skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This can fail horribly. Consider that the truck can decelerate faster than its solo braking ability by hitting a wall or another car. Chain reaction pile-ups aren't only about reaction time.

So, you can count on not being forced to collide by the driver acting alone, but it takes some extra margin to reduce the threat of rear-ending by a poor braker following you, and to account for obstacle-assisted braking by the driver in front.
PlayStation 3 Console 80GB HDD Review: Playstation 3 Invites You To Play Beyond.
Blunt? Ok.

It's bad for users.
I agree with Paul Graham completely. I wish there was some kind of founder VISA. I am graduating from penn state with a PhD. I have started my own startup which is developing educational apps for iPhone, android, desktop and web, but I am going to have a hard time staying back in US. I dont need to be present in US to run the business but I would prefer and wish there was something like a founder VISA for legitimate companies making more than $200k an year.
13 Ways to Browser Test and Validate Your Work
So basically, you screwed up your scheduling, your project management and your resource allocation. As a last ditch effort to save the project you created a sweatshop and bandied it around under the euphemism of "immersion".

Instead of taking personal responsibility for entrepreneurial, management, and financial shortcomings, you've degraded people's health and sanity.

Going so far as to mock these people who built your product by showing before and after pictures of them in a state of decline and then presenting that to us as "humor" is a bit much.

I'm insulted and ashamed at the way this operation was carried out. Hacker News is supposed to be a community of the forward thinking, not those who wish to revert to the abuses of the industrial era.
I think Bill G. should be on the white list. Even though many people don't like him.
Interesting that it runs on the balls of its feet rather than using the heel-first running that running shoes tend to promote. Is the barefoot ball-first gait easier to implement?
Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough"
Quick, someone see if it's being collapsed upon by a Hrung!

http://hhgproject.org/entries/collapsinghrungdisaster.html
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_Collapsing_Hrun...
Frankly I found this guy rather hilarious. I don't even think there is a point in saying he is just trying to screw a few hopeful who think they can make money from doing nothing.
Dallas data center raided by the FBI based on false claims by former employee
This is true, but stinkers like .mac and using the iTunes store for App developers still make it through in a place where the standards are much higher.
Throw some dubs or spinnas on those bad boys, and they'd still look like dorks.

Funny, personally I think that cars with spinners and huge rims looks quite a bit more dorky then Segways.

The big difference between the two is that the Segway never had a sufficiently counter-cultural fan base, and therefore had exactly the wrong sort of exclusivity.
RTFA

Dammit, I forgot this was HN. It'll never happen again.
It's amazing as to how, they say, creativity is commonly thought of.
I believe Creativity is an energy state vibrating at a certain frequency and Anyone can enter that state.

So then, certain conditions (like the space around you) help more than others to enter that state.
What kind of space helps you depends on the you.
Dosage matters. You eat plants that include chemicals that would be harmful in large doses every time you eat plants, but you don't give up eating just because of that risk.
At this risk of sounding stupid, what is this #startups channel? # like irc?
Creepy/Uncanny looking. While it is doing the dishes by day, it will come to you at night, while you are asleep, and MURDER you!
I think a lot of people will be moving their hosting out of the US because of this.

Unbelievable abuse of power and a total lack of understanding of the nature of this business.

To do this much damage without a shred of evidence is absolutely unforgivable.

The fact that the guy basically assumes that he'll go to prison because he refuses to admit guilt to stuff that he didn't do is quite telling. So much for justice.

This reminds me of the Steve Jackson Games raid.
Contributing to the segway-smug/ridiculous factor is the fact that the segway is parodied in so many movies and television shows, most notably with JP in Grandma's Boy or in other movies like Paul Bart: Mall Cop. It's such an odd looking mode of transportation that it's easy to use it as some ridiculous prop.
being successful necessitates blood, sweat and tears

This is one of those Real Scotsman pieces of lore which I think we repeat to flatter ourselves. I bleed a lot less for my startup than my day job, let me tell you.
DDoS from people outside of the U.S.
I can understand you're skeptical of anyone who tells you they have a few "strangely healthy habits", or whatever you want to call those, but believing that absolutely nobody says the truth completely when they claim it, that's another story.

(My apologies if I'm not being clear)
I don't get why Shimomura is listed on there? Surely getting owned by Mitnick disqualifies him?

I think getting the FBI to step in qualifies as "winning" in the as much as screaming for your mommy and having her scold the other boy qualifies as "winning" a schoolyard fight. The other guy suffers worse consequences - but you definitely do not get to be the coolest hacker of all time.

The article was just plain uninspired.
I have similar sentiments, but I won't call it outright wrong. I just don't spend my time dealing with the money-grabbers. Their lifestyle doesn't appeal to me.
I wonder if one can brute-force the results.txt file. To the github folks: do like netflix and publish the comparison with one data set (validation set) and, after the contest is over, publish the comparisons with a test set that is only used once. That way nobody can brute-force anything.
I downvoted both, if it helps. I also upvoted you for adding to the conversation.
That's rather an oversimplification in practice. "Just one piece of evidence" can almost always be explained in many, many different ways. Overturning an apparently well-established theory generally takes a substantial accumulation of contrary evidence, and preferably the appearance of a new and better theory.

So, suppose someone found a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian. J B S Haldane notwithstanding, biologists would not abandon evolution, nor should they. They'd start looking at possibilities like fraud; previously unknown ways for things to get fossilized very rapidly; some screwup in their dating of the relevant bits of rock; and so forth. It would take a whole lot of fossil rabbits, and preferably some other evidence too, to make "evolution is all wrong" a better theory than those. That doesn't mean evolution is unfalsifiable; it means it's got a whole lot of evidence and arguments behind it, and overturning it would take a correspondingly large weight of evidence.
I wonder which day will be the day the fat man eats a mint and blows up
Ask HN: What are the Ruby on Rails Plugins you can't live without? 
My list

* will_paginate
* Authlogic or restful_authentication
* thinkingsphinx
* exception_notifier
Check all the downtown Austin scenery as he talks. Does this dude live here?
Thanks for this very interesting link, by an author whose writings I like a lot. (He is a chemist who writes about food, a good background to have for this thread.)

It is a puzzler that he mentions one small sample of rats

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that doesn't show the same result (indifference to whether or not food is "organic") shown in many human studies he mentions in his article. This kind of study needs a bigger sample size and a great deal more replication.

Here's another problem: how do we know that either human beings or rats prefer what is best for them? Preferences for smells and tastes may have evolutionary origins that are then exploited by adaptations of food organisms in ways that are not beneficial to the eater.
MEF: Making Extensibility Fun
Our campus police use a golf cart
Even if I do get your point and I agree about apple - I wouldn't want google to be anything but a semi-gentle giant it is as of now.
I'd like to see some actual data on the relative usability. Maybe Nielson could take care of it.
Hair Treatment
Yes it can be extremely annoying and embarrassing having a scalp condition like dandruff, eczema, scalp infections or a nasty itchy red rash on your scalp. If you are suffering from: is your scalp flaky itchy or do you have dry scalp with…
Oh my: "The economy is literally nose-diving."
I occasionally drive that sort of short distance and it's usually because I need/want to be there quickly or I have something heavy/bulky to carry.
There is plenty of evidence.

Where is the evidence of direct DDT harm to human beings? I don't recall that ever being mentioned when DDT was banned in the United States (within my lifetime, so I remember the contemporary news reports on the issue). If there is a harm, how does it compare to the harm of insect-borne diseases?
Yes I go up and talk to people that ride segways whenever I see them usually in malls and the like and most use them because they are partially handicapped and have trouble walking and the segway makes them look normal.
Is this an affiliate marketing scam or a parody of affiliate marketing scams?

I mean the guy is so full of shit that he cannot possibly be for real. Oh and there is a link on the front page that leads to the front page. Also, the name seems far too silly. The compensation plan begins with the phrase "At iJango, we are committed to the highest standards of ethics and integrity".

And really, the center of the internet?
Actually, electric wheelchairs are superior for this purpose. People with mobility issues generally aren't going to want to stand for the 5-10 minutes. I've never ridden one, but if it requires core strength at all to lean-steer, then that rules it out for most people with disabilities.
Just Shred It-Protecting Your Identity
figuring out the answers is actually not that hard - we're using data that is publicly available through our API. in the rules we state that your entry will be disqualified if you do this sort of thing, though.
There have been other posts about this before on HN, I'm pretty sure. The Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

reviews some of the literature on this observation.
If your servers are hosted overseas, the FBI can probably ask local law enforcement (via some treaty) to seize everything.

http://www.eff.org/cases/indymedia-server-takedown/
Heroes Behind The Scene - I
A lot of people do or worse at least where I grew up.
Idea: remove the handle bar and use an iPhone to control it.

With the accelerometer and the compass it wouldn't be that difficult.

Call it a Tri-pad, sell it for $999.
I agree that when #2 and #3 pool their efforts the goal is to merge their strengths. But all too often the result is to merge their weaknesses as infighting, politics, and the inevitable friction of trying to get two disparate cultures working together smoothly takes over.
I route mine through my computer's line-in and use passthru. Though you could hook it up to speakers directly.
Ask Harley Live @ 8PM Eastern (investor and mentor answers startup questions)
Ask HN: What Kind of Biology Study Did You Have in Higher Education?
I'm trying to get a sense here of how many of the HN participants, who I wildly guess are mostly people who studied computer-related subjects in their most advanced education, also studied a higher-education course in biology or a related life science. My last formal course in biology was my university's first-year undergraduate honors biology course, a course popular with aspiring physicians. While I was at university, I developed quite a penchant for reading journal articles and monographs in the university's Bio-Medical Library, but a lot of new biological science has been discovered since I last took a formal school course in the subject. How about you? What life science courses have you taken? What books or journals do you read to keep up with the subject? I like PLoS Biology

http://www.plosbiology.org/

PLoS Medicine

http://www.plosmedicine.org/

and

PLoS Genetics

http://www.plosgenetics.org/

because they are free-beer free, Web-based, and current.
It would be even cooler if it had an option to create a playlist, like fizy.com does.
Black Hat 2009: Get an SSL cert valid for any domain using a null character
From your hypothetical, you don't sound like you know a single farmer, but I'll agree with you: GMO patents are wrong and should not be allowed.

GMO For the People.
Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway.

Don't you mean: "the company was itself a kind of segue" ?

Weird word;

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/segue
Thanks for the link! I just figured it would use the simplest solution that could get the job done. I don't know how important measuring foot slip/ground contact is for quadrupedal locomotion or how well it can be approximated by measuring joint angles and computing forward kinematics. I guess load cells are cheap so why not use them?

Again, thanks for digging that up. It's heaps better than idle speculation.
What kind of users? Do you have more feedback on that end? Thanks!
Just because your prejudices fit the biases of the day that doesn't make them scientific.
if it has good content. it would suck to get spammers or advertisers using it only, similar to following a Twitter user who's just spamming. But then there are the twitter accounts you like. It definitely can't mitigate all awful content. You're also getting these links from people you know hopefully.
Those are all good points and questions.

I think it also relies on the actual message in the content of the page. If that content is actually good, people will want to look at it. The percentage that the content is good? That's the question. Probably not too many.
> All we have is confidence in something.

Yes but if you can't define what confidence is what does it mean? When I studied physics we learned to provide confidence intervals for each measurement and subsequent calculation so every variable was of the form X +/- Y. From memory the confidence was a specific number of deviations from the mean. That meant something. Saying 'roughly X' doesn't.

All the examples you provided are so improbable that 'never' is of course appropriate in most contexts. But what do you think 'it can't happen' means in a case like the existence of a phenomena like EM-sensitivity?

10% probability, 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%?

None of these are at all appropriate to describe as 'it can't happen' in this context. I think that in your heart of hearts you know that chances of EM-sensitivity existing could well be better than 1%.

> No one is asking you to put money up, nor does the infrastructure or even rules exist for how to handle it.

Check out http://longbets.org . Otherwise I'd settle for a proof of ID from whomever wants to take the bet and a public and signed statement to the effect that they'll pay up if the conditions are met within a certain time period. I'm pretty sure this type of bet is legal in most jurisdictions.
There is a market for the Segway, its just not the one they assumed it would be. Thats very common. They assumed consumers would want one - in fact police like them. Smaller market, raised too much money. Lesson there some place: , insufficient early customer contact.
There is work involved in everything.
Very smart guy! Going to be great advice!
When Jobs returned, they already made Macs by default. The iPod was Tony Fadell's idea, but that was for a market that didn't really even exist yet, so it's hard to see how market research would help. They just tapped into the universal human need for music with that one. The iPhone was likely based on a deep understanding of how much cell phones generally suck and a vague recognition that cell phones are a huge enough market to accept a new niche player.

I'm not sure how product research would even help. It's great if you're refining an existing product or entering into a well-understood market, but Apple's game is to reshape the market around itself, rather than reshaping itself around the market.
Just looking at the homepages of Google vs. Yahoo - it's clear that Google's focus is search. On Yahoo's home page, search is just a feature on a page littered with tons of bandwidth hogging widgets.

But Bing is clearly a search engine. That's the central focus and that's what people will remember. It might not be "top of mind" for most of us but it's going to be top of mind to a lot of Yahoo users soon enough.

The market's immediate reaction: "Yahoo Shareholders Transfer $2.9 Billion To Microsoft Shareholders" - http://bit.ly/yn2TT
The Certificate Authority looks at the domain string starting from the root, and NSS looks at it like a normal string.

The real problem is not just that they both stop at the null character, but that they both preserve the original input instead of only passing along the part before the first null.
GPL - Makeshift Patriot
I'm a little puzzled by this piece. From the title I was expecting to read a proposal for a crowdsourced venture firm - a firm that made collective investment decisions and was funded my a large pool of people. There are big legal and practical hurdles, of course, to such an arrangement.

Upon a second read it sounds like the author is actually suggesting a large pool of people getting together and being some sort of LP at a VC. That's even more far fetched.

Anyone think of a way something along these lines could work?
Anybody else find it funny that Apple blocks apps that allow the user to go around the carrier, given that Jobs and Woz's first entrepreneurial endeavor was selling phone phreaking equipment?

It isn't unexpected, of course, but I find it a bit ironic.
I'd like to respond to the last paragraph, which seems like the relevant point for a startup audience.

"It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them."

This is less an issue of funding and more an issue of their belief that they would make a "new cool"/"paradigm shift"/"disruptive tech." Although this might often be correlated with funding, I think that's because funded disruptive technologies are the ones that make waves (heh). Segway was a company that had the balls to believe that cities would change shape for them; it seems ludicrous to think that looking silly (now) would pose much of a threat to their confidence, money or not.

So instead of pg's conclusion that it was the funding that inhibited them, I suggest it's the very nature of disruptive technologies. Some of these fail and we laugh about it; others actually change the fabric of modern life.

In fact, perhaps it's because they had such a big, outrageous dream that they captured the public imagination (and possibly funding). Outrageous propositions like "technology that changes the shape of industrialized cities" are the sort of black-swan-esque gamble that VCs seem to adore. (Nicholas Taleb's extremistan / pareto principle) Not to mention that it makes a great story for the media.
Debunking the "Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index"
Mathematics isn't that rigorous, I think you've been misinformed.

Compared to philosophy?
Here's a question this post prompts for me: What is a startup and what is just a website that sells license plates?

People use the term startup, around here especially, a whole bunch but it feels to me like there should be some kind of clear distinction between a company founded as a startup and a single website.

I have a handful of websites that make some money but I would never call any of them a startup on an individual basis. I might call the all encompassing enterprise of building and maintaining those sites a startup but I think calling each individual site that is a bit of a stretch.
Big university sports programs have positive ROI in the literal money sense. Spending more money on a football coach or basketball recruiting makes more money, not less, for the rest of the university.

It's like complaining that a university spends too much money on parking enforcement or tuition collection. Or that an Indian tribe spends too much money building casinos.
wow I never thought about that. Thanks!
Requires browser plugin installation == Fail.
That's a straw man argument.

Patrick didn't say there wasn't work involved.
I just graduated with a BSc. in Biology from the University of California, Irvine. The plan was to go on as a physician, and thus, to fulfill med school requirements, I took 3 years of biology courses. Dna to Organisms, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology, Cellular Neurobiology, Language and the Brain, Neurology lab, Immunology, Human Physiology, and Evolutionary Biology, in no particular order.

By far, though, the best biology course I took was a graduate course called Systems Cell Biology, where we used Mathematica to create mathematical models of receptor responses and secondary messenger systems. Reason I loved it so much was, considering my lack of cs background, because it was the only class where I witnessed and experienced the the intersection of cs/mathematics and biology. The text we used in the class is called 'The Cell' by Alberts, and James Watson. I asked the professor of the class about further reading, and he suggested "2 texts: (1) An Introduction to
Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Alon, U.), and (2) Physical Biology of the Cell (Rob Phillips et al.)."

Hope that helped. You can email me for more info, email is in my profile.
Even inheritance?
Getting the job done is important! A simple solution is no good if it doesn't work. Presumably they need to know where the ground is / how firm the ground is, before putting all it's weight down. There is a good bit in the video of it climbing over rubble.
Tell HN: I blocked HN, etc. during work today. It was a whole new world. Try it
How Microsoft Made PHP Suck Less on Windows
Report charts out “iPhone Middle Class” of app developers
But I thought the GPL is less free?
Indeed. Shared state is absolutely necessary sometimes, it's just not a good default.

Exactly what you said about Clojure applies to OCaml as well, except the syntax in that case is

let x = 42 in ...

and

let x = ref 42 in ...
A confidence interval is a different beast than saying that you are confident that current understanding is correct. One can be quantified, the other cannot.
My 4 year old WinMo phone can run whatever I want it to. I'm in Australia. Hasn't this been possible in the US?
It allows the <img> element by default, so it's wide open to XSS in IE6 and older versions of Opera -- they treat <img src=url> identically to <script src=url> when the response from the url has javascript content.

You really can't let people embed images from arbitrary domains, if only to prevent getting goatsed later.
For Sale: Dating Website...
Until recently, I was planning on marketing my website and making a go with it. However, I was recently laid off and unable to maintain the hosting cost of my site.

If you're interested in buying a fully functional dating website (that could easily be converted to also be a social site) then take a look here:

http://mikesandmegs.com

The name is not so hot, however, it could be changed, and the graphics revamped to make a completely hot site.

The sale would include the rights to the source code, the IP etc.

Serious inquiries only please:
mikecurry74 (at) gmail (dot) com
For me, seeing a Segway always calls to mind the image of Martians in Bugs Bunny cartoons: http://www.guba.com/watch/2000901951. I tend to assume that is in the subconscious of a great many Americans and contributes to the fact that we find them so laughable.
Geeks Has Taken on Wall Street