skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only ones that will work with non-technical users are things that are simple, and I have tried them all.

1. Adobe connectnow/connectpro. This is brilliant, and allows bi-directional screen sharing which clients love. It's really powerful when training someone to get them to do the training instead of just showing them.

Connectnow is free, and it's only requirement is flash. Couldn't recommend it more.

This can be a problem when the users don't have flash installed, but it is rare. I keep a link to the actual installer exe (some users struggle to download flash the normal way) to send to users that can't use it.

I ask them to go to connectnow.acrobat.com before the presentation and if they can see the begin button they will be fine to view.

Not only is connectnow the best, it's free, but connectpro can scale to thousands of participants if you need it.

2. Others, such as copilot, vnc, glance, beam your screen, webex et al all have a huge number of issues in my experience. We do all our training, support and sales through connectnow exclusively now because it offers the least issues.

3. We use skype if they have it for voice, but more often than not have to call. Voice is cheap regardless.
Now all they need to do is pair up with those other guys who were doing real-time ray-tracing
Water features
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I'd steer away from the really small microcontrollers, as they tend to be register-starved (and/or memory-starved!) enough that you have to make ugly compromises, particularly in the area of call stacks. :(

ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS are all good choices if you've got appropriate hardware to play with. All three are nice, clean RISC architectures with plenty of registers and sane addressing modes.
According to the Singularity is Near book, Kurzweil predicts human level artificial intelligence by 2030, and singularity by 2045.
Why I use Moose, Perl's Post Modern Object System
Why Moose is Post Modern
http://taboos.wiki.zoho.com/TabooCollection.html
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Asynchronous extension hooks with Perl
I've been a vegetarian for 15 years. I would have voted such a comment down, simply because it is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because no one has contracted swine flu from eating pork, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm tempted to vote this comment down because it is complaining about you being voted down in a wholly unrelated thread. (See the site guidelines. Complaining about votes is distinctly uncool.)

And while I'm providing constructive feedback, your erratic use of punctuation, lack of capitalization, aggressive tone, and generally sounding like a self-righteous teenager all leave me feeling a bit negative towards you. I'm sure you're a very fine person in real life, but I'd prefer it if you weren't trying to start arguments in threads that aren't even about the topic you've decided to talk about.
I see the advantages to having CSS variables and all, but can anyone tell me why this (Sass/Compass) would be any better than me defining variables (like grid widths/colors/etc..) in something like PHP, running it through a CSS document and outputting that document as a CSS file?
The companies who cried foul when the attack on net neutrality endangered their bottom line now block out user that can't be monetized.
All exponential growth comes to an end eventually.

In the real world there are no "hockey-stick" curves, only S-shaped curves because the real world doesn't deal with infinity.

I wrote a better explanation here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...
Casey Aldridge Hospitalized
You may find the book "Computational Homology" by Mrozek and Kaczynski interesting (though not obviously useful). Available in the usual places. Years back I had a chance to finish a course by the author, but being a confused physicist, I switched. Now I rediscover obvious references via HN :/
I'm not sure if I voiced my particular distaste for the term "singularity" before, but it's something that really does get on my nerves. I'm reminded of Pasternak denouncing the phrase "We the people's" in Dr. Zhivago. It's a word that the community that use it most often are utterly stripping bear and bastardising. As far as I'm concerned there are only two (with a possible third) definitive singularities - those of the "black holes and baby universes". <br/>

I really can't see the useful application of the metaphor here. It's not a singularity... a wave, certainly. This gives us the idea of the "seventh wave" which concentrates the potency of the waveform. Or how about a renaissance? It will get to the point where software development, especially in AI, reaches a functional plateau. Branching out and diversifying into many stylistic forms. Or (my personal favourite) a "Babel Event", where we construct a universal medium, shattering the old converging paradigms and multiplying our complexities by an order of magnitude.
<br/>
Surely these are far more "useful metaphors" than the idea of a singularity - the point at which the rules change, or the classical conventions are destroyed? I think this is insidiously vague (and might be why the "singularity meme" has spread so far/fast?)
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Interesting list. Unfortunately for the author, the people who will actually solve the problem - the engineers - already have their act together and aren't particularly interested in what sociologists and theologians have to say about desalination plants...
Obviously the content has not been deleted, as rms was able to link to it. As far as I know nothing is ever deleted here, it just gets deaded (which is a flag, and if you want to see dead articles, you can...just set showdead to yes in your profile).
What you're bring up here, Paul, are framesets. Framesets are the context we place the information we gather. Every minute we get new information, what we choose to accept and reject (and the angle we view that information) is based on these framesets. The stronger you are emotionally, the broader your frameset can get.

Note that I didn't say, "The stronger you are intellectually." It has /nothing/ to do with how smart your are. I know amazingly smart people with tiny framesets on, for example, patriotism. Their country is great and everyone wishes they could live there, etc. It's a psychological trait and is worst in the aspects where we are weakest.

The stronger (and usually smaller) a frameset is, the more it can't be argued against. Logic won't work. And heresy is simply when we poke at strong framesets.

The way to battle them is: to be a good person. By being good (honest to yourself, honest to others, loving, and generous), you push up pool. When you do the opposite, you pull it down. The healthier we get and society gets, the less we'll need framesets. In other words, by making the world a better place we'll make it ... less messed up. :) You know what I mean.
Disclosure: I go to WashU, but I don't know too much about UMich outside of what I've heard from friends.

grandalf: I don't think you give a WashU a fair shake describing it as "if your parent(s) make under $400K you'll feel poor there."

Sure, there is a significant number of students whom do have quite a bit of money and you will surely know it. However, the majority of students are very down-to-earth and there are many students who are not wealthy that feel perfectly at home there, and don't feel excluded or "poor." There are numerous students I know of receiving financial aid, and they blend right in along with everyone else.

It's noticeably a "private" school, but I wouldn't call it a "boutique" school. UMich, of course, is much larger in scale being a public school, whereas WashU is a fraction of the size.

Despite the fact that most students at the school are fairly motivated, it is still very possible to stand out through hard work, or by doing something unique with your skills. The engineering school is fantastic (I am an art student myself, but most of my friends are either engineers or med students), but the sports at the school lacks. The teams aren't terrible, but they aren't very good -- if you must have sports, that's where UMich shines.

The dorm situation, if you haven't seen it, is very nice. The "South 40" is where all the major housing is (especially for Freshman and Sophomores), and they are actually building some brand-new housing for next year (they took out some of the older housing). The community aspect within the South 40 is great, lots of events held by RAs, student groups, etc.

As well, in your Junior and Senior years, you can live in "The Village", some of the school-owned apartments, or off-campus (there are lots of apartments and houses for rent within walking distance to the school). All are great living arrangements, though cost differs widely between them.

Both of the schools, as grandalf concluded, are great and either one makes for a fantastic choice. The major differences are the scale, weather, and "rah-rah"ness of the school.
Disclaimer: I went to UMich.

Go to Michigan. It's a great combination of a GREAT school, fantastic school spirit, and great college town.

Also, as a hacker you might enjoy working on the Solar Car Team (http://www.umsolar.com) A few of us alums are here on HN, and it's an amazing experience. The car I built is on permanent display at the Museum of Science in Boston, which is pretty cool!

It's been a few too many years for me to speak directly to student life, but you'd be surprised at how a huge school can quickly get small. My senior year I would walk across Central Campus and always meet someone I knew... despite the fact I hadn't had a class there in 2+ years! (And neither had any of my other engineering classmates.)

My sister also went to Michigan (education major) and also loved the experience. It's tough to go wrong when the school excels at virtually every major available!

Happy to chat more; my contact details can be found through my profile.
I've frequently seen recommendations for POE...it's like a religion. But, when I've tried to use it, I've been disappointed and frustrated. It just never felt right as an API or an implementation of event-driven applications. (It's been compared to Twisted in the Python world, which I also don't particularly love...but I don't think POE even holds up to that comparison.)

Interestingly, the author of this post suggest AnyEvent, which I'd never heard of, but will check out now that I know about it.
Rich list reveals ‘bonfire of billionaires’
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Thanks - I've been looking for something like this for a while for over the telephone product demonstrations. Had a quick go just now and can't fault it!
So, to put it in context, you woke up one time and lost half your weight but showed no concern because later that night you made it up again completely in carbohydrates.

"I was still a bit worried, but felt comforted to know I had averted a disaster of catastrophic proportions."

Um, in your own metaphor you would most likely be dead.
Heading style fail. ;-)

#header h1 {
letter-spacing:-0.07em;
}
>> If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky could, I suppose, be taken as a heretic. After all, he did write an introduction for a book that denied the Holocaust. He also traveled to Lebanon and had hail-fellow-well-met meetings with the leaders of Hezbollah.

He also demands that people divest from Israel -- a nation he has criticized -- while owning several million dollars of real estate in the U.S., a nation he has criticized a lot more -- to worldwide applause. Indeed, in a poll a few years ago -- Europeans rated him the world's most important intellectual. Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism (often, not always, dressed up as anti-Israeli sentiment) are some of the most widely accepted normative beliefs in the world today.

All of these would be criticized by many on the American right, but, with the partial exception in developed countries of Holocaust denial, most of the world's people would have no problem with them.

You seem to see Chomsky as a heretic. I see him as a prime example of something Eric Hoffer wrote about over a half-centruy ago in _The True Believer_: the formerly creative man who has lost his powers and who compensates by becoming a fanatic. Chomsky's books are international bestsellers. Chomsky's MIT faculty peers made him an Institute Professor. I'm a fan of your writing PG, but I'm sorry, I'm missing the heretical heroism. YMMV.
We're sorry. The IPv4 address you are trying to reach has been disconnected.
Like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKSodRhEvA8

My favorite one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQw1tsgrJOs

There's also this suggestion which just puts a piece of floor under you where you need, but currently it seems a bit scary to try. I imagine if I suddenly jumped to some direction I would end up falling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYsvB2y2Ero

These are all from a blog I found: http://cb.nowan.net/blog/tag/locomotion/
Is anyone familiar with Launch:Sillicon Valley
I have an opportunity to go to this event http://launchsiliconvalley.org but I am on the east coast and want to make sure I am not wasting my time.

Any experience with them? Should I go? Waste of time? Must not miss?
Doorpost Director Tom Wozny
Find out about how to view and vote for online films.
by definition, putting pork meat in mouth puts one in extremely close proximity to swine

no i'm never complain about being voted down, if it's really about karma, i won't say taboo things

my prev post is relevant because i happened to experience what pg described in his essay

sorry about the 'challenge', but really, i'm curious how many will take it

ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do
Wouldn't all this require a massive investment in strong AI right now ... Well, I can tell you; that isn't happening. Good luck trying to convince your dissertation advisor that you want to build the Singularity. :)
This is a pretty good explanation.
Fair point, but I'd like to think that if Hummer came to them, they'd say no. Something about an affordable hybrid car seems aligned with the personalities running Vimeo.
> Europeans rated him the world's most important intellectual

The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."

He's not anti-Semitic; he's Jewish and is critical of some of Israel's policies.
>> Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best.

It was Nietzsche's great insight that internal considerations play a much larger role in constructing morality than external considerations. See, in particular, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_. Nietzsche's first questions on encountering a morality were always: what "instincts" are active here? Does this ethic arise from a overwelling of strength and confidence, or from resentment, envy, and fear? Nietzsche called the former good and the latter bad. He despised the Political Correctness of his time. I've no doubt he would have attacked the PC beliefs of our era as well, seeing them the same way that pg does: as arising out of fear.
Early Amazon Investor Alberg Says Newspapers Need More Kindle, Less Paper, to Survive
For remote collaboration w/ voice and video, we use one or more of the following:

Yugma (with Skype): http://www.yugma.com
ooVoo: http://www.oovoo.com

These allow for screensharing and audio.

Yugma has a call-in number, so to avoid fees, we use Skype. ooVoo does both screensharing and audio.
Does Folic Acid help you get Pregnant and Increase Fertility
A number of women tend to ask the gynaecologists the simple question, “Does folic acid help you get pregnant?” The answer here is very simple if you want to get pregnant, Folic Acid is a must for you. How ever a common mistake made about Folic Acid is that is doesn’t improve your chances getting pregnant faster. Opposite to Child-wish.com natural products which in fact triples your chances getting pregnant fast within 1-3 months.
Capitalism gets questioned a lot in the west. Just go to your nearest union meeting.
> by definition, putting pork meat in mouth puts one in extremely close proximity to swine

Dead, cooked 'swine'. Entirely different to getting up close and personal with an infected live pig.
Read the notes: http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html

[15] By this I mean you'd have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky's opinions = what you can't say. If you actually said the things you can't say, you'd shock conservatives and liberals about equally-- just as, if you went back to Victorian England in a time machine, your ideas would shock Whigs and Tories about equally.
Most of your points apply to the German school system, too.
> ah right, judging someone from grammar is a very rational thing to do

I think you just turned "rational" into a label. Apart from your attempt at sarcasm, this statement is probably true. Like it or not, your ability to structure sentences reflects your ability to structure thoughts.
Nietzsche also hinted at the way moral rules get enforced: you aren't ashamed of your own thoughts, only of someone finding out about them. Basically, this is fear of being exposed.

In our (the Western) society, this is most true for sexual and/or violent thoughts, as well as anti-government or anti-religious thoughts. Particularly when it comes to sexual thoughts, I cannot find a reason for holding back any of them.
Ask HN: Selling the software without the business
My start-up partner and I have spent the last 3 years (off and on) building an enterprise class piece of software that today beats most commercial offerings in its field. The problem is that we are both now exhausted and feel like just selling the software rather than forming a business around it.

What would be the ideal way to find buyers for the product itself? Is this sort of thing ever done? We are considering just approaching our would-be competitors but want to make sure we're going about this the in most optimal way..
Thanks for talking about homeschooling groups.

I am from Germany, where homeschooling is more or less verboten. Homeschooling seems like a good idea. But I always wondered where children would get their social life from, when most of their peers are locked away for at least half of the day.
I think this says something to Facebook, Google, MySpace, and web giants facing this problem in general. It's time they gave some attention to these countries and started pushing to raise awareness about online ads over there. These companies have the reach and brand name recognition to at least start the ball rolling.

I am from Saudi Arabia, which I'm pretty sure has these same issue. The relevance of Arabic online ads over here (even Google's) is far from where it is in the west and in English. That could have something to do with the low number of online ads, which I attribute to:
1) Most advertisers still do not appreciate the benefits of online ads
2) The advertising industry in general is a lot less mature than in the west. A friend of mine is an editor of an tech magazine in Arabic (which are rare) and also maintains a popular Arabic blog on entrepreneurship and marketing. It's his assessment that most marketing people in the regional offices of global tech companies don't really care about how effective a campaign is as much as which of their friends in other companies it benefits. As a consumer, I would say that isn't far from reality. Granted not all companies are like that, but your Googles, Apples, and Sonys just don't pay a lot of attention to their representatives in these countries no matter the purchasing power of its people or the potential for gain is.

The disparity between the cost and income generated per user in developing countries will continue to be this way for sometime to come. The big companies can start paying more attention to their user, partners, and potential customers in those regions if they wanted to reach the break-even point earlier. But even if they don't do anything, it will still get better eventually as people catch up to technology, but it will be a lot slower rate. Denying or limiting service to these countries however will be a great opportunity for competitors and for local startups.
I tried to figure out how linkrap.com makes money. At least it doesn't seem to replace Amazon links with affiliate ones, so will you reveal the trick?
IPhone ? The Next Generation of Social Applications
iPhone apps are available for free as well as on download, charging usually between $0.99 to $2.99. Be it free or charged, these apps are swiftly making their way into millions of users. Facebook is on its way to uncover layers of dynamism one by one. Initiating from Facebook for mobile, second in the row was Facebook for iPhone and then easy connectivity via Facebook connect. Finally Facebook connect for iPhone turned in taking connectivity to a next level all together. This wonder gizmo is breaking all barriers one by one to extend reach and enhance engagement while it refuses to halt.
Just a guess: Western civilization? Perhaps not today, but before schooling was made compulsory.
Sounds good. I'd think hard about how to assign mates, though. Perhaps just letting students choose their teacher/pupil would work. Some kids would get more than one pupil, other's none.

Or you'd better do a lottery to assign children 1-on-1.

Further experiments are needed.
> [1] On the other hand, I will accept novel theories about why all these men are named John.

Selection bias?
There is an assumption that all home schoolers keep their kids locked up all day away from other kids, or that home schooling requires this. Hardly. Many of the stereotypical home school kids (socially awkward) are that way because their parents purposefully shelter them. For them, home schooling is as much opting out of the culture as it is opting out of the school system. There's also an assumption that typical schooling is, in part, socialization, which seems odd since most of us don't spend our days exclusively around our own peer group.

We've investigated several local home schooling groups, and we're also finding that many unofficial co-ops exists too, once you get plugged into the local learning web.
Funny, a while ago I rolled out my own version of this, even dirtier than the Wattvision solution. My users would go to the website, put in the digits displayed on their meter, and get a nice chart showing their consumption.

Accuracy obviously depends on how often you enter your meter count but it was fine for shared flats that needed to split their electricity bill and sublets.

We're using it for our shared flat and I still think it would be a good holdover until dynamic meters are rolled out everywhere. I even thought up a fitting domain name and put the app online. Before I even got any users, though, some marketing company got wind of it and offered me a load of money for the domain name - so I sold it.

I'll put it back online once I think of a new name but it's low priority. I'm not sure how many people would actually bother with putting in their data.
New Blow for Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Theory