skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to do this if I was a bit smarter. :)

This is the kind of thing that Amazon could, and should, do. If they become very transparent with Vine then I think this could be a good success. But at least to date Vine feels very opaque and that's not a good thing.
Perhaps the bias in their reviews is one of the reasons an increasing number of people are avoided getting reviews from traditional media.
Hivelogic - Anonymous Pro: a programming font with style
I think the idea is that the "Home" functionality is built-in, but say media center is an option, domain/security permissions is an option, and maybe "server" is an option (to transform into Windows 7 Server).

It's stupid that they have like 9 (home, pro, server, server small business, etc.) versions of a very similar solution (an operating system). They're all fundamentally similar.
If each person waits until the next room is unoccupied, you only have one homeless person at a time, but it takes infinitely long to add a new guest. However, I don't think that's Hilbert's point. If it's easier, assume that no guests have possession, and that every room has a door to the previous and next rooms. So everyone can get up and go to the next room at the same time.

I always have the sneaking suspicion that these things only feel paradoxical because we have a better intuitive understanding of the "First" room than the "Last" room, and yet we also understand the idea of the "Next" room. In every case, we have a chain of "Nexts" taking us from the concrete "First" to the weirdness-factory "Last".

Let alone the fact that infinity doesn't exist because we can't observe it.

Does someone standing silently behind you cease to exist until you turn around?
I think people underestimate what it takes to make a good game that people will be willing to pay for. Take Flight Control. It's a very enjoyable, addictive game. However, if you take this same game and its mechanics, slap a different set of graphics that's not as polished, take away the highlight when you land or link a plane to its landing strip, change the sound effects, use simple randomization for where planes come from and their rate of appearance, and it's not going to be as big a hit.

The iPhone hardware and its built in apps set a certain level of expectation of polish. Graphics that would work on other environments won't cut it on this device, especially when there are a lot more options.
Can Google Trends Predict Winners?
We, for instance, structure all our code very carefully with clearly defined and documented interfaces and modularised functional areas. I doubt that any function is really interdependent with more that 20 other functions, never mind thousands. If someone needs to understand thousands of functions to maintain any piece of code then that code has a serious problem and probably a low 'bus factor' (how many developers being hit by a bus it would take to derail your project). I suspect that the power of the lisps tempts developers into writing code that does effectively have many interdependent functions, though they may not fully realise until it's too late.
If you use Firefox, the gTranslate extension is pretty good for looking up words/phrases quickly. All you have to do is highlight the word, right click, and there's a translation menu item that has the translation. It might not be the best for individual characters, but it's quicker than going to the dictionary every five seconds.
Have you tried using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji?
Trusted Breast Pumps
Trusted Breast Pumps: Your baby's health is important to us. We offer the largest selection of breast pumps on the internet because we know that each mother's body, pumping needs and preferences are different.
If I need to run my programming language to run on top of the infrastructure of another program language to use its services, the designers made something wrong. Today larger applications are based on layers communicating with each other over all kinds of ways. Deeply embedding is just one way.

I also think that developers should do more than read books to evaluate a technology. Reading Lisp books is surely not sufficient - eventually the author now was able to use a Lisp dialect and not only read about it. The author is also mostly guessing that 'Clojure has all the benefits of LISP' without having used other Lisps.
From the Generically-Named, an Appeal for a Facebook URL Aftermarket
Generically-named Bob Moore begs Facebook to let him attempt to buy his name in vanity URL form (and generate them some revenue in the process)
infinity doesn't exist because we can't observe it

Presumably, you are accessing this website using a some kind of personal computer and some communications infrastructure. The engineers who designed these systems all made frequent use of the notion of infinity, particularly in their use of limits and calculus, when these systems were designed.

I am sure that those engineers would love to hear about the equivalent (but necessarily much more complex), infinity-free versions of calculus and limit processes that you have obviously developed. Since infinity is the only simplifying assumption the average engineer is ever forced to make, I'm sure that as a group, they will be very eager to take your advice, even if it means they have to do twice as much work.
I like what these guys did with cardboard: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/march/step-into...
I think delicious will do all that.
Amongst other things, I think it has made a small car (other than e.g. a BMW 300 series and such) socially acceptable/desirable for a certain portion of the U.S. population. It's not just an economically influenced decision; there's still the motivation to "fit in".
I've used other Lisps to write production code, and I'll say that Clojure has all the benefits of the Lisp family. Certainly, specific other Lisps have their own advantages. I miss Common Lisp's method combination whenever I use any other language.
"'Mommy & Me' is catchy and alliterative, and, in my neighborhood, it’s the standard label for parent-child events, whether fathers are welcome or not. The term is also unapologetic in its exclusion of fathers, and no analogue exists: the top results for a similar Google search for 'Daddy & Me' include disturbing news items about horrific domestic violence." An interesting look at how our language both reflects and shapes our ideas of what parenthood is.
First known homogenous object...
I've seen a lot of taxi priuses recently, which makes me think they're good for more than just looking trendy. I would assume taxi drivers tend to buy cars that are economical to run and maintain, more than any other factor.
The excel multithreading thing, right?
I actually had a similar frustration for Half-Life 2 single player. Valve originally hard-coded the field of view (fov) to 75 which caused intense motion sickness for me (for some reason). I enjoyed the game immensely, but I still had to go lay down for 20 minutes for every 20 minutes of play.

In the first few weeks of the game (before they patched it to be less restrictive), it ignored and reverted changes to the game fov with some sort of bizarre level of meanness. They really wanted the fov to stay at 75 for some sort of game experience reason.

I edited the game binaries to remove the forcing of that field of view back to 75 (using VC6's binary editor after using SoftICE to monitor the code that was changing the value in memory) so that I could play the game without getting sick.
> Piqued. Unless this is the most interest you've ever given Opera ;)

:-) Should've looked it up. But I thought "hey, my other option - "peeked" - is definitely wrong, so this one must be right" :-) Thanks.

As for the open source thing, I wouldn't put money on it, but I do think it would be very cool :-) I really don't have a clue what it can be. I just hope it won't be a let down :-)
A friend recently remarked that she got 55 MPG on her last (all highway) car trip in her diesel VW Jetta. I wonder what demand looks like for these?

Also, I had lunch with a marketing contractor regarding a "green" tinted startup I was considering. She recommended I offer blog/facebook badges so that people could "brand" themselves as users of the service. She used the Prius and how its instantly identifiable shape/look helps sales as an example of this benefit. One of the important factors for potential customers is that others know they're green.
The Crack-Up By F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no way in hell you can design a cable in such a way that it will pass signals in one direction, but not in the other.

Did someone just uninvent the diode?
Planning: VIM
Blogging: VIM
E-mail: VIM
Coding: VIM
Finances: VIM
VCS: Git .. with comments edited in VIM ;)
The Peace Corps of my youth taught the volunteers to speak the new language by 3 months of total immersion, then threw them into the wild. My friends who had gone through the process said that they could get by, but it took a year to become totally fluent.

I picked up enough Portuguese to fumble along in Brazil by taking 40 hours of lessons from Berlitz, 2 hours per day twice a week, just me and the teacher. That was kind of the minimum to make continuous progress. Group classes are way less effective, and courses at the local JC are totally worthless. The only thing that counts is how much time you actually spend speaking.

It's expensive as hell, but I strongly recommend 100 hours of individual instruction before going off on your own in learning. It gives you a good feel for the pronunciation of the language. If you learn by reading but with the wrong pronunciation, it may take a long time to recover. The proof to me was when I was in rural northeastern Brazil. The person that I was haltingly talking to said that he could tell that I was from Rio by my accent. I wasnt, but my teacher was.
quote is by Confucius. :)
On my Linux machine, not even a server but just a desktop, there are 111 running processes. There's room for growth in multi-core yet.
XMPP is more probable than a full on web server
...it takes infinitely long to add a new guest

No, because once the first client moves, the first room is free for the new guest, even though the whole process of moving hasn't finihsed yet, and in fact will never be finished. You will end up having infinite "waves" of moving clients.

assume that no guests have possession, and that every room has a door to the previous and next rooms

My point is, there are intermediate states when you can't strictly say the hotel is full and that every occupant has a room, i.e. one-to-one relation. In your scenario, if you start from the first room, you will always have one room with two occupants, which is against the rules, or in my scenario there will always be one homeless dude.

I understand this is an abstract situation anyway, which can not be experimentally reproduced (for one, it would take infinite time to build this hotel and we'll never see it finished), which leads to the next point:

Does someone standing silently behind you cease to exist until you turn around?

You can never be sure about anything unless you observe it using your own senses and possibly some equipment in the middle. (And it gets even worse in the quantum world, but let's forget that for a moment.) So strictly speaking, when you don't see the person behind you, you can only make a prediction/hypothesis that if you turn around you will see that person again. It's based on some laws of physics suggesting that a person can't disappear, say, in one nanosecond. But hypothesis is just a hypothesis, and it's not observation of reaality, e.g. a fact.

Back to infinities. In the physical world all kinds of infinite values are defined through either infinite distance or infinite time, including both infitely big or small, i.e. ∞ and 1/∞. Space and time are closely related though, because in order to measure a distance you need "some" time, and obviously, to measure or observe infinite distance you need infinite time. Which is not possible for us, humans and therefore infinity is just a hypothesis, and I'm afraid will always be. (Always? You mean, for infinitely long time? :)

Curiously, for some reason I started thinking about infinities this morning and here you go, a post at YCNews.
i would not. i have a lot of interest outside typing.

i prefer news site for 'creation' -- not showing often in hn: from bits (how to make buttons, logos, diet, health, pets, hobbies, etc) to physical (how to make soap, ink, fert, shoes, clothing, carpentry, masonry, housing, bomb, cooking, sport, etc)

also news for alternative living is interesting (like how to live in desert, mountain, sailing, around-world-air travel, live under $1usd/day, etc)

these stuffs are of course a google away (as is everything else), but rarely shown in hn maybe because chemistry (and physics?) is not the prerequisite for CS / EE

or maybe those are 'not hackers news' shrug
Its crazy how much tech google can build that a normal startup couldn't, because these techs lack of a business model.
The Secret of Creating Monkey Island - An Interview With Ron Gilbert
Care to show an example how the notion of infinity can make a programmer's job easier? Particularly in the field of Internet protocols and web applications.
Project management: Trac
Versioning: SVN/Trac
Monitoring: Nagios, Pingdom
Support: Get Satisfaction
Newsletters: Campaign Monitor
Communication: Gtalk, Email
I don't think this is funny at all. They've now managed to be a real asshole by sabotaging childrens' clips
Language learning is such a VAST and ignored area in start-up community. I'm also learning French and while Rosseta Stone is the mainstream software it's practically a wasteland with small occasional gems like http://babbel.com ( which is very nice Adobe Flex application).
Anyone finding a quick and a fun way to learn a language will become an instant billionaire :)
But I guess it's the general problem of knowledge learning and is as old as the human race exist. Imagine building something that has a possibility of destroying the current concept of school! For now all we have is sci-fi stories about swallowing pills for instant learning ....

P.S.
I wrote a little Adobe Air application for someone who likes to learn a language while listening to songs or watching youtube. You can search lyrics/save/translate and bookmark your videos. It's a just organizes the whole process. Have fun !
http://www.singandstudy.com
There should really be just one edition of Windows: an official userspace Microsoft WINE library for OSX and Linux. It is really a waste to dedicate an entire computer just to run Excel.
What Joel has to say about reviewers accepting free products for review:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/28.html
While it's true that there are a lot of versions, there aren't 9 boxes side by side on a shelf in a store. I think home, pro and server is all that should be in a best buy or equivalent.

More specialized but very real and useful cases such as enterprise, unlimited, small business, etc should still be available but only through a vendor or website.
Startup lawyer in Phoenix?
Hi, I wondered if anybody could recommend a lawyer in the Phoenix, AZ area that specializes in startups, partnerships, and setting all of that up?

Thank you.
green IS trendy.
I was coming at the problem from a sane angle and meant that there was no way in hell that you could design a cable in such a way if you were simply trying to design the best possible cable.

If you are suggesting that Monster seperates each of the wires in its cables into multiple parts and connects them with electronic components emulating a diode (you couldn't just put a diode in; that would screw up the cable), then yes, it could be done. It would be an insane way to actually let the directional arrows make sense, but granted, when taken literally, my original statement was wrong.
If you're planning to live in Quebec, then French skills are critical. Lots of points for immigration/selection, and things just aren't in English outside of Montreal. If, however, you're trying for someplace like Vancouver, French is less important.

I think various websites publish the skill set(s) the country and/or provinces are looking for. It's trivial for a US-ian to get work here, and it's a 3-6 month process for Europeans to do so (at least in software-related businesses). It also helps if you're young, single, ...
What Open Source Shares With Science
What is the point of the cigar section of the article?
Why Dell should buy Palm
They should code into law the divide by 2 and add 14 rule :-)
Ask HN: textbooks, references for crawl+ingestion architecture
Hi,
I'm writing a system that ultimately wants to grab lots of data and organize it into a database. I'm currently using a crawl to file, ingest file to database scheme, and I'm just wondering what is some good literature to read so I don't re-invent all the wheels (not just in the task at hand, but also in logging to evaluate performance, etc)

Thanks.
Just turn on network sharing over wifi and run a packet sniffer (in osx). then connect to the new network from iphone over wifi.

SystemPreferences->Sharing->InternetSharing

Cocoa Packet Analyzer
http://www.tastycocoabytes.com/cpa/index.php
Python to get Google-backed speedup
He was writing satirically -- see comment 23.
Just to mention, Microsoft office offers some pretty nifty services in this regard. Check out Office Live Small Business. You get a workspace with 5Gb of file storage. You can view docs, ppts right in the browser and with a plugin you can edit them right on your desktop MS office.

There's also Live Mesh service (seperate 5 GB) that allows you to sync files across different computers. You can use it as a documentation, file sharing tool.
.

.

.

We have a Team of 5. We started with a google based solution for now.

Conference Calls: Skype 3$ accounts(to dial into US) + http://www.freeconference.com/

Mailing List: Google Groups

Collaboration: Google Docs

Scheduling: Google Calendar

Project Mgmt: Google Sites (with different task list), with widgets showing our docs + calendars on google services.

Files: Google groups has 100 MB, so does Sites.

VCS: git/svn on pvt server.
Writing "lol" means almost automatic downvote in HN. And that's usually a good thing.
How Will Robots See in 2018? [video]
Powerful macros and functions make it harder to reason about code.

In Lisp and Smalltalk, you can look at the inside of a function and have some idea what it is doing.

With Lisp you can use #'DISASSEMBLE and with any Smalltalk worth its weight, you can simple click around and find the method that you want to look at
For those who don't have an hour or so to listen, here are my notes. I think a lot of this stuff is also covered in Peldis blog.

The motivation for starting Balsamiq was to learn all about the business side of things. Being a sole founder was hard, but it forced him to learn everything. He doesn't recommend this for people who need to launch quickly.

Mockups solved his own problem. He suggests to look for a problem that you're happy to work on for the next 10 years, and the products will come from that. This also means that you will identify with the community who also has these problems, ie customers. If you don't have a specific problem, try partnering with someone who does.

He doesn't like the typical freemium model as he thinks the free version can give a bad impression of the premium version. He prefers a useful but inconvenient demo - it gives people a taste.

He didn't seem to give a lot of thought to setting the price of Mockups, but did say that it is important because it indicates quality and a commitment to being in for the long haul. He suggests thinking of how much time the product will save customers, what other products sell for, and the accepted pricing tiers.

His launch was completely informal, and he keeps that attitude to marketing. He says be interesting and you'll be written about, so focus on the product and making your customers happy. Have a good website, and send the message that you understand the problem and are committed to solving it. Transparency is also important - you can't hide on the web these days so why try?

Gets most feedback from Get Satisfaction, and likes it because it puts customers and company on the same level. He gets a lot of feature requests but tries hard to keep with his vision of Mockups. He won't compromise on anything that reduces his competitive advantage. He does whatever he can to reduce the number of support requests, but those he does get he handles in a way that reflects his committment to customers.

Other miscellaneous thoughts:
- the two things that matter most are user experience and customer service
- paid to get rid of ads on Get Satisfaction
- stayed with GS because he liked and trusted the people behind it
- would rather pay for software because it's more likely the company will continue to exist

He also wanted to stress that his recent success was 10 years in the making.

The podcast was pretty good listening, although maybe a bit too long. I'll definitely be checking out the other interviews.
Sometimes the use of efficient/alternative cars is mandated by the taxi licensing authority, regardless of the total economic calculation. (It may not be the "taxi drivers" expressing preference via these purchases.)
Windows isn't exactly popular here to say the least. Anyway, I fully agree with you on that strange aversion to expressing disagreement with words.
Why would it be silly? Microsoft would charge the price where they can make the most profit and that would probably be somewhere in the middle of all the current price ranges. The current setup allows Microsoft to sell to people who don't have the budget of companies without appearing to rip companies off. Similarly OEM demanded that the price be cheaper so Microsoft made a new version but had to justify to regular users why they don't pay the starter price.
For those that don't know, the Heisig method is a very famous mnemonic method for remembering the kanji. According to some people with brains apparently wired differently than mine, you can learn all kanji in a few months with this method. The method starts with giving each compound part that appears in more complex characters an English language name. These names are then used to create stories that tie the more complex kanji together. After this you have English names for all characters. Then you go on to study their pronunciations.

Yes, I have seriously tried it. Maybe it works for some people. It's of course quite hard to recall why you really remember something, but in the 800 kanji I know according to the test, the vast majority I seemed to remember from seeing/using them in context while reading/writing Japanese. Mnemonics are an attractive thought, and I hope they do really work for some people. Personally I am a bit skeptical. My feeling now is that learning doesn't have to be brought up to conscious thought, but is something that happens naturally as you re-encounter things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

If you'd like, you can combine these two things too.
http://kanji.koohii.com/learnmore.php
Let's reimplement Eurisko
Apt-build — optimize your Debian/Ubuntu
http://www.rikai.com automatically displays popups for kanji as you hover your mouse over them. Here's a direct URL to browse the Japanese Slashdot with it: http://tr.im/ooJg

But what I really meant were dead-tree books and newspapers that I could read while not at the computer.
The TV commercials for the 3rd-generation Prius are fantastic: in imagery, music, special effects. Here's the first of the series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq4nrmnqY9o&hd=1

And a video of the 'making of':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_M-WaCg27k
Also note this part:

<meta name="description" content="The Web is your browser. .." />

I took it for a marketing talk initially, but now it seems like a major hint to me. The Web will be browsing you.