skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So are you not a fan of it because it isn't used properly at your company or that it doesn't fulfill your needs?
Building a Semantic Web
US National Academies of Science wants to use science to create the ultimate warrior
How to choose colours everyone likes
GPS May Crash By 2010
Sorry, I don't see any world lines merging there. Can you elaborate?
I agree, he's full of it. I know some environmentalists who are not scientists themselves, but work closely with scientists to make sure that they are pushing to do the right thing (these folks are members of the Sierra Club, and they're very clearly not against the species...).

I've also met a fair number of environmentalists who are environmental scientists. They actually go to the trouble of doing exactly the research that this author claims that they don't, but they also go quite a bit farther; the author's cop-out 80/20 rule fails on a number of levels, one big one being that the stuff accumulates. One example is mercury; once that's in the water, it's there. Fish absorb it through vegetation, and then predation. They can't get rid of it naturally, so it just accumulates in their bodies. As the upper-level predators like salmon and tuna feed, they ingest more mercury, and since they can't get rid of it, the amount in their bodies accumulates.

The pseudo-science this author puts forth ignores that sort of actual science.

There's not much in that article that's worth taking seriously.

That said, there ARE environmentalists who don't have a clue about science and hide behind lots of rhetoric. They probably don't understand the science, and don't want to admit it. They're not an asset to the cause, unfortunately.

Fortunately, in spite of their noise, they're actually doing some good simply by generating awareness that the issues exist, and they're not clever enough to get in the way of the folks who are actually trying to DO things to address environmental issues that matter.
Even if he is right, this isn't something that can be stopped. Even if you manage to stop all the innocent hobbyists, you'll never stamp out the malicious ones. Seems to me that, assuming bad shit will happen, the best thing to do is get as far up the curve as possible as fast as possible.

It's like, in the Sarah Connor chronicles, she's trying to hold back the singularity by firebombing the houses of AI researchers when the only real answer is to set off the singularity yourself so at least you can hope to sculpt it.
Both. More of a jerk(since you can say whatever you want w/o any repercussions, so you don't really care about hurting feelings), but more likely to help people(since you have a lot more relevant knowledge to share)
MySpace.com Blogs - Y SIN EMBARGO magazine MySpace Blog
Citation needed. (seriously.)
:D The reason journalists have low pay is the same reason you find ridiculously beautiful and over-qualified people running coffee at TV stations -- so many people want to work in the industry that employers have their pick.

My friend "W" is a PhD and former model. She tried for two years to get any job at all at Univision in Miami. She gave up and got a crap job at a newspaper in Colorado. Another friend "J" is a fiber optic technician who's constantly bothering his cousin to get him an assistant gaffer job on local a game show.
Perhaps not hackerish, but beautiful design work. Nicest money I've seen since the Dutch guilder went out of circulation. One small change i'd made (for blind people) is to have the notes slightly different sizes. This is the norm in Europe and it works fine, without hindering ATM machines when depositing cash.
Cute. There's actually a much more pedestrian point hidden in there, which is that cpp really is an extraordinarily expressive (if hideously clunky) environment, and you can do all sorts of good things with macros if you're willing to learn the tricks.

It's really sad that a bunch of people who never did learn the tricks ended up declaring macros as "bad" by fiat, to the extent that newer languages have had to invent less expressive versions (C++) or omit the facility entirely (Java). These days, it's almost a lost art.
Business in China is a rip off
twitter will need to borrow a page from the anti-spam war being waged in email land.

-rate limiting

-de/duplication

-source analysis

and a variety of other anti-spam measures. all this adds to the computational cost for twitter but in the long run is in their interest.
I don't even think the Minutemen types (and I know a few) really oppose this sort of immigration. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be encouraging; highly skilled individuals should be encouraged to come to the U.S. and work.

It's the flood of low-skilled workers that essentially drop the bottom out of the labor market that present a problem.
thanks for the advice... especially about the buttons and loading screen. those will change soon.
ING direct for savings.

I'm in California too, and use Mechanics Bank (http://www.mechbank.com) for checking. They have great service, and they pay your ATM fees no matter which bank's ATM you use.
Not that again! Someone comes up with some reason to say that C is really Functional about every one and a half years.
I really like the idea of putting the Bill of Rights on the currency.

"I'd like a small pizza and a medium Coke."

"OK, [kaching] that'll be one search-and-seizure and one free-speech..."
Campfire's just-work quotient is pretty high. As someone who's got his own web hosting, I was casting around for a hostable Campfire-workalike and there was nothing that I could find to compare. I also know some folks who have developed a very similar system as a part of their larger product and I hear enough of their bitching to know that there is some degree of skill in getting things to be 37S-level smooth.
Well, cpp isn't Turing complete, assuming you only run it once: http://www.ioccc.org/2001/herrmann1.hint
required reading for any aspiring iPhone developer.
I use Bank of America and have used Wells Fargo, mainly because they are all over the place. They have an international presence, whereas your small local bank probably doesnt.

Also, if you qualify, consider a credit union. They usually have all the usual services, plus pay higher interest on deposits and charge lower for loans.
I love it!

There were actually 3 comments for london, and I like that feature. Maybe it could be improved by asking something more specific ("is it really not raining right now? wow!").

I needs something really good to beat the simplicity of just checking that beautiful dashboard widget..

I also think the layout needs work:
why is london the biggest thing? the "wind/humidity" is actually quite small compared to the rest of the interface (smaller than the blue "use fahrenheit" link!), some icons would definitely help, etc..

Still I like the comments idea best out of those things. And the geolocation is also a clear winner!
what ever happened to survival of the fittest, now i.e: modern day, everything is run by a human being, who wants controll over everything, little knowing that we are as equivalent to an ant. yet they want to know about what was here millions of years ago what is going to happen to the earth in a million years, whats beyond the universe, look how simple a birds life is, the only problems they have is where to get there next meal. yet somehow our species have manged to make living in this planet so much more difficult. its mainly run by paper, forms, money, letters, a government. a group of people who put them selves in charge and enact laws in which thay can controll the whole of the race. you need a passport a visa to travel across borders. yet birds do it for free, you put a man behind bars for illegitimate reasons while hes rotting away in his cell the prison guard goes home to his wife with a smile on his face. a ceo of a large multinational company says he worked hard to where he got, no he didnt he got lucky, yet the thousands of people who depend on the job they got within the company have their lives resolve around the job. but the ceo doesnt care. he/she needs to get a new massage chair for their mansion. and what about the 'shes' females are all so niave and have become so equal within the past century with men. and what is with feminists shaving their head to make a statement. when i see a bald woman placing orders on a male it makes me want to get a razer and shave the skin of her head right down to her skull. i cant beleive we live our life by what other people made up and have now apparently become official 'laws'. i dont like this! i want This world to end now everyone including me every man woman baby bird lion giraffe horse cat monkey should be wiped out there should be nothing here except a big ball of rock. I am far beyond the term 'fed up' with this world!
Ask HN: How to make smalltalk?
Hey,

I realize this appears OT, but I don't think I'm the only one on HN with this problem, and we can just think of it as 'hacking social interactions' instead.

Here's the problem -- I've broken through the fear (of rejection) of talking to random, attractive girls. However, I have problem maintaining the smalltalk (i.e. conversation generally dies after 2-3 minutes).

Here's a typical scenario:
() I find some reason to talk about them -- if waiting @ bus stop (do you know when the next bus comes along?); if waiting in life for smoothie (those are nice ear rings ...); etc ...
() then, conversation starts dying; [btw, I'm on a college campus]; i.e. we can chat a bit a bout their major / field of study, etc ... but that's about it

The goal here isn't the pickup society's goal of: hey, go into a random bar, get laid; it's just figuring out how to meet new people + have interesting conversations without those .. ehh .. awkward 10 second silences that kill everything.

Suggestions? (help me debug my life, lol)

Cheers!
Wouldn't that just fix the problem for 7 days, to which the bots would use accounts they created the previous week?
I'm sorry, I'm sure my lack of a maths degree is showing, but wouldn't the probability of hitting a random digit (0-9) be 1/10, but the probability of the hitting the SAME random digit twice IN A ROW be 1/100?
Because Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky were actually the ones running the business while they did those extra things like take support calls/put up blinds.
I don't understand. Could you explain your guess?
No and No

Though I do think the internet has made me a jerk. I tend to give more flippant answers than I would in real life. Though I do tend to try and help people out more.
I didn't say the bots had to play well ... if at the end of every competition, everyone rises up to the level of the winner, then I think the bots would also improve drastically :-)
280North looks awesome: hacking on some cool stuff, enjoying life. If you don't mind me asking, how do you survive?

Most YC startups are desperately pimping their little web sites on every techcrunch they can find, consuming every open sourced library there is, without contributing much back, while you're sailing along like open source gods, immortal, living off the sunlight.

I know about 280Slides, but it seems you're mostly about Atlas and Cappuccino, so which one is your monetizable product? Or did I nail it with immortality? :)
Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm [video]
It's funny that the Cassandra blog post talks about bloom filters as the "hot new thing". They were an old idea when System R* used them to do distributed joins in 1986.

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/cis650/papers/r-star.pdf
i think that this is a good rule of thumb, although its not exactly the universal solution:

ask open-ended questions, and latch onto any information that comes back to you in order to ask more open-ended questions.

its not exactly small-talk, but people tend to like to talk about themselves and will generally respond reasonably to doing so.
Please make an option to switch between European and American style dates...I would use this if I didn't have to consciously think about the dates I'm typing in to make sure they're in the correct format
There certainly is a killer plague coming. Its memetic, infects the brain, and is spread by articles like this.
What about merchant account vs the premium services like Paypal Website Payments Pro? Their fees are reasonable and the API looks like it accounts for the flexibility issues you would ordinarily go to a full merchant account for. I'm currently considering this myself and I'd be interested in anyone's experience or comparison :)
The internet had nothing to do with it.

Seriously, I've never considered flame wars to have much entertainment value. I find that I am more civil online, because there are far fewer nonverbal cues to turn a cutting remark into a jest.
I wonder how you will handle the cost of storage and streaming.
I really like the concept of Today/Soon/Later. It's very similar to the Today/Soon/Whenever sections on my app http://untodos.com

I wish they had made this app last year so I wouldn't have spent time on creating my app (and could just send them feature requests instead :-P). None of the old todo list apps made it easy to move tasks around so good job to the developers on that. I keep my app extremely minimalist because all I want to see are my tasks but I love this interface a lot. Good job!
When I clicked on the link I was hoping to find a article about cheap design...

Anyway, I like the designs and I really like the idea of using currency as a means of education (e.g. Bill of Rights, and branches of government on the bills.)

One thing I don't get though is this: "One thing I definitely don't want is the government deciding what cultural figures or movements are the most important or 'American.' Instead, I think the most important politicians should be on money." I'm not sure how you determine what political figures are on the bills without influence from the politicians in power.
I'm a hermit, similarly incapable of smalltalk.

I long ago discovered that no one really likes small talk. It's the prelude to a real conversation; that's the only reason people engage in it (or to signal to each other's monkey brains that one is not a threat).

The solution? Ramp it up into a real conversation. Talk about economics, politics, religion, and Emacs vs. Vim. Out of the blue, whatever.

On a side note, who do you think the women will remember more: the guy who they got into an conversation with about Frederic Bastiat, or the 100th guy to ask them about the weather?
...Just like windows mobile was going to be.
> It's the flood of low-skilled workers that essentially drop the bottom out of the labor market that present a problem.

Do they? Any statistics to support that point?

Edit: Added the line I was questioning.
Atlas, as far as I know, won't be open source. So Atlas would be their monetizable product. 280Slides could be monetized in the future which is also not an open source project.
The Power of Twitter for highly-followed users
I was about to capitalize the S because I thought this was going to be about how to write a Smalltalk implementation.

As for your actual question, sometimes the conversation dies because the other person wants it to, and you'd seem pushy if you tried to force it to continue. But in borderline cases I recommend asking the other person about their feelings about relevant things.

I was a peer conselor in college. They taught us something called Rogerian Therapy, which consists of adding as little as possible of your own spin to the conversation, just asking questions, particularly about how the other person feels. You can't be too obvious, or it gets annoying. But if you're subtle about it, people just open up.
The difficulty is that the Pre is a CDMA 1x-EVDO handset, which is really only compatible on a few networks (Verizon, Sprint, and a few other regional carriers). Unless Palm has a super-secret GSM one waiting in the wings, it could take some time for the Pre to filter over to other networks.
"Templates are not used"? Do you mean that you code C++ without the standard library?
There are basically three sources of small talk.
1. Things said previously in the conversation as in after asking what their major is a follow up where you actually know something about the topic. It helps to be well rounded.
2. Your personal interests(note: for a geek this usually turns out badly if they haven't signaled interest in the topic.)
3. Surroundings, posters for something happening on campus etc.

Let it die. It is the holding on to it after it is dead is what makes it awkward. It is easier to approach them a second time if it dies cleanly the first time.
Right now it's built on s3... so storage and bandwidth is pretty easy to do, and cheap. Also, notice that there are premium feature (more songs, and playlist streaming) which users can, and are, paying for.
Haha! I had to read that twice to get it. Nice one.
Braingate Frees Trapped Minds
yeh sorry I misphrased: I was thinking the fact it was a self submission too tipped the balance to flag it (it did for me: I was kinda assuming by extension - my bad)
About Generativity
I agree with that. I think it's a continuum. Most other relationships don't have the expectation that he should be life-long, day in and day out things. That added constraint ups the anty on the difficulty a bit I think.
Your answer only increases my confusion. How is the fee mandated if the code is "completely free" and "open source" and can be run using peoples' own hardware and twitter accounts?

(Neither "free software" nor "open source" in the common definitions include a company charging for the right to run software. You can charge for delivering a copy, but you can't prevent others from also sharing and running the code without charge.)

It would help clarify things if there were a license in the GitHub source other than "todo: insert business friendly license here :)". (Do you mean friendly to other businesses, or friendly to TipJoy?)
This article makes a pretty big assertion, that Android will be the most common platform in 2 years. I think that's a really naive prediction. First, it's going to take a LOT to knock Apple off of it's roost as 2nd most common platform, due to their ability to sell by making their products part of a culture. Second, I don't see RIM going ANYWHERE soon, they are by far still the best messaging provider, and provider of business services of ANY mobile platform, and they also have a VERY big market share already. Finally, we're going to really have to see some new phones with Android before anything can happen, because as of this writing, the only real Android phone in the US is the G1, which is lacking in many areas.

I think Android taking over would definitely be a good thing, but I don't see it happening this late in the game, they just missed the train I think.
Not to derail the thread, but I believe this has as much to do with hacking as most stuff on Hacker News. It's unfortunate the term doesn't extend to Designers going beyond the minimum required by their profession because I believe they have the same curiosity and spirit that drives extraordinary programmers to become "hackers". After all, the guy just redesigned the American currency.
Mike Butcher from TechCrunch - Dealing with the Media
Ah, ok. I do agree with that point. I was lumping "Intelligent Design" in with Creationism in my previous post.
Good luck gauging if the person you're talking to is familiar with classical political theory.

I honestly do think that the content of the conversation doesn't make up 100% of the reason why a girl/friend/colleague remembers you. A lot of it is your mannerisms, look, demeanor, friendliness, etc. A real conversation is great, but it's a very risky bet trying to dive straight in to controversial topics.

The reason smalltalk exists is to get a feel for what topics one can actually discuss. It's all part of the dance.
was very much expected.
I think a lot of people do.
I don't like the idea of having money that has different sizes. I would prefer if the colored bar on the left had a different texture and each denominartion had a differently sized block of alternate texture. Then the blind could simply feel what the denomination was. Unless the braille on this actually works, that would be better.
Accounts suspected of spamming with hashtags should still be able to tweet, but their tweets shouldn't appear in the search results. Problem solved?
i really like the design and feel. didn't bother logging in though.
I don't think there have been any comprehensive studies about Minuteman-types on this subject, but I can offer some anecdotal evidence from my Minuteman chapter in Clint, Texas (near El Paso).

We are a little divided. JerryD and Greg do not like it at all. Dan, Zach and I don't have a problem with it. Jared, our leader, has adopted an intermediate position; he supports such immigration, as long as they're not Mexicans.

I'll bring up the question at the next county-wide meeting in August. I'll tweet the results.
This may not be what you're looking for, and I don't generally favor medication. However, for a personal, anecdotal perspective. A number of years ago, when stress was particularly high, I started taking St. John's Wort. In addition to taking the edge off of my anxiety, I found myself communicating somewhat more facilely particularly in random social encounters. It was a surprising and pleasant realization.

Now, as a counter-balance, in addition to lessening my anxiety, the St. John's Wort also seems to lessen my "spark" somewhat, depending on dose. I countered this somewhat by adjusting the dose, e.g. at times taking 150 mg as opposed to the "standard" 300 mg.

It's not a dramatic effect, and people still consider me plenty witty (when I'm in good form); but I do sometimes notice, particularly after it wears off, that I'm "seeing further/deeper".

The thing about St. John's Wort is that it is over the counter. It's also considered to be generally fairly benign, although you do need to be aware of potentially adverse effects on some other medication regimens. There are others to be aware of, but as an example, if you are female you should be aware that St. John's Wort lessens the effectiveness of oral contraceptives.

St. John's Wort is also noted for increasing photosensitivity in some people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Johns_Wort#Adverse_effects_a...

For me, in part perhaps the St. John's Wort helps me to let go of my own concerns and to focus more on the immediate moment and what interests the other person. This immediacy eliminates much of the "hesitation" that quickly grows in awkwardness to the point where the interaction is killed.

As I've gotten older and, frankly, my hormones balance has correspondingly changed, I've found it easier to achieve this state without e.g. St. John's Wort (or alcohol, or whatever else might be used). Also, being involved in an activity that is very engaging and immediate can also on its own bypass / short-circuit / obviate this "hesitation".

So, I think there are ways to get towards what you describe without popping a pill. Perhaps meditation might be a component, over the longer term. Still, experiencing that ease is of itself interesting and informative, and so I share my experience for any benefit or further discussion it may promote.

I wish you well, and I wish you particularly the social grace you seek: As one gets older, it does become apparent how "short" our time is, and how important social life is to one's quality of life. You are right to want to improve your own.

Regards

P.S. If you do look into St. John's Wort, be sure to find a product that is standardized not only against hypericin but also against hyperforin. I've found that only those products that ensure the latter have the best efficacy for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Johns_Wort#Chemical_composit...