Core Animation as much as they are Unix support, because they aren't savvy enough to know how to avoid spyware, or because they're looking for obviously much-needed help at the Genius Bar. A stopped clock is right twice a day.
Insightful piece. I wonder what solutions we'll devise to edit all that video. App idea: outsource tightening to mturk. Hardware idea: the record button on your video camera should operate on a cache so if what happened in the past isn't interesting it won't get saved.
The not-so-positive corollary is that 3% of GDP must be extracted from the economy before it can be 'committed' to the politically-viable science projects.
And yet, because of the syntax I don't remember learning PHP. It was pretty much one night of reading the manual to get to know the API, and that was it. They're close conceptually too, not just in syntax.
Absolutely stunning talk. The real fun begins 8:00 in.
Entrepreneurship classes should be mandatory in K-12 to combat teacher bias.
K-12 teachers often focus on academic achievement. But that is entirely the wrong thing to focus on. What ultimately matters most in life is how much money you make, not your academic credentials nor your IQ.

And so it seems that entrepreneurship classes should be made mandatory in K-12 to combat this teacher bias.
Normally I'd make some argument about how Big Government has no real motivation (i.e. money) to supply a better product and private enterprise is better qualified, but the current state of the telco companies make that argument impossible. 10mbit fiber for $35/mo, no caps, and no packet sniffing? Where do I sign?
or better yet:

[Send Error Report] [Don't Send]
One-on-one plus fun adds up to 'stunning' progress in maths
One-on-one plus fun adds up to 'stunning' progress in maths
Amazon Buys iPhone 'Stanza' E-Book App Maker
Isn't the meta description tag's purpose to describe the page? It's not intended to describe the entire website, which is what you are insinuating.
Congress Begins Deep Packet Inspection of Internet Providers
But I don't want an asymmetric Facebook.
Heroku (YC W08) and Cloudkick (YC W09) take honors at Under the Radar
This is pretty cool. I remember once joking with a friend, and I offhandedly described her office as being in a "little crappy building". As soon as it came out of my mouth, I realized it should have been "crappy little building" (opinion precedes size).
This may be of interest:

"Stackless Python allows you to use lightweight threads (tasklets) that can be switched with less overhead and it allows for cooperative multitasking with the intention of making async programming easier. This helps with IO bound applications where you can have tens of thousands of tasklets running at the same time (try doing that with threads). It does not however allow you to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources. It simply allows you to squeeze the most amount of work out of a single threaded process..."

http://www.stackless.com/pipermail/stackless/2007-August/001...
Pinker has a good 'atgoogle talks' vid on youtube that summarises his thoughts on the topic well.
What about the internet? I don't have a TV but I wouldn't give up the internet because my work depends on it - but for others it would be a luxury.
That looks like it could eventually be incredibly useful. I hope that they write their code in a way which allows some of their improvements to be added to Python.
By the time this gets to market, won't I carry a one TB thumb drive in my pocket? They apparently haven't heard the Gretsky quote about "skating to where the puck is going to be."

More generally, it seems that the "USB disk" abstraction layer allows innovation in storage without the pain of hardware standards adoption. I understand using this disk for consumer-ish stuff as a means of enforcing copyright via hardware, but why would commercial users care?
Agreed. I tried, did not like. At least it is a viable solution.

My only big reason is because mac is a *nix under the hood. So I get all the nice scripting benefits and never have to deal with the windows shell scripting for dev purposes.

The hardware issue is a BIG fucking deal. I just got a mac mini at work for testing. ONLY ONE VIDEO PORT! So no dual screen. My PC? Oh no dual output? no problem a hundred bucks will solve that problem. To make it worse I can't upgrade my mini with a new card, gota get a new mini. (sorry just got = right before their new model was released)

So yea mac is a pain still. I want a nice motherboard like a PC has, and a nice case like a PC has, and as powerful/weak as a mac mini, for the mac mini price. If I need a new card Ill buy one. But that's not available, gota get me the $2000 power mac.
Tell HN: Opportunities for Cloud Computing Startups (Bay Area)
Put several thou into this puppy - mostly A & AA - loans started going belly up about 8-10 months out. Have basically written off this as a worthless investment - will be happy to get back ANYthing at this point.

And NOW...prosper is "off the air"...fascinating.
If it takes 5-6 years for these to be productized, magnetic hard drives may be to 10TB/$100 by then. So these could be DOA.
OK, Go for it. What's the use case for a tablet?
Have you ever lived in the south? A/C is very much a necessity.
So people complained that you were doing business under your own name? Did you set up a 'doing business as' since then?
Nothing against GE or any other vendor doing R&D work here, but call me back when the format reaches mass market numbers and traction, and when the media longevity and reliability and pricing are all better known.

The numbers of optical and magneto-optical and tape other (now) dead-end drives and drive formats are legion.

Even once-popular formats can get into trouble here. There are organizations that make their living rolling their critical data from one of these now-weird and now-archaic formats to another and more current format. And there's the occasional success with a particularly unusual format that gets publicized:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-lunar22...
I will probably end up using stackless. CCP seems to have gotten it to work quite well for EVE. I'm still really impressed by their single server MMO architecture.
Google's Efficient Data Center Summit
That's a good thing. Internet polls have never been reliable. The Time poll just confirms it.
How about just focusing on getting things done? I find that when I have a list of prioritized tasks for the week, I usually get them done and when I don't , its never been because I watched too much TV.
People may want to consider not taking vacation time any more at this rate , if we are trying to squeeze as much work as possible into our lives.

There is life outside the internet, and TV does a pretty good job of letting me know what is happening in the 'real world'
Yet people did it. My parents grew up in St. Louis without air conditioning. It gets uncomfortable but is not unlivable.

People live in the tropics without it. It is not a necessity.
City of Monticello tried before and got sued. Hopefully this works out, monopolies have a stranglehold on the telecom industry in the US.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-wer...
"There are plenty of instances where person X codes something that person Y could do in a fraction of the time."

Corrollary: There are plenty of instances where I coded something last month that I could code in a fraction of the time this month. It's scary but true. A typical experience:

Day LinesOfCode Comments
--- ----------- -----------------------------------------------------
1 250 idea
3 500 add to idea
8 1,200 a few more features
12 1,500 fix some stuff
16 2,400 add more features
20 2,700 getting really cool!
25 1,200 test & refactor
30 800 Holy shit! It's so simple someone could just copy it
My interpretation of what he said is that they were complaining about his programs and the reviews were next to his name.
It was very interesting to read the hierarchy. I hadn't seen it before. In some case it may be more statistical than universal.

For instance, even in the case of the old canvas fishing hat, what if it is both "battered" and "large"? Do we call it a battered large hat (which sounds odd, but follows the rule), or a large battered hat? (which sounds better, but then does "battered" take on the new role of material?

Ah, the endless possibilities for quibbling grammarians.

Still, it is nice there are such rules to fall back on to get it right most of the time.
I do despise animation in user interfaces. When I click a window I want it to just appear and not spend 3 seconds animating.

I don't like OSX but I am not going to deny it's power or appeal.
> Most recently, they broke the system Perl.

Incorrect. Security Update 2009-001 replaced a Perl component which some users had (inappropriately) upgraded themselves, causing breakage for those users. The "system Perl" worked fine as long as you hadn't touched it, though.

: The inappropriate part was touching the Perl install in /System. You don't do that.
I'm in the United States, Maryland specifically. My school hours are from 7:25 to 3:00, or, if you include when I get on the bus and get off, from 6:20 to 4:00.

School hours are long, and it doesn't leave that much time, it's true. I compensate by going to sleep around 2:30 regularly, sometimes later, and catching up on sleep on the bus or through smaller naps during the day (and no, not during class :P).
"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to W.H. Auden (7 June 1955)
Slightly off topic, but related none-the-less: something that has always bothered me about "necessities" is that 99% of US households have a TV [1] but at the same time, ~12% are in poverty. [2] How do "necessities" like this tie into poverty?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_the_United_States
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
I don't know why I clicked, but I'm glad I did. The points about "governance" emerging as an accident, a mistake even, were particularly perspicacious.
It's your argument, the burden of proof is on you.
I would imagine that's why you got all the downvotes.
Facebook needs to make sure they don't have trolls doing their marketing, since basically everything they do is the first time it's been done at that scale.
The intended meaning here is that the phoneme patterns of English will be reliably mistaken by a speaker habituated to speaking German, or the other way around. (I have some acquaintance with both languages.) If there is some rule of universal grammar in the general case about how sounds can combine, the fact still remains that the particular case of each speaker's native language is not a reliable guide to the phonological structure of any other particular language.
I'm rather blown away that 49% of 18-29 year-olds consider a land line phone to be a necessity.

I think the last time I had a land line was a decade ago, when I was 17. And I live in the decidedly non-cutting-edge midwest. Even my parents haven't had a land line in years.
> monopolies have a stranglehold on the telecom industry in the US.

Name one telecom monopoly that wasn't created by the government.

Federal government created the telephone monopoly.

Local governments create cable TV and cable modem monopolies.

On purpose.

They do it through legislation.

The stated intent is to "avoid wasteful competition".

IMO, the actual intent is to get a single company under the thumb of government regulators, which then gives more power to the government officials.

Those who can, create.

Those who can't create regulate.
Please live in Tucson in July. :)

I would give up Internet before I gave up A/C. I've only seen one home in Tucson well enough insulated to give up A/C, and it was built, brick by brick by the owners, and only had two very small windows.
How to: Model Swine Flu In Eclipse
A quick pointer over to the important information you need to model the Swine Flu outbreak in the Eclipse Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler.