skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If by "a few minutes" you mean 35, then sure. And I'll probably be doing the same thing

I don't want it for the SEO, but if nothing else having the name is convenient for telling new "friends" how to find me on the most ubiquitous social network without having to email them a long profile URL.
Man turns closet into living space
WSJ: Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates
the only problem with this piece is, I have yet to find the mythical "real domain that you can own". I've leased/rented/licensed/used quite a few domains over the years, but they each come with some sort of expiration and a threat that someone else can take the name if I don't pay up.

..and the "Facebook Username Debacle" won't help solve that problem either....
Slideshow: http://www.wptv.com/Photo.aspx?content_id=692f9048-a33b-4758...
The Ultimate Enterprise Java Build Solution
Thanks! If you try it out, e.g. for a week, we'd love your feedback. Feel free to email me anytime (contact info in profile).
You have a lot to learn about enterprise software.
One strange thing that happened to me is when I had this dream (following some long and deep programming session) where the "reality rules" were very close to the logical spirit of programming. Suddenly if I had to reach a platform that was very high, I could just "imagine and build my own tools" to add new abilities to my being. Very difficult to explain. I could clone objects if needed. I could somehow "loop" things or actions. etc.

As far as I know I did not solve any programming problem with this dream though.
I'm 20 and have hereditary hypertension. I've never smoked and I'm a health 160 lbs at 6ft... yet I've clocked in at 180/110 and doctors aren't sure what's causing it.

Regular coffee drinkers don't experience any blood pressure fluctuations due to caffeine intake (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2488117.stm)

Thank god for treatments, because prevention isn't always possible.... and it's not always the person's fault that they're experiencing these issues.
If you have anything you want us to write about, please let us know.
Yahoo Releases Internal Hadoop Source Code
Ask HN: Why is difficulty for difficulty's sake highly valued?
It's most obvious in theoretical fields such as mathematics where completely useless conjectures/theorems are highly valued because they are/were difficult to settle/prove.

It's also something that you see in the software industry. People brag about how difficult something was to accomplish in a technical sense. Are they trying to scare away potential competitors? Brag about their IQ?

Perhaps this all stems from an education system that glorifies difficulty above all else.

Just because something is difficult doesn't make it interesting. Conversely, just because something is easy doesn't make it uninteresting.

I find this all very strange.
LPs, however, might.
Kiva ranks up there with Better Place as most inspiring types of companies to create post-success.

World changing ideas.
I don't think "online dating" will ever work. Sexual attraction isn't about the kind of rational things you can communicate over our current, low-bandwidth digital connections. It is well and good to describe your personality with words and pictures, but in most cases it isn't enough. It might even be counterproductive for people who are unable to look good in a photograph.

The things described in the linked post (commonalities) are important parts of dating and attraction, but initial attraction is much more about the subtle things: Body language, subtle personality cues like clothing and hair style, all sorts of instant non-verbal communication, social proof etc. So either you have to remove these factors from the equation entirely (I can't really see how to do this) or you have to make an arena where they can be properly expressed.

This would mean, essentially, arranging real-life encounters where everybody has a decent chance at relaxing and being themselves. The thing is, nightclubs do a pretty good job at this already. The biggest solvable problem of nightclubs is differentiation; if you go to a nightclub you invariably meet the outgoing, confident, secure club crowd. It's always a high-pressure arena. But actually, relaxing and being yourself around strangers is pretty damn difficult as it is.

This is just the basic human part of the problem. But there are much deeper issues to think about. Sexuality and relationships are a very sore and difficult part of human nature, and it is never rational. There are chaotic, unmapped social issues here as well; for example a lot of women are interested in sex just for the physical thrill but have a huge social barrier against casual relationships. On the casual dating scene, this manifests itself as a series of games of playing hard-to-get, blaming alcohol for a successful one-night-stand, etc. I don't think anyone has the vaguest idea of all the other similar, irrational cultural norms that will bite you in the ass if you try to tame this problem.

Online dating is difficult because

+It is hard to convey your personality over an internet connection

+No one is able to tell you what you're doing wrong, since the rational and quantifiable part of dating is so small

+There are a lot of unmapped social and human behaviors that will fuck things up

Basically, I'd just try to tackle some difficult technical field instead. Human sexuality is too chaotic and hard to quantify.

However, I do like your idea of using an existing social network to bootstrap the thing. It is the best solution of the chicken/egg-problem I have heard.
I'm sure they'll all be virtual one day, at least as far as basic science is concerned. But they'll also be called holo decks and not science labs. ;)
How to bring a startup culture into the newsroom
Best Mineral Makeup - Is it Worth Using?
Sigh. Already, there is quite advanced work on controlling stem cells (Google for e.g. growing human organs).

Medicines to recreate the effects of exercise and good eating will certainly be done inside a decade or two. (-: Needed, since human laziness is harder to change. :-)

In less than 20-30 years, young people can probably be much healthier than today. (What happens after that, neither you nor I can even begin to guess.)

EDIT: Please note my point above that medicines will be able to emulate exercise... It is sad, but obviously needed. (Also, I don't really see why a 20 year old coach potato would be that much worse in the future than now.)
"I really see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to"

I believe these laws are due mainly to the casino lobby.
I don't directly care about the SEO, but I'd rather not have some random guy with a beer belly and pictures of his last wild party to come up when people search for me. If I don't grab the name, somebody will.
'Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”'

This the last paragraph in the article, which has the title "Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?". The fact that this isn't the first paragraph, beneath the headline "Scientist speculates adaptive quantum computation effect in bacterial photosynthesis" makes this a shining example of what's wrong with science journalism, and why everyone should stop reading it.
they should partner with YCom or setup a secondary market for folks that didn fit the niche focus of Ycom, so young startups can get cash from a broad community. maybe its a whole separate biz concept loosely modeled after YC and Kiva.
And sending new friends a picture to look for is better than just sending a URL?

Oh, you thought "friends" would meet in person?

I've never met, in person, most of the people I actually regard as friends, much less those I'd put quotes around. :)
Test HN: need a simple answer
This has me stumped - or rather annoyed :) A friend asked a simple question on a BB I frequent (dont worry, he's kosher and well out of school/uni age so it's not a "do my homework" query :D) regarding calculating monetary combinations.

Here is the brief summary in his words:

Probably not interesting to most people but I've again I've just underestimated an algorithm I thought would be very simple ...

I get paid a weekly total for many small daily jobs. All is well if I get paid for everything but if I don't then which jobs haven't I been paid for?

i.e. last week I was paid only paid £153.00 for the following list of [potential] jobs
£24.10,£45.40,£21.30,£7.55,£24.90,£24.50,£7.45,£1.25,£9.60,£30.00,£17.20,£21.05,£7.40,24.10,£9.35,£14.65,£4.25

Which payments am I missing?

My first answer was that there is approx. 130,000 (interesting anecdote: Wolfram Alpha was a bitch to get working on complex combinations, I did by hand in the end :D) combinations of the payments. So just compute, store in Sqlite/Mysql and then query for the total you get each week to retrieve the list of payments.

But I cant help feeling there must be a nicer way (i.e. one that means adding a new payment doest mean you need to reprocess). Maths is not my strongest focus.... so, HN, am I missing the obvious?
Nano technology will make body implants much less cruder then your description.
I wonder how well the "think of it as a donation" model will work when it is Americans lending to Americans? I don't have any poor expectations or anything, it just feels a little different somehow because of our cultural baggage. I'm curious to see how it goes over.
I agree that you need a leader with clear vision. In my opinion, the definition of a leader is "someone who has a clear vision". I don't think it needs to be the founder, though. In fact, one of the jobs of a leader is to train a successor (I think "Good to Great" mentions this).

Empirically, though, vision seems to be a scarce commodity, so having the founder stay on for a long time is a good approach.
It's also ridiculously hot when you stand in front of it. Fun Fact: The wall is powered by 20 Mac Pros each attached to a 30 inch monitor.
Ray Kurzweil Wants to be a Robot
well considering the fact that you need to go to a special building to go to your labs class, I don't see why the same thing couldn't happen in the future.

Take your lecture online. And once a week come in to take the lab class
There is a Russian proverb that roughly translates: "Will you please be our Guy #3?"

> — Третим будешь?
There's been some, not much, talk about it: http://searchyc.com/zuora
$134.5 billion in US treasury bonds seized from Japanese smugglers
Co-existing with platform vendors
Stress can make a big difference for blood pressure. Trust me (and many others) on that.

I had problems with burning out when I was young. I realized (after too many years) that I wasn't sensitive to stress -- I just couldn't relax during periods when I worked hard, so I was stressed all the time. Not good.

Meditation exercises helped me. Yoga could probably work, too.

Disclaimer: You might, of course, have a medical condition.

Edit: Some grammar, hopefully clearer.
It's only slightly misleading to say Kiva lets you lend to small businesses, but downright false for RWW to say it lets you invest in them. If you can't get any return on the loan, it's simply not an investment.
Many -- if not most -- human intellectual pursuits are a form of stotting. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting )

In fact, competing with other minds, not meeting direct challenges in the environment, is probably what led to most of humanity's advanced intellectual development.

Sure, it can be couched in the language of the "thrill of discovery" and all that, and some of that is true -- but that doesn't explain its genesis, and doesn't explain what you're talking about, as all too often, the difficult solution is taken over the easy solution merely because it is difficult.
I spent about 10 mins looking before I finally found one of ours! Too bad it wasn't pulsating... =)
I loved reading this post, I found it to be cleverly written. With a just enough humor to keep me amused.
Props to the writer
Is this your lucky day?
Working in Chrome on Windows 7 32-bit.
living solely on microwave food seems, well, unhealthy. He might be trading cheap living costs now for poor health in the future.....

EDIT: unless he shares a kitchen too - in which case it's a non-story because I, and millions of others, have lived in equally tiny places :)
Google Launches A Guide to Enterprise Apps Deployment
It will be interesting to see if the delinquency/default rate of domestic loans is less than or greater than international micro-loans which are reported to be at only about 2%
Perhaps this all stems from an education system that glorifies difficulty above all else.

Weren't you also the guy who was talking about being ostracized by your teachers and peers because you weren't math olympiad material? From your comments you have had the most atypical educational experience I've ever heard described.
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it would be fun to autogenerate a thousand or so fake profiles and see if you could earn six figures on this
My experience shows that it's not true. It depends on how much people are devoted to your site/service/product. We at gtalk2voip.com turned 30% of our free services into paid for because we could not support more unpaid traffic. The result was not as bad as we expected: 1/10 users converted and paid for the services they previously used for free. Yet we received a lot many complaines and even threats. Of course you will be regarded as doing unfair and evil business, but as someone said: "no evil - no business". To soften the situation we kindly explained in every email why we were enforced to start charging for free services.

The overall results are:
1. Not so good publicity, we are no longer treaded as "cool service".
2. Increase in revenue.
3. Significant reduction in traffic and CPU load, hence save on expenses.
While I'd be glad to see this happen, he's focusing on the wrong thing. As I said in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642828), even if he's right about all of the new technologies, it might not be enough.
As did my wife and I. Victory!
I got a sLIME environment set up and found a screen scraping tutorial. It is a regexp based tutorial which seems very Perlish. I guess I was wondering if there was going to be a magical Lisp pattern matching way of doing this. I'm building an aggregator of content for an industry filled with a bunch of jokers who don't have RSS feeds, clean HTML and are bad at keeping things consistent.

Next up, I'm checking out Cells. (that's for a different project than the scraper)

Thanks!
The Soul of The Machine
incomputable with the information given
Good point. But not every web service benefits from the network effect. The spreadsheet example was not chosen at random. As long as you can save you spreadsheet in a common format, would you really choose a service with a higher user base over one that offered much better functionality but with fewer users?

There is space for both models. But for web applications I think microbilling has significant advantages
except that costs money
In response to both the preceding comments. My point is that technology is useful when we've reached the limits of what the human body can withstand from aging, disease or genetic problems, but that it's never a good idea to use it to take you places you should be able to get to through good habits and taking care of your body.

What I'm afraid of is that people will just rely on it instead of staying in good shape. "Oh well, I don't need to watch what I eat cause I can get this implant that will fix my blood pressure problem." It's situations like this where I think technology is rarely as good as the biological, natural solution. In contrast indeed, it's clunky and cobbled together.
It's great money, but not good enough to swear an oath of celibacy for. Especially if you can just keep the same amount of money, find a spouse who makes a few dozen kilodollars of their own, and then not be so lonely.
The companies that survived to follow through on their original vision tend not to have gotten bought out and absorbed into a megacorp.
You are right; there are 131,072 possibilities. Just have a computer go through them each week and see which ones match the weekly total. I'm sure there are nicer ways in terms of mathematical beauty, but if your friend is just trying to get work done, it doesn't really matter. Computers are fast.
Brilliant, I feel that HN will now disregard each of the various blog posts that will discuss these issues at length as they occur.
Would be nearly impossible to analyze because so much is dependent on (private) vesting terms
I thought photosynthesis was amazingly inefficient compared to our best solar panels. http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7241e/w7241e05.htm
How to 'save' newspapers? Charge $345 for web access
It's something you can pretty easily test by tracking the clicks from the footer links or by using one of the services that tracks user mouse behavior. Some people's reasons for not hitting the bottom: http://pickfu.com/PGDFOA
This is an instance of the subset-sum problem. It's NP-Complete. If there were a polynomial-time way to incrementally update the solution, then you'd have a polynomial-time way to solve any instance.

So finding an easy way to solve this problem efficiently would be a major breakthrough for CS.

Note for your application it probably doesn't matter whether you can solve the problem "efficiently" because it's feasible for you to check a hundred thousand possibilities. I'm just saying that you shouldn't expect to find a dramatic shortcut.
Almost all cellphone cameras are basically pinhole ones. There is only one set focal length.
The mental transaction cost is certainly an issue with content. I wouldn't want to have to decide every time I start reading a news article whether I want to pay to get to the end.

However, the one-off mental cost of deciding whether to allow a web service to bill me for future usage is not a big deal, and, anyway, it applies even more to the choice of upgrading from a free to premium version.

In fact, it applies to any instance where the user is faced with having to pay for something.

What do you propose? Everything should always be free?

As for the scarcity argument, charging for support is a horrible business model. Look at Red Hat's revenues per user vs MSFT's. The key is to leverage the negligible marginal distribution costs of digital content.
difficult things narrow the spectrum of individuals capable of accomplishing them. when you hear a guitar jam that is merely simple and easy are you impressed? are you interested? no it does not strike us because it is a commonplace accomplishment.

it is simply a form of elitism, and i don't mean that as a derogatory term. really if you don't understand why something difficult and challenging is impressive and admirable i suggest you hang out on twitter where you can be entertained all day by banal mediocrity
So now I'll have two devices measuring me every day: the Wii Fit and the Zoo sleep device.

I foresee a niche in getting all this data out of walled gardens and putting it together seamlessly. Google Health would be a good place... except Google has too much data and it needs to see someone else do this first.
Heady Theories on the Contours of Einstein's Genius
It's funny you brought up crap. I keep a notebook in my bathroom. I tend to get more ideas there. No Joke.
Smart General Purpose Labels Printing
Yup. The trick is to get consumers to embrace it.
Also a 3-axis magnetometer.
-- That's exactly what I'm talking about. :)

Ok, I agree with you on that piece. I still disagree that self-congratulatory thoughts need constant analysis for something as simple as enjoying some milk.

-- Why do you think that is?

What a great example of how, yet again, you're thinking too deeply here... as if I had some underlying internal motive for ignoring your one example.

I didn't address it because I ran out of time and was headed out to lunch with friends. So I mashed the reply button and figured I addressed as much as I could.
Not to mention that chicks dig it. The other way around, it's very sexy if a girl runs her own business.
Like TrevorJ said, meeting people through a circle of friends may not be the best method for landing a date, but it could help to relieve the lingering stigmas of online dating.

I know many people that still frown upon and feel uneasy about digital hookups. It might be useful to investigate ways of reaching these people. Maybe like a dating site in disguise?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Anderson_(writer)

"[Mark Anderson] is a proponent of the Oxfordian theory that the Elizabethan court poet-playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the works conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare."

Also, Stuart Hameroff, cited in the part about quantum consciousness is a grade A crank. Listen to his presentation at the Beyond Belief conference if you don't believe me. He believes, among other things, that faster than light communication is responsible for the "paradox" that we apparently make certain decisions before we are consciously aware of having made them.
Sure. But to be honest, that point is kinda trivial, no? If you give any competent developer a hard problem in an area where they are not a domain expert and ask them to deliver a correct solution based on nothing but an elegant description of an algorithm, they're likely to fail.

My point was this: it's easy from your perspective to complain about subtle practical details with stuff like RC4. But that obscures the fact that RC4 is an important algorithm, and worth studying. It's prudent to put on your expert hat and warn amateurs away from crypto stuff, but if they're going to study it, they should know about RC4.
Business owners speak about responding to negative reviews on Yelp
arranging real-life encounters where everybody has a decent chance at relaxing and being themselves. The thing is, nightclubs do a pretty good job at this already

I don't know where you live but I've never been to a relaxing nightclub where everyone was encouraged to be themselves. In fact, it's almost the opposite: a loud stressful environment where everyone is dressed up and trying to be someone they aren't.

To meet women at a nightclub you are pretty much taking a shotgun approach. You need to have no shame and be the guy with the most cocaine. Online, you just need a decent photograph and a funny profile and the women will come to you.
Top Canadian Startups (June 2009)
That's why you should start something that you really believe in. :) Start-ups aren't a get-rich-quick scheme -- it just happens that the market desperately needs some product or good that leads a select few company to explosive growth, which the media then focuses on.
I'm liking it. Its pretty clear what the site does, but I prefer more straightforward tag lines like "Send real postcards to anyone." Out of curiosity though, where does a start-up get $50,000 for a design competition? I've often considered similar practices to lure early-adopters, but I've never come up with a viable plan.
I really enjoy this metaphor:

"Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller."
What potatolicious implied is that people don't go to bars and nightclubs to find dates, they go to find partners for casual sex.