skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll venture to say there's something wrong with just making the quick buck. Unless you're starving, I don't really see it as a good excuse.

It seems when one's life is in the pursuit for money for its own end and meaning, it's easy chase after things you don't really want in life. In addition, it makes it easier to do careless things to others, stifle innovation, and harm the environment, because you're just optimizing on money.

And in the end, the great businessmen of yesteryear are mostly remembered from how they benefited humanity. Hardly anyone knows or remembers exactly how much Ford and Rockerfeller made off the top of their head.
I use my mac for everything. Our application is hosted off of ubuntu servers, and it's pretty seamless to switch between the two. My business partner runs ubuntu on his laptop - he has to boot windows to do photoshop, but that's pretty much it.

The Mac OS is prettier. I would suspect that it gives you a better experience on a laptop than Ubuntu does. For some reason, I like my macbook better than I liked my thinkpad before that. If you don't care about such things, you might be better off with Ubuntu.
I think this explains the (predictably) irrational hatred for the GPL; it makes doors close, and that is something we are apparently hard-wired to hate. Even though we know we are never going to make our free app proprietary, we want that option.

I write libraries as well as applications, and I know that I'll use those libraries for both free and non-free applications, as the occasion requires. Accordingly, I do not want to pollute the libraries with GPL restrictions, and thus avoid all GPL and LGPL code (even the LGPL restricts how I can link against the code, requiring dynamic libraries, and how I distribute the code).

I don't consider this irrational; the paycheck that allows me to devote many many hours of my life to open source software comes entirely from software sales.

Consumers don't purchase "services" for desktop software, and the enterprise services I do provide are purchased by companies who ... sell software.
PerlMonks has been hacked
"People on Segways look smug" is a good observation, but it's a strange and confusing emphasis in an essay titled "The Trouble with the Segway".
steve jobs is now the guy on the big screen that the woman throws the hammer at in the commercial
Here's a whole list:

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2005/07/seeds_of_sui...
The one issue I have with the essay is how startup investors are chosen. "We know who one another are" is an unsatisfactory way for the government to decide who startup investors are, mainly because it could become a closed club very easily.
Great timing, I've been looking at Haskell again lately. This is the third time around, maybe it will stick with me this time :)
I guess it depends on where you live, but at my local farmers market there is a sizable percentage of the vendors that either meet the FDA organic standards or meet a fraction of them (no pesticides or no antibiotics). With respect to preservatives and flavor enhancers, I have no specific knowledge, but I would imagine that whatever are applied to local produce would necessarily be less than or equal to whatever is normally applied when something has to be shipped from across the world, absence of any evidence to the contrary.

Finally, with respect to your energy/environmental argument: I am not advocating buying local as a way to save on energy costs; I am advocating buying local as a way to get significantly fresher produce. With that said, even if buying local saves a single cent per pound of produce (not unreasonable [1] at current gas prices) that could be savings of upwards of $5.4B per year if every american shopped local ($0.01/lb * ~300 million amercians * ~1800 lbs of food consumed/american/year).

1. http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/04/buy-local-vs-shop-l...
Well nobody except programmers know what a function does.
Just a point of information: the original essay did not use the phrase "caught on." PG said: "The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly.

Given that the hyped promise of the Segway was literally to revolutionize public transportation as we know it, I'd say the statement is accurate.
Is anyone else worrried about facebook enabling LBS at some point down the road?

I love Loopt's features, but I cant help but think technology is no longer a barrier to entry. Providing a meaningful social graph is.
a smidgen of info easy to miss: http://the-songs.com/copyright.php
I did some of my first programming in HyperCard in elementary school, so it's a nostalgic subject. It was a clever and flexible program. Its game-creation sibling was WorldBuilder, which I "borrowed" from my 5th grade computer teacher, because it had been discontinued when Aldus bought the Silicon Beach company and they wouldn't sell it to me.
Patrick Rothfuss: Video interview
It's a dangerous business to be in. As soon as you get big enough, you'll get sued by the same people who sued SeeqPod.
Many iPhone users don't buy into the whole appstore hype. It was always going to be like this. It was inevitable.

At the end of the day, the browser on the iPhone is awesome, and it's completely open - I can use whatever webapp I want. That's all we really need in the future IMHO. (Hopefully more and more hardware will be exposed to js).
You did the right thing. And at least you didn't commit the heinous sin of applauding. I spit on clappers, curse their mothers, and I make a strong point of never breathing their exhaled air.
I'm not sure I understand how that doesn't apply to every startup. If you insist on valuing your time fairly from day one, you can never start anything new. You must work for someone else, who can pay you a fair wage. The trade is in the payoff one, two, or seven years down the road.

The payoff for this guy was $100,000, and he seems content with that payoff. For me, just the fact that I don't have to answer to a boss, be in the office at a certain time each day, or have to deal with constant meetings or corporate culture, is enough incentive for me to voluntarily value my time lower than I would working for someone else. Add in the potential for a very large payoff in the future (either an acquisition, an IPO, or just building a multi-million dollar business) and the trade is more than fair. I'd actually do it all for much less than I'm currently paid and less than I expect to be paid in the long run.
Well, people have modded their segways to suit their personal tastes:

http://www.segwayjunkyard.com/customs.htm
I really don't see Apple jumping into another carrier-exclusive deal, especially not with phone-crippling shitheads like Verizon.
Why are we allowed to critique a web site for having small type and a shitty font and bad colors, but we can't criticize people with poor fashion sense? They're one and the same.

Because websites are there to be looked at, people who are just going about their lives are not. Websites with small type and bad colours are hard to read but supposed to be read, people's clothing has minor effects on their ability to do what they're doing in most cases. Websites don't have feelings, people do. Many websites are built by designers who ought to be good at design, there's no such expectation that us ordinary people would or should have such skills. Website type is about usability, fashion is about taste - which is subjective and individual. With a website it matters what experience the viewer has, with a person it matters what experience the person themselves has.

They're not one and the same, they're different in just about every respect I can think of.
Such a thing already exists, check out http://www.runrev.com
Really? AdSense: Applied Semantics acquisition; AdWords: GoTo/Overture innovated here; Google Earth: Keyhole acquisition; Google Apps: Writely/Zenter acquisitions; SketchUp: @Last Software acquisition.
GMO crops have only been around since, at the very earliest, 1986, so it's pretty hard to say that people at the top of the ladder are there because of them. Lumping "efficient farming" in with GMOs to make that argument is wholly disingenuous - efficient farming could have nothing to do at all with GMO crops (see: Polyface Farm).
Giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking
Exactly. Gripes like the OP signal to Apple that lots of developers are writing code for their phone. If there were marketplaces to sell apps for other mobile phones, these gripes would be old news.
I don't insist on valuing time fairly from day one. I'm saying that it's intellectually dishonest to say that he turned a $12 domain registration into a $100,000 payday as though there was nothing in between.

The fact of the matter is that making $100,000 from starting up is significantly harder and costlier than it would be to make $100,000 holding down a day job. I know the audience here knows that especially well, and I know that you specifically know that very well. I just feel like it devalues what startups do when people just hand-wave away the fact that being successful necessitates blood, sweat and tears.
The license of the submitted code should apply to everyone, including GitHub!

Indeed. I'm tempted to try this but keep the code GPL'd. Sure, I don't get any liquor or free disk space, but the amusement almost makes it worthwhile.

(I hate proprietary software.)
How about using a stripped down browser for the reader, html or text files for the cards, and a list of links to the cards in an html file for the "stack" of cards. I bet an interested programmer could get something like this working in a weekend, maybe less since I don't know whether there might already be a stripped down browser available.

EDIT: The link to Runtime Revolution was added while I was writing my comment. It's an upgraded version of HyperCard for networks. I was thinking more along the line of a least common denominator replacement for HyperCard.
I don't think it's being actively developed, but check out PythonCard: http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net

It looks to be exactly what you're after.
Just an anecdote, but I saw an older gentleman riding a Segway in the street on Lexington avenue in Midtown Manhattan!
That's a mighty strong statement of fact to throw out without any kind of citation. Care to share a couple?
So you predict people will yell insults at supercar owners too?
Yahoo Shareholders Transfer $2.9 Billion To Microsoft Shareholders
AP’s rights management DRM explained
There's a 3rd element that goes hand-in-hand with these:

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Well it is Maddox (if you are unfamiliar, read some of his other rants). His goal is not so much technical commentary as make-you-angry commentary. He makes ZSFA look like an apology. In fact, this was actually the least inflammatory writing I've probably ever seen from him.

So yeah, rest assured he put that in there just to rile people up.
If you can't stand that, don't read this http://cameronbsharpe.com/

It is his attempt to redeem himself after making a bunch of money and babies, drinking too much and snorting a bunch of cocaine, and ripping a bunch of people off.

Any product or service that provides real value to customers doesn't need MLM to succeed. That being said, these schemes make their founders a ton of money. SkyBiz was an internet based MLM in 2002. Their revenue was said to be 200 million a year. Although, eventually the FTC filed a civil suit and through a settlement forced them to close down.
At the current clinics they often distribute it in these pseudo-medical test tubes that are highly amusing... The bottom line is if they legalized, there's no real need to market anything but the dispensaries giving it out.... I think it would really depend on the type, you can see this happening already - vapor room in SF advertising a place to smoke up, other places advertising good prices or delivery services... that's an appropriately rambling response to this particular topic.... oh look a cheeto!
"What has Wolfram achieved in the last 30 years?"

A new kind of science
If you don't know enough about the issue to discuss the it properly, then on what are you basing the assumption that people's claims to the superiority of organic farming is knee-jerk?
Alan Cox quits as TTY maintainer
I got maybe halfway through before I had to close it.
How do you know that it's a reason and not a consequence?
Six Things Your Mom Never Told You About Debugging Javascript
if it's only for that matter you could use the Google Reader's notes / clipping adding bookmarklet - you save a url and add a comment.
Technology on way to forecasting humanity's needs, IU researcher reports
They'd have to redesign the whole thing for Verizon, T-Mobile's a better bet if exclusivity ends.
It's illegal to advertise tobacco on television, and hard liquor is never advertised either out of social norms. Also, open and legal production of cannabis would improve quality and variety while open and legal distribution would help too.

Whenever I go grocery shopping, there are the mass-produced cheap beers, but there are also good imports and microbrews. The wine aisle has even greater variety. Why would weed be different?
The Segway features in Weird Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy", lumped into the same category as doing vector calculus for fun, fluency in Klingon and wearing a pocket protector...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbVtbc_XzrI
Because websites are there to be looked at, people who are just going about their lives are not.

Whether your or my ideal includes it, a deft sense of social signalling is one of the precise things we humans are both (a) good at and (b) judgmental of. On the African savanna, it evolved as an incredibly useful and efficient tool for deciding if another human was friend or foe.
Submitted 5 hours earlier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730352

More discussion there.
An interesting exercise in theory, though I can only imagine the last 'brand' as ever actually hitting the shelves. The rest of it just ain't practical..
Weak U.S. 5-year debt auction raises worries
I wonder which day will be the day the fat man eats a mint and blows up
I try to use all these tactics on websites I'm assigned to "bring up to date." However, the PHB usually refuses to allow time to do so - trusting more in "security by obscurity" than trusting in security.
Wow, that was truly awful. But I did learn something: the word "habitually" should never be used in speech, unless you want to encourage your listeners to think of the word "bitch".
My reaction to redirect pages is always the same: "What? Oh." finds and clicks the skip ad button. So I don't really understand why sites bother with them.

Does anyone know of any metrics as to what percentage of the time that "skip" link is clicked? Does anyone know of any eyeball tracking studies to see how often people look immediately top right for that link?

I just can't believe those landing pages are of much value, but then I doubt I'm a typical user.
Keep downvoting. I would appreciate if someone had the balls to stand up and say what is it that Wolfram has achieved. OK, he has a cool software company, but for a guy who wanted to revolutionize Physics, that's a meager accomplishment.

I can think of tens of Caltech alumni who accomplished much more than Wolfram, but who are less inclined to publicize themselves. Some examples:

- Arnold Beckman: invented the pH meter, founded Beckman Instruments, and funded tons of great research. Has two buildings at Caltech named after him.

- Linus Pauling: revolutionized Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Won 2 Nobel prizes.

- Charles Townes: invented the maser, won the Nobel prize.

- Bill Shockley: co-invented the transistor, won the Nobel prize.

- Donald Knuth: invented TeX, wrote TAOCP.

- Gordon Moore: founded Intel, started the microprocessor revolution, changed the world.

- Irving Reed: made important contributions to the field of error-correcting codes.

- Carver Mead: revolutionized electronics, founded tons of companies. He's one of the greatest technologists of the last 50 years, and yet few people know of him.

- Bill Gross: started IdeaLab and founded tons of cool startups.

So.. what is it that Wolfram has achieved? His papers on Cellular Automata are cute, but not earth-shattering. ANKOS is a recreational book with more artistic value than scientific value. Mathematica is great, but we could do well without it as there are tons of other CAS'es out there. Alpha is still hype. For someone of such high intellectual caliber, Wolfram has not accomplished much indeed.

Feel free to downvote. Or, if you actually have anything insightful to say, go ahead and destroy my argument.
I ran into an MIT engineering grad who was talking trash about Big Dog. He said "When you see a video of a new robot, remember that what you see is all it can do." In the case of Big Dog, this apparently means that it can run but not walk. And we only get to see the runs where it doesn't collapse. OTOH, it is truly impressive and sinister.
The JibJab Story. Maybe The Most Inspiring Mixergy Interview Ever
I would... I would uh... oh man, I forgot. I would... can I borrow a 20 from you? I'm so hungry, dude. I got... wow! Oh I remember... wait, what are we talking about?
Ask HN: Know any electronic design firms?
Hi, I'm looking for a recommendation of an electronic design firm to make a Bluetooth device. Any recommendations?

Thanks!
I think the bigger problem is that it looks like a minivan. Steve Jobs was right - no sex.
It is important. But I am sure Apple would listen more if people voted with their wallets.
the solution to all this is simple, don't buy apple products. stop bitching and just stop buying, and tell your friends not to buy either. I refuse to do business with companies like apple and sony who show no semblance of respect for the customer's intelligence. if you want to do crazy stuff with your hardware fine, but don't lie to me about in such an obvious manner.
Search results not bad.
You'd have to associate it with companion products, not just the obvious junk foods but also things like music. I could easily see record stores and concert concessions being major retailers of marijuana.
totally missed that smidgen, thanks!

I'm not too knowledgeable about this particular industry (outside of the mainstream lawsuits), so I've got a couple of questions:

1. Do people generally think this line of thinking (it's not our responsibility) will work long-term?

Furthermore doesn't it confound the responsibility thing that this service is specifically for searching for music rather than a tool that is used by a subset of users for "illegal" material.

2. Does a service like this pose risks for those sites that do have illegal content? Is it now easier to find and sue or otherwise put them in a legal/financial bind?
It's not prohibitively expensive, most people can afford the $5.5K price tag. It's just that for 1/10th of the price, you can buy a bicycle that does the same exact job.
I've attributed these claims to statements by Norman Borlaug elsewhere in the thread. Here specifically: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730793
Inside Starbucks New Stealth Store
From the Wikipedia entry on Betelgeuse: "Some theorists[who?] have speculated that this behavior is expected for a star at the beginning of the gravitational collapse at the end of its life.[citation needed] The mass of Betelgeuse puts it in range to become a neutron star or possibly a black hole."

So this might be what is happening. .
Are we forgetting about Cydia? If apple wants us to avoid their official app store, then so be it. GV Mobile is already downloadable via Cydia on a jailbroken iphone/ipodtouch.
How To Write When You Think You Can’t - Dumb Little Man
Read the Terms and Conditions (http://www.ijango.biz/Portals/1/IJANGOTermsConditions072809....) to find out what $149 + $19.99 monthly fee can buy you!

I feel angered for all the people that will inevitably be burned by iJango. What are the options to getting something like this shutdown or at least investigated? What is the likelihood this will succeed?
The demo seems to highlight its use as a visual cue that your confirmed password is the same as the original. Not that useful in my opinion, as one attempt at creating an account with non-matching passwords will tell you they don't match anyway, and you (usually) only create an account once.

Still, pretty cool demo and very nice colour schemes.
That was so great. That article opened my eyes to visual design - or started the process. (And the Bezos thing shocked me - how could such a smart and accomplished guy be such conspiracy theorist? Weird.)
If you allow surplus consonants, you could get quite a few, eg. Pete Nut, Walt Nut, Koko Nut, Mac Adam Yanut, Ke Shu Nut.
Gosh, you really want to grow some crops, I see. Well, I've got these seeds that are completely resistant to disease, only they cost 10x more than regular seeds and they're engineered so that you don't get any more seeds from the results. But you'll get a huge yield, we promise, more than enough to keep coming back to us and buying.

...One year later...

Oh, you say your crop failed? We didn't mention they needed twice as much water? That maybe they weren't as resistant to disease as we said? That there's another disease we hadn't engineered against? That the pesticides they were engineered to work in conjunction with will ruin your soil for everything else? Now you have no money left? Hmm, well... that sucks for you. Thank your government for our lucrative subsidies, though. When you commit suicide, I'm sure we'll be able to find a large corporate farming operation to come in and take over.

GMO isn't the problem (that we know of). Abuse of GMO, for the purpose of locking farmers in, that's the problem.
I got two minutes in, and he still hadn't actually said anything. So I stopped listening.
Wrong. There is plenty of evidence. Now clearly an argument can be made that the consequences of malaria are far worse, but to say "there is no evidence" reveals that you have some sort of idealogical bone to pick with environmentalists and you are not 1/10th as objective you'd like to think.
BigDog Robot System Overview [pdf]
You can use openCV on linux.
Is tweaking some complicated algorithm, really innovation anyway?

I think Yahoo are better off leaving this problem to Microsoft. People don't tend to call Microsoft innovative and search is an established place that they want to be in - this is normal behavior for them. Microsoft are in a good position for doing search by acquiring powerset and other companies (as Jason mentions). Microsoft this more so they can compete with Google directly and Yahoo have better sense. Yahoo is doing stuff that neither Google or Microsoft do well, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, News and other content.

Innovation from the customers point of view would come from improving the interface to search, which Yahoo can do without doing the algorithm themselves.

If look at what they offer with the BOSS and search monkey APIs
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/
Yahoo is keen on this direction.
At the Yahoo Hackday London in May they were pushing these APIs with talks and handing out documentation etc.
Posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731300

It uses an IMU, optical vision, lidar, encoders, force sensors, and ground contact sensors.

Why do you think joint angles alone would be enough?
"Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and co-author of the new study" - conflict of interest?, since her institutional affiliation benefits from fear-mongering about "addictions".

Also, they didn't actually test for addiction; they tested for a biochemical/neurotransmitter condition which is somewhat correlated with reports of addiction. At least according to the article.
The keyboard delay would be a little annoying in my opinion. The password is usually the last thing you type into a login form and as such immediately hit enter after typing. Having to wait 300ms for it to update would likely result in me not using the colour-hash.

Perhaps a timer that decreases as more characters are entered, so that once 8+ characters have already been typed the hash is updated almost instantly?