skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure there is: lack of expertise. Also, unfamiliarity with the code base. For people without programming experience, there's also the opportunity cost of learning a programming language.

The reason open source hasn't taken off with the general public is b/c every time a non-programmer suggests a genuinely useful feature (to non-programmers), the response is: "it's open source, program it yourself." Most often, the easier and cheaper path is to just buy the competing commercial program.
Does having more competitors lower the motivation to compete?
I think the example of the moon kinda sucks, I agree. but it doesn't mean that this is totally irrelevant.

To measure the speed of a wave, you find the length between peaks, the wavelength, and then the time it takes to go from peak to peak, the period. Wavelength / period = speed, which has nothing to do with the motion of the particle. But the interesting thing about waves is that it can stack without disturbing each other, and if you can stack different waves just right, you can make create something that looks periodic, but travels faster than any of the combined waves.

Shining light on the moon or motion on a LCD screen uses a similar idea where the peak intensity is moving much faster than the components (pixels don't move at all in lcd screens). If this is periodic, you can call it a wave, whether it makes sense or not to call it as such.
Wouldn't the way to go be to have an illustrative IDE instead of an illustrative programming language? That way you would have the full power of the language, yet newbies would be able to get something done in it.

For instance the flow of the program could consist of a number of boxes stacked on top of each other, illustrating the flow. Each box would have one or more lines showing the input and output, and when clicked it would open up showing either the boxes it contains (funtions, nethods, code snippets etc.) or the raw code if you're at the lowest level. You can click the boxes-within-boxes until you reach the raw code at the bottom.

The user would be able to drag boxes into his program, from simple ones that just print something to the screen (Two lines: input text and output text) to complex methods and functions.

The whole thing could probly be coded up in emacs.

Note that this is just a wild idea, and there are probably tons of things I haven't thought of. It's pretty interesting though.
Hi Scott - I admit it was a cheap trick. This is the first time I've had something like this posted to an audience so I've had one or two things to learn!

I'd appreciate it if anyone interested in the post would skip the first few paragraphs and start at "Benefits of automated functional tests" since that was what I was intending to convey.
As for myself, I'd say I prefer the opposite. There's something to be said for personal & solitary contemplation.
At the very least, he's notable for taking all the competing arguments and putting them together into a single post that people have noticed, thereby becoming a potential reference point for future people who will make the exact same arguments.
My intent was to brush over the site guidelines, not to dig deep into the ethos of HN.
Drive it until the total annual cost of [repairs, inconvenience of breakdown, time lost due to failed vehicle] exceeds the cost of another used Honda/Toyota.

As someone who remembers their first high-school vehicle too well, there's value in a level of reliability.
Your code should be robust enough to provide an intuitive default behavior for corner cases like that. That way the application code doesn't need to be cluttered with special conditions.
I don't understand why the private browsing session needs to hide the public window. Wouldn't it make more sense to let the user be able to have both opened at the same time?
I think Amazon's going to get disintermediated, just like they disintermediated others. Why should I pay serious coin to get something that doesn't do what a cell phone, iPod, portable PC or PC does? They should recognize the process.

And I think we're going to continue to see newspapers, in that they're easier to read (and can be read off-line). Maybe 1, maybe 5 newspapers per country, but they're going to be there. They'll be the source for things that appear in Google, possibly taking over AP/UPI.

Or, newspapers and news will morph, making sites like the BBC the future. But people value information with value, and life's too short to calibrate the mass of information available on-line. And, people want to eat, so if I want somebody gathering news, they've got to be paid. And paid enough to make them do newsgathering rather than all the alternatives their talents lead them to.
The vast majority of them. Photoshop was designed from the beginning to work with print media -- it's called Photoshop for a reason.

Conversely, the people who just need to whip up some graphics don't need Photoshop; they have cheap alternatives like PaintShopPro, Paint.NET, or competing lesser-known commercial software.
How Beckham Blew It in LA
The power industry is slow to adopt change for a reason, that being a conventional power plant may have a lifespan of over 50 years. This is why there was such a call for nuclear power decades ago, to avert the problems of using vast amounts of depleting fossil fuels.

There's already concern growing over the wind farms affecting weather and not just weather, but also causing changes in soil hydration. Potentially mass adoption of wind turbines risks increasing desertification and damaging crop production.

Slow adoption can be good and in the case of wind power, it's better to fix the problems now than cause disasters later. We're causing global warming from fossil fuel use, but if we do a mass switch to wind turbines before the problems are solved, we're risking desertification on an unrecognisable scale. Not to mention risking mass extinction of bird species.

This is why helical wind turbines are attracting so much attention, because instead of mixing air vertically, they mix it horizontally, which if not reduces actually eliminates the risk of desertification and the potential damage to crop yields. It also reduces damage to bird populations due to helical wind turbines generally having a smaller impression on the land, which incidentally boosts efficiency for a given area.

It would be nice if all our fossil fuel plants had been changed to a mix of nuclear and green, but just like Nuclear had a dangerous start, it's wise not to have Green make a dangerous start and stall the production of Green energy for 40-50 years like we did Nuclear.
I think a better idea is to just edit your essay directly. Maybe even re-submit the edited version to HN - you may find people are more receptive to discuss the content you wanted to convey.
With some combination of telomerase, nanomachines, and time travel, it may be possible in the near future to reverse the aging process or at least achieve negligible senescence. Who will be able to afford these treatments first? The VERY RICH.
Since installing 3.5RC and even upgrading to 3.5 my login state for sites hasn't been respected by FF. I have to log back into every site I visit every time I restart firefox - anyone have any suggestions as to what I can try to fix this? Cookies are on, passwords are stored and I'm not in privacy mode.
Perhaps, but your experience does not indicate that the SAT test is not useful for college admissions. Chances are, colleges will want to admit the person who was motivated enough to complete the whole test instead of the person who was intelligent, but lazy. Intelligence without motivation is not of much use.
It still works fine if a and b are the same value.

Here's the general proof:

a ^= b (a = a ^ b, b = b)

b ^= a (a = a ^ b, b = b ^ (a ^ b) = a)

a ^= b (a = b ^ (a ^ b) = b ,b = a)

Now, let's replace all references initial values with constant c:

a ^= b (a = c ^ c = 0, b = c)

b ^= a (a = 0, b = c ^ 0 = c)

a ^= b (a = c ^ 0 = c, b = c)

Notice that at the end, you still end up with a = b = c. There are plenty of reasons not to use this approach, but that ain't one of them.
I've never taken the SAT, but here's what I think about the ACT:

It tests the smaller of two things: your test-taking ability and your "knowledge." "Knowledge" in this case is what you have learned and retained through high school. I am being gracious by throwing test-taking ability in there, because I'm not entirely convinced there really is such a thing. I only took the ACT once, as a senior, and scored a 32 (out of 36), so I certainly hadn't specifically prepared for the type of test. I just took the test, and the questions I knew the answers to, I got right, the others I got wrong. But since almost everyone else seems to agree that being bad at test-taking can make you "choke" and score lower than what you should, I will concede that your ACT test score represents the lower of those two attributes.
I guess the infamous CouchDB presentation wasn't discussed on here very much?

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

Edit: borderline NSFW
Convert Your mobile phone into a web server 
Great inovation
The private browsing mode is terrible! I've been using the Stealthier plugin for previous versions of Firefox and it works great. You activate it and from then on nothing you do gets stored in the history. You deactivate it, and history starts getting tracked again. It's simple and it works. Having private browsing mode close out all the other tabs is incredibly annoying! What purpose does it serve?
"Captain, the switched reluctance motor is overloaded... We need more time!"
It suffices that just one such individual exists to invalidate the claim of the title.
Perhaps it's just your standard introvert vs. extrovert style of thinking? Everybody's different. :)
"Not long after they took their table, the waiter asked if anyone wanted wine. They all raised their hands.

"'O.K.,' the waiter said. 'I need to see some I.D.'s.'

"'I don't have my I.D. with me,' Beckham said.

"'No I.D., no wine!' the waiter announced, theatrically snatching Beckham's wineglass.

"Beckham thought it was a put-on. 'Is this guy taking the piss?' he asked. But the waiter was serious. When the Galaxy's Portuguese defender Abel Xavier couldn't produce an I.D., his wineglass disappeared too. 'What is this?' the 34-year-old Xavier thundered. 'I have a kid who can drink.' The other players laughed hysterically, partly because the waiter hadn't recognized the world's most famous athlete and partly because Beckham and Xavier were so used to being mobbed in Europe that they didn't bother carrying identification. Welcome to soccer in the U.S., guys."
Since this thread is becoming a VMWare hate session I'll add my gripes:

-No native VMWare infrastructure client for Linux (or OSX)
-Very limited hardware support for ESX
-Stupid restrictions on the free version of ESX to up-sell. (ie, no jumbo frames on iSCSI?)

It's no surprise to me VMWare has completely squandered their lead in virtualization. The actual end user experience of VMWare products has gone steadily down while the free/OSS and commercial competition has raised the bar. I don't have any major problems with VMWare's products from a technical standpoint but I'm seeing less reason to use them and deal with a lot of arbitrary marketing/licensing restrictions that just ends up making my life harder.
1) China. Enough said.
2) The box never says whether the cd-rom uses a "standard driver model."

After reviewing the facts as they exist in this world, why would anyone have trust your reasoning or logical skills ever again? Moreover, given how important logical reasoning is to the computer programming, why would anyone ever trust your computer programming skills ever again? Finally, given how important computer programming skills are to being a computer geek, why would anyone ever trust your geek cred ever again?

See what I did there?
You make a good point. If you wisely use your time on any medium (Internet, Books, Newspapers, TV, Radio, Lectures, whatever), you can learn a lot of meaningful information. Kudos to you for doing it! :)

If you don't use your time efficiently, however, you can end up in an endless purgatory zone of just, say, "clicking around the internet".

I think it comes down to the individual, if you're able to "focus" effectively on the task at hand or not. I read a blog posting a while back that argued that focus is a competitive advantage in today's world as so few seem to do it well (must check my email every 5 minutes, gah!!! ;). Switching focus rapidly throws your mind out of the zone and arguably makes you less productive (there have been some pop-science study's of late that have backed this up).
Pretty sure everyone's feet start hurting after walking a mile, especially if you drive everywhere.

Instead of getting surgery, how about spending a few minutes working out and building up your legs? A few wall squats, a bunch of jumping jacks, and some towel hopping and you'll be just fine, without involving surgery that'll screw up your life 20 years later.
Many intelligent people spend many hours every week of their lives and many dollars doing things for purely cosmetic reasons: putting on makeup, picking out clothes, buying clothes, painting interior walls, waxing and detailing their cars, taking photographs of things because they're beautiful (rather than because they need to remember something about them), painting on canvases, performing plastic surgery, getting tattoos, tattooing other people, piercing ears, brushing and cutting and styling hair, listening to and playing music, dyeing fabric...

Although in the case where the canvas is oneself, you can raise the objection of narcissism or selfishness, I think these pursuits are fundamentally worthwhile and even noble.
The real trick, of course, is to cut the right cables.

The Internet is a graph with many interconnected nodes, and when one node fails traffic is routed through other nodes. If you cut out the right nodes the resulting traffic will overload the nodes that the traffic is redirected to, causing them to fail too, and in turn rerouting to other nodes that will also fail under the increasing load. A cascading failure.

I remember reading a report where someone calculated that if the right three major routers in the US were taken out the entire Internet would grind to a halt within minutes. This could probably also be achieved by cutting the right cables.

The real danger is terrorists with shovels that know their graph theory.
If Rand is wrong and morality is to be found only in doing things one doesn't enjoy, doesn't that sort of take the wind out of the sails of anyone who might claim to enjoy something like working to help the homeless, etc? Do you view all of those people as noble souls who would quite rather be working on a trading floor somewhere but are gritting their teeth in self-suppression as they provide social services to others?

Rand would argue that if someone derives meaning from solving a world problem such as homelessness, that his/her selfish (self-actualized) pursuit of that goal is the highest thing he/she can do.

note: Rand's essay is not at all about taxation. The conceptual overlap comes from the tradition of the church to use the ethic of self-sacrifice to get members to do its bidding... a meme that has also been used by the state to justify unequal taxation regimes.

I don't think the "ethic of self-sacrifice" argument is necessary to justify basic taxation -- simple social contract theory is enough -- but the meme works quite well b/c it allows the state to also be the arbiter of virtue.
"I can take it" might not really want to be the declaration you want to make, there...
I simply can't imagine developing without unit tests now. I very rarely (never) get things spot on the first time and the unit tests help me maintain pride and position before most of my big merges.

Sometimes I do wonder if I rely on them too much, but they aren't a waste of time.
A lot of very intelligent people notwithstanding, the burden of proof is still on those who claim that the first person to live for a thousand years is sixty years old today. Even De Grey is sensible enough to realize that he's going to have to show some pretty remarkable results in mice before efforts to combat aging get serious amounts of funding.
I'm most interested in:
"If you have artistic inclinations and fear that the search for wealth will coarsen such talents, you will never get rich. (Because your fear, in this instance, is well justified.)"

This stuck out as something I've never heard anyone else say, perhaps because it's difficult. I wonder how much truth there is in this statement, and whether it is a necessary truth or a truth of default. Is creativity truly stifled by financial success? It seems more likely that we get good at what we practice and few business people carve the time for creative pursuits.

Does this quote concern other HN readers?
There is a link to this on the page, but I can't tell you how valuable HTTP Client (also by Todd Ditchendorf) is for testing miscellaneous APIs quickly. http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/ The ability to save requests and load them up later is a nice touch.
Oh, I just found out that this book is also available online:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
I've sold a couple of domains years ago simply by people emailing me and making an offer. I'm also curious about the state of the current market. Today I flagged a couple of domains with my registrar (dynadot) as "for sale" and they list them, handle payment and take a %5 fee. Big caveat is that they don't pay cash, but only give you credit on your account.

Would love to hear about recent positive experiences with selling domains.
Damn, I previously thought LHC is the only thing that's gonna suck up the world.
In Europe the drinking age is 18, in some places 17, and if you don't look under 15 you don't get challenged. It's a cultural difference, not ego on the part of the players. It's not a question of who they are, it's a question of looking 21 or not.

Maybe they do have big egos, but this incident doesn't show it, and if the author doesn't know then then he himself is displaying ignorance.
and further, those with high SAT scores and low grades seem to be showing that they aren't using their supposedly high IQ towards academic achievement, and perhaps should be questioned more than those with the reverse split.
I don't know much about Ferris nor have I read his book but I am very interested in what he has to say. I didn't know he was viewed as an 'Infomercial' type of guy but its not like the body can't be hacked.

There is the Atkins Diet, Caveman Diet, etc that go against the traditional nutritional advice. There as that one guy that recently watched TV in the morning and just that helped him control his appetite. (it was a story on here or Reddit I think) There was the woman who used eye training to give her depth perception that she had not had her whole life. There was the researcher in the 70s or 80s that wore glasses that inverted the light entering his eyes and he proved that within a week his brain adapted to it and he could function normally. Josh Waitzkin mentions being in the 'Zone' during a chess match when an Earthquake happened and he was so focused it was Zen like to him. There was an article today on researchers finding that sleep happens as areas of the brain shut down independently. Charlie Sheen went on a special workout and diet before Hot Shots Part Deux and gained 20-30 pounds of muscle while getting to under 10 percent body fat with in 4 to 6 months. Eating many small meals a day versus three square meals is supposedly healthier.

I'm not saying that Ferris is correct or a good man or anything like that. I am interested in what he has to say and as far as hacking the body I completely believe it is possible.

Heck, I was thinking of what the 30% strength gain could be and I figured it might be something like over-training a muscle group for several hours one day and then resting. Perhaps the body through evolution will direct more resources to repairing it as it might have in the evolutionary past because it assumes it is going to be needed again soon. Then on day two you get really angry or scared to release adrenaline to give speed, strength and cover any pain as you try and lift something. I don't know... but I know that the stuff talked about today nutritionally would seem crazy 100 years ago and the stuff now ill look crazy in 50 years.

"Come on! Get liposuction to release the natural stem cells in an adult body and then inject it into your heart during a bypass to increase your chance of survival 10 fold AND lowering your chance of complications?! Crazy!"
Ask YC: How to become an accredited investor
I am submitting this under a different username to remain anonymous.

I understand the qualifications of becoming an accredited investor - $1mil net worth or $200,000 in income for two previous years.

Here is what I am unclear about:

Is there some organization to contact, form to fill out, or approval process to obtain "accredited" status? Or are you accredited "automatically" when you meet the requirements?

I'm asking because I am interested in possibly attending future YC demo days.

Thanks for any assistance.
This is all pretty naive stuff. "And maybe a PhD someday just for fun." Really? I say revisit some of these ideas because they are pretty contradictory.
Confused. Looking at those charts makes me think that there is so much category-to-category variation that it defies logic to make such sweeping general statements.
Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy
Is Twitter the New SPAM?
This article is kind of lame. 1 - 6 should be basic skills from undergrad CS courses. Also the intro paragraph is a bait and switch,

"Instead of performing some operation (such as counting the 1 bits in an integer) by looping over individual bits, these programming nuggets do the same with one or two carefully chosen bitwise operations."

We never actually learn how to count set bits in an integer. (My initial thought was look-up table but is there a better way?)
I'm not really sure what your point is here…the feature is _already_ available in closed-source form. I was merely pointing out that its presence and that of an open source implementation are not mutually exclusive simply because the closed source version was developed by the same people who developed and released the source for the rest of VirtualBox.
Seizing Opportunity
His main point was, the more responsibility you take on, the richer you can become. In the financial industries, only the best talents get the type compensation that would qualify them as "rich". It's basically like becoming a Major League Baseball player, so I wouldn't call it a "safe" job. At that level the rewards are high, but the leash is even shorter. I'd go as far as saying that the unreasonable amount of risk these institutions took on was mainly because of that short leash (much like MLB players taking steroids, and how that whole saga played out). The pressure to perform is astronomically higher. These guys handle quite a few more figures than your typical everyday banker, and thus fit the criteria.
You are write on the time issue (but it does work if a and b are the same)

The reason becomes very apparent if you write out the assembly necessary to compile the xor, vs what is needed to compile a classic swap.

The xor would look something like:

load $1, a
load $2, b
xor $3, $1, $2
xor $4, $3, $2
xor $5, $4, $3
store b, $4
store a, $5

where as the classic swap would look something like this:

load $1, [a]
load $2, [b]
store b, $1
store a, $2

which is much better.

If you take the pipeline into account, then the difference between the swap and the xor can be huge because their is high level of dependence between the instructions.

On a theoretical classic 5-stage pipeline, the swap approach ends up needing about 10 cycles, where as the xor needs about 18.

In a real processor the difference would probably be much worse.
Better than eMusic, where once you cancel your subscription you start getting spam.
The Future Of Money