skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quality is quality - and much of it is non-functional. The car analogy is really apt here.

I can buy a Toyota for $20K that will get me to work at the same time as I could if driving a BMW. It costs a hell of a lot less for the same functionality, and if we believe the reliability numbers, will last me just as long (if not longer) than the BMW - certainly longer than I plan to own the car anyways.

So why would anyone in their right mind buy a BMW? Or really anything more expensive than a Toyota? User experience. Maybe I like the extra frilly features like dual-zone climate control, power seats, in-dash GPS, projected HUD, or whatever. Or maybe I like the fact that the interior has a lot better fit and finish than the Toyota, and is made from far better materials. Maybe I like the fact that it sits low on the ground and doesn't feel like it's going to float off the ground at anything above 70mph.

These are the factors and the features that people easily discount, but add untold amounts of satisfaction to the user experience. Whether it's worth the extra cash is up to you, but the difference is there, and not always easy to notice if you're only ever looking at the spec sheet.

To bring it back to laptop-land, my old PC was thick, clunky, heavy, had tons of flimsy plastic flaps covering the ports, and the screen hinge was loose and floppy. Was it usable? Of course. Could I get work done on it? Naturally. Did it have similar or better specs than the Macs of its day? Yes. But in the end it was a poor user experience.
odds are, it was flagged for being non-topical.
Thanks, will check it out.

Yeah, I appreciate what Hadoop is trying to do. I am just not sure they are going about it in the right way. I don't like their technology choices and do not get a good feeling from the few times I've looked at their issue tracking system (bureaucracy).

I mean look, MogileFS is also a distributed FS. It works. It's very good, actually. It's in production in a lot of places.

MogileFS is 268KB of Perl.

Gearman is basically a distributed jobs broker, just like Hadoop. There are some complexities but it is not rocket science. They basically do the same thing.

Gearman is 560KB of C, the original was 12KB of Perl.

One of these solutions is literally 100 times larger than the other. I don't know about you, but for me .. that is not a good sign. I do not see what Hadoop can do that the Danga tools cannot. Hell, I have a hard time seeing what Hadoop can do that a couple hundred lines of Python can't. Sure, might not be enough to operate like Google does, but 90% of the time, quick and dirty gets it done ..
> the LCD guys are throwing away quality that, apparently, people don't care about either.

The problem is that a substantial minority does care about quality - and we are left out in the cold. Have you ever priced a "specialist" monitor? That is where all non-lowest-common-denominator user interface technology seems to be headed - squarely outside the budget of the individual. And as we can see from the article, it has become entirely impossible to purchase a new laptop with both a decent screen and a decent operating system.
For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and calendaring.

I wonder if they considered IMAP + CalDAV with Thunderbird + Lightning or Mail + iCal on the client.
Logically speaking, I don't understand how this would work. You're sitting on a stool when the plane takes off, you're going to call backwards and onto the floor of the plane. You can't expect someone to hold onto a bar during something like that, like you can with trains or buses. And don't even think about holding onto that during any sort of plane turbulence. You're all going to fall into each other.
If 'getting stuff done' means wasting time, then yeah, you're getting stuff done.
Pretty cool idea.

Even just to create a game for yourself for playing with friends.

The website is a bit limited, though.

The games pages should have at least a picture of the board and a description of the included parts.
The bit about VaR is inaccurate. VaR is not a measure of leverage, it's supposed to be the amount of money an institution may lose over n days with an x% probability.

The increase in VaR could have come from changes in vol, the yield curve, stock prices, etc. etc., not necessarily larger positions.
If it gets people to slow down, it improves safety. They should be praising this application if safety is what they're actually after. But they aren't, they're denouncing it because it is denying revenue.
A lot of people do exactly that. Marketers use those those terms and graphical callouts because they work, not out of some altruistic desire to keep copywriters and graphic designers gainfully employed. I resent the time it takes to process all these claims when I go shopping, but people like you and me are a minority among the buying public.
Well, it seems that it's only in beta, so hopefully we'll see more improvements later.
Probably. However, it was upvoted to number three (hopefully legitimately) and had a couple of interesting comments (including one on the work of Aldous Huxley). Aren't those two factors a major test of appropriatness for news.yc?
My GF seems to have the same experience being a vegetarian. I'm not preaching by living differently.
Not sure if anyone is reading this but I said I'd report back so I am:

Google Voice installs easily

It integrates with voice dialing

It does send SMS but you need to use the Google Voice App instead of the standard Messaging App to send SMS

I got an error when I was on WiFi that prevented the dialer from working but I think that was due to a WiFi issue

Once I turned WiFi off it worked

If you look at incoming SMS in the standard Messaging App they all show as coming from a 406 number

But it does have the name of the person next to the number and they look better in the Google Voice App
Vistrac Analyzes Everything About How Your Customers Use Your Website or Web App
Yea, but I only learn to spite my co-workers.
I'm surprised nobody else is a fan of Yahoo News. It might be faux pas to say this here, but I find Yahoo News to be a lot better than Google News, so I use Yahoo and NPR as my main news sources (NPR isn't something I can easily glance at, though). Google News seems to be a bit more random, and it doesn't really pick up the highest quality version of the stories.

I guess there's something that human editors (which Yahoo still uses for its news page) can do better than machines for now. At least, to me.
I use it everyday for web search.
The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's becoming more and more rare that I'll recognize all the names in the comments.

It used to be that you would go into the comments section and it was the same herd of people talking, which was really useful because you didn't have to judge every comment on its own. You had an idea of where most of the commenters were coming from because you'd read a lot of their other comments. You knew if they tended to get their point across with sarcasm, or that they were really working on a startup that was very similar.

There are people here that I disagree with a lot of the time, but I have a ton of respect for their opinions because I know that they've always really thought about what they were saying and haven't just come in to stir up the pot.

With all the new faces, people get concerned because they don't know all these people so you have to judge every comment on its own.

In a way, it's like a favorite old bar suddenly becoming a hot night spot. The same people are still there, but there are all these other people. It's the same bar, but it's a different experience. Either all the new people will mesh well with the old people and it will be good for everyone, or they won't and the old people will find a new favorite place to hang out.

The only certain thing is that it will never be the way it used to be again.
It's frustrating to consider on one hand the tremendous amount they're costing in bandwidth, IT expenses, and lost productivity; and on the other hand, the relatively trivial amount of money they're making for it.

Whatever became of CANSPAM? It seems like the government made a regulation, declared victory, and went on to the next soundbite -- completely abandoning the battle after preventing anyone else from fighting it through the legal system.
well, there have been many similar threads. ones that had a lot of responses, interesting posts, lots of upvotes, but still got axed due to relevance.

the ones in the front of my mine are articles that were perhaps marginally relevant to HN on the topic of the current economic problems.
There's no reason not to - Safari / WebKit's Inspector is API-compatible with Firebug's console object, and there's always Firebug Lite for other browsers.
Cron'd Python script polls the Twitter API grabbing any new tweets and caches them to a file on a shared server.

Ajax periodically polls a PHP script that reads the cached tweets looking for ones that are new to that particular client, and if there isn't anything new it displays tweets from the history.

The page itself is really simple, mostly just some JS and Mootools.

Lemme know if I'm leaving anything out...
I think that he should be more worried about people using their phones while they're driving, not the application itself.
Some of their "required" features aren't well thought out. An intelligent consumer wouldn't insist on a car with 400 horsepower that costs less than $10,000. Yes, it is possible, if you are willing to sacrifice safety, gas mileage, product lifespan, and the ability to turn. There are well rounded laptops that run Windows and will serve consumers for years to come, but the bottom dollar "bargains" this campaign focuses on are only going to make consumers unhappy in a year or two.
You didn't lose points for saying anything controversial, you lost points for writing flamey, unfocused posts filled with unsubstantiated claims about Macs.
Ask HN:  deferred compensation structures, pre-funded startup
I am in the pre-funded prototype development stage of my product and have been making some very useful connections with people who are interested in contributing to the effort (UX, design, code, biz dev) for deferred compensation.

The part I want to think through carefully is how to protect both myself and the collaborators in this equation -- without writing formal legal contracts etc. It seems that getting into legal costs would put the cart before the horse at this stage. We're building the proof of concept.

My thoughts have been to write a brief statement of understanding that simply gets iterated/emailed/signed back and forth describing the timings, expectations and compensations. Not a formal legal doc, but at least concretizes and marks the basic understandings.

But I am trying to think through the compensation part. How does one structure something before one has an established biz structure? ....

* Equity.

* Placing a monetary value on hours spent to be compensated at time of investment and or revenue.

* The possibility of key role/involvement in the funded phase of the product.

It's more straightforward when there's simply a local-fulltime-team being built -- all agree on a division of equity and off you go. But I am talking about working with people in smaller time-chunks, and in scenarios where being a part of the ongoing team may not even be desired, or an option; for example a collaborator is half way around the globe and creates a set of visual themes.

It's great to be able to collaborate like this ...but how can we set this up so that when things do take off there are no messy situations, just coolness and excitement all around.

Appreciate any experiences, resources, ideas.
is it? the android sdk emulator is based on qemu.
Making a Bundle Out of iTunes
well it did ask something cryptic, i didn't realise it was asking to erase everything. it is terrible design i agree.
Wow effects one can only dream of, if you live in 1990.

HTML is lame
Yeah those license prices are way beyond my reach. Hiring a pro firm seems a much better option. But I might tinker around a bit before shelling out couple hundred bucks.

Thanks for the tip anyway.
Just reading the title of this post made me swoon a little bit. My friends and I make all sorts of games like this and this is exactly the sort of site I need to kill all my productivity.

Looks awesome, I'm going to look deeper now.
Made it clear to me that at least half of all celeb tweets are spewed from PR bots.
Although broad trends might be visible across a whole population, it's also who you hang out with. I'm not American (Australian) but definitely there are wildly varying attitudes to risk and failure within the same community. Depends on the person. I assume it's the same in the US - some people would be impressed with your fortitude if you told them you'd started 5 failed companies. Others would be horrified.

Surround yourself with the first type! Might be harder to find than in the US, but there's got to be plenty around. Here might be a very good place to start.
How is this not hacker news? Nmap is the port scanner / network security audit tool that everyone uses. It's a tested and true, classic piece of software.

http://nmap.org/images/matrix/reload_nmap_f.jpg

IT WAS IN THE FREAKING MATRIX!
So you blogged about it and posted it on a site that votes content
And the person I was responding to deleted his/her post.
PG said two weeks ago that if a story gets flagged enough times, it can get auto-killed. He recently put in a point threshold that prevents auto-killing. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686303

Personally, I think it's a fallacy to assume a popular story is an appropriate one. Popularity rules results in Digg, which we're trying to avoid.
My opinion is that radar detectors and these apps encourage driver to break the law if there's no law enforcement around.

Speed limit should be respected no matter what.

Yes it improves safety of areas with speed traps but it makes it more dangerous for other areas since drivers think they can speed up without getting caught.
ISTR that there was a supreme court case long ago, pertaining to CB radio, establishing that prohibiting these warnings is unconstitutional. My Google-fu is failing me, though. Anyone know the name of the case?
I apologize for the spam, but I just was finishing a blog post about how you can use our site (http://FairSoftware.net) and its Software Bill of Rights as a free insurance between founders before they incorporate.

If you want true 0 cost, legally-enforceable system, you can register your project there, have everyone agree to the equity split. Then, everyone starts vesting their shares over time. That sort of takes care of 90% of the issues you'll face. When you become successful, you can just go your own route, incorporate, raise angel money, etc... but at least you put in place a recorded, auditable trail of what the equity is supposed to be among founders.

You can change the equity split later if everyone agrees, but if some founders become unfriendly, you have an insurance and can still legally use their contribution even if they never talk to you again :-)
Maybe he's trying to make a commitment he will be held to.
"illusion of an audience"

What about those who use this illusion to drive traffic to their website or front door? Just because you use Twitter for useless chatter doesn't mean everyone else does. Or am I missing the point of the article?

If you spend x hours Tweeting every week and can track it all the way to measurable 'results', you can still get a sense of accomplishment that the author seems to be searching for.
Do his police use radios?
> Speed limit should be respected no matter what.

Nice cost/benefit analysis there!
Game publishing on-demand. I like it. Music, books, what's next?
All the research I've seen shows that it has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue.

As far as I'm concerned, this guy is a modern day Paul Revere:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/04/accused-tollevader-r.ht...

Some European countries who actually CARE about safety are REMOVING stop lights altogether:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0127/p01s03-woeu.html

I'm tired of pencil pushing bureaucrats pretending they know a damn thing about safety.
I'm seeing about 1 million hashes per second on a single core. So, you can do about 10^11 hashes per second on 30,000 cores. At that rate, it will only take you 10^48 years to cover the keyspace.

You won't even cover a fraction of a percent of the keyspace before the sun burns out.
I'm going to follow you because that's my path too (though Digg was short lived).

The process is known as "the September that never ends".

Slashdot is a bit better now days though the rate of submission is slow.
Here's some feedback. Keep on truckin':

* You should add a title, logo, and a tag line that summarizes what the site is for, because people who aren't coming from HN won't know. I like your link that says what you index, but how about summarizing that with one word, one image, and five more words for a tagline.

* Of all the titles for your search results sections, I only know what Sphinx is. I've never heard of Ferret, SOLR, or Xapian, and so these words just confuse me. I mean, I can make an educated guess, but why should I? These words don't convey information and should be removed. How about interpolating your search results?

* I feel like your search results are intended for consumption by a machine. Can't you pull snippets that humans can understand from the stuff you index? Numbers and slashes make me dizzy.

* How about a nice autocomplete? That's sort of standard for search engines these days, and would be particularly appropriate in this domain. YUI provides an easy to use package for this.

* There's no reason to use red for your links. Use blue, and underline them, because otherwise some people won't figure it out.

* Finally, I think you know that your colors and UI need work. Maybe you have designer friend who can give you some pointers. I could also recommend a great one that works for fairly cheap and does my projects.
This is a fantastic idea. I've got a few board games in the works, and this would be a great way to get some decent prototypes made up for cheap. No more sharpies and white hankies for me!
I think video games for the elderly (eldery? sheesh!) are a great idea but what I'd love to see are some innovative tools that would give seniors an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to their community. For example, giving someone who has a visual impairment some kind of "OnStar" device with two way voice and a video camera so that if they were standing at a bus stop they could press a button and the call would be routed to my elderly mother who could tell the person when the number 134 was pulling in (and help them navigate to the door). That's just something off the top of my head and probably not terribly practical but it's just an example of how someone with limited mobility could reach out and participate in the wider world.
Google Calendar Labs Released
I'm not sure what this tool does. Can you give a clearer explanation of what this tool is for, or maybe an example of how it would be useful?

Also, the front page of the site needs to make this goal explicitly clear. Instead, the front page gives almost no indication of what this is for, and shows a lot of weird sounding empty result sets.
Not to mention that in the ads they either:

1. Say the laptop has everything they need, but never tell you what that "everything" is, or,
2. Say the one thing that they want the laptop for, as if you only do one thing per laptop.

Also, when they mention software, you either don't see the laptop supposedly running it, or you only see the desktop with no apps running.

What isn't being talked about is that no matter how great your hardware specs are, if the software you're running doesn't take advantage of it or use it efficiently, you won't see the benefits as an end user.

Instead of getting the ads pulled, Apple should be using their commercials to show their software being used (like in the iPhone commercials) and explaining the TCO benefits of having a Mac.
SCO made the threat because companies were using Linux code under what they claimed was an invalid license. It's very unlikely there would be any grounds for suing someone who uses a website.

Not only that, you'd have to find their customers. I'm going to guess that just asking them "Hey, who are your customers?" won't be very productive (and, if they do answer because they want to brag, since they're plain ol' liars, they'd probably make up some really impressive sounding customers; big names who've actually never even heard of the company).

Of course, contacting their customers (if you can identify them), to let them know that the service is a crappy imitation of the real deal might be a useful pursuit. Maybe. One would have to be very careful about the tone of the letter.
This is a classic "quitting an addiction" post. I've seen and heard this many times, from people playing wow to smokers to coffee drinkers.

If you have to announce how and why you are quitting, then you probably are doing it too much.
Mariusz Cieśla - Public Portrait - @dotmariusz | MonoExpression
What went wrong with economics
Don't see any mention of O-code in that article?

O-Code Machine, a predecessor of JVM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-code_machine
Software Engineer for beta stage Harvard/Stanford/Google Startup
Join a world class team of 25+ engineers, PhDs, and business people from top companies and schools such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Cal. After 1 year of hard work, we will be launching our beta in August. If you are brilliant and you don't have experience with PHP, which is what we are using, you should still apply since you could learn quickly. We are only looking for software engineers at this time.

This is an equity only opportunity plus salary/stipend once we are funded. Our beta will be released in August; with some success we will be able to raise venture capital.

Make sure to include your resume AND your salary history from your last 3 positions or your resume will not be considered. Please also include the following: which of the following times would you potentially be able to meet with some of our lead engineers for an interview at Stanford: Sunday at 1pm, Tuesday night at 8pm, or Thursday night at 8pm?

If you are interested in joining, please email us at stanfordathena@yahoo.com
(cheaper) electronic circuits?

3D printed furniture and kitchenware?
where are you located and what stuff needs recovering? It's a million to one your near us but I might know a company in your area that's decent.
The soles are really thin but very tough. I've never had anything puncture through it including broken glass, although I wouldn't want to step on a nail sticking up! The wired article linked to a Tim Ferris (I think) blog post. That post had a video which will help you get a better idea of what the shoe is made from.

Edit: Here is the link http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/07/vibram-five-...
Emacs Speaks Statistics - Easy scripting in emacs with R/S-Plus/SAS
Yes Acorn/Acornsoft did do for some "off the track" languages.... I recall they did COMAL as well.
Finding work in unconventional places
Wordpress theme frameworks explained
For those interested in a more detailed view of PPP, see the world bank table (2005) below. It includes a breakdown by expenditures such as food, health, transportation, etc. Compare with the actual US$ exchange rate to get the PPP ratio.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/icp-fina...
Welcome to the periodic table Copernicium
Enable the "showdead" option in your profile and all HN's secrets will be yours.
Firefox has an alert mechanism. If there's an update, that alert mechanism sends you to firefox.com, you get a new package for your OS.

This already works for .exe and .dmg versions, there is nothing stopping it from also working for the .dpkg and .rpm versions.
IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On
And it's already on webelements (it's a brilliant site for getting all your fun facts about elements):

http://www.webelements.com/copernicium/