skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of the major distros do it - the biggest irritation I have with Red Hat and Debian are their package managers - both rpm and apt add a layer of cruft I have to learn without really improving on tarballs, except that they are easier for people who can't be bothered moving untarred files to the correct directories. And since the "correct" directories are different on different distros, they are a royal pain when working with more than one distro.
Btw aloo=potato and bhindi is another vegetable whose english name i dont remember currently.
> Barnes & Noble encourages you to sit down and read books

Don't know about BN, but I noticed recently that their Canadian version called Chapters now have substantially fewer chairs than they did a year ago. In smaller stores chairs are gone completely. There's also virtually no wall space to lean against, and they generally discourage from sitting on the floor.

> If you let customers chill for a few hours, they're going to buy stuff.

Let's say you sit for 4 hours and buy two cups of coffee. If the shop is packed, your chair could instead serve 5-6 lunch customers in a matter of just two hours, each spending considerably more than you. On the other hand if the shop is half-empty, it's nice to have people sitting around, because it creates crowd.

So if you add 1 and 1, you will arrive at the exact policy described in the article - no idlers during the lunch hours.
One suggestion I think would work is cater to user or student study groups. Maybe offer a discount to the group if enough show. Or possibly reserve seating for a nominal charge, or with a minimum $ purchase.

I know it would have been beneficial and a "value add" for me to know that my study group of 8 would have guaranteed seating and beverages.
I got one a few months ago and just started doing baby projects. Here's my first project: http://www.blendedtechnologies.com/realtime-plot-of-arduino-...

It's just a knock sensor that prints a plot of the knocks to the screen. a "poor man's oscilliscope" sort of.

My next project is a variation on this haptic ultrasonic hat: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects...

I'll post it a writeup if anyone's curious.
See this paper: "RETRO: A (hopefully) RESTful Transaction Model": http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddffwdq5_2csz22wfd&pagevi...
I don't have but 1 or 2 songs today online and those are not ones I'm too proud of lol. I did just buy a new Eric Johnson Fender Strat and have started getting back into practicing though :)
probably you could use Amazon Mechanical Turk
That sounds really amazing. I'd love to build an autonomous solar powered glider someday and have it just fly all over the world sending back data.

I guess we just need really lightweight batteries first so it can make it through the night. It could seek out free wifi hotspots to use to report the data back to me.
Free Technology for Teachers
That I can never understand. I'm a control freak. I'm a spider, and I'm not going to let a small thing like death limit the reach of my web. (muhahahahahaha..)

I am accomplishment-oriented rather than experience-oriented [1], and perhaps a lot of folks on HN are the same. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense of accomplishment and impact on the world, than from experiential pleasures, or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.

[1] Citations please? I remember reading something like that dichotomy, but I can't find it.
Maybe I'll try it; Slackware was my first and still favorite distro. The big problem is I'm on dial-up and can't download much - and too many linux resellers are apparently rip-off artists, since at least half the CDs I've bought by mail won't work. That's one reason I bought the new Ubuntu 8.10 DVD; unfortunately I don't like it much more than Vista, which isn't much. I haven't got a Slackware distro that will work on my current computer, the 10.1 setup apparently can't handle SATA disks.
Something worth noting that is along the same line is. I was told that you should avoid sales people that have come from very well known companies like IBM. The reason for this is they aren't the ones attracting the clients. The IBM brand is what is attracting the clients.

This is not to say there aren't good sales people from well known companies, it's just that they probably had it pretty easy so they wouldn't know what to do if they had to fend for themselves.
okra
Actual headline: "Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest"

From the guidelines: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

What part of the article said anything about derailing? Sigh.
Free Start-Up Tool Kit (legal docs & forms)
It's a short but decent discussion of why unemployment figures dont reflect the real unemployment rate. It mentioned discouraged workers, who are not counted because they stopped looking. Also the underemployed are not counted. If you find 10 hours a week sweeping out a church, you are employed, even if you really are an unemployed corporate lawyer. Unemployment figures will tend to lag the recovery because formerly discouraged workers will start looking again and be counted again.
Great feedback... Would love to hear more about your previous startup and the sales experience. Any chance I can get in touch? My e-mail is in my profile. Thanks.
This is important, but not for the reasons you think.

Refusing to support (or implement or discuss or contribute to) a standard up until after it has been ratified as a full standard is Microsoft's favourite new technique for derailing standards.

On first glance it seems reasonable but imagine if everyone followed the same rule. There would be no standard for anyone to follow, or if people forged ahead and wrote the standard anyway it would have no real world implementation and as a result be entirely useless.

If you think they do support web standards then note they use the exact same tactic with ODF. I trust no-one is stupid enough to think that Microsoft is in any way enthusiastic for that standard to get traction.
What Google's got cooking with Chrome
bhindi = lady finger
Sure.

I am not aware of any direct effort on the part of Microsoft to influence the search results in a way that deliberately attempts to obscure negative press about Microsoft's products. I would not be surprised if some security-related things were in fact concealed, but I can see how that might be considered unreasonable in some circles. In any event, I'm certainly not aware of any generic policy in this regard outside of age-related filtering.

Now, I am a low-man on the totem pole working in a satellite office. So I wouldn't necessarily know. If I did know of such a scenario, it'd be a firing-level violation of my NDA to talk about it here, but it'd also be a violation of the ethics guidelines to lie about it publicly, so I probably wouldn't be posting here at all about this subject if I knew anything like that.

If I did discover Microsoft doing this, I would probably resign. But I don't believe they're doing it. Microsoft is very serious about this Bing project. I've met and talked with a lot of the people who manage the product, and they're serious, talented people who clearly understand (and have directly said to us) that a search engine is about results and people trusting those results. It would be incredibly risky to deliberately filter things in Bing and risk discovery at the formative stage of Bing-as-a-brand's reputation.

PS. "Fudge factors" are just some things like saying, "Wikipedia and c2.com are awesome, give them a nice boost." It's pretty clear that Google loves Wikipedia even more than what we know about its ranking algorithm's major features would suggest. Once upon a time all wikis scored very highly in google because of the way page rank and link text worked, but they've since reduced that effect, it seems. Wikipedia's ranking never really went down.

PPS. I really can't talk about specific features of Bing or Powerset's ranking algorithm. One reason for this is my NDA. The other reason is that they're not my primary domain of expertise, so I'd feel uncomfortable lecturing about them instead of their actual architects, who are often unsung heros of a search team.
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.
But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
Justice Potter Stewart - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Where is your area?
Oh come on, these things come up all the time and should be common knowledge already. And even worse, this linkbait article is not mentioning deflating/gzipping text-files (html, css, js, etc).
Dont expect astounding insights. He says Google is into targeted ads and phones.
Thanks, that is really appreciated, nice to see you being such an upstanding guy!

It's funny how absolutely crucial search is and how we depend on it but how little we actually know about what goes on inside. I think that is part of what drives these wild goose chases based on limited querying, if there were more transparency then this would not take hold. At the same time the spammers would waste no time or effort trying to exploit such knowledge so out of necessity it needs to be under wraps.

Or maybe a 'many eyeballs' approach here would help too.
"yc hacker intelligentsia"? Sounds like your expectations are way over-inflated. Consider reconsidering your concept of "intelligent".
Inbox2, is email saved? (demo)
Scoble sais: "Email is saved! Inbox2 rocks", what do you think?
Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749299
OMG Intel Celeron chips in terrorists' hands
Clicky Web Analytics - New Spy real-time features
Ah, sorry. My first draft had my location.

I'm ~20 minutes north of Boston.
This is sort of what was happening back when gas was $4 in the states. It turns out that all those wall street players had a sort of racket going where each was buying from the last in a long chain.

Those firms collapsed in the crash, their trading stopped, and gas went back down to >$2.
Here are two sources:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Pager-Vibrator-Motor-Bristlebot-Robot-Be...

http://www.pagermotors.com/index_files/Products/DiskL/DiskL....

(Don't feel bad, searches come up with nothing!) I was reading unrelated blog posts to find these.

By the way, I'm going to try building a feel space belt soon, you should email me.
You should write a book: "b2b sales for amateurs". Or at least an article - I'm sure someone like HBR will pick it up and generate publicity for you. That, and my eternal gratitude. :)
There are only two rational reasons for bases on the moon:

1) We decide to go full speed ahead on solar power satellites and lunar resources will save enough money over lifting them from earth to pay for itself eventually (solar power satellites are only marginally rational today, but political or economic changes may make them more so), or

2) We decide it is worth the cost as an insurance policy, http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space.htm , especially http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space/survival.htm
I wrote this "Wii Emulator" in HTML5, do you like it?
I am posting this as a video, as the MP3 sound probably wouldn't stream fast enough to sync with the demo. This uses the <canvas> tag for everything.

Postmortem:

- Javascript is just as suitable for 3D coding as any other language (at least as far as structuring code goes, speed is another thing).
- However <canvas> still is very limited, as there is no hardware acceleration. Opera 3D canvas probably would help. Doing texture mapping required a bit of a hack. I used <canvas> transforms and .clip() to accomplish it, perhaps there is a better way?
- I can draw about 50-100 non-texturemapped polygons or a few texture mapped ones and remain at interactive speeds with my technique.
- Releasing anything is hard. This took me over two weeks to write, even though it looks simple. A big timesink was trying to get the Doom3 animation format working. Couldn't get the animation system working in time for the deadline (I participated in a demo competition with this).
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Ask HN: Fabrication startup name?
I remember a company that you could design products and I believe they cut them out of wood on demand as people ordered them. Can anyone help me out with their name? Google isn't helping.
What is your opinion on this: Musings about Popup Frameworks?
Nokia Reviews | Modern-Gadgets.Com
I was surprised by that too. I usually take that as a sign that either everybody understands or nobody understands. Hopefully the former.
Did you actually read his "Best" descriptions? Most of them are literally impossible for a real programmer to actually achieve - most are sort of transcendental goals to keep working toward.
> Why is machining stronger than casting?

One reason is that billets are far less likely to have pores and other defects (caused by air bubbles) than a casting.

> Is one method more energy efficient than the other?

Which is more energy efficient depends on the application and expected life of the part. Casting several cheaper parts and paying to replace them may or may not be cheaper/more efficent if you look at the entire process (including shipping and human interactions with the part).
Virtual relationships and the art communication
WalkMan Series | Modern-Gadgets.Com
Big Blue Saw?
fifth spam link in 24 hours...
I wouldn't like to spend few hours in a packed shop, would you?
Bangkok meetup
hi everyone. I've finally bitten the bullet and gone out to see the world. I'm currently travelling around Thailand for a few weeks. Are there any fellow YC fans in Bangkok interested in meeting for a few drinks?
It's odd that some people seem to be assuming everyone is either surfing or job hunting.

From having talked to people, I think more often it's people making stuff, being creative, getting stuff done - some amazing projects and products get created in cafes.

I love seeing laptops out in coffee shops.

When a cafe is welcoming of laptops, I always tip better: paper only.
How do you get involved in an open source project?
I've reached the point where I'm pretty fluent at some languages (C/C++, Python, and some web stuff), but I'm tired of working on tiny little projects. My internship this summer has enabled me to work on a really large-scale project, so I've learned about revision control, complicated make files and autoconf and the like.

My question is, how do I get involved with a larger open source project now? Downloading source code and reading through it leaves me pretty lost, and there's generally no documentation on the code, so I'm having trouble getting started.
It's a LOT more than IQ; IQ is more a limiting factor, without enough intelligence you cannot reach a particular level. You also need LOTS of specific knowledge and LOTS of practice; I'm 156 but nowhere near a good programmer (yet).
Meh and the Mundane Sublime
Mixpanel (YC S09) API + Ruby on Rails = Improved My Webapp (with code)
The news is already old enough that it's been debunked: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/07/teens-tweet.html
Yeah. I don't think prediction markets work without money (well, scarcity...)
This does raw RSA in ECB mode. It is vulnerable to both chosen-plaintext and replay attacks.
"it’s not about to rebound, as many stock investors apparently assume."
WHAT? You tell me that after I bought the bridge and Ford shares?

"Williams is a bit of renegade among economists, and certainly no household name."
Good for him. If everyone stayed in the herd, we wouldn't have anyone left after the stampede off the cliff.
Not the one I was thinking of but I bookmarked them.
Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what's changed since then)
hi Tom,

That's a pretty well reasoned out bit of writing. I think you are indirectly restating the 'safety valve' argument, that by giving people with frustrations about legitimate concerns a place to blow off their steam and feel 'at home' that their frustrations with the real world have been vented enough for anybody to actually get up and do something.
Seems at least an hour and a half better than reasonable.
As the co-founder of http://askmarkets.com let me add that Predictify seemed to have huge operational costs, and the business model of running public play-money markets, with no specific focus remains to be proven sustainable. Moreover, it was more of a game and less than a market (prediction or not). So far, only real money public markets (Betfair, Intrade) and marketplace-as-a-service providers (Newsfutures, Inkling, Consensus Point) are performing well enough, to my limited knowledge.
Full-disclosure equals reduction in vulnerability here, in an odd way. Because of links about this all over the blogosphere, the google search results are now mostly cluttered with stories about it, instead of the actual pages. (Although you can still find them.)
This article was very disappointing - thin, old news, and generalizes to all developers from two very specific and unique examples. Not to mention the jarring its/it's usage. I do not come to HN to get this kind of blogspam. Sorry to be so negative, but something is broken here. I suspect people are upvoting simply for the easy-to-agree-with headline. Please don't do that, without actually looking at the article first. I want those two minutes back, and I wish HN had a way to prevent this kind of thing in the future.

ObTopic: It still comes down to writing a good app, and not tempting fate by straying close to Apple's sensitive spots.
I was flabbergasted at the account of people bringing in their own tea bags or home-made sandwiches. Kudos to the coffee shop owners for trying to accommodate them by adding sandwiches to their repertoire, but I'm not surprised that it didn't change much. If someone comes in with a teabag and a PB&J so they can cuddle up in the corner with their laptop all day, I have no compassion; coffee shops need to stay in business, and to stay in business there needs to be place for paying customers to sit.

Conversely, kicking someone out when the place is almost empty sounds like just awful PR to me. It's an intuitive distinction: "It's busy, we need space for people to sit," vs. "It's empty, feel free to hang out until it gets busy." What's complicated about that?
PragPub magazine #2, august 2009
Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy
Yahoo's PNUTS Database: Too Hot, Too Cold or Just Right?
The world is fucked up beyond repair. There's not point in interacting with unintelligent (or worse, anti-intellectual) people beyond what is necessary (for example, most of us have to be accommodating to less-bright customers/clients for business reasons).

You aren't going to change the system, it's a waste of energy to try.
Voorkeuren (reddit.com)
"Downloading source code and reading through it leaves me pretty lost, and there's generally no documentation on the code, so I'm having trouble getting started."

Fix an open bug. This is the easiest way to get your feet wet. Send a patch to the maintainers incorporating the bug fix. (Read any suggestions as to coding style etc to maximize your chances of acceptance). Rinse. Repeat.
Agreed ... I like to take downloads and play them on my tv. That'd be nice.
But people enjoy official support and going through the risk of a broken phone is just too much
I live in Queens, NY and the B&N in my neighborhood has basically zero seating. It's actually the only B&N store I've ever seen like that, and I emailed them to ask why. The response:

"As our stores and selections have expanded over the years, we have had to reduce the seating in some locations to make room for additional inventory. However, I have shared your feedback regarding our Forest Hills store with the appropriate department who will certainly keep your feedback in mind."
I thought this from the article was the most impressive:

In the experiment, described in Current Biology, the rooks proved highly accurate, placing in only the precise number of stones needed to raise the water level to a reachable height. Instead of trying to get the worm after each stone was dropped, they apparently estimated the number required from the outset and waited until the time was right [LiveScience]

But in the video, I see the rook checking after each rock if it can reach the worm yet.
Why ePub is the ebook format of the future
Hey - I'm in Koh Samui right now... for another week. Then in Bangkok near the end of the month. What are you working on? Startup?
Who cares? :/ who seriously uses bing anyway.

I doubt this is malice, it's just a ridiculously bad search engine which returns bad results.
If you are interested in getting involved in a "big" FOSS project, I would suggest two things:

1. Go on the IRC dev channel for the project. There you can get to know the developers, and discover from the quirks of the code base, and any other misc. help you may need.

2. Go to the website of the project and look for a beginner's todo list. Many major projects have these, I know GNOME does. The list is basically some simple tasks that need to be done and make it easy for new developers to learn the code base.

Aside from these two examples, the best advice I can give you for learning any poorly documented code is to use exuberant-ctags in vi or emacs. Using tags, you can easily jump through the codebase, following the logic of the code. This is far easier than manually looking up function definitions when you want to see what a function does. I'm afraid I didn't describe ctags particularly well, but a bit of googling should get you up to speed.
Hey Nate, I watched your google talk yesterday from work. I've always been fascinated by cryptography as it seems to be one of the more complicated branches of computer science. I was trying to find this info online, but to no avail: what sort of education does one need to have a solid foundation in this field? And if you don't mind, what's your educational background :D

Cheers and thanks for the educational video!
Twitter Verified Accounts Are Here
Today, I confirmed the existence of Twitter Verified Accounts, a much needed add-on for businesses, brands and celebrities to communicate to users that they are the real deal.
Ask HN: Which site's APIs use/need oAuth protocol for authetication
I know that Twitter API requires oAuth.
I want to know if I implement a generic oAuth library in javascript (mostly for firefox extensions), which other site API developers might find it useful.

Please dont reply with sites which using something "like" oAuth but not really oAuth (e.g. Yahoo's BBAuth)
I don't think the waves are doing anything at that frequency. They are just providing the force that keeps the planet resonating at its natural frequency. This is my best guess.
That will really stick it to them--buy their product, pay them cash every month for service, provide advertising by letting people see you use an iPhone, but screw them over by not buying apps.
Start-Up Legal Forms Library
what total hogwash. the FCC legally prevents competition in the first place through the high cost of regulatory compliance and then makes a few token gestures in the consumer interest. If the government really had a problem with what the telecoms do they would cut the subsidies they receive.

I'm not even going to bother going into the whole AT&T NSA fiasco because then we're feeding the conspiracy troll.
When you're hiring for any normal development position, ability matters more than reputation. If I was interviewing someone for a job that required writing SQL and asked them to write some SQL, and they couldn't, I wouldn't hire them. What is so hard to understand about that?

I'm sure that I could EASILY pick up the skills required to be a gardener, but would you hire me to tend your rose bushes based on that fact? No, and that's what this discussion is about.
The coffee article is brilliant.