skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not even slightly excited about robot cars. Driving is fun, for a start!

human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents

What kind of human errors? Running out into the road in front of cars? Driving while too tired? Arguments with passengers? Not looking when changing lanes? Too busy looking for road signs to see a stopped car ahead? Driving horribly to try and go back for a missed turn?

Technology could help with a lot of these problems without replacing cars altogether. Current Volvos can have a blind-spot warning system, they can ready the brakes for you as you get close to a car in front so they will react quicker, they can silence incoming phone calls when the car detects too much activity (e.g. sharp cornering) so it wont distract you.

I look forward to the day when all road signs are gone and replaced with informational broadcasts that my car will interpret, and on the dashboard I get a neat summary of the current speed limit, the GPS navigation route to where I'm going, and that's about it.

You also aren't clear which figures you mention are worldwide and which are USA only. Worldwide, there are countries which don't require regular car maintenance, and people drive around with tree branches instead of steering wheels, for instance. Is that kind of thing 'human error'?
By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect.

Dear Nature, I would like to eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect by virtue or vice of me being smart. Thank you.
Howto Install Opensim locally on Win XP with MySQL
> If compromise is impossible, coercion is the only answer, right?

Not necessarily. Ideally, these people should be ignored. It isn't until they are actively standing in the way of freedom that real conflict should occur.

> That's the danger: if you can't even admit the possibility you're wrong, you really have no options apart from agreement or conflict.

Like I said, there is plenty of gray in the world (like how to best promote freedom). But I and every person who values freedom should be prepared for conflict. And I'm ok with not having any other options other than conflict if it means freedom.
Great read! It would be nice if someone tested if 5% increases in video content also get through. I wonder if this will lead to a new generation of piracy on YouTube,
'Instant on' computing - researchers say rebooting soon may be a thing of the past
How Charter Communications warns accused file sharers
A C corporation, involving one person, probably doesn't make sense. You probably want a S corp or LLC. In any case, a lawyer is good but I've always gotten my advice from my accountant. The lawyer knows the rules. The accountant knows how the rules affect your money.
What is "powerful" software
Everyone understands this intuitively, but it is useful to say it anyway. And then act on it.
ISPs refuse to shut down Pirate Bay
Both sides handled it poorly, but what I primarily saw was the pro-Bush side dismissing their opponents as just "idiots" or "well intentioned idiots", not "evil idiots". Which, is obviously not good for a healthy debate, but an idiot is totally different from an evil-idiot.

"Democrats are the party of hate. Republicans are the party of fear" - Penn Gillette

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG6JYsm1GmM
Got half way through the signup process before finding out it was only for the US :(

Would be nice if this information was listed somewhere earlier.
Malcom Gladwell on Ecommerce 10 Years Ago
Google Native Client. So many programmers are wasting their time trying to make web apps that will work on all browsers...
With all due respect, this is not awesome. Nowhere near it.

But this - http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen - is.
Fantastic read, thanks for sharing!
Apple sells beautiful, fashionable and durable products worth every penny spent.
Surprised someone downmodded me for this one. If you actually read the article, she wasn't literally talking about living in an overcrowded neighborhood and wanting to move to a big, secluded house; she was talking about feeling bombarded with tweets and wanting to get out of the Twittersphere, where she's not really well accepted.

You know, writers sometimes use these things called "metaphors" to make their points more interesting ... :P
I feared the day the pro-Apple kidiots would take over HN ...

This article tells us nothing we did not know, provides no meaningful insight, and then tells us in no-way-shape-or-form exactly hhhoooowwww Apple is bettering its brand.

To the Apple lovers: Notice how the tens of millions of corporate desktops are <i>sticking</i> to Windows XP. They aren't switching to Apple, and couldn't due to a lack of a proper Exchange client, nor advanced Active Directory features ...

I guess its too late for HN :^(
I've become a fan of Confluence. It looks decent has a wysiwyg editor.

It loses points for being written in Java (requires a fat vm to run a small instance).
I would rather have book search results available as fair use, instead of through legal settlement. That would allow other companies to compete in this area.

With this deal, Google's dominance in search engine market is even more secure than it has been. We don't want yet another monopoly, even a purportedly benevolent one.

To compensate Google for the cost of scanning all these books, perhaps the publishers and author's guild should force Google to license the scanned version to other companies at a 'fair' price, which they also need to agree upon.
Facebook is a website, not a state or any other sort of political entity. Why people seem to feel that they have "rights" when it comes to facebook is beyond me. I wonder if those complaining are the same people that keep yelling about bailout money and saying that "the market should correct itself"?

Funny how market correcting forces don't seem so pleasant when you're caught in the middle of one of those corrections...
Note the blog tag line:

Big tin: IT infrastructure used by organisations to run their businesses.

So, I think this final sentence needs translation. For "Apple's business model", substitute "Apple's business model, which involves not caring much about the low-margin, high-grief corporate IT hardware business." And, for "contempt for its users", substitute "contempt for the people running corporate IT departments". (Remember, IT doesn't care about the people who type on the computers. It's the people who set up the computers who are the primary "users".)

I'm sure it really does suck to try and maintain Macs in a Windows-centric corporate environment. But it's not as if corporate IT has anyone but themselves to blame. They turned away from Apple in the early 1980s and have never really looked back until now. Apple has learned to survive without their business and now has no real incentive to become the next Microsoft. Somebody else needs to step up and do that.
Thank you, tptacek. Excellent feedback! Bulletin board material in case I ever want to start something.
NYCSeed's summer program: $10k for 5% for 10 groups
First Mac OS X botnet activated
Write something that solves a pain. Then drown yourself in that pain and see if your solution really solves it. Few people take step 2.
Open source support systems
can anyone recommend any hood open source support systems? need something that will have a front-facing email and an issue trackig backend. already tried out eventum. anything else out there?

thanks.
Nothing special - all those cheap digital illusions (TV and now its successor - Internet) were adapted especially for the poor, targeted to the poor, and massively advertised to them. It just works, and now we can see the results.
Check out TiddlyWiki.
We will give up to 10 teams a small amount of funding, space, and mentorship in exchange for a small piece of equity in whatever they build.

I thought the cash was a little low, I mean, this is NYC, after all?

They are providing space (working space, that is, not an apt, I think), though, which makes it a little better - but I like YC's 5k*n idea a lot more.
- LED and OLED lighting. When prices fall enough, classic bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, CFLs will be out the window. Lighting, and therefore atmosphere, will completely change. Can you imagine an office without strip lighting? With varying warm, friendly colours and intensities of low power OLED panels dotted around? Computer controlled lighting features will become common because they will be cheap and easy. Homes without a kilowatt of halogen uplighters?

- The next iPhone. Even after owning one for a year, which was a year old when I got it so it was being designed three years ago or more, I still turn it over and marvel at it, at what it does, how well it does it and how good it looks and feels while doing so. It's the biggest consumer success of HCI in a long time, and that's really pleasing. They're addressing the lag when opening the SMS app, adding MMS, adding better bluetooth support, an autofocus camera, enabling and encouraging an accessory market, and twisting the arms of the mobile carriers like other handset makers haven't been. It's exciting.

- Small, LED driven, no-moving-part "pocket" projectors. See: Microsoft surface and Epson's coffee table and similar. One day they wont be driven by a big expensive noisy projector hidden a few feet beneath or behind. It need not be a massive screen itself, but an improvement of today's pocket projectors - when they can do 1280x1024 at better brightness, look out basic office CRTs and LCDs.
It's worth noting that this article has a link to a detection and removal tool for the trojan: http://macscan.securemac.com/files/iServicesTrojanRemovalToo...
You obviously misunderstood what I said; "force" does not only apply to physical things: it runs the gamut from plagiarism to patent infringement.

You are forcefully (and wrongly) obtaining media in that you have not first obtained the consent of the owner or producer.
I just installed wpjobads to our Wordpress blog which doesn't have the 50% cut but was a $50 license. Our site gets 50k PV in a localized niche and we are hoping to charge at least 10-25$ per ad.
You're comparing apples to oranges.

Facebook is a website that hosts your personal info. Whats more, they want to store that info for as long as they want and use it for whatever they want, besides making money.

If facebook was a site that didn't store any info about you, then they can do whatever they want and I'd be willing to bet that nobody would care. But it's not. So yes, we do have rights when it comes to this stuff. Which was explicitly displayed when people began to close their facebook accounts.
They aren't even in Manhattan, they are based in Brooklyn. I dunno that kind takes a hit on their legitimacy to me.
India's Prime-Minister-In-Waiting, Advani is accused in Hawala scam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala_scandal
1-2 have no relevance to CS. 3 is important.
The enterprises that are on Windows today aren’t going to move to OS X anytime soon and this is why:

There is a huge barrier for enterprises to move
to OS X, it is locked into Mac hardware.

Macs are extremely overpriced as compared to their PC
counterparts: 30% - 50% more!

So for cost conscious enterprises, when they compare between
the cost of upgrading to Windows 7 (which has had good reviews so far) with cost of buying new Apple hardware and OS X, Windows 7 turns out to be the winner.
Does anyone know if YouTube actually removes clips containing parts of copyrighted films? I doubt it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting
So how do you tell whether you have this trojan or not? Is there an easy way to check?
[pdf] Java Structures - Data Structures in Java for the Principled Programmer
You can very easily plug a mac in to an exchange based organisation. I know I have plugged one in to what was the largest exchange install outside of Microsoft's own campus. You can very easily make it map on to Active Directory, mount your Active Directory home folder and even use all of the exchange email and calendar functionality using office for mac. The reason organisations aren't switching from xp is because they trust it, its stable and it can do everything they need their users to be able to do.
How to read code, use version control, write code in a professional environment, find libraries that can help you, and keep abreast of current technology. I think that CS grads should be expected to be contributing to open source projects by senior year.

The marketing, business, and work/life balance problems are important, too, but they don't really belong in a CS course, and CS professors are not experts on these topics anyway.
The media's fake Twitter backlash begins
How to program well.
A S-Corp is easier to convert to a C-Corp, so if you want to go the VC/IPO direction, but want to start simpler, you might want to start with an S-Corp. http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/s-corps-vs-llcs.html

But an LLC is more flexible and generally simpler to start.

If you're looking to build a small profitable company, I'd go LLC. If you're looking for VC money today, go C-Corp. If you're looking to build a profitable company but want VC money in a few years, consider an S-Corp.

Talk to a lawyer and accountant, of course.
And now my summer program: $10 for 5%
They've been around a while, and are state-funded ($2MM fund, I believe) but they've only invested in 3 companies so far... I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people applying so I'm guessing they're being really selective/non-risky (which is usually the case with east coast tech investors compared to west coast ones).

Here's more:

http://blog.nextny.org/2008/09/03/nyc-seed-seed-funding-for-...

http://www.nyconvergence.com/2008/06/mayor-bloomberg.html
If you have torrented software (photoshop cs4 or iwork 09) then you need to download the checker and remover from securemac.com: http://macscan.securemac.com/files/iServicesTrojanRemovalToo.... If not you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
Could you clarify how you extrapolate from this article to "pro-Apple kidiots are taking over HN?"

To me it seems the article is only talking about trends and survey results, is not espousing any particular "Apple Love" and is not aiming to delve into the mechanics of how Apple is bettering its brand -- its merely making observation.

Your comment to Apple lovers really applies to Linux as well, so I'm not sure why you need to make the distinction.

I guess corporate users would generally move their desktops (either to the next version, or to something else) because they feel it creates extra value (maybe better stability, easier management or whatever), and this outweighs the cost of the change. Or, from fear that if they don't keep up, in future they may be stuck with a larger problem.

Corporate desktops that are sticking to XP aren't moving anywhere; not even to Vista/7. Obviously nobody is creating sufficient incremental value - yet. Thus, one really can infer nothing as to where they might end up migrating down the road.

Lack of "proper exchange client" or "advanced active directory features" (?) also probably doesn't mean much -- its not as if anyone has the "One True Way (tm)" of doing email, scheduling or ldap. Corps do walk away from Exchange/AD (or any other technology for that matter) if sufficient value is added overall.
Incorrect headline.

"ISPs refuse to censor Pirate Bay"
I will happily accept your $10 in exchange for 5% of same. :)
It's also slated to be built in to Firefox(https://wiki.mozilla.org/Taskfox) soon, so picking up on it now would be a good idea.
Driving is fun, to be sure, but there are enough of us that would love to be done with it. I currently commute an hour and a half each way in DC traffic. I LOVE driving, but due to other people, all the fun is taken out of getting to work. If I could hit a button and just 'get there' via auto-pilot while I finished work, that would be ideal (for me).

I could turn off auto-pilot, but then there wouldn't be any point. I think that the magic in getting auto-pilot to work in cars is in enforcing that enough other cars on the road are using it too. I truly believe that so long as there are any cars on the same road as you not on auto-pilot, that it will negate most of the benefits for everybody.

Regarding human error, I think that most of what you listed would count. The car is a human operated machine, which means that most of the time, wrecks are our fault. Unless the wheel falls off unexpectedly, or the brakes fail, you could pretty much always attribute a failure to the operator -- or the operator of the other car where applicable.

I would also not like to be rid of driving as a pastime, but until you do, I'm also not sure that there's any point in automating the driving experience. So while I am sympathetic to your point, the pain of my daily commute is sympathetic to the other.
I missed that list. thnx
Whichever side causation lies on, the VC as a whole will lose more (have less to gain) than the entrepreneur as a whole.
We've been hearing lately that "the kids" prefer the degraded sound quality of MP3 files: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511615

Anyone want to bet that, a year or two from now, we'll be reading that "the kids" prefer listening to sped-up music?

Also, I object to The Waitresses being labelled "one hit wonders". The author apparently forgot about the ubiquitous holiday song "Christmas Wrapping".
The more people in middle management (i.e. people who are not officers and people who are not leaf nodes) the more difficult it will be for the organization to make rational decisions, and the more compromises will be made to the quality of the product in lieu of other considerations (schedule, metrics based on invalid assumptions, etc.) In general, these people will find that they have no actual way to contribute to the product, so they will attempt to contribute to the organization instead, which bogs everyone else down.

On the technical front, CS will not teach you anything relevant to the practice of software development. You will not learn things like how to correctly factor code for automated testing, or good strategies for source code control branching and build pipelining.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_there_any_text_file_containing_...
http://www.apsaulters.net/downloads.html
Ah, ok, then what you want is linode (or slicehost, although it's more expensive). You get images that you can expand or contract (in terms of memory, disk, cpu) as you need. That won't take you into the territory of horizontal scaling, but it should be good enough to get started without spending too much.
What is your prediction for how long we will have to wait for autonomous driving?
What are you talking about? This isn't a pro-Apple article, despite its protective coloration. As you point out, the article isn't even about Apple. And the author hardly sounds like a partisan fan of Apple, or even of Linux. His tone is that of someone who is being forced to go on a particularly unpleasant diet.
I'm the type of guy who goes and googles this kind of thing..... It looks like halfnium is a byproduct of zirconium production (1:50 ratio is what the pdf says), and that we have a decent chunk of reserve (worldwide), compared with the rate it's mined.

It's a riveting read: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/zirconium/m...
Point taken; however, if that is the argument that he is trying to make, it is not made very clearly and the title is misleading. There is a subtle but very distinct difference between "What is out is not significantly better" and "What is out is significantly better but not cheap/prevalent/simple enough for me to buy it". Because, yes, what exists now is more than good enough for people who don't particularly like or use tech. Yes, some people still use Win95, but to say that Win 7 is the same thing with "a few shiny baubles" is laughable.

As far as long-term effects are concerned, there may be a time when we decide that there's not much left to do, but I'm willing to bet that it's not anytime even remotely soon. A lot of people have been impressed or overwhelmed by the things we achieved during the 90's and 00's; their kids won't be. Looking at some of the areas from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569103, you can see how far we have yet to go.
download here: http://drop.io/seductive_interactions
So while the data doesn't lie, it also doesn't tell the full story. There is money out there for good ideas, particularly ones that are capital efficient and located somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

Capital efficient is what well-run Internet companies can be. Most other sectors don't have this luxury.

And it seems to me that Silicon Valley may be a leading indicator. Its higher order terms just seem to have bigger coefficients than the rest of the investment community.
i should add that its important to determine what the people who start the group want from it in the first place... ever been to a tech cocktail, silicon prairie social, or social media camp event? The lack of quality interaction that exists there is one of the reasons we choose not to go crazy with publicizing

second tuesday of the month or whatever meets the consistency principle, note that you didn't switch until the event was established

the number of people needed to make it worthwhile depends entirely on the frequency with which you have the event
I can't understand: is this a joke?

Oh well.

6. Take a couple of hostages and record them begging for this company to land you a job. Originality is a great way to impress an interviewer.
low-margin, high-grief corporate IT hardware business

Low-margin? I used to work at a large bank, and I recall Dell charged them some £25 for a plain USB optical mouse with just 2 buttons and a mouse-wheel. I'm sure many businesses could do with these kinds of margins.
Yes, however spammers are known to operate on very tight margins (they make a few pennies per million users or something) so even slight additional operating costs can seriously affect their bottom line, possibly sending a profitable operation into the red.

So eventually forcing spammers to employ humans instead of bots is not for naught.
The lifelog.

Short explanation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm

Long explanation:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...
Let me preface this by saying my favorite language is Clojure.

I've been writing Ruby professionally for two years. Yes, there is truth to your perception. The standard library is immature, the standard 1.8 VM is slow, and the language design has significant warts. There is no language spec, and they just keep adding new ways to do things.

As of 1.8, there are 6 different ways to create a lambda expression. Each one acts slightly differently. There's yet another another in 1.9.
After voting, I see:

"More than 280,597 people have voted.

73.16% (for the proposed documents)

26.84% (for the existing documents)"
So I guess the thinking is tha 5% is worth the access to other VCs?

I ask because $10k seems ridiculously small: if I had 4 people saving in my team, we could get $10k together in a month or two.
Enjoy Youtube Video From Desktop
Micro- optimization tips to increase performance
Ask HN: Is there an archive, dataset or RSS feed of all HN posts?
I know searchYC is great, but i'm looking for the actual dataset of posts. Either as an RSS feed or more likely as massive file. There were some datasets available up until about 7 months ago, but wondering if there are any up-to-date options?
You can't stop the signal.
Given that Apple has the better platform the only thing Apple needs to do to beat Windows is:

LOWER THE PRICE.
Just use a hash table.
Unfortunately for Apple, Microsoft doesn't need a brand. It already has millions of people who are locked in to applications that depend upon Microsoft software.
Well, now I know what sort of logic I can expect in his book!