skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't take this the wrong way -- I know where you're coming from, and it's natural to push the boundaries, especially for a hacker. But let's stop to appreciate how hilarious this comment looks to someone who majored in physics in the era just before the web. It's like eavesdropping on the gods as they complain about the quality of this year's batch of ambrosia.

You own a machine that returns a meaningful number for "height Empire State Building" and "height average male". In less than a second. And which will perform floating-point division for you, at the press of a few keys. And you're vaguely unhappy because you can't do it all in one step!

Now I know how Hans Bethe (acknowledged grandmaster of the slide rule, who routinely computed logarithms in his head) must have felt when he heard the young grad students comparing the features on their scientific calculators.

I wonder if tools like Wolfram Alpha will eventually succeed in doing for Fermi problems what Google did for Trivial Pursuit: Turning an activity that was formerly regarded as a touchstone of intelligence into a typing exercise. Estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago will be a lot less impressive when you can just type "piano tuners in Chicago" into a text box and get the answer back to within a decimal place.

Fortunately, right now typing "piano tuners in Chicago" into Alpha just makes Javascript crash in Safari, so I guess we humans can sleep soundly for a while longer. ;)
We use Prawn, read more about it here: http://github.com/blog/204-pdf-receipts. There's a code snippet in the comments that looks a lot like the code we use to generate the PDF.
We looked into it, and we'll take a look again, but as long as we don't profit from it via rakes and the like, it's legal.
"solar system volume / volume of grain of sand" works.
http://www54.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solar+system+volume+/...

or "planets volume / volume of grain of sand"
Makes me want to round up a troop of roombas, add a little swarming code, and have a robotic peace march down to the capital.

"Make install, not war", as they say.
If you want to learn Lua, _Programming in Lua_ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/) is the best book, by far.

The first edition is free online, though there are some changes between Lua 5.0 and 5.1 (most notably: the module system and the syntax for variable-argument functions), so if you get into the language, it's worth buying PiL2.

In my experience, Lua is most similar to Python, but with a cleaner overall design, and a more pronounced Scheme influence (real lambdas, coroutines, lexical scoping, etc.). It's a "smaller" language, in much the same way that Scheme is smaller than Common Lisp. OTOH, they've made it very easy to use with C (both calling C libraries and as a scripting layer for C), so having a smaller standard library is not a big deal. It's also trivially portable. (It's supposed to be easily usable with C++, but I haven't tried.)
from what we have seen, that's only if the house is making any money from the game. this is a friendly game and so should be safe under the law. see: http://www.pokerpages.com/articles/homepoker/augustine01.htm
Failure And Success Rates Of Nearly 200 Web 2.0 Internet Startup Companies
This is big news. VC funds rarely do this sort of thing. And Greylock is arguably the most prestigious fund in Boston.

http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html

Now 9 of the top 10 funds in our poll are headquartered in the Valley. The only exception is First Round, which is in Philadelphia (and whose lead partner called his blog "Redeye VC").
Why Facebook Will Never Be Twitter
Facebook has been getting a series of facelifts recently, and while Facebook itself is convinced that they’re doing it so their users can enjoy the service better and take advantage of all the features, we all know they’re trying to jack Twitter’s swagger.
http://www.battlebots.com/BattleBots.com/Home/Home.html

... for nations. But, one can only dream.
Extraordinary!

I tested both my company logos in it, and nothing came up. This means they don't infringe. :-)
The Technology Behind "I Can Haz Cheezburger"
Well that was a waste of time reading.
Except McHawaii.com, which is owned my Management Consultants of Hawaii, so McDonalds uses McHawaii.net instead. Trivia!
So, maybe the free UK version of Spotify provides no reason to upgrade. But I can tell you that the Swedish version is getting on a lot of people's nerves. And many of those people are seriously thinking to upgrade.

- First, there are plenty of commercial ads, the stuff that used to run on the radios years ago. Cheesy.

- Second, they fill up ad inventory with non-profits ads. So for example the ad about safe sex that goes something like: "everyone loves music, especially in the bedroom".

- Then they have ads from artists promoting their albums and telling you that if you upgrade, you get the single 1 week early.

- Also, you have ads urging people to call in and leave a fans voice mail.

- And finally Spotify plays the voice messages from people to tell you how much they like it and how much they love the premium version.

In summary, Spotify is clearly playing a carrots & stick game to get people to subscribe - the carrot being the social networking features they want to launch, the ability to create playlists, etc.

And I can clearly imagine how the company is bringing the stick strategy to the UK soon.
Nope, this is totally free and open. I can't find the website again, but I heard about them here. They are creating a larger index of the web than google's. The article was on the HN front page for a while because it detailed the technology they use to scrape the web.
Do you know if it has only one motor?
Hackers care about being able to work unfettered. Not being able to distribute your application in a form that anyone with the hardware can use would qualify as fettered.

The jailbreak option is not a viable option when jailbreaking requires extra work on the user's part and carries the risk of impeding the upgrading of the phone's operating system.
This is a great reference, better than the clojure.org website.
Isn't this the "if we can get just 1% of the people in China, we'll have 10 million customers!" strategy?
Probably isn't about your comment specifically but about the robots -> all-robot war connection.
Importing Data the WTF Way
It was more the trend for discussions about robots in the military to degrade that annoyed me. This thread is going down that path.

You specifically were lazy in that we already have automated tools of killing each other and each others automated tools. It is heavy influence of hollywood that makes us think something without a human on board is fundamentaly different.

Robot armies fighting each other and super AI taking over military robots are two of the most common topics brought up in the context of military robots, and two of the least realistic or likely.

It's particularly irrelevant in a story about a mini robot used as a radio relay, 100% human controlled, with no weapons. This thing is a wi-fi repeater with a camera on top of an RC car.
Headline should probably be corrected to "Most and Least Affordable Cities to Own a Home".

That's notably different than overall cost and quality of living.

Given the aim of this 'study', it's hardly surprising the rust belt owns the top spots.

And at some point it would probably be useful if we drew a line between -cities- and uncomfortably populated suburbs. Because a -city- of a couple hundred thousand and a -suburb- of a couple hundred thousand are very different beasts.
I've found it's very useful as a food nutrition calculator. E.g. "protein 200g chicken breast".
As you can see from the video, it has flippers and wheel that power the treads. I don't know much about the internals.
I think you're really missing something by just looking at just the number of total hits over a month. How do you expect them to be distributed? What do you expect the peak rate to be? How slow is the site allowed to be at this peak?
Does this support CalDAV as well?
Financial Exposure: Rudder Inadvertently Shows Users Each Other’s Bank Account Info
I'd have to say our capacity to kill each other far outweighs our capacity to survive

Well, we're still here aren't we? Seriously though, when push came to shove (Cuban missile crisis was the closest) we (collectively) backed down. It seems nobody really wanted to fight when it meant certain death to themselves.
Programming Scala Book Rough Cut
It's the version you're seeing here, or something much like it. It's significantly updated relative to the version in arc2.tar.
What, no comments? Both sides have some valid points. From the NSF point of view, it is hard to teach abstraction and they also want to develop teaching materials that don't rely on expensive and proprietary educational toys. Then again Bogost reasonably asks how you can expect kids to stick with the program when you move from the toy to a screen of code.

I wish he had explored his alternative ideas further (although the comments do pick up where he left off). Computer games can definitely be used to teach basic concepts, and indeed some very good games have used programming-type puzzles as part of the gameplay.

A kid-friendly programming interface, to me, could just be a skin on a full programming environment. As you would complete basic programming tasks, you could then unlock higher level features.
A Gap Year Can Get Gen Ys Groove Back
I am of a contrary opinion, because I am consulting on a project where all of this was done in spades. Abstract class, interface, concrete class, spring runtime injection, and occasionally a factory, all for a single concrete implementation of a class.

I think all of this should be done iteratively. Do the concrete class. If it turns out you need multiple implementations or subclasses, then go ahead with all the complexity. Too much of "best practices" leads to overdesign and implementation and maintenance costs.
And, all future applicants for Google jobs will be evaluated on the basis of their historic efficiency in entering and finishing their own Google Calendar tasks.

Just kidding -- I think.
Seedlings that need to be watered
How is CarsForAGrand monetized?
I've been reading up on the whole CarsForAGrand.com thing a bit in the last couple of days. I also took a good look at the site.

Besides one Google ad box on the bottom of the left column, I cannot detect any other ways of monetization for the site.

Most of the sites talk about the author of the site as a person "earning a six figure salary thanks to the site."

What am I missing here?
I used Anonymous for a while, but then I switched to Consolas. I'm not sure if Anonymous is free or not. One site wants to charge you for it, and another has it for free(no, not the Pirate Bay!).
How is it BS? Are they not disapproving iPhone apps on the grounds that they use Phonegap?
I have now sanitized the program. Anyone else wants to play with it?

PG, is it OK to download such massive amounts of items?
it is purely driven by ebay listings. probably earns serious cash from the ebay affiliate program. $30-ish on a single successful referral is pretty nice.
I realize they have a metric that takes into account multiple factors, but I don't think "median home price" is the best thing to think about here.

For instance, you can live in the San Francisco area and have access to things there without buying an entire property in the city proper. An apartment in Oakland, etc.

Also, I think you can find affordable housing in just about any city, depending on what you're willing to put up with.
This was asked and answered here in the thread about the 37Signals article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616948

eBay has an affiliate program called the eBay Partner Network (http://ebaypartnernetwork.com), and so CarsForAGrand will make money when somebody clicks through and bids on one of the listings, or even if they click through and bid on something else in the next couple of days and still have the affiliate cookie.
I don't think there are a fixed number of winners in advance ...

My expected return may go down if the person in front of my wins (I have to split with more people, so each winner gets less) - but my chances of winning don't change.
and spare parts for everybody would be around the corner.

Spare skin, at least. That's not something to just slough off.

Seriously though, it seems to me that growing something like a heart, which has large-scale structure, would be a lot harder than just growing a few different layers of tissue.
Yes, owning a home is different from renting, but really cost of home ownership is a pretty good measure of overall cost of living. In almost any city, rent prices will sit just a tad bit lower than a mortgage on an equally comfortable home - the two markets are in competition because they essentially meet the same need (a place to live).

Secondly, most other costs of living (transportation, food, utilities) don't have the huge variance that the cost of a place to live does, so it becomes the most statistically meaningful measure.
It doesn't show any of that because it's all made up. He just slapped together a story that would appeal to someone like you based on your preconceptions, but there is no actual argument. The whole thing could be reduced to "idiots can't write software" and it would lose no substance.

Even some of these points that are supposed common sense engineering wisdom are specious. Do you need to draft design documents to build a workable product? Of course not! Is the first thing you should do when you start a new website to buy $20k worth of hardware? No! Do you need enough RAM to hold your entire database? Maybe it's the best optimization you can do, but it's far from a foregone conclusion.

Why I am I so vitriolic? Because the article is not truthy. The quote above says "MIT-trained" in the same sentence as "without official CS training." Uh, it doesn't get much more official than MIT. Suggesting that a programmer with 20 years experience couldn't get a single web page to load faster than 5 minutes is a flight of fancy plain and simple.

I might as well write a long-winded story about how Microsoft hired a Chimpanzee to program the next version of Word, and failed, therefore mammals make terrible programmers and furthermore decided to use C based on ill-informed simian whimsy.
Thank you for your answer. I somehow missed the result when doing a http://searchyc.com/ search. :-(
They aren't really problems. As was pointed out, this is the way floating point works. It trades (decimal) precision for speed. Personally, I do wish that Python would default to a fixed precision decimal style instead of defaulting to floating point.

But, you can make Python use the decimal style if you use the Decimal (or similar) library. Also, you can use certain wrappers for Python such as Sage to do something similar. I am a great fan of Sage for certain tasks personally.
There have also been narrow misses that could have gone either way:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/...

[TLDR version: Stanislav Petrov prevented nuclear war by correctly guessing that the nuclear launch his station detected was a false alarm, and not a true attack on the USSR. If he had decided the other way, nuclear war may have ensued.]
Is this really how it works?

How many flags does it take for an article to be killed?

Does each user's flag count equally?

[EDIT]
I managed to answer my third question, the other two still stand though.

(Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Perhaps this should be entitled, "The Long Reach of the Meme". :-)
Lua Programming Gems was released around christmas and I think it's pretty good (although you definitely want PiL first). The mailing list is very friendly and there's plenty of information available on the lua-users.org wiki. Also take a look at Penlight (http://penlight.luaforge.net/), which tries to add a collection of useful helper functions to Lua. I haven't explored it in detail yet, but it looks like the strongest attempt so far. Finally, The Implementation of Lua 5.0 (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf) is well-worth reading. It has some interesting discussion about the move from a stack-based (pre-5.0) to a register-based virtual machine.
Is This The Future of the iPhone? Push, Background, Bundles
Apparently X-Forwarded-For is an array that has all the proxies in it. Check out this page and we should be able to fix the problem. Thanks molo for the tip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For
With known equations, then yes, dimensional analysis is essentially just a form of bookkeeping that helps you verify your math as you go.

But once you get into using quantum field theory to study new systems, the standard approach is to concoct a conservation of energy equation by summing terms, where each term is a combination of the system's variables with units of energy.

From there, you can discretize the coordinates and predict the existence of various particles (or pseudo-particles, depending on what kind of system you're describing) and their dynamics.
It shouldn't, but since lotto winnings are shared, it would decrease the already low expected payout.
This, combined with the report about a robot that can forage for biomass (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614006), means we're that much closer to building a race of cybernetic Summer Glau's.

The future will either be awesome, or scary.
Always good to see more poker being played. If anybody's looking for a game in SF, give me a holler.
Yes, in recent times I changed my searching habit a bit: I still mostly use Google, but when I want to find out what are the newest things about some topic, more often that not, Twitter Search will give better results than Google. So I think Larry is correct.

Still, Twitter doesn't do "realtime search", it does "realtime twitter search", so what Googlers ough to do will be more complex.
Please don't do this. Google is already useless enough as is. New HN comments get indexed in like five minutes, but then they're gone in a month or two. Same with all content lately, it gets indexed really fast and then it's gone. It's gotten to the point where I'm looking for stuff I know exists and I know the keywords used on the page, and I still can't find it because Google just doesn't index that page anymore even though it's relatively popular. (For what it's worth, I was looking for a lecture that IIRC was submitted here a while ago that was basically a defense of pure math research in university.)

I actually used Yahoo! this week for the first time in a decade because Google just doesn't return good results anymore.
Something to think about: developing world and science
It seems like an interesting idea, although I wonder how well it will scale. It seems like these sort of batteries would have large surface area and ventilation requirements, which might become a problem in many applications where lithium batteries are currently popular.
I tried reformatting the original title so it was <85 characters but couldn't.

Interesting thing to think about - good comments in the article.
Now, THAT I'd go to. We should do that in Berlin too...anybody?
Larry: just buy Scoopler and be done with it.
I see nothing wrong with metered billing - and it certainly far preferable to ISPs doing deals with favoured partners. Even better, pricing could vary with price of day. There are (or, at least, were) electricity tariffs in the UK that offered low rates for a few hours at night.
You could try something like this: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1557-javascript-makes-rel...
Previously submitted - some discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612360
GE to Start Selling (Energy) Smart Appliances This Summer
VAT - Nope.

VAT In Europe - Nope.

Value Added Tax in Europe - Nope.
Darwin validated: Missing link found
If this happened, bittorent clients could get an automatic throttling feature built in to minimize downloading/uploading during peak hours, and maximize during off-hours.
The Lost Art of Reading Aloud
How does Google figure out relevance in realtime? With twitter, it's user driver content with tags etc.

But with the net at large, blogs etc, this becomes difficult. Incoming links etc are hard to determine in real time (primarily because they haven't occurred yet).
Actually their usage of ad-hoc networking means that you can easily use some robots (or simpler devices) as sort of 'radio-link-stations' to extend their range.
100 Most Creative People in Business
0.99? That's useful to know! Sorry about missing the Celsius link.
Ok, I'll explain what I mean better:

By looking at certain bits of data, they attempted to find these 'cigar butt' companies - Graham more than Buffett. The way they did that was to comb through a lot of data in a way that can now be done by a computer extremely quickly. So perhaps 'quant' is wrong... shall we say 'data driven'? Of course that's not all Buffet did/does, but it just struck me as an edge that he had then that he couldn't have now.
Paul, I'm sorry that you are stuck using IE6 at work. Can you download another browser to use in addition to IE6?

I would point you to our earlier blog post on why our blog prevents IE6 access but it will end in the same result.
Can you explain this more? Why would HN comments vanish? Doesn't google follow all links?
http://www.scoopler.com/
So you think intellect is not correlated with revolutionary-ness?
When I watched the LOST season finale last Wednesday I was trying to find out the answer to the question "What lies in the shadow of the statue" right after the show ended. (During the show, the answer was spoken in a different language)

Google real-time search had picked up the answer from both a TV forum and Yahoo! Answers in about 5 minutes and it took Twitter about 55 minutes before anyone had an answer in the search results. I felt a bit let down by my first usage of "real time" search from Twitter.
Does anyone know if the research team around this has actually published anything? Everything that I have seen on this is all in some mass media format. There's a book, a film, and a few pictures of a suspiciously intact skeleton, but I haven't seen any links to actual research yet.

Really, this thing seems to be throwing out pretty much every warning sign possible.
As a customer, figuring out how to make AA profitable is not really my job. I love the service they provide to me, though, whereas I would only fly the "low cost carriers" under extreme duress. Maybe that's the problem, but probably not.
Great, now give me a tasks.app on my iPhone and let it sync with Google, Outlook, and Apple tasks through mail.app.

Please??
um...the main problem is that ISP's are flat out lying about infrastructure costs to make their money grab seem more legitimate.
Can we have a poker bot competition? I'm not a great poker player myself (in fact, I don't really even know the rules) -- but I think it'd be another cool way to socialize; especially if people are required to release the source later, and we can all chat about what worked / didn't work, etc ...