skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have quit smoking for over a year now using these and have been through at least 15 different models. They break easy and as demand has increased, their quality has worsened. One supplier I know who has made a killing selling them says when He first started in business, 10% of his sales would be returned as DOA. Now it is ~40%. He has a 2 week warranty in place on parts but sells them with only a small mark-up(~$50) compared to the mall stores(~$125). They retail for $12-$17 wholesale. When he first started in business, there were under 10 suppliers in the US. A year later there is over a hundred and counting.

There are a couple of legitimate concerns in using e-cigs though most of the scaremongering has been concocted by organisations associated with the pharmaceutical industry who fear these like Saudi Arabia fears lithium-powered cars.

1: Though an ingredient might be classified as FDA approved, it does not mean it is safe to inhale. Recently it was discovered that workers at a popcorn factory were suffering from a deadly lung ailment due to a synthetic flavour that replicates butter which they were inhaling. Some avid consumers of the popcorn have also died due to the disease. One won a $6 million payout posthumously. The chemical remains FDA approved. There is a new e-cig flavour out every other day - from red bull to black tea. No-one knows how these flavours might affect our lungs. One supplier who had his mint flavour tested discovered that it contained methanol. He quickly halted it's sale. Others are not as cautious. I have never seen a list of ingredients on any bottle of e-liquid I own.

2: The main ingredient in the liquid is propylene glycol. This is the same substance that is found in fog machines. It is found in many cosmetics and toothpastes too. PG is generally recommended as safe though its cousin diethylene glycol which acts in the exact same manner, tastes the same though costs far less is deadly. Recently in Nigeria over 80 babies died because a teething formula imported from China which was supposed to contain PG had been substituted with DG. How long before someone wanting to cut corners in China does the same with e-cigs. Hopefully never - but it is a legitimate concern.

Regardless, I do suggest to everyone I meet who smokes to try these. Some are amazed, some laugh. They are not for everyone. I keep a site updated with relevant news at http://www.e-cignews.com
The Simpsons was never a brilliant show. It was good, and you can still watch old Simpsons and enjoy it, but it was never mindboggling genius.

Ditto Monty Python. For all the clever ideas, the execution often left something to be desired. Once you know the skits, you start to realize how poorly many of them are done. Monty Python has some exceptions, however: the Life of Brian has some excellent moments, and post-Python many of the team members did some great stuff.

In a way we can relate that to startups and design. If you have a brilliant new idea, then you're a gem up to the moment that somebody else does your idea better or goes further with it. If you take an old idea but polish it till it shines, you don't have the same novelty but you've got something that will last for a long time.

I can't think of much TV to compare to, however, because most television is so incredibly poor. Arrested Development, perhaps? I can see that one withstanding the test of time.
I'd rather see the 24 hour cable news networks taking the beating but hey, gotta start somewhere. We'll all be much better off when journalism and news are not controlled by a handful of powerful companies with their own agendas and political biases to consider. A thousand different perspectives averaged out is pretty close to the truth IMO.
The article title is misleading. Twitter bought the rights to use the image and they did this on istockphoto.com.
It's vaporware, it's promising something that's been promised before, we've never seen this idea work before, the technology will almost certainly be very faulty. To top it off, Microsoft sucks at game design, and developers are notoriously slow for taking hold of new ideas. They can't do what Nintendo did with the Wii because Nintendo provided both hardware and software, and Microsoft can't do that.
10% Of Twitter Users Account For 90% Of Twitter Activity
The world is not safe with this brutal, cash-strapped country building nuclear weapons (and imprisoning its own people in concentration camps).

Too bad the cowardly U.S. government does not do anything but "negotiate".
Raising and providing for your kids is the most important thing in life

I've heard a fair number of people say this, as a social piety line - one of those things everyone nods their head at, with which you're not supposed to disagree. But I do disagree. Certainly it's important. But there's nothing more important than reproduction and the endless family trance? I refuse to accept that.

I observe a lot of people doing a passable job of raising and providing for their kids and using that as an excuse for never pursuing what they really wanted. It is the socially acceptable way to plug the existential void (for twenty years, anyway). Apart from its obvious flaws is the ironic fact that in the end, it's a lousy, dispiriting example to set for one's kids.

I applaud your defense of responsibility. But after years of struggling with this, one thing I am sure of is that it's not as simple as TV moralists want to make it.
I know people who have been actively recruited from one large high-tech company to another, so I don't personally put much stock in this...
You could conceivably ssh into anything, so you could just leave copies _everywhere_.
MLB Blogs updated with MLB News
Up to the minute MLB News which is posted on the site 24/7 in the form of a blog. The site also contains detailed information on each MLB team which includes their history and some fast facts about each MLB team. This is one of the top sources for MLB News, and is one of the most popular MLB Blogs on the internet.
She was 14 person-months pregnant. Of course she must have been considered mom.
Why is it up to the US government (only)?
Weird. I write smarter than I talk.
If you think that the people here haven't all heard Hicks then you've got another thing coming. Bill Hicks is almost a prerequisite to growing up at all intelligent, not because he's good - I despise his style of comedy - but because he's quoted so thoroughly that one can't help but be saturated with Hicksisms.

We don't need that. We already subscribe to that. I'm on Hacker News because I think the rat race is bullshit and I want to spend my time doing meaningful things. I'd hope that's why you're here too. Posting something saying that nothing matters and we should all lighten up is going perfectly with the themes of Hacker News, but it's adding nothing of interest save for Hicks fans.

Against the grain would be an article telling us that progress is a crime and that conformity is the key to a healthy society. But I'd hate to see that here, too, because it's equally bullshit.
I think having kids make starting a company harder. You simply have that much less time to focus on your startup.
The first-person narrative linked at the bottom of the article is really worth a read : http://www.gadling.com/2007/12/06/infiltrating-north-korea-p...
Where were you the past 8 years? Just curious.
I think these devices are definitely a step in the right direction but I am not so sure that regulation of them is pointless. Surely at the very least we can agree that all drugs (and e-cigarettes are certainly a drug delivery device) should meet some minimum standards for quality, purity and safety. For example, does the dose of nicotine in a cartridge match what is advertised? Also, it may be worthwhile to restrict the sale of e-cigarettes to adults.

It should be very easy [1] to show that the e-cigarette is as safe or safer than a cigarette. The problem of the fake smoke is easy enough to deal with-- simply manufacture a version that does not include propylene glycol. The fake smoke sounds obnoxious anyway. The whole reason for banning cigarettes in public are the second-hand effects; it seems silly to replicate an aspect of them.

Once the safety issues are worked out it just becomes a morality issue: do we care about cigarettes because they are addictive or because of their public health implications? I would argue that, as a society, we should concern ourselves primarily with the latter. But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the push-back is because of the addictive nature of the nicotine.

1. Generally when you introduce a new drug or device that is similar to an existing product, there is a much lower regulatory bar to cross because the precursor has already gone through the more rigorous demonstration. However, there may be more red tape in this case since the FDA doesn't even have explicit authority to regulate tobacco yet.
Monty Python were certainly uneven, but if there's ever been any sketch comedy that can touch them at their best, I'd love to see it.

I disagree with the premise of the article too. Great comedy is timeless. The stuff that wears off is the stuff that didn't go very deep to begin with.
I didn't say other countries weren't also being cowardly.
Sail of the Century
Mahalo’s Case Of Mistaken Identity
Yes, so, it really should be: instead of spending billions on weapons, don't spend it on anything.
As the person who made the coding mistake, I think the lesson drawn from this is the benefit of open sourcing Keyczar. I've seen this exact type of timing attack before, but overlooked it in my own code. There's a real advantage to having fresh eyes find bugs like this.

Thanks to Nate and other people who have been contributing. Keep the bug reports coming.
UK'S BEST BEACHES REVEALED
It seems to indicate that, but I don't think that's the intention. When someone tries to log in (and succesfully passes the username/password stage), then you receive a phone call, because only your telephone numbers are registered to the account. It's implicit in the process.
Event-driven. There's a lot of motion that way - Enterprise (usually across a SOA) as well as application space - look at how D-Bus is used in linux apps. The trend towards real-time data flows (think twitter) will speed this trend up I think. OO might still apply in an implementation, but as an architecture I think it's not always as good as thinking in terms of events.
Ask HN: Can iPhone applications be used on iPod touch?
I have heard that iPhone and IPod touch are almost same, only that later doesnt not have phone features. Is this true?
Can it Touch run IPhone Apps ? like games , bloggign software etc?
The Math Gender Gap Explained
No kids. I'm only 44 and still not old enough yet. My mother will have to rely on my siblings for grandkids... I'm still having too much fun.
Monty Python's the best sketch comedy I've ever seen, don't get me wrong. I have the complete set, and it's the standard by which I judge all other sketch comedy.

At the same time, as you said, they were very unpolished. Sometimes they'd ruin good jokes with bad acting. When everything aligned, as it did in, say, the courtroom scene, or the parrot sketch, they were stunning.

The Simpsons very occasionally had moments like that, but returning to their earlier work I found that they too rarely were full-blown terrific. They faded with time not because good things fade, but because they weren't as good as we thought when we were younger and less experienced in comedy. Meanwhile, Shakespeare's comedies are still hilarious, and they've lasted for centuries.
In the U.S. Why do you ask?
9 year old son, 7 year old daughter. They're both way into Scratch.
Ramanuja redicovered (mathematics cofnerence)
Ramanuja is regarded as a mysterious mathematician who till date had not been understood fully. This was a recent conference on his work held in IIIT B
Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil
A cofounder of Arbor, and one of the heaviest travelers there, had 4 very-well-adjusted, very-happy kids. It's extremely hard to avoid giving offense when your message is "what you're doing is hurting your children", so it's probably best just to keep that sentiment to yourself.
> Given that Microsoft has long been the target of antitrust cases, there’s no way the company would have done this on purpose.

Yeah - right. I suppose exactly so.
CBMS networks is a startup company that develops chords detection technology and Chords! is one of the product that is based on this technology.
I am co-owner of CBMS networks and fully developed Chords! as a separate product.

Now the question is could you call Chords! a startup? From mine perspective yes - since it is brand new product. If this is not according to HN definitions, than I am sorry for posting it here.
I was reading HN for more than 3 years now, without posting, so no need to register.
I will have to disagree. While I'm not a huge fan of The Simpsons, I can recognize that the comedic landscape is forever changed as a result of The Simpsons and Monty Python. In dismissing those that implemented the idea first, you're minimizing the genius involved. Things like humor just become dated, that doesn't mean that it isn't genius for its time. It just becomes so integrated into society that we become immune to it.

It'd be like suggesting Newton wasn't a genius because a 12-year-old can understand Newtonian mechanics.

There are those gems that survive the test of time and remain funny (for me: "Who's on First", "Caddyshack", "Office Space", "Dumb and Dumber"), but that doesn't minimize the landscape altering humor of such stuff as Austin Powers, South Park, Napoleon Dynamite, even if you're sick of hearing "Yeah Baby, Yeah!"

And yes, Arrested Development is bloody amazing.
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What was the upside to "favicon.ico" over some kind of meta tag in the document header? Also: the notion of standardizing on a 16x16 square is intellectually offensive.
Yeah I am trying to find out. They are here at javaone - doing too much UI on the server side does seem like a real mistake for a tool like this. One of the nice things of things like this (and cappaccino) is that the server side becomes freed from worrying about what the client is doing/has open etc...
yeah, on a mailing list. but if I'm twice as smart as I talk and three times as smart as I write, then assuming my IQ is constant, I would seem dumber if you read what I wrote (as it is 1/3rd my actual capacity) than if you listen to me talk, (as that is 1/2 my capacity.)

But that's just a dumb joke. As for the article, I think it misses the point... writing and talking are quite different. (and writing in different mediums is different) - But when you write, you have a chance to strike out all the really stupid shit you said, before hitting send.
On Spriting and Website Build Processes
Agreed, I definitely feel most comfortable with my Python on server-side, but the UI ability on this thing is beautiful. Too bad... I wish I was at JavaOne so I could ask these guys some questions regarding how easy it is to separate the two components.
I used to think like that as well before I launched TweetLinx - I was working on my news engine with peace of mind in my personal echo chamber when I realized that I might be able to make use of Twitter's buzz to introduce people to my company and technology. You can always expand your product line later - if there's easy traffic, sometimes it's worth taking.
Edownload is a segmented http file downloader in Erlang
I've found my humor threshold has increased dramatically over the last few years. I'm not really sure why; it just takes a lot more to make me laugh than it used to.
Hmm.

Content unavailable
Bruce Schneier's blog is down for maintenance.
No I don't think so ... I actually found this library as I was watching the GoogleIO Wave Keynote. When I saw what the wave team did with GWT, compiling Java => Javascript became a viable option in my mind. Before the demo, it had always been a mystery to me as to why anyone would want to use such an absurd amount of abstraction.
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ForeUI: Create Interactive & Skinnable Prototype then Run as DHTML
What's that got to do with the price of butter?
I know everyone in the tech community is drooling over this, but I'd give it 50/50 odds at best. The real advantage it has going for it is that Google can throw a lot of weight behind it and maybe push it through with sheer force of will.

Here's the problem with Wave: what is it? Every blog post I've read about it struggled with how to explain it. I read this entire post and I'm still not sure of how I'm supposed to use this thing or what pressing problem it solves. Even the videos I've seen are super long, presumably because you can't really show it off in 60 seconds. "Well, it's kind of a mix between email and IM, but also with wiki functionality and social networking...oh, and it's got these crazy widgets and media sharing and stuff. Hmmm...you really have to play with it to understand." 97% of the people I know wouldn't get that, and don't have the patience to figure it out. It seems like it's just too flexible, that it can be used for a million different things, which makes it hard to know how to use at first. Think about almost every successful web site out there and how easy they are to explain, especially when they first launched. You would have zero trouble explaining Google, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc. in a 60 second video.

Wave is like FriendFeed on crack, and FF is already dangerously close to being too much for most normal people to grok. I just don't see it catching on.
> But there's nothing more important than reproduction and the endless family trance? I refuse to accept that.

I think there are two interpretations. One is that having and raising kids is the most important thing you can do. This is, as you say, questionable (which is not to say that it's not extremely important to me, personally). The second, however, and the one I think tjic meant, is that if you do have kids, then raising them and providing for them is your primary responsibility. I think that's a lot harder to dispute.
Regarding the credibility of the twitvid.com people:

"It’s backed with money from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a group of angel investors, including Stanford’s Rajeev Motwani (early advisor to Google), Amidzad, former Google employees Georges Harik and Aydin Senkut, as well as XG Ventures, another group of former Googlers."

(From http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/23/twitvidcom-lets-you-tweet-...)

That's a pretty credible group, if you ask me...
Yes, I believe what you have heard is true. Ipod touch is like the iphone without the phone.
Impressive Microsoft Game Console Concept
There's a bit of the whole Dreamworks vs Pixar thing.

Monsters vs Aliens was cute, timely, and throughly enjoyable. UP was downright brilliant and clearly timeless. Pixar consistently produces a form of the art that is simply higher than Dreamworks can even approach.

We see this in stand up as well. There are comedians who are topical, or who test social norms. And then there are comedians like Brian Regan who tell jokes which appeal to everyone and always will. And then there are comedians like George Carlin who tells jokes which are topical, test social norms, AND manage to age well.

There's nothing wrong with telling jokes which don't age well. It's easier. If you're going to do a show which runs every night, or every week, for many many seasons: for goodness sake, tell some jokes with short shelf life! You'll never make it otherwise.

If you make a great animated film, and people pay to come see it, and they walk out with a smile on their faces, and that's what you set out to do: you have succeeded. If you wanted to make sure they were still smiling, after the 100th viewing, 20 years from now... well... then you're going to produce fewer movies, and you're going to work harder to do it. And maybe you go home more fulfilled at the end of the day. Or maybe you don't. shrug
That's a sad story. Personally, I tend to laugh at everything as much as I possibly can. I've heard that you live longer. And even if that's a lie, I'm living better.
I agree, Wave is really hard to explain, but once you see it in action, it actually becomes a lot easier to figure out.

Maybe one way to think about it as a more structured version of Etherpad, only that you can use it for collaborative editing and messaging at the same time.
What makes it misleading? It says just that. Although the article also says that by not buying the _exclusive_ rights to the image the 'cheap logo'-trick might backfire when other (twitter-like) websites would (legally) use the same image.

"Nothing is stopping people from making sites that ape, mock or build upon Twitter using its own official graphic."
See also Terry Pratchett's "Making Money"
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To throw different opinion here: I personally like the format of print newspaper.

- yes, they are "yesterday" news, but that isn't a problem for me. For most news, I just don't need to know instantly that they happened.

- by fliping the pages I can get better overview of what is going on in the world (comparing to clicking on links).

- It doesn't have the interaction element. I could better relax with print newspaper, since my mind don't need to think about adding comments to articles I read.

All in all, I'd say that I am as geeky as any of you, but for general news, I have found that print newspaper still provides better user experience for me, comparing the online news.
Threads, slow and buggy
Not only that but you should be able to add predictive text logic to the decision process: pick the next letter both based on the location of the key press and the next letter that we think you would type anyway. If you last typed a Q you probably next want a U not a J.

Edit: DougBXT claims below that the iPhone already does this.
Elegance of the code typically implies its maintainability. Not every maintainable code is elegant though :)
Not to come off sexist but in my experience the stereotype rang true in my high school experience, there were just as many girls as guys in the advanced math courses but performance was drastically different in the majority (though there were a few girls who did perform the same if not better than the rest of the class).

This probably has to do with culture more than ability, and I'm not talking terms of equality as the article suggests. People are still raised very different if they are a girl or a boy. Girls get dolls, tea sets, etc. Boys get legos, and videogames, etc. Maybe the boys get more spatial training in the way they are raised and maybe this is why I see a 11-2 boys to girls ratio in engineering and other advanced departments at my school.
It's clear that he didn't mean the first interpretation, because he said "your" kids, i.e. presupposing that you have them.

Primary responsibility? Sure, up to a point. Where that point is is what's in question. "Most important thing in life" is far too absolute. Is anything more dangerous than a socially acceptable opiate?
location /people-are-twice-as-smart-as-they-talk-three-times-as-smart-as-they-write {
serve static_article.html
}