skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortunately, YC folks have you to advise them. I often find myself in the predicament where I need to discuss an idea/ get some feedback / advice from someone who's familiar with the startup scene. Friends - family are too out of touch with tech startup world to provide any relevant,useful input.

I'd say YC should start like a monthly session (paid) where a limited set of entrepreneurs can get advice/input? Maybe far stretched considering your time constraints, but just thinking out loud.
I.Saw - The World's First USB-powered Chainsaw
"How do you fix that?"

Not by fighting the urge to type, but by feeding it.

You mention "coding one more feature". Where did that feature come from, you or your users? If you consider "intimate contact with your market" as a box on a flow chart that provides input into "features to code", any self-respecting geek would understand how important it is as a critical step in the dev process.

"Intimate contact with your market" is just as important for development as it is for marketing. Don't allow yourself to play the introvert card when pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
From Simply Scheme's preface:

"The only trouble with SICP is that it was written for MIT students, all of whom love science and are quite comfortable with formal mathematics. Also, most of the students who use SICP at MIT have already learned to program computers before they begin. As a result, many other schools have found the book too challenging for a beginning course. We believe that everyone who is seriously interested in computer science must read SICP eventually. Our book is a prequel; it's meant to teach you what you need to know in order to read that book successfully."
I agree with most of your comment, though take exception to:

" LSD is completely safe physically, it's impossible to overdose or cause brain damage of any sort."

During my college years, I met a couple of people that were very much affected, in a negative way, by LSD. There are some folks, possibly a minority, that can not handle the affects of psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms. So in not so many words, IMHO, LSD is not 'completely' safe and can indeed be harmful for people who are not mentally capable to handle the intensity of the experience. (I know you stated 'safe physically' and my point skews towards 'mental' safety; though the people I am referencing were physically and mentally disheveled, and to an extent, blamed their 'bad' trip(s).)

Sure, they should/could use smaller doses but the way LSD is distributed makes this very hard.
I do this a lot, too. I guess this is like "Just type in the AOL keyword, and boom, you're there!", except it's Google keyword. :)
" I don't want to be lied to before I even click the link."

I think the word "lie" is a bit strong for your meaning. Misled, perhaps, or ill-advised.

Lying means to deliberately deceive. Whatever you think of the title, there is no reason to think the author is trying to deceive you.
The Metropolis Model: A New Logic for Development of Crowdsourced Systems
Evolution is not the process of selecting for traits you think are awesome, it's the process of selecting for traits that lead to more offspring. The fact that this particular protein hasn't been naturally amped to the max just means photographic memory may not be as important a part of getting laid as you might hope.
Why Google Chrome OS is a Nonstarter
Vint Cerf On Social Networking
I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug

Amazing that the author of a sci-fi blog would say this; such a drug could feed the premises of a dozen short stories or Twilight Zone episodes -- and many would have dark endings. (Perhaps this was really her intent, to trigger fun scare stories in comment threads.) Examples:

You could remember a good experience so well you spend your whole life trying in vain to reproduce it.

You could remember a bad experience so well it paralyzes you.

Your initial advantage could go through phases of benefit and detriment, ultimately be so isolating you're completely alone, and then be reversed (a little like 'Flowers for Algernon').

There could be an ironic turn (blinded just after gaining perfect visual memory; 'Time Enough at Last').

You could, imperceptibly at first, lose other valuable skills in proportion to the memory gain. Social abilities; judgement; empathy. The irony would be you can't even remember the dimensions of life you've lost -- they're no longer perceptible compared to the eidetic perfection.

Etc, etc...
Apparently there is an auto responder set up, to notify you if have found the correct address.
Why Does Everyone Else's Code Suck?
Not much, but nothing says the user needs to be able to type 'rm -rf foo'. Most people are used to OS that are designed to be fast and permissive, but you can code a defensive OS.
I think that your ability to keep the ego out of the picture can convert (potentially fractious) collaboration into the best kind of continuing ed. Bravo!
"or cause brain damage of any sort"

I'm sorry but that's not the case. In high school I ended up emailing David Nichols (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Nichols) to clear up something they mentioned in health class. I couldn't believe it when he replied with a two page sized email to a high school student. I don't have it saved anymore unfortunately, but he said that physically, it is fairly safe, but if you have existing predisposition to mental disorders such as schizophrenia, it can push you over the edge and aggravate it immensely. So while it's physically safe as far as I remember, it has the potential turn predispositions into actual disorders.
Well from a technical standpoint you are correct. Although, if I see buggy/weird behavior on a website, right away I question what sort of hidden unsavory stuff is happening on the server side.

But there is an issue even if the implementation is totally seamless and bug-free. Maybe one site implements this slightly differently, and maybe some sites have a checkbox to clear the mask, or other sites show me each character for a fixed delay (e.g., character disappears after 250 ms or something), etc. In each case I must make some accomodations to how I expect a password field to behave. On the other hand if it is at the application level then there is opportunity to evolve the feature uniformly across all websites--and also give the user a single option which controls the behavior.
The problem is that the people in this world that are both great at marketing and great at coding can probably be counted on one hand.

Doesn't mean you aren't right and people shouldn't try though.
I'm going just to quote Peep Show as a response to that:
Jeremy: "If you build it, they will come". That's my market research.
Mark: Field of Dreams? A man who builds a baseball field in his backyard for ghosts? That's your role model?
It is correct to use binary units unless you are selling hardware. We say TeraByte, but we mean TibiByte.
There are strangely many all over the country. Once I started looking, I noticed them everywhere whenever I drove outside the city.

As to DIY, one thing that worked well for me was printing out a photo of the area and bringing it to a local nursery. They helped us put together a nice little layout, which we of course bought right there. Then, a day of digging and you're done!
The only thing Firebug has over Safari is adding styles to a page. That's pretty huge when you are trying to get something to look right without 4 million page reloads. It's only one thing, but it's pretty huge.
Sometimes, other people's code really does suck.
Easy Retweet Button
Not cool in my book. tag=f033-20 -- It seems like the affiliate ID is also intentionally made to look like it isn't one. LAME.
Google is a cohesive force between these makers that might not otherwise have existed, except tenuously. Sure, they could have formed an industry consortium, but maybe a direct partnership never suited their game style. Maybe it's easier to band together indirectly.

It doesn't hurt that it's all under a brand name that's arguably a lot better than anything they could have come up with individually or (heh!) as a committee.
We're going with professional growers only. The any-seller model seems like there would be too many issues with quality. Plus, there are live-plant shipping laws that someone could easily run afowl of without knowing.

We're working on recruiting more sellers, so if you know of anyone who might be interested, send them our way.
You are arguing with the wall. I'm just explaining what Schneier meant by "2+2=3".
The Emperor’s New API
Bad product design. The USB port on the saw is an "A" receptacle, which sort of implies you would connect a USB accessory (like a thumb drive) to it. This would be, for the average chainsaw consumer, kind of confusing (IMHO).

If tooling and initial manufacturing are not already done, this port on the saw should be changed to a USB "B" receptacle to help eliminate confusion. Otherwise, I can see support issues when people try to power iPhones or other devices from the chainsaw.
Thanks for the tip on the help link. I forgot about that one.

We experimented with color overlays, but decided to go with b&w because the color ones were very distracting, especially when displayed all over the page. I'm not really the designer, just the backend coder, so I leave most of that stuff up to the rest of the team.

We also have some ideas for the left menu, as far as nice little things on mouse over, but yeah, it looks bland to me as well.

Good feedback, thanks :)
No, not at all. I think the outrage over the price tag is a miscalculation. All we see right now is "= 18MM" but what we don't see is what comes before the = sign. THAT's the problem.
Threatpost Podcast w/ Nate Lawson on Side Channels, EM, Smart Cards, Web Crypto
Don't you kind of think homomorphic encryption is a big deal for what it allows? I mean, at it's core, running arbitrary computation on encrypted data for the later consumption of the decrypter is a very big deal, and can be a Cloud game-changer.

Schneier may not be the world's greatest guru, but he knows a lot and he writes well, which makes his opinion more relevant on average than almost anyone else's. If you want a similar amount of "street cred", write a book.

No seriously, I'd read a book by you guys, just write it, please.
Money point:

One of the problems with cryptography is, you have timing channel vectors that are so minute and hard to measure that they don't look exploitable; the measurements you'd need to take are drowned by latency and jitter. But someone can come up with a novel application of signal processing --- an advance in a totally different discipline from crypto --- and suddenly an attack that was impractical can be modeled and made practical.

This stuff is just awesome to think about.
Thanks for the correction. Now that you mention it, I do remember that from many years ago. I bow to your higher Simpsons intellect.
Good to know. I should have been clearer in my original comment, but the second paragraph was referring to Impact, not Extreme. I know some people involved with Extreme VC/Xtreme Labs and I think what you guys are doing is great.
Watch the text-based episode of StarWars IV on Terminal
> Everyone needs a roof over their head.

They can go back to where they were before. They can live where the folks who will buy those houses are living now.

There's no shortage of housing and if we're going to subsidize these folks, these houses are the wrong place to do it.
On chrome and windows
that's because we are so used to the firefox search bar where it'll fill in what you were looking for as you type
Average 4 to a household is fairly high. A lot of single adults get food stamps.

Also, food stamps are a variable, income-based benefit. If you make money you can still get a couple dozen dollars a month for food, and if you make less you can get a hundred or so. It's rare that you get a lot from it.
Hmm, that's actually bug. The lungswort shouldn't even be showing up. That's one of our test plants and shouldn't be displayed.

Thanks for the note, I'll make sure it's removed.

Most of the plants actually describe how they're shipped and what you'll receive. In most cases, it will be either a small bare root (for trees and other "woody" plants) or a small pot.
but it seems that something is incorrect even if this email is valid... Need more hints! This is like a neverending story
Yeah, I hate empty categories too. We want them there to give an idea of how we plan to organize things, but maybe that's jumping the gun. Maybe build the inventory first, then decide how to organize it.

Thanks!
The bit about schizophrenia is true. I was referring to physical brain damage, like the "LSD makes holes in your brain" myth.
Google Finally Adds Creative Commons To Image Search
The SNS Usage Overlap chart could use some improvement. Examples: 1) Who uses MySpace and LinkedIn but no other network? 2) Who uses Twitter and Facebook, but no other network?
Does that actually make any money though? I often wonder what the purpose of chasing a few bucks here and there is if it doesn't make much and isn't scalable.

Maybe it does make some money.
I'm new to web development, and I keep asking this question but I've never heard and answer to it:

What's stopping us from making a tool that parses HTML/CSS and points out constructs that are known to be bad in certain browsers? Sort of like lint: "It looks like you're sending element foo inside element bar to IE6. This probably won't work right"

I personally don't have a windows box to test IE, and I'm not looking forward to the day when I'll have to test on IE. Surely there is a better solution than manually testing browsers?
So does that mean that Bill should have missed a day of work instead?
Info shared | Michael Jackson Funeral
I agree about the rationalization (dressed up as morality) on both sides of this. Still, the conclusion that seems inevitable is: if enough people do it, it isn't stealing.

Not to be a complete relativist, but it's naive to believe that the way we formulate moral rules (e.g. how we define stealing) isn't historically conditioned. This is a moment when that's visible because conditions are changing faster than our rules. The rules will have to change. As with all such changes, some entrenched interests will lose. That the record industry turns out to be the loser this time is, for anyone who knows how they've comported themselves in the past, a feature not a bug. (Yeah I know I'm repeating myself and that the latter bit is irrelevant to your point, but on this subject I can't help it: the karmic comeuppance is just too tasty.)
Tutorial on DOS bot and trojan.
Alleged Massive Technical Trading Fraud At Goldman
Gotta say right now, Karl Denninger, Certified Crazy Person. I don't buy this story.

But hey this is definitely Hacker News. What do you think?
How to create old style photo effect with interesting accent
There are two measures which seem to be the focus of "longer life" aging research:

1. Increasing average lifespan.

2. Increasing maximum possible lifespan.

This article deals with the first. I, and I would think most others, would be most interested in the second. I do recognize that the first is easier to achieve.
Good advice. It's easy to get caught up in a comparison with the achievements of others, and to say, "why can't I be like them, why couldn't I have seen that opportunity?" In doing so you make the whole thing competitive - in your mind. The truth is that you aren't them and you probably weren't motivated to try what they did at the time they did it. So why regret it now?
For the water bill that I'm looking at, the connection charge (which is determined by the pipe diameter) is $15/month and taxes are about $3. This household is using about 40g/day/person and its monthly cost for the water is about $15.

> However, the connection charge is just highway robbery if you are really paying that per gallon.

San Jose city govt uses services to pay off various folk.

> They might also be adding the sewer system charges based on your water usage.

I just looked - the sewage charge is on the property tax bill.

The "water source" report that they send every year mentions ground and well water. It does not mention desalinization.
Just in case we didn't have enough metaphors, Software Engineering is to Computer Science as Cooking is to Baking.

They are very different fields...and going through school there was very little to be learned about the art of Software Engineering. Most people, I suspect, have to learn it on the job.
I think the design is simple and clean. The icons may work better with a description on rollover, with a possible "yellow sun green house etc" but overall the design is cohesive!
I've always used -moz-inline-block for FF2, and it has worked for me so far, although PPK warns that it's not always the case: http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html#inlineblock

But at this point in time, I'd drop FF2 support (pixel perfection) for most projects.
While this particular algorithm is impractical, its discovery will lead to refinement, additional research, etc. We are much closer to a practical algorithm now.
Yeah, but in reality, even if we accept Keynesian economics as a given (which I don't, but I will for this post), the question is not really "Which is better, do nothing or do another Keynesian stimulus?", it is "Which is better, do nothing, or let Congress write another crappy bill using Keynesian economics as cover?"

The "first" stimulus (not really first) had extremely little content that even conforms to your explanation of good stimulus spending. Thus, by Keynesian economic standards, it should have failed. It has failed so far and I see no reason under either Keynesian economics or my preferred economics to think that will change.

What will a "second" stimulus change? Will our government do an actual Keynesian stimulus, or will it pay lip service to an ideology it believes tells it to do what it wants to do anyway (always dangerous!) and just spend, spend, spend? And if your answer is the former, I ask you, on what evidence do you base this belief since all evidence seems to point against it?

Explanations of how Keynesian stimulus works are pretty irrelevant in a world where we aren't actually using them. People who think the government should cut back may be wrong in the sense that it is not optimal, but it may still be the best course that we can actually bash Congress into following. It isn't a chamber where "nuance" does very well.

I have read vast swathes of the "first" stimulus bill. I invite you to read it and come to your own conclusions about exactly how much of it is actually Keynesian. I didn't find much that was unambiguously Keynesian, much that was unambiguously not, and a lot of other things that are basically slush funds that seem pretty unlikely to go to Keynesian things.
Server Error

Either the Macromedia application server(s) are unreachable or none of them has a mapping to process this request.
Besides the human-nature problems (Even tiny fiefdoms suffer from the corruption of leadership, etc), you have to basic issue that if history is any indication, eventually your colony will come under the thumb of one nation or another if it grows large enough to warrant attention.
Article fails to live up to its title.
Ask HN: Best listserv setup?
Howdy all,
I'm currently using GoogleGroups for a listserv, but I'm a bit frustrated by the whole Google account thing for sign-ups - I would rather be able to just add their e-mail to a DB. Does anyone have experience with alternative listservs? This wouldn't be a newsletter, per se, as anyone in the group would be able to send emails to the list. Ideally, the contents of the e-mails would be backed up automatically, and, if possible, viewable online through some sort of feed.
Thanks so much!
Josh
In a world where jquery is about rock stars and rails is about porn stars, nothing is a clear giveaway anymore.
Jay Leno’s 3D Printer Makes Old Car Parts
This is a (poor) joke meant to promote the conservation of paper. Click the "Preorder is now closed" link for the explanation. Or don't and save 30 seconds of your life.
This isn't a new result. It's just a poorly-explained pop-science review article on MOND: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOND

It's one of those things that looks just awful aesthetically, but explains a few things (galactic-scale mechanics in this case) for which we don't currently have good answers. Wikipedia is a better source. This article is mostly fluff.
Someone seems to be taking this extremely seriously. I just tried to post it on a large, paid WordPress hosted blog, and the blog refused to accept it three times in a row. Then I "TinyURLed" it and it went right through, and was posted as an ordinary "TinyURL"!!!

Try it!!!
This 200 word blog post made it to page 1?
Perhaps "most" is an overstatement, but certainly a greater proportion know better today than did 10-12 years ago. As time goes on that segment of the Windows user population is only going to increase.
Point. I should have said simply that there will be Netbooks running this within the year. Which, subsequently, there has been an announcement that this will happen.

All I meant to say is that I'm sure this will be concretely available for purchase in stores and not merely some abstract new Linux distro. Nobody will have to "install" it. (It may not even be possible to install it.)
By his definition of "filter" then Google would also be a filter and not a search.
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?st...
"But today, Milgrom says that he has calculated a new effect of MOND that should be measurable for planets and comets in the solar system," they say, so apparently there is something new to this.
I remember reading about a study in the UK that found that the thumb had replaced the index finger as the most dexterous digit among teens. This could easily be attributed to mobile phones and video game controllers. It may not be my most dexterous digit, but it certainly can do a lot. Just look at texting speeds and almost any video game controller.

Why then is it relegated to only pushing the space bar? Is there some stigma that it is that ham-handed and awkward? I would rejoice if I could do more things with my thumbs, particularly modifiers, instead of making awkward pinky reaches. The pinky really shouldn't be asked to do so much work.

Sadly, there is so much momentum behind the QWERTY keyboard that it won't be going away any time soon, and alternate keyboards and layouts are limited to enthusiasts, and the transition is awkward at that.
An excellent read, especially for people considering going into software engineering. It gives a good overview of the life cycle of a "typical" software engineer.
I think you judged it too fast. The article spends most of its words explaining MOND because that's necessary to present the new result:

But today, Milgrom says that he has calculated a new effect of MOND that should be measurable for planets and comets in the solar system.

The new effect is a quadropole force that repels objects in the space above and below the plane of the solar system while attracting objects that lie within the plane. Milgrom says that this should produce an effect on the precession of the perihelion of planets in the solar system.

The paper in question, http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0906.4817, is dated June 25, 2009. I'm not a physicist, but it's clear to me that Milgrom's contribution is a MOND prediction that can be tested experimentally.
After using a sun console once with the ctrl and capslock keys swapped, I do it on every computer. I use capslock much less frequently than I use control, so it makes sense for me to put it in a fairly neutral left-pinky position. I end up pushing alt/super with my thumb most of the time, and now my left pinky no longer gets sore after long days.
True. Which is why a team with a great coder and a great marketer (Steve Wozniak & Jobs come to mind) is the best approach.

However, a great coder can probably get away with being a decent marketer. I just think that it's the extreme case of genius coder + clueless marketer that is a killer.