skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've given my answer to the freeriding problem above: upfront payment, moderation, rep systems...

Re: 100 people answering the same questions: I don't think that would be that big a problem, because questions are going to be specific. Take my use case scenario: at any given point on Twitter, there might be 100 people willing to answer questions about restaurants in Paris -- but about sushi places in a specific neighborhood? Much less likely.
http://ysearch.com/ ? ;-)
Sory, I meant:

http://gigaom.com/2009/07/26/getting-comfortable-with-people...

Which was submitted in

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724314

My mistake - I copy/pasted the wrong thing.
How can anyone stand those nasty apple keyboards. Apple makes wonderful computers but their keyboards and mice are some of the worst I have ever had the displesure of using.
Woman to sell virginity on net 
A WOMAN auctioning her VIRGINITY on the internet to help her sick mum has received bids topping £2MILLION.
H20 ... chilled. Used to be Coke (2-4 cans a day) then coffee (3-5 mugs a day). These days an afternoon coffee and snack bar is a once or at most twice a week treat. Typically after eradicating some extra perfidious bug!
This is not news. In 2007 it was already reported that video out stopped working in iPods unless you used a new cable with an authentication chip:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-locks-t...
This guy seems like a psychopath of the most normal variety. The kind of guy who couldn't imagine putting on his pants in the morning if it was only going to benefit the goddamn asians on the other side of the planet. If his ballteam can't win the pennant, then burn down the damn stadiums.
Instant coffee causes greater dehydration due to the chemicals used in the manufacturing processes. So you should be drinking extra water to make up for its diuretic effects. So if it's coffee it has to be freshly brewed - the aroma is a bonus treat.
What makes men attractive to women 
Always wondered why some guys always manage to get the best of girls? Well, the secret is not good looks or a well-defined six pack.
I always have a bottle of Minute Maid Pulpy Orange near my computer. And I also drink about 5 cups of authentic Madras Filter Coffee [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee] a day.
Thanks for the explanation. What I gather from all of this is that I should probably either learn physics and the mathematics involved or stop listening to media blurbs about this subject or both.

It seems to me that what's happening is that physicists have created models that can be shown to work for certain parts of reality. That is, they can be applied with predictable outcomes in the real world.

The same models also have extreme states, where some variable switches sign or some function curve changes directions. And now they're asking, what would be the effects in the real world at these inflection points of the model?

It could well be that the model simply stops working at these points, like a variable representing the height of a person stops working once its value turns negative. It could also be that the model does work, but the semantics used for its popular description stop working.
I gotta be careful. I just know there's gotta be a "Do these pants make me look fat" trap in here somewhere.
Then why don't I get an electronic version when I buy a physical copy?
As far as I've seen, the vast majority of Yahoo Answers questions aren't really of the "I need help" variety. They're more conversation-starters-in-question-form. It's a forum.
The integrator is excellent.
Does Local Search Sucks Less?
I was wondering what the hell they were talking about when they said the tabs were on the "bottom" when they weren't - they're still out the top of the application.

Someone's posted links to sidebar tab mod, is there one that actually puts the tabs on the bottom of the browser?
Interesting video. They do concede that aluminum recycling is worthwhile.

What's also interesting is that Penn rails against the government a lot in the episode (Penn's obviously libertarian), but thankfully due to government regulations, landfills are well-engineered to be safe for the environment. And landfill safety is one of the points that Penn uses to refute one of recycling's benefits.

Also, they say that a square landfill that's 35 miles on a side could hold all of America's garbage for the next 1000 years. I know they're not serious about it, but realistically you cannot have a central place to hold all the garbage since you have to ship the garbage to that one place (thus wasting energy, manpower, etc). So we still have to make do with landfills all over America and the problems of finding places to put new landfills still exist.
you're entitled to the downvotes, but I had hoped that they might be accompanied by a reply or two.

without that i'm left wondering if the disagreement/disapproval comes from ruby advocates with no facts to back their arguments or people who think that underendowed "office space" jokes are a valid retort for ruby fans with no facts to back their arguements.

I guesss maybe I do have a case of the Mondays, but you have undergraduate class project garbage collection and worse threads. Go charge $300 dollars a seat for your motivational ruby seminar or something. Scrum's at 11am.
I don't understand Yahoo!'s focus, except that they own a large assortment of web properties (e.g. flickr, Yahoo! search etc.). I don't understand the positioning of the elements on the page and their relative importance. I don't understand the choice of the colour purple (very edgy, certainly not a majority favourite - ever seen people dress in purple??).

People are smart enough these days to know, who's the market leader in certain categories. The walled garden approach will not deter them from seeking out the best product just because Yahoo!'s own product is featured on their portal. This is essentially an early version Internet strategy, or the AOL approach, which will work for novice computer users, but as the population becomes more tech-savvy, will show ever diminishing results.

One strategy that IMHO makes sense to me surviving as a portal (aside from their web properties), is that of a personal aggregator, like netvibes, so the front page becomes a customized dashboard reflecting users interests.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in those "lumbering" organizations, I tend to agree.

While it isn't unreasonable to expect professionals to learn multiple deployment scenarios, the sad truth is that it can be hard to arrange to have such professionals.

Expecting someone who's career has revolved around JBoss/WebLogic/Tomcat/whatever, to come to grips with the vagaries of mongrel clusters is a recipe for failure. Not only does it mean learning something new, something they may regard as a "toy", it is a solution which exists outside of their domain, i.e., a threat.

That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it does mean being able to say "it's a war file" is a huge and important lever.
What is the real reason for [X]?
1) For your keyboard surfing: vimperator.org vim-style keybindings for mouse-free browsing.

2) The URL & search bars are for the currently active tab, so they belong below the tabs. Visual hierarchy really helps make things easier to use.
the ipod touch has a mic?
Ask HN: Joining an Incubator. Concerned About 2 Items in The Contract. Advice?
I've been developing my web startup for a while now. I applied to this government funded incubator in my country to be able to use their services. It's not a profitable entity and aims only to boost technology startups in the country.

I applied to join, and after several meetings, they sent us the agreement contract. Two items stood out the most to me in the contract:

1) The Incubatee shall, permit the Licensor to participate in agreed negotiations or discussions in respect of Incubatee's business activities or the financing thereof.

And

2) The Incubatee shall, after expiry or termination of Agreement or after graduation and for five (5) years thereafter, provide the Licensor on regular intervals agreed on, with written reports showing its business status and business progress, number of its employees, turnover, capital on value, total third party investment, copies of audited balance sheet and accounts and other similar matters. This obligation shall survive any expiry and any termination or discharge of the Agreement.

Now the agreement does not include funding, although they can make it easier to get once we sign (and want it). The services I'm after are mainly office space, simplification of governmental procedures (in a 3rd world country these can get tiring), access to legal advice, and the advice they can deliver on things like business model and marketing (although they don't seem particularly savvy about web startups).

It's enticing because these services are free, they only want this monitoring and other measures that would help the success of the venture. I just wanted to make sure that these do not encumber our startup, or make it unappealing to potential investors.

What do you guys think? Is this okay or not?

PS: I'm assuming they want the data to monitor the performance of the businesses they incubate. The agreement states that this information will be treated as confidential.

Any help would be appreciated.
What did you call it, "IE"? Never heard of it... :]

It hasn't been on my list of priorities. Might work in IE7 or IE8, but I haven't tried it.
Why edit the bit that contains actual information out of the the title?

Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
IE supports XSLT. Yes, even IE6.
The State of United States’ Incubators
Helpful Roundup of JQuery Modal Plugins
Do you mean this link?

How A Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719328
I don't think we have much in the way of "behavioural modules" that are instinctively programmed for specific inputs and outputs, in the way a sensible engineer would design it. I doubt that many animals do. It's more likely that we have modules that react to a certain range of inputs, in certain ways, and their combination forms reactions that evolutionary pressure select against. It's neither modular nor hierarchical.

In other words: mess, not modules.

It's clear that animals have instincts, and it would be surprising if we didn't have any. Clearly, we do: for hunger, for sex, for defending territory, for pecking order (dominance hierarchies) but also for language, conscience, law, commerce, cooperation, tool-making and wanting to believe in something greater. These things arise in groups of us without instruction.

But I think two kinds of layers separate us from most other animals, which the article refers to as our flexibility and adaptability. There is conscious adaptability, where you refrain from punching the other fellow on the nose, because of your ethics or fear of consequences or whatever - the reason doesn't matter, the point is that you can modify your response.

And there's the much more important unconscious adaptability (which I think coincides with the physical outer layer in the brain - the cerebral cortex). Conceptually, this acts like an abstraction layer, so that you can treat a tool as an extension of your body; litigation as if it were a physical threat; or users of a computer program as if they formed a tribe. Your interpretation of input is what gives the input meaning - e.g. misunderstandings will affect your reaction. I think this layer can pretty much convert anything into anything; though some instincts, like hunger, can apply pressure towards overriding it (but not control - consider hunger strikers).

I don't claim any special insight here, just restating common sense.
Surely you must agree though that allowing these apps on The Distribution Channel of Android that 99% of the users use exclusively, and the remaining 1% uses it as well by default has quite some symbolic value.
China's hidden debt problem
Is Google Wave the beginning of the end of email?
I like the look better than the old one. Much cleaner.

But yikes! What's with the giant modal box covering the whole thing, demanding I bookmark the page? Why is it popping up full-page ads over the rest of the content because my mouse strayed over the links on the left?

Terrible.

Yahoo, if you're listening, here's my advice: Keep the design. It's pretty. Now strip out all the javascript from that page. Then I'd consider using it.
Play the 10 Days in Google Books Game
Also, you can't have multiple inheritance with Jinja2. That's a showstopper for me.
Linux Foundation Launches Branded Credit Card. Yes, It Features Tux.
"Accidental fail" is the thing that would happen often. Two opposite actions, stop and reload, placed on one button. I'd rather give user two straightforward buttons, than one complex and modal.
He really should have known beforehand that it's a terrible idea to start a new project in Coldfusion. Now he has proof!

Coldfusion has everything bad about PHP, but without any of the ease brought by popularity, the cheap hosting, the instant deployment, the extensibility with native modules, the piles of open source code (or implementations), or even people controlling it that still care. The fact that it's been implemented in Java for a while doesn't help you one bit, since it's at least as difficult to find cheap hosting with JRun et. al.
I concur with the notion of the mice being among the worst I've used, but I love their aluminum keyboards.
Yes, it uses energy, because it has chemical reactions going on.

But that does not make it structurally heavier.

Nor do I expect my nervous system to gain in weight significantly when I have an excess budget of calories.

I'd expect to get fatter though.
My first guess on how to proceed would be to find some other parties that have already signed on to this program and to ask them what these tersm mean in practice.

regarding the first term:

That one seems to be the most serious, why they would want a seat at the table in negotiations is hard for me to understand. What I don't see is the teeth this contract has in case you do not live by its terms in the long run. What recourse do they have if you decide to negotiate a deal on your own ?

as to the second part:

It sounds like the reporting requirements are quite heavy for something that is basically government supported cheap business space.

Figure out how much it will cost you to comply with these requirements and how much you will save because of being in the program (and there might be fringe benefits).

Another avenue would be to take on some angel funding and use that to rent your office space but that will cost you equity and may not come with the same networking possibilities.

It reads like they want more statistics on what is going on inside the businesses they have a contract with, which is typical for government services, it is one of the coins with which you are expected to pay them back.

It is very well possible that you will be making these reports anyhow (for yourself or your co-founders or for some other funding entity), in that case the overhead would be minimal.

good luck!
The article does point out scientifically based refutations of some simplistic eve-psych explanations rape, abuse of stepchildren and so on. Doesn't your point about the motives of feminism and liberalism use political name-calling to counter the scientific arguments?

I agree that evo-psych in general is an interesting field - and certainly all human behavior is somehow rooted in evolution. So of course rape also have some kind direct or indirect evolutionary explanation, just as love, music, wine-tasting, pole-sitting and so on. But the explanation is probably a lot more complex than "rape helps spread genes".

Pop-evo-psych have gotten great exposition in the popular media lately, so it is quite refreshing to see a debunking.
Which is absolutely beyond the pale.

Tax money I give to the government, they give it to the universities who then do research and I'm locked out of the results.
economically support chinese companies that treat their workers well and thus put pressure on the rest of the country to improve.

reform won't come from protests, it will come from the economy.
A lot of cases where you need template tags in Django just does not exist in Jinja. And while Django tags are quite easy to implement, there is a problem that they are completely inconsistent because you need to parse input string yourself.

Jinja tags are harder to grok, but after that they are starting to make sense.
As I said, generating a Makefile (i.e. the dependency graph) from Python would be fine, which conceptually sounds like what SCons do (from your comment).

But look at the build file example on the fabricate page, it is a user supplied build file with a build function which calls a compile function which loops over sources. Having the fabricate system take input like that and do parallel execution is as hard as solving the halting problem.
It would be nice if somebody did this for the whole capital sphere, including follow on investment and the rest of the world.

To have all that information in one place would make it one hell of a resource.
Google already had written this off as a defensive cost to be sure. There's never been a surprise about this deal not being, prima facie, a good equity investment. However since it's been publicly traded, losing three points of market share would have had a much more material effect on the market cap, such that this made perfect sense to do.

As for how much it generated, I'll bet it was breakeven. Assume Google had a 90/10 or 85/15 revshare with AOL, so Google made maybe $100M-$150M off this deal if the prior three years' numbers are correct above.
All Apple laptops (except the Air) have Firewire. The 13" Macbook was briefly without Firewire, but that was reinstated at WWDC.
Those would have to be pretty stupid spammers then, the rel='nofollow' took care of that.
Automated comment spam (using scripts) can be easily blocked just by using random form field names.

I'm surprised that this solution has not been adopted yet by the most popular blogging softwares.
Website designers
Pom Design employs professional website designers to meet your online needs
Well, depends where you live... I spent a summer in Santa Clara in a really crappy apartment and the water always developed this weird white film (or was it a precipitate? I forget) if you let it sit. I considered it very suspicious and did not drink water from the tap at home - I got my fill at work.
We'll throw this one in the "non-binary response" category then.
"The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise."
The title of this post is an excerpt (from an excerpt) of a quote by Masanobu Fukuoka. Sometimes the best solutions involve removing some of the previous innovations.
I have discovered the same thing - giving my brain time in modes other than problem-solving, like wait-for-kettle mode, seems to augment my problem-solving mode endurance.
I was under the vague impression that a little bit of sodium was necessary for keeping the proper h2o equilibrium in the bloodstream.

I don't go out of my way to ingest sodium (I probably get plenty in my diet) and I don't know whether sodium helps or hinders hydration.
Meeting over.

Other things not working on GAE, at least in my limited experience:

1) There is no way to run the console, period, which is a nuisance to my typical development style.

2) There appears to be no good way to do testing, which is a showstopper for many Rails developers. (I don't do TDD personally so not a big deal for me.)

3) Warble (wonderful software, don't get me wrong) has some performance issues, at least on this computer. (30 seconds to change one line in one file.) That wouldn't be a problem except...

4) ... I can't get GAE to operate locally with Rails, which means development has to be done by edit, deploy, edit, deploy, edit, deploy, which combines all the development speed of Big Freaking Java Enterprise Apps with the rich your-IDE-will-spot-typos-for-you power of Ruby. (/sarcasm)

5) You can't use ActiveRecord on GAE, which sounds like a nuisance until you realize how much of Rails magic depends on ActiveRecord being there. Validations, for example. (This was a major GOTCHA! for us.) I hear this will be mooted with Rails 3.0, which allows DataMapper (which will support Google's data store) to be dropped in in place of AR, but it is one of the major issues making me tell my bosses "The exploratory app was a big success, but the platform is not ready for us to take it to production yet, even though you have one production-ready app sitting in front of you."
Bill the Lizard
Pixelvader
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/linux-credit-card

But when I visit the URL it says Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page.
How to guess the number of M&Ms in a jar (vid)
I'm saying that they probably use a general midi sound bank, with sample sounds and limited control. You can only choose instruments from a predefined palette.

I doubt you could generate your own waveforms, apply your own custom effects and so on.

I never researched much into MIDI ringtones so I might be wrong.
Based on my research if you're an Indian citizen (which I'm), there's hardly any country where you can just get off the plane, look for a job, get a bunch of job offers, and start working no matter how awesome a hacker you're.

USA is the worst in this regard - their H1B quota is so small every year it effectively ends up being a lottery. I've an Indian friend whom Google wanted to hire for their Mountain View office. Since getting a H1B is impossible, they sent him to their Zurich office - he worked there for a couple of years and then finally got a L1 transfer visa and moved to Mountain View.

EU is slightly better because it is not a lottery at least. But the process is ridiculously long for a non-EU citizen.

Australia and Canada - They're slightly better I think. They've point-based system to get permanent residentship without being tied to a particular employer?

Singapore - Singapore welcomes immigrant workers (I'm a permanent-resident of Singapore). Even though there's still some amount of paper-work and waiting time, it's fairly straight-forward.

Do add your experiences with other countries.
No. E-mail is too fundamental.
An iPhone isn't intended as a general purpose computing device, nor it it sold as one, nor should anyone who wants such a device buy it.

It shouldn't be a federal crime to fool around with it, mind, but this is emphatically not a "freedom" issue.
On the other hand, there are plenty of places that do ship their garbage ridiculous distances. I have no citations, but I think you could find examples with Google. I seem to recall a few instances involving France and Siberia (separately, I think).
I do customer support for a non-technical market. Name an issue, my customers have had it -- they can't print when the printer isn't plugged in but the print later button doesn't work, etc. (You might describe this as "I can't save.", since your model of what a program does is a bit more sophisticated than hers is. Plumbing that mental model took a day of wading through some fairly exasperated emails.)

A lot of small software developers think that I must be going totally insane with questions like that. Honestly, no, I could do this forever. I have two main secrets.

One is relentless focus on ease of use, because you CAN find ways to take your existing program, business, and business processes and simplify them so that there are less places to have errors.

The other is that you can never have contempt of your users. Not even quietly to yourself. Don't call them Help Vampires, even mentally. You'll poison yourself, you will start to dread the You've Got Mail light, and you will find answering questions exhausting instead of a routine task which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

P.S. Charge more. If there were such a thing as Help Vampires, and there is not despite the fang-marks in your neck, charging more would be a cross against them. You'll almost invariably find the most difficult people at the bottom of a market.