skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are ways to make this more efficient in terms of numbers of robots and distance traveled per bag. You can have larger dump trucks on major thoroughfares, and use the smaller dustbots to manage the last mile to the houses.

I'm with you that this version seems highly inefficient, but there are obvious ways to improve and optimize.
Django-Based Blog on Google App Engine Tutorial, Part 1
Yes, rather "argue", the article is actually about: persuading, negotiating, debating, reasoning, communicating.

Not just being "argumentative".

In Canada, we call the class on rhetoric "Critical Thinking".
> If you want to debate me that all great scientists really do go around saying "Look at me I'm so great; I'm the most important working scientist of the age"

I really think most of the really great scientists have consistently _thought_ that to some degree. Some of them have been better or worse at internalizing, and had different degrees of political sensibility.
I know people named Avi that are assuredly Indian. Goodjob being presumptuous.
NDAs are a pain.  Can we fix this?
I'm doing work for a larger company and trying to get information from other companies. Each new company I talk to requires this back and forth of NDA's and negotiating not so much the content of the NDA, but who's legal team will review it.

<insert weeks of my life wasted>

Can't we get everyone one the same page? Perhaps something called OpenNDA? Am I naive for thinking this can be solved?
The article started out fine. It's an interesting topic that I've never really wondered about and it made me curious. And then I came across things like this:

Instincts are coded for by genes. Genes are made up of DNA strands which use a sort of language, Gattaca. In English words, a man’s instinct may have been quite simple, and something like the following:

"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests. If they have such a thing, feel sexually repulsed. Increase this feeling as they are bigger, rounder, wobblier."

One might argue that a man with such an instinct would do well, in the light of the changes in the bodies of women, to delete this programming entirely. However, a much smaller mutation could alter the programming to:

"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests. If they have such a thing, feel sexually stimulated. Increase this feeling as they are bigger, rounder, wobblier."

Can we say "pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo" here? Just because it's a smaller change in a natural-language description of an instinct, it doesn't necessarily mean that the mutation is smaller. The author is making a huge, unwarranted and rather silly assumption about the relationship between the DNA structure and the complexity of the natural-language description of the consequences of that DNA structure.
I'd like to hear some advice about this, too. anyone? anyone?!?

I've often thought it would be awesome to find a personal assistant/drill-sergeant/project-manager to keep me on track. I can't figure out how to pull that off, though...

Instead I remain frustrated with myself (and my 42 minute attention span)
I'm pretty sure it usually means other things. I know for sure that there are Chinese people named 'Bing'.
I quoted the name to make clear that it was a joke, as I assumed that they were Indian. But I fail at "clear", and I'll take my lumps. :)
> I'd have thought that even a nimble active man might freeze in the night if a layer of fat could make the difference.

No, a large amount of regularly exercised skeletal muscle can produce an incredible amount of heat, even in idle state.
sometimes....a person has something meaningful that they want to say/share with other people. i know it sounds crazy, and it's a total reversal of the more popular idea: "make sure to post something at least once a week" but it does happen.

fugazi (as i remember it): if you had to get paid to say it, you probably had nothing important to say.

on the other hand..when someone has something important to say, the mind is just looking for any way to get it out there, and above the noise.

i believe that when something is really eating at you, something about society, something about the world, a perspective, an idea -- when things cannot be summarized into a snippet or tweet, or a single blog post, which is to say, when they are truly meaningful - then there's relief once you know it made it to the audience.

all that effort put into the book, or whatever, was working towards that release....this is why some people don't get what makes great art - the creative world seems 'flimsy', lacks orientation, weird -- but the good stuff usually very much has a direction - just an atypical one, that breaks the conventions. there is a drive in these people....and it's not money, it's an idea, and they are its slaves.

huck finn has been described as something inside of twain - huck finn needed to get out. everytime twain talked to his black friends, everytime twain read the newspaper, everytime twain reflected on those trips abroad, huck finn scratched on the inside, trying to get out. yah, the book made money, but i'm sure there was a real high inside of twain when he knew it had been read, when he knew that finn got his say, when the book was being discussed.

perhaps someday an idea will rise up in your mind, not a business idea, not something that can get you some more pillows for your sofas, but a meaningful idea, an idea that affects your core, an idea that you feel needs to be shared, and then you won't wonder anymore why some people write things like an "authors reward is to be read."

like i mentioned earlier, those kind of ideas take a lot of work to share, you don't just write a blog post -- truly meaningful ideas, ideas outside the current social mindsets, have to build up their language, their perspectives, their new contexts, over chapter, over time and to bring others with them, they have to do it well. until they finish that hard work, the idea is festering inside, trying to get out.
Goog-411 Now Tells You Intersections
WSJ: Crazy Compensation and the Crisis
I think what the data shows is that the average sort of wobbles around a bit. Check out the update to my post for a new image link to see it varying throughout the day.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html
The part of me that you mock, who wants to pound my chest and watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship and write abrasive comments on internet forums, I now realize is a gentle creature who needs nurture, and the direct source of much that I value.
The MySQL load is much higher than 200 Hz. Depending on how they do it, what you want to count as dependent load, and how you want to measure it all, you have a scalar for the average number of followers to update per tweet, work to update indices, etc.
CAN this be solved? Yes, I'm sure it can be. But WILL it be solved? Probably not. Large companies are like this, and they often have good reason for making the process difficult. The best approach is to just be polite and respectful. Offer helpful advice, but I've found that just getting on someone's good side can make all the difference.

Best of luck, to you!
"TAX on every energy consumer" (FALSE).

Not all forms of energy invovle extracting a stable form of carbon from the earth.

Nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, all provide electricity and the "carbon tax" need only apply to energy sources that are a net carbon gain. The tipping point between wind and coal is really close so a tiny subsady over several years could replace all coal power plants with wind farms over time (think 40+ years).

You might suggest that effing with electricity production is a bad idea but there are huge discrepency's between the cost of electricity around the county and it does not have much impact.
This article attempts to draw parallels between tobacco an porn in the promotion, use, addiction, and rationalization of the "substances."

I'm not moved. Tobacco kills and injures people even innocent bystanders. There may be a case for psychological damage, but the author herself admits that the damage may be a learned reaction. At the end she looks at the political aspects and says the the political supporters (by innuendo) are left wing liberals like Obama and Henry Waxman.

Whoa there Nellie! Then I see "Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review." Says it all.
Carbon neutral but not global warming neutral. Methane is worse, like 1000 times worse, per molecule, than CO2.
He had a dedicated researcher on the Baroque Cycle books.
Submit to HN, reddit, digg, etc.

Contact relevant and/or popular blogs/news outlets with non-form emails as to how and why they should write about your site. Getting on Lifehacker was a huge boost for one of my side projects.

If you can afford it buy the keywords on google, yahoo, msn that are extremely relevant.

Post to various web application directories(this was probably the least effective use of time)
This sounds like it would turn my hobbies into yet another job. I understand where it's coming from, but sometimes I like working on things that I don't have to finish.
> Yes, rather "argue", the article is actually about: persuading, negotiating, debating, reasoning, communicating.

Which are all forms of argument. (Ok, the last one is more general than "argue" but it is far too broad to be useful in this context.) One of the minor points the author made is that people often try to downplay disagreement or avoid dealing with it to their detriment. Acknowledge the disagreement up front and employ persuasion, negotiation, and reasoned debate to come to an agreement that both parties live with.
Criticizing people for all sorts of valid reasons and treating them decently are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to know someone personally in order to give a fair critique of their published ideas, or to know that the reason they sued you was stupid. Not everything is a personal attack (and you seem to take criticism of Wolfram more personally than he does. Note that this is an observation, and not intended as a personal attack on you!).

Again, I'm only defending the criticisms that I've read, which do not include Hecker's. They seem fair to me.
Thanks! I've been trolling the Wikipedia pages for both of them but that's easily the best summary I've come across so far. =)
> …how it all worked…

Refers to building systems in general. How do you build a solution to a problem? This is a skill, and it is learned and taught.

> …don't build models…

Refers to mental modelling, correct. I don't do that until I have broken the problem down into mentally tangible pieces, and then – only to accommodate for the particular tool that I'll be using – i.e a programming language/famework/hardware of this kind or another.
Agreed, and it's not limited to books either. My startup's (http://ThinkCode.TV) aim will be selling high-quality programming screencasts. We immediately decided that the first episode of each course should be free.
The way the author phrased this is unfortunate. However, there are very good reasons to believe that even small mutations could have resulted in large changes in morphology or behavior. A mutation in even a single base-pair could result in cascading effects. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox
Highly recommended: Creature From Jekyll Island - A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

Amazon reviews: http://tinyurl.com/lbowtv

Video presentation by author: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6507136891691870450
yes but generally you upload simultaneously to several people - that has a big impact (less so on BW but on load there). Plus if you have multiple prior downloads (obviously not so applicable here) then it starts ro add up if your seeding them.

Ask any ISP :) P2P sucks for them.
I live and die by lists personally. I will make a list of things to do before I'm done for the day and I try to knock the list out. But I also have a drop-dead end of the day time. Don't pull an 18 hour day unless you're so deep in the zone you don't realize you've done it!
"Lesser" stuff?

Orkut was dominated by Brazilians in 2004. That is at a time when Friendster was the social media darling and Facebook was still called TheFacebook. When Fotolog was huge in Brazil, Flickr was still a MMOG.

You just can't say that Brazil adopted "lesser" stuff, when the "other" stuff didn't even exist in a comparable form.
CocoaHeads Amsterdam Beginner iPhone Development Presentation
Yes, of course I've used flick scroll. You don't think a HNer who owns 2 Kindles would own an iPhone? I have 3 iPhones! (Three! Three iPhones! Wah ha ha.)

It's still not the same. You can't get AWAY from the content and get a higher/further view. It's different. Maybe I'm failing at explaining - but while flick scroll is BETTER, it still falls short. By a lot.

I am most interested in KM and information science, and a book addict, and a crazy user interface designer. I have paid much attention to these things. :)

BTW, there was that study a few days ago that said that physically taking a step back improved puzzle scores. How bout that?
I have noticed a bug tracking system works better for a one-man one-project setup. You can pretty much express everything in tickets/bugs. I am using lighthoseapp.com and its working just fine for me.
It's a 50/50. I quite agree that the internet is a mind-blowing thing, and I had to smile when I went to see Star Trek last week and couldn't help thinking that my phone is smaller and more functional than the Starfleet communicators (although I imagine the latter have better signal quality and the battery doesn't go flat every day).

But our physical environment changes a lot more slowly than our digital one. I don't get a 'woah' moment as often as I'd like, but things are improving slowly. Certainly, some of this is down to my individual design sensibility. As context, I felt 'disappointed in the future' a lot during the 1990s, until one day I opened a magazine and saw a picture of the new VW beetle. Actually, 10 years on I still think it looks futuristic.
That's a cool idea. I think 37 Signals did that with Getting Real (first an ebook, and then printable at lulu.com.)
Post-Consumer Prosperity
I really really doubt that "all they have to do is append" 140 chars" to a table.
I can't seem to find info on this, but it doesn't look like the "trim" ATA command made it into this spec, which is a bit of a shame. This would allow the OS (well, the file system or some smart block layer) to mark regions of the device to be discarded, which would help avoid constantly copying data between banks in SSDs.

Apparently, Win7 has support for it, and on the hardware side, the latest OCZ Vertex firmware apparently does too. Last I heard, Intel are waiting until there's an official spec.
Ask HN: I'm doing a series of lectures on entrepreneurship - what should i say?
I've been asked to do a series of 12 lectures on entrepreneurship, and the ins and outs of starting a company. Each lecture will be 2 hours, and will be given to a group of people that have just started, or are thinking about starting a company.<p>The idea is to be very hands-on, and talk about what's important, what the traps are, what to spend your time on, etc. The goal is that the group will go out and start their companies, and hopefully have a higher chance of success because of these lectures.<p>So the question is: What should I talk about? What do you think is important? What do you wish someone had told you when you started out?<p>The audience isn't particularly technical, and many of the companies are in sales, services and other non-tech industries.
Happens to me too. I've found that having a collaborator really helps to get things done, because I don't want to let them down. I'm almost at the point where I won't start projects unless I have a collaborator.

Maybe the next step is to have users? I have an app I'd like to have users for, but it isn't quite ready yet. Maybe once you have actual users that will keep you motivated as well.
Despite crazy rules, America is still a great place to do business
Just think about who you're building the product for and how you can help them.
Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships
> I'd also let the company know you are doing so

Don't.

You've already told them that you want to be paid. They've already said no.

It's almost always a mistake to threaten. It's almost always a mistake to accept an offer to stay after you've accepted an offer somewhere else. It's almost always a mistake to make an offer to stay to someone who has accepted an offer somewhere else.

The only reasonable time to address issues is before the employee has accepted an offer elsewhere.
Henry Blodget is a Dope
I'm happy to see all these content-creating people come out of the woodwork!
BakerTweet: announcing via Twitter when freshly baked goods are ready.
Yahoo Meme is not being placed as a twitter knockoff. Rather, they will push it as a tool to spread links, pictures, news, etc.

It's for the kind of thing that you don't want bookmark with delicious, but want to share with your friends. The user base will certainly be different, too. The user from Yahoo Meme will have the same profile from MySpace.
I don't see the value in Scoble's argument, if he has one. I don't see the point of comparing the amount of tweets/sec with the rate of Google queries. They are just very different things, in their essence, purpose, way of usage.

It would be more interesting (maybe) comparing the number of Twitter search queries with Google's, at least we would be talking about similar operations.
Sure, this "evolution-x.com" stuff is just someone's personal writings, but the academic and peer-reviewed study of how human features were produced by evolution is definitely a valid field. Yeah, it's hard to arrive at any definite conclusions since we can't make direct observations of our own evolution, but it's still the right paradigm to use in thinking about these questions.
Thanks. For some reason, I think I know exactly what you mean re how to pronounce each tone.

I usually say "bing" to rhyme with "ping" as in "ping news.ycombinator.com".
Most of us are trying to create something of value that will allow us to get away from the corporate job frustrations.
In the end you might be working longer/harder than that frustrating job, but at least it will a) provide for you and your family b)something you are proud of c) enjoy while doing it

A finished project will help in that direction.
Hmm:

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Reference #97.4573aad1.1243623691.7b13fa9
NDA's are the bane of my life!

My boss is paranoid about people stealing our ideas - pretty much any vistor to the office has to sign a ream of documents (not literally but it feels like it :)) just to get in the door. And imagine what out-sourcing work to a contractor takes (my new solution is to in-house and hire new people, mostly top piss the boss off :)).

So, yes, OpenNDA is a great idea.

But as already pointed out the whole point is to obfusticate and delay access to the information. It's like a polite way to say to someone yes we would like to work with you, but please wait two weeks whilst we ask round & check you out to make sure your kosher. Tying them up in paperwork for the same period is, apparently, more polite....
If we're talking about the keynote, I'm not sure how much more technical live-blogging could be than the usual suspects: macrumors, engadget(?), etc. They all always blog the announced specs of new stuff, and without a leak or a hands-on, what else could they do?
This post is _really_ outdated and just causes people getting started to get confused. See the link jeffforester posted for more up-to-date (circa may 2009) instructions.
Technically it is zero sum, but bittorrent prioritizes peering based on how fast your internet connection is. So somebody on dial-up internet probably isn't going to upload to anyone, while someone who has high speed internet is going to upload to many people. So somebody with high speed internet access might upload twice as much data as they downloaded.

And while I don't think ISPs really care about you maxing out a phone line, they will notice you maxing out a broadband line. And bittorent will do that.
I tried Basecamp once for a side project, but I quickly found myself not using it. No particular reason. I just didn't feel like I got much value out of it.

Trac is pretty nice because it's lightweight and is tied right into my repository (if you use SVN). It seems to fit my workflow better.
Also think of stuff like latencies. Current USB drives add like ~5ms of latency. That's doable with normal drives (which have ~10ms access times), but is killing for SSD's (which have <0.1ms access times).
Where does he claim that this is a scientific theory? I think he just makes an hypothesis.
What is the "real stuff" by name? I am not familiar and would like to investigate further.
No, this is why:

http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html
> Dorothy: “Dad, you look tired. Want to sit down?”

> Me: “Thanks. Where did you have in mind?”

> Dorothy: “Ben & Jerry’s.”

There's a difference between argument through reason and manipulation. I think this guy is teaching his kids to be manipulative.

The little dialog above shows that the daughter doesn't care a wit about how her father feels, she's just using the emotion as a point of leverage. If I had kids and they did this to me, it would sadden me.
Not even worth talking about at this point
I find it interesting that no comments (as of writing this) touch on the other intersting issue the article brought up: that Americans "prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change." I think that's an interesting point, especially given the focus of the HN crowd. We often look to technology and innovation as the disruptive element in society, and one can find many examples in history of how it has been exactly that. But in these modern times, I'd be inclined to think that true change doesn't happen until the politics catch up to the technology and accept its disruption as the norm. Historically, it seems to me that change always flows from technology => social/cultural => political. When it reaches that last stage, that's when the change really takes hold.
These are pretty much the standard arguments for our current monetary system. I think this video is a bit out there but for different reasons that Krugman might suggest. What Krugman fails to realize is that the divide between rich and poor has grown a lot since the floating currency system proposed by Friedman. That Keynes was part of the group that designed the Brenton Woods agreement isn't brought up by Krugman or that the U.S. survived many recessions without expanding the money supply. There was a very severe recession that started in the early 20s and the government did nothing and we never read it about because it ended quickly. Considering that our financial system has never been less stable than it is today it's so funny hearing people still suggest that the conventional understanding of monetary policy is in any way correct.
Well, there actually there are 3 things that make me mad about PayPal:

(1) Bad process (users have to create accounts/ passwords before they can checkout)

(2) Rejection of some credit card numbers (happened to some of our customers, due to their PayPal's security measures - the cards worked on other sites)

(3) Blocking of merchant accounts (happened to us twice. Only way to resolve the issue was entering my drivers license + id number, which were not accepted - spent several days trying to get it fixed by phone)

You're absolutely right that one could probably avoid issue (1) by choosing their $30 plan and integrating it into our own website. But I am pretty sure (2) and (3) will still apply, which is nothing but horrible if you are a small business.

Another question: Does anyone have an idea why there is no competition in the market so far? I suppose there must be kind of regulatory issues, although they must be even harder in the US where there is competition.

[AND thanks for your code-offer - I think I'll get that done on my own anyways ;) If not, I'd be happy to get back to you ;))]