skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's where I see the fundamental difference between Microsoft and Google:

Google has a conference, well known to all and sundry. Google plans a big reveal. Microsoft plans a big reveal to steal some thunder. Normal PR all around.

But look at the scope of the two reveals. Google essentially plans to reboot the entire mechanism of interpersonal interaction on the internet. Whether it will ever work, catch on, or even be useful it's without question astonishingly ambitious. Arrogant even. "We're so smart we'll tell you how you should be talking to each other." Love, hate, angry blog posts are generated in abundance.

Microsoft launches a new search engine. Which, to be fair, seems like a quite nice new search engine. But where's the ambition? Where's the absolutely insane, balls-out wtf? Even if the Zune was better than the iPod it would be a clone. Even if Bing is better than Google it'll be a clone. Even if the Xbox is better than the Playstation it still won't be qualitatively different. Sure some of them may succeed and none will likely fail completely but it's hard to see the ambition in any of them.
clear fields, a small but very useful extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2408
Being point of sale, it would be best to build a GUI app. Airports especially "still" use non-GUI apps (possibly due to the cost of upgrading), but it'd be far nicer for your end users to provide a clean and clear way to work with your application.

If it were to be a web app you could (for example) use a PDF library to produce receipts and handling printing that way. In this case, you could also provide a simple and clear way to customise the receipts.

Certainly the advantage of it being a web app is that you wouldn't specifically have a requirement for Linux (if for example they already have a set of workstations) or installed applications. This would mean that implementation would be far easier and say, managers could quickly pull up the POS system for a specific client in the back office.

The only issue I can see with a web app solution is interfacing with hardware. You would either need to forgoe the possibility of hardware, or work out a way to interface them.

I think there are countless possibilities, most of which will be rather dependent on the local businesses. They seem to have provided you with a lot of breathing space, so it may well be that many solutions will fit and you are free to choose which would work best for you.
I don't think so. I've lost intern candidates to one of these outfits, and have had subcontracting conversations from another, and I think "top young talent" needs to be ignorant about the market to wind up in the middle of nowhere working for some bloated defense giant.

Raytheon and Lockheed are, I'm sure, making a mint off these initiatives. But the talent can, from what I'm seeing, do more than 2x better working in industry.

It's simple to see why: even the largest penetration test requires minimal project management overhead, and that overhead actually gets less as the work gets more complicated (software -> hardware -> math) --- the work is more specialized, the outputs are more discrete and measurable, the work cycles are longer, the workers more senior. And yet a typical project run under a DoD subcontract will likely have more than 8 layers of management.

There are people who really do "hack for the government" and make real money doing it; their work predates Obama, isn't public, and has more to do with http://www.nomorefreebugs.com/ than with Raytheon.
The most perplexing thing for me is that Stephen Wolfram's kind of hyperbolic self promotion is something I normally see coming from companies that are trying to mask their lack of success. I actually think that Mathematica is an interesting and educational tool to use. Too bad it is a failure at affordability. Wolfram Alpha is not much to boast about in my opinion, but certainly an "answer engine" is a great goal and I would love to see more innovation here.
Ask HN: eliminating cable TV - how should I set up my media center?
I'm thinking about getting rid of cable TV and am looking for suggestions on how to set up a new media center. In particular, I'd like to be able to:

* record HD content OTA
* have complete DVR functionality, including program guide
* have a nice, integrated GUI for finding, downloading, and managing content
* have a good remote

Can anyone suggest best-in-class hardware, software, and services (including antenna and anything else I might find useful)? I'm not tied to Mac, Windows, or any other particular vendor - simply looking to create a compelling, cost-effective experience.
At the time, IBM, Unisys and Bull were about the only vendors with SQL 2000 capable servers with > 8 CPU's. (And Itanium, of course.)

The customer purchased IBM x460's, 16 CPU's, 64GB RAM = $225k each in 2005, right after they came out. Three required (active, passive in a cluster at the production site and one for the DR hot site). Upgrade them to dual core x3950's six months later = another 200K (or so, the upgrade was to 16 dual cores, 128BG RAM for each of the three database servers ). Plus all the odd's and ends, like 60 amp 3 phase power, 70,000 btu's of cooling, etc.

The software/licensing/support costs were because with > 8 sockets, you needed Microsoft Data Center Edition, and at that time, it came with an expensive support contract ($70k/yr).

Had the vendor been about 6 or 12 months ahead on their optimization, the 16 CPU x460's could have been 8 dual cores instead, and the 32 core upgrade probably wouldn't have been needed - or if it was, it could have been delayed until quad cores were available, the expensive OS support would not have been needed, half as many Microsoft SQL Enterprise CPU licenses would have been needed, and the 24x7 hardware maint contracts would have been half as much, etc.
At least until the next time Techcrunch links to news.yc.
Agreed. Anyone that tells you a sufficiently large corporation is untainted from the effects of human greed is either a) horribly naive and asking to be taken advantage of, or b) trying to use said naivete to their advantage.

In Google's case, promoting their "Don't Be Evil" allows them to keep a pristine rapport with the media,which in turn helps to promote their eye-ball centric products. In Microsoft's case, selling the "developers developers developers" ideal allows them to keep their lock-in of a vast share of the enterprise software market.
Oh Yeah? Where's Your Patches Zed?
Preliminary release of new Arc version, including latest HN source
I love LAMP! I love LAMP.
How do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in open systems?
Ralph Nader isn't even half this cool.
eLearning (On line Courseware) for a population of a quarter million students, about half of which use the system daily.

Registration is as large of a system, but with higher peak loads at semester start, as you've indicated.
Bad guys aren't what they used to be
The situation you describe simply doesn't exist.
I always start with the standards. Typically you will find that engineering protocols are more simple than you think. But when there are lots of solutions it starts to cloud it.

http://xmpp.org/rfcs/

Check the bottom of : http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3920.txt

If you like to look at full products using the standard take a look at OpenFire; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openfire

It has most of the standards implemented and is open.

Then when you want to whip out a prototype in a few hours or minutes dig in with some python: http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps today. But in the past, General Motors was so threatened by him that they sent hookers to seduce him. His settlement with GM funded Public Citizen. Ralph Nader was a total badass once upon a time.
I think you are interpreting it right, although it won't have any effect on pure patent trolls since they don't need to license Google's patents anyway.
SETI @ Home? :)

The customer hardware is IBM xSeries (3950's), with modular, stackable components, much like a stack of switches. It could be broken up into smaller servers and re-used on other projects.
That's a good question, Jim.

Instead of going with your example, which could get partisan in a hurry, take a look at IT projects. Ever been on an IT project that shouldn't exist? Say something that's not going to help anybody, probably won't even be released, and is going to waste a lot of time and money?

What do you do? How do you have a rational conversation about making something good when there is a legitimate view that it shouldn't exist at all?

I think you get it out in the open, talk it out, and rhetorically have at it. Then you put it away and leave it alone. Perhaps you could have a special section of the site for "why do this at all?" posts. People who kept venturing into that no-man's land could be directed there, instead of rehashing the same debate over and over again.

I'm with your competitors: government is a necessary evil and I do not wish it to successfully intrude into all areas of my personal life. But I can see your point too -- if we're going to do something, we can't make progress if some don't want anything to work.

So I say respect the dissenters, let them have their say, but don't let them ruin your momentum.
As for why Tcl won't just up and die, see the SQLite testing thread. Tcl's built like that too, and built well: native threads, Unicode, a very extensive C API. Definitely some pieces missing (OO), but they are being actively worked on. In other words, Tcl is not the most popular thing out there by a long shot, but it's not "dying" either.
Favorite quote: "Perl has become the COBOL of web design"
Warmer, Fuzzier: The Refreshed Logo
Individual correspondence is important, and I don't think Twitter would be a good vehicle for the types of things that might be communicated in personal correspondence.

That's actually exactly why I like Twitter. Direct Messages are a perfect way of keeping in touch with friends over something that isn't email worthy--the equivalent of sending an SMS if we were in the same country.
I guess it's my fault. I'm a science fiction novel fan: character development, story, action, society building, and ideas. In a short story you only get one. And as soon as you get attached to a character, setting, or idea, bang it's done. For a lot of people even a novel isnt enough. They go for 2000 - 3000 page mega-novel spread across 3, 5, 10 volumes.
Sad thing is, I bet he's right.
I don't Know about that. I put Kim Jong Il right up there with Mini-Me.
The official Blosxom website (according to wikipedia) is http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/ .
I don't think the code metaphore is a good one. Its more like reverse engineering self duplicating and self healing nanotech hardware i.e. hardware so complex it can't be artificially designed with current understanding.

The situation is made more complex by the fact that this hardware is interacting with different types of other hardware such as viruses and bacteria.
a full-fledged unauthorized intruder would use more than just lock picks. but social engineering can't get you past a locked door. which is why people buy expensive locks.
I didn't have any issues. It actually took me reading the title several times to see what you guys were talking about.
King called it, IMO. This phenomenon isn't restricted to lit. fic.; it applies to the genre categories too.

It's a progressive death spiral. Mass market fiction magazines don't pay enough to justify the time spent writing a story -- because their circulation and readership is declining. So short fiction has become the domain of people who don't write for money -- like poetry: once a respectable paying niche in newspapers, and now little more than a hobbyist field curated by a handful of scholars. And then you get the curious aridity King notes, an airlessness in the room, as the stories being published chase an audience of readers motivated by something other than entertainment.
A few points:

1) If you at the point of considering living in your office, then you are past the point of worrying about social acceptability. Don't pay attention to what we say, it sounds like you need to figure out if you will get away with it in your particular situation, and then just do it.

2) I think if you are finding studios as expensive as private offices you need to broaden your search area a bit. Generally it is cheaper, easier, and more socially acceptable to use living quarters as an office rather than the other way around.

3) You are that your business idea requires you be in that expensive area ? Maybe you could make a slight modification, and move to some foreclosure stricken area where you can rent a whole house more cheaply, and arrange with San Francisco friends to stay with them a few days a month to get done whatever you need to get done there ?

4) I regard posts like this as signs of The Coming Economic Collapse. ;)
And so it slowly begins, the alienation of Zed Shaw from the Python community.
I think the idea is sound.

However, my experiences with Java have been so consistently horrible that I won't bother to try it as is. If you make a native application that I can install, and make sure the download is a few megabytes at most, I will try it. It sounds like a good idea.
Zed was actually quite polite [but strong] in that post. For the first time I'm starting to believe that he has kept the promise of changing. I might subscribe again.
Follow the hidden subsidies.

How is is economical to built a fleet of fuel guzzling ships that weigh approx 120,000 tons and deliver goods in what are essentially disposable 8000 pound tin cans?

Fuel oil is artificially cheap. This explains everything.

The steel in one container ship would be enough to create 240 million square feet of domestic manufacturing space with wages and profit benefits that go along with it.

Call that 240 twenty thousand square foot manufacturing spaces in every single state in the USA.

There are approx 4500 container ships in service and over 600 on order being built

Anyone want to play with these numbers, maybe figure out how much oil they are burning to get their cargo around?

4500 ships * 240 million feet of manufacturing space = one Trillion square feet of manufacturing space!!!
I don't think it's fair to turn the Bing vs Wave previews into this kind of corporate comparison. Bing is being released to try and gain MS a good double digit market in a billion dollar industry. It is little more than a clone because that is all that a search engine can realistically be with current technology.

Sure innovation is great. That's why we're all at HN right?! But the big money (short of creating a whole new industry) is about getting market share in established markets. That is what MS are doing - from Bing to Silverlight to Xbox to most other things they do. Nothing more or less.
I don't know anything about the lemonpos code, but they presumably have made and corrected their share of beginner's errors in the POS space, and you would save a lot of frustration by not repeating them :)
"Pling: a questionnaire site with some social media scheme" would have been fine as a title.
This was my favorite blogging platform back in the day. It was easy to plug markdown into and I thought they had a good idea for just using the filesystem (no web post editor). Not to put words into any mouths, but they must have figured you already had a favorite text editor (Emacs, Vim, etc.)
Given the title, I was almost certain that this would be an article about Haskell!
I really very highly recommend that every geek/hacker out there learn lock picking.

There is a row of padlocks on my desk at work that I play with every time I get stuck on a coding problem. It's really helpful :). (I also freed my brother's bike from the clutches of the bike rack after he lost the key to it a week ago).

Go take a walk and look down. What you're looking for are street sweeper bristles. They'll look like sticks, but unnaturally straight. You can use of one to make a tension wrench, and the others to make your picks.
Because we have diseases to cure, lives that we want to enhance and curiosities to satisfy.

Insofar as the code metaphor goes, I don't think you can comment on the quality unless you completely understand what it is doing and how robust it is. For example, the code that architected your neocortex is significantly smaller than the source for Open Office. I find that impressive.

Until you are capable of producing something better, you can't make those statements.
E-Ink Prototype Kit.
I haven't been that impressed with Kim Johng Il since that movie came out with the puppets a couple of years ago. Just that image of the Kim Jong Il puppet singing "lonely" took away any gravitas he might have had with me.

If I remember correctly, it was the only R-Rated movie that at the bottom explained that it got the R Rating for violence and sex involving puppets. Can't remember the name, though.
Wait--who says it is poor code, and by what criteria? And what we think of as parsimonious as a quality is not a useful metric for DNA.
Some people really need to be on the offensive to get things done. They need to feel like someone else is the enemy and they are going to defeat them. It seems to me like Zed puts himself in the position of David vs the open-source-community-Goliath on purpose so that he can be on the offensive. He gives himself an enemy, throws down the gauntlet and declares that he can and is going to make things better. I'm not one to argue that he picks the best motivational targets, calling people out and demeaning a hard-working community seems pretty negative, but damn when Zed says he is going to deliver, Zed delivers. Laser focused, intelligent and hard-working. I would love to work with Zed, hire him or have him contribute to one of my projects, but damn, I'd be terrified of pissing him off.
Posted days ago, some discussion here, including a link to a single page version of the entire article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630770
Yeah, balancing robots are cool but are they really appropriate for this task?

Save some cash, make a simple three or four wheeler and for the love of god make them able to carry more than one bag.
I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example:

http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story

I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if you count "As We May Think", then it is a use way before the web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
It's what i came here to recommend :)

May i also add ImgLikeOpera (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672). Avoid downloading any pics on a page.

My 3gb per month mobile broadband limit here in the UK goes soooo much further with it.
Favourite: PDF plugin for Mac OS X. This uses the mac's native pdf rendered and makes viewing pdf's a joy rather than a pain. http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

Shameless plug: If you are a google docs user you might want to look gdocsbar [http://www.gdocsbar.com]. an update with some more features like download, is on the works and will be released shortly.
He's right on with open source communities shunning new comers and code coming from people outside of their own circle.

I've seen all over the place, it's pathetic.

Great code is great code, doesn't matter who it comes from and who gets the recognition. Think about the project over yourself.
What is connection between Detroit and Green Card?
I'd say,Detroit is exactly an outcome of excessive reliance on foreign intellectual force for building and sustaining economy. Foreign intellectual force has a nasty habit fleeing home or to some other country, (for example, one up north), in case of economic downturn in the country; and that accelerates downturn really badly.Especially bad, that accumulated knowledge is also carried out of the country together with H1B-guys.
Corollary: no matter how arrogant Americans are about their country the standards of living are not highest there, and with worsening of the economy exodus will grow bigger and bigger..
Five years isn't that long; Twitter has already been around for three. I seriously doubt it'll be gone in another five.
3000 dollars for a devkit makes no sense to me at all.
I have to say that I don't really like the 2D-sprites-from-3D-models look. I much prefer hand-drawn pixel graphics... but that might just be the taste of someone who grew up playing SNES instead of Xbox.
Ask HN: Recommend solution for scanning forms?
I am working on an application where I need to collect data from lots of regular people. I am looking for an efficient, reliable, inexpensive alternative to "Scantron" (used for machine-readable multiple-choice exams)

I am hoping to use a Mac laptop with a portable scanner (http://www.fujitsu.ca/products/scansnap/s300m/) that scans pages to PDF.

I have complete freedom for how the data forms are designed, ... and I am looking for reliable (free?/open source?) software that could capture the data from the (scanned) PDF and save it to a text file.

If anyone has any experience with something similar, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Any other links or suggestions would be appreciated too.
Even that option has limited PR value; Microsoft either uses their "shared source" licenses (and comes under fire for not using a more recognized license like GPL or BSD) or they use such a license and feed ammo to the "shared source is trap" crowd.
its not quite what you're looking for, i think, but i've heard good things about http://www.pdftoword.com/
Team America World Police... fuck yeah!
The difference is that code from an existing developer is going to be maintained: that is, the existing developer will stay around to take care of it.

Code from an outside developer will just be committed and never touched again in many cases, since the outside developer doesn't intend to stay and work on the project. If you don't believe me, look at the history of the ffmpeg project: there are enormous swaths of unmaintained code (and uncommitted code) for exactly this reason.

Thus, it is often reasonable to have higher code standards for code whose author does not intend to maintain it into the future.
Agree, I'd like it if they would just call it MS Search.
(I know about other meanings of MS , and one is very bad for a search engine, but I still like it).
The Ascendance of Internet Radio
Looking interesting. But as you guessed, I am not looking for OCR (optical character recognition).

I am looking for capturing which circle was filled in: A or B or C.
Or maybe it has become a web of trust ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust )

Programmer A has been working with me for a long time, has done a lot of B- to B+ code. I trust that what he does is going to be up to that level.

Programmer B has been working with me for a long time and consistently turns in C level code. It isnt great, it isnt horrid. Call him pedestrian. When I get something from him, I know what it is going to be. Adequate. Not everything has to be great, most things move forward on adequate because there are too many things to get for B and A level people to do them all.

Programmer C is someone I don't know it all. Maybe I've heard of them by reputation, maybe not. Doesn't much matter, there is no trust there, I don't know what I'm getting. If I'm responsible, I'm going to vet their code closely. Make sure they follow coding conventions, best practices, etc. This takes time on my part. And my time is limited because now I am BDFL or some similarly ridiculous title that means "He's a busy guy".
If you do any web development that involves web metrics (Google Analyitics, Omniture, etc.), Omnibug is quite useful:

http://www.rosssimpson.com/dev/omnibug.html
well, that service does more than that, including trying to capture and recreate images.
Tree-style tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

An absolute must if you love having 50-100+ tabs open. Oddly enough, it works rather well with Tab Mix Plus as well.
Use Yahoo Pipes to Grab TV Show Feeds
As a public company, they want to not compete, but improve and expand into new markets (growth). So in effect, they're in competition with themselves!