skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I realize this article is very light but its is an interesting point of departure...)

So are all the 'positive thinkers' correct? Is life but a giant breadth-first search where we strive for some optimum to only remember the last path we took?

I'd be willing to give up some memories to bring Dad back.

[Pathos apparently gets downmodded - interesting].
Top-level menu item for "Ask HN" posts. I like to help people spitball on ideas, review new apps, and the like. That's become my favorite use for HN.
Also worth seeing: http://yuml.me
The Importance of Balancing Between Online and Off
Anyone knows how the natural language detection work (especially that fast). Resources?
Anyone know of anything like this for data models? I'd love to build something like:

Customers have a name, address, and phone
customers have many orders
orders have many items
items have a name, description and price

Something like that.
Couple getting married, creates registry for funding for their startup 
Jefft Bar already got AWS hosting for them
Ugly and difficult to read in Win 7 in both Opera, Firefox, Chrome and IE8. It's especially unreadable in Opera and Firefox, especially in the shaded Note bits where half the font pixels appear to be missing.

Looks like a combination of suboptimal AA and an incredibly poor font colour choice which massively reduces the contrast, which is made even worse when the background is shaded in the Note bits.
Check Yourself with Symptoms of Swine Flu
Looks interesting - but the documentation, 1000s of plug-ins and helpful community of both Wordpress and Drupal are hard to beat.
It doesn't understand what you are typing. It probably just splits on words and tries to match what it has seen before. I'll bet if you abuse it you can break it.

Edit:
It seems to do a split on spaces and then takes the first word and the last word as the nodes and labels the edge with what is in the middle.

http://diagrammr.com/edit?key=dkCDRHJUJA7
A Tale of Two $100,000 Jobs — A Tale of Two Americas
I skimmed the paper the other day, but still didn't quite understand what he was on about.

In particular, I didn't understand why he feels the need to invoke quantum mechanics at all. Thermodynamic systems don't flow backwards from high-entropy to low-entropy states simply because there are far more high-entopy states than there are low-entropy states.

Or to put it another way, what does Maccone think would happen in a purely classical universe? Would not entropy still increase there?

I find that discussing thermodynamics works terribly for picking up girls in bars, but maybe I just go to the wrong bars.
Of course, with such a great product and icon design, you can sell thousands a day!
17. Native ISO Burner. I haven't used Windows in about 5 years, but it still amazes me that this was not baked in to Vista. My parents purchased a Vista desktop computer a couple months back. My dad called me on day 2 asking me how to burn a cd. He gave up on Vista after day 3. The awesome dual core Vista box sits and collects dust while he continues to use his XP (1 Ghz) computer where he has Roxio or some other crap already installed/setup.
Microsoft often gets sued anytime they try to pre-install useful software with their OS.
It could help that Head First HTML/CSS is wonderfully written for someone who basically knows how to use a computer.
I think traditionally, it is considered better to learn it the hardway first. It teaches you more about the progression of thought through which innovation leads and provides a better understanding of the content.

That's why we learn Reimann Sums before we learn how to do the little tricks in calculus.

There has also been a lot of discussion lately about how higher level languages are "dumming down" programmers. Colleges who have switched to Java for example are producing graduates that are having more difficult times in the "real world."
It's just a guess but I'll bet it's using Graphviz under the covers. I wrote something similar to create ERD's on the fly from a schema.
Anyone who's participated in academics /should/ know this intuitively- but people seem to really, really want to believe that academic performance and intelligence are the same thing.

It would certainly make hiring easier.
Have you looked at PyQt at all? It's dual licensed GPL and commercial, so if you're writing a closed source app it will cost you money; but I've heard good things about it.
If you lock your vocabulary down e.g.

entity 'have a' comma-sep-attr-list
entity 'have many' referenced-entity

etc and create dot files for Graphviz this would be very easy.
Sorry, I must have missed what's so "wild" about it.
We (the US, at least) also have to tread carefully around China.

They hold a majority of our government's debt...
You raise a good point: Clojure is being actively developed, while the core of CL is stable. If you care about language velocity / activity in either direction, there is a difference between the two.
The article should really be called "18 things you never thought for the life of you would not be included in Vista that we will present as if they are groundbreaking features"
I'm not very familiar with the app store and what it takes to be a top seller, but selling 40,000 units in two weeks sounds like a pretty good success to me.
I have very limited experience as a consultant/independent worker so take this with a grain of salt.

Have you considered doing a number of smaller projects while building up your reputation? If you are having trouble finding ~50K look for ~10K or even ~5K and then deliver far more value than they are paying for. At first you may be working more for reputation than money, then that will invert later.
it's like graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org) with natural language
I tend to generate my dot file from separate data anyway.

To me, this lowers the barrier on getting something out there quickly. I can think of a lot of simple improvements to what is there now.
CSS image resizing.
I've noticed this with chess pieces. Play on a cheap unweighted plastic set, it feels a lot different than playing on a heavily weighted one.
... and if you're at the head of the PR beast that is MacHeist and have a personal fanboy army that's got to help as well.
Nokia Finally Announces The N900 with Linux/Maemo | My Philly Network
$2000 / day is quite nice :)
metallic textures?
Hans Rosling bursts myths about the developing world [video]
The Leading Cause of Startup Death – Part 1: The Product Development Diagram
I think it's safe to assume that they'll ride the top charts for a while and this product will definitely give them a really solid return. However, I wish they'd paint a more realistic picture for AppStore publishers... but I doubt I'm their audience in this blog post. :)

- 4 team members (based on props in blog)

- $5,999 promotional MacBook contest

- high quality promo video, mkting material, etc. ($$)

- tap into large MacHeist audience

- TapTapTap was one of the first on the store, Classics and WhereTo? got them a nice following of fans.

I'm not trying to sound negative here, I think TapTapTap deserves everything they have coming for their amazing products. But this post is the tip of the ice berg, so try not to get disillusioned that the AppStore is lush with $$$ for indie developers... a majority of the time it's the exact opposite.

What's worth noting about TapTapTap is how they approached the launch of Covert and the level of polish in the 1.0 release. I really believe you need to come out with a BANG if you want an honest shot at the Top 100. Trying to get there with iterations is definitely an uphill battle.
As useful as the iphone and ipod touch have made pocket-surfing, for any session longer than a few minutes they are no longer the right tool for the job.

In 6 or so months, Jobs is going to sing a different tune about mobile computing. One in which the iPod/iPhone is an important 'always with you' part, but not the end-all/be-all.
E.g. The iPhone means you're never at a loss, even if you're caught off-guard.
But if you expect to be doing some work/reading/media consumption away from a desk - a larger device with more appropriate ergonomics will be the way to go.
Your feed2lead and your supervariables videos have the same audio as your first introductory video.

Otherwise looks nice so far.
Susskind answered a similar question during his stat. phys. lectures which you can watch on iTunes.

Somebody asked the following question: given that entropy is the volume of the system in phase space and Liouville's Theorem (of classical physics) tells us that the volume in phase space is conserved, how come entropy increases?
His answer: Liouville's Theorem holds, the volume stays the same, but the blob representing the system (the system's microstates) spreads out in a fractal way in phase space, increasing the "coarse-grained" phase volume / entropy. Then, a "you can't set the initial conditions infinitely precisely" / "you can't measure inifinitally presicely" type argument is invoked to say that in terms of real-life reversibility the course-grained volume is what matters, so entropy has increased despite Liouville.

Explained here:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
Do these things work for presentations?
Boston area entrepreneurs blogging about failure
No thanks on that login, NYTimes.com...
Right, but the "problem" is that unless you're using SMS forwarding (and any carrier fees that incurs), then an incoming SMS to your Google Voice number isn't arriving to your phone as an SMS message. Instead, the Google Voice app is polling the GV service, not unlike checking email, and notifying you of any new messages it finds. How instantaneous you get the message depends on how rapidly the app polls.

The official Google Voice app on Android waits a few minutes between polls. The 3rd party "GV" app lets you set it more aggressively (though naturally, there's a battery trade-off that comes with doing so).
Probably more - this rock is never going to kill that mamoth.
So, edw519, what do you think?
It sounds like the Mazda 323 I drove when I was 16.
But then again, would we rather hire people with extraordinary IQ or extraordinary self discipline?
This is a constant process throughout history.

It was impossible to hunt enough game to feed everyone, so we invented husbandry and agriculture. Then there wasn't enough arable land to grow food for everyone, so our ancestors invented terraced farming and irrigation.

There's not enough space for everyone to live while being able to get to work, etc., so we invented high-rise buildings. There's not enough forests for everyone to burn wood to heat their houses, so we've gone through many generations of improved heating systems.

Humanity is always on the brink of disaster, but as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. When the stakes get high enough, the market promises riches to whoever can offer a solution. This motivates people to think and look hard for it. That is the beauty of the market.

Search for discussions of Malthus and Ehrlich.

Now, with a centrally-managed economy, the only way to find a solution is through politics. Thus, we now have most of our cards riding on biofuels and ethanol for energy, since so much of the US Congress is in the pocket of Archer Daniels Midland, etc. That's a bold bet, staking so much on one narrow option. Of course we could be investing more in sources like windpower, but that would disturb Ted Kennedy's scenic view.

My point is that the market drives people to come up with the best possible solution. The only other option that's been found is to let corrupt politicians make the choices based on poor information and questionable motivations.
Microsoft drops price of 120GB Xbox 360 system
Yes Maemo 5 is mainly gtk based. But nokia announced they will switch to Qt for Maemo Harmattan. It is only logical after they acquired Trolltech in early 2008.
I would really like to know how long you've been using this. Technically, this is a violation of the MyFaves terms of use. I'm wondering if, as Google Voice becomes more popular, T-Mobile may take note of MyFaves using numbers like the GV outbound dialer number.

Still, I'm signing up with T-Mobile soon and I'm likely to try this myself. :)
That's sort of the point of windows 7 isn't it? It's faster, smaller, and needs less resources.
I use etherpad for my to do lists. I used to use "Things.app" on my mac but I found that had too many features I just didn't use, and I couldn't access it online/elsewhere.
It's not that they think it's safe, it's that they have no idea what 'it' is.
It's light grey on a lighter grey background. It's an appalling colour choice.
Absolutely. My high school taught C++ and it convinced me to not major in computer science. I was hacking on Perl and Visual Basic at home and couldn't imagine four years of pointers, segfaults, getters, and setters. I just wanted to have fun.
Feynman's Messenger Video Lectures Online
If you check the comments, Amazon Web Services fulfilled their wish for a week in the cloud. Cheap and makes for good publicity.
I am just curious to see the ones that are better than the iPhone. Care to post any links to them?
The China Consumption Gap
You have to install Silverlight, which I did (under MacOS/Firefox). The actual interface is interesting, there is sliding subtitle at the bottom, and some other extras.
When my IP was blocked I could connect but the HTTP server wouldn't respond. The ban was caused by a userscript posted here a couple of days ago that was poorly scripted and would thus trigger anti-DDOS/anti-scraping protection. I emailed PG about it and he unbanned me. The same thing happened to at least one other person.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=781918
The colour choice is what makes it really unreadable, the font isn't that bad.
This is something that's painfully obvious now but would have been considered blasphemy if you told me when I was an adolescent.
Writing about the failure of a business is immensely valuable for other founders; probably more valuable than the success stories. I applaud you for putting this out in the open, that really takes a lot of nerve.

I'd love to read an entire book on how and why certain ideas didn't work out as planned. Maybe a collection of these stories could be published in something like Founders at Work?
> No, it's because it'd be stupid.

Since when has stupidity disqualified legislation from being passed into law?

> A consumer is free to discriminate by whatever criteria he wishes when purchasing goods, the employer is not allowed to do so when hiring labor. They are different.

Congress has been trying to alter the laws of nature with legislation for years. That doesn't mean that the law is a reliable predictor for reality, though.
The Buckminster-Fuller Challenge
Yeah, I tried to make a bookmarklet for "Add to Bookworm" and ran into that problem.
The difference between packet analysis and protocol analysis
Thanks, Enrique. Not sure what you mean by distribution of meetings/term sheets. If what you are saying is which VCs or angels are most likely to fund, that is a really hard question to answer. It really depends upon your plan and what you are doing, so I don't think I could say "firm X gives the most term sheets."

In terms of your other question about recommendations, I would guess that if Reid Hoffman or Marc Andreessen recommended an investment to a VC firm saying they were investing, the VCs would take notice. However, getting time from either of them is difficult. I'd recommend getting a strong, well-connected advisor, and a similarly connected lawyer, and work closely with them. I hope this helps.
I think it's more like saying: replacing your car with a bus allows you to get more people to the destination more efficiently.

It's true -- if you have more people than the car could hold.
If you don't, the added overhead of using a bus will cause a comparative loss of overall performance.
The iPhone Won't Do Well in China
Very cool. Here's one for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

http://diagrammr.com/edit?key=dvvAjKyVhCs
Why is this on the fp with just 2 points after 13 minutes?
How Big Is the Apple iPhone App Economy? The Answer Might Surprise You
Then again, the question is also: Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?

From my experience, you will very often see a very intelligent student blow off tests and homework, only to do average in the class, despite having easily picked up the concepts. On the other hand, you'll see someone with average intelligence (or slightly above average, but nothing remarkable) get straight A's because they spend hours every night studying.

Personally, I would rather have the intelligent person who may get sidetracked easier, but is able to pick up new concepts easily than a extremely disciplined person who may take 3 times as long to learn new concepts. I like to think of the intelligent, non-disciplined person as someone whose time to complete a task has very high variance, but averages low, and a highly disciplined, average intelligence person as someone whose time to completion has very low variance, but a higher (possibly considerably higher) average.
I think I just won the game: http://diagrammr.com/png?key=dVDri1xYrbp
Help thwart new craigslist scam
I wrote a proposal for an extension that could passively solve the porn+awesomebar problem in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the ad blocking problem. Since I am not a coder, I can’t whip up an alpha proof of concept, but perhaps someone else can take a crack at it. (I pitched it to Wladimir Palant a while back, but he wasn’t interested).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently, there are already hooks in userChrome.css that allow preventing results from appearing in the awesomebar on a per URL basis:

http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome
Ask HN: How do I delete my account?
I don't find any functionality to do this.

The market worship is just not for me. I'll probably still visit for the articles, but commenting here just depresses me too much so I don't want to do it anymore.

Not trying to make a big production out of it all, but would like my account deleted. Thanks.
It's all to do with the res. Any video can be downsampled to 300x300, for instance, but computer images need to fit the projector's resolution. My projector (Epson EMP TW20) is about 800x600 and so in 1400x1050 (which it automatically downsizes), the fonts are hard to read. In 800x600, it's perfect for any computer image you can think of.
But if they had a faster .zip compressor and/or a different format like 7-zip, it would be faster and/or need less resources.
Hi Gruseom, I probably won't follow after this post, but you are welcome for the share. You can always email me directly via the address on the first page of the presentation. Board composition really matters, because your board is going to make decisions about the future of the company, and their most important role (some would say only role) is to hire/fire the CEO. Many founders give up 2 board seats for a bag of peanuts, and live to regret it.

The bottom line is board composition should be proportional to ownership. If a VC buys 25% of your company, they should have 1 of 4 board seats. The day investors (or their close friends who are identified as outsiders) have more than 50% of the board seats is the day you as a founder have lost control of your future.

I think most investors are fair about board composition up front. However some bigger VCs rely up on the fact that over time, you'll need to do multiple rounds, and they know that follow-on investors are frequently afraid to go against their decisions, so in effect, they end up with multiple board seats because the other investors don't want to piss them off. I have seen this dynamic firsthand, and it is not good. I hope this helps you!
Ask HN: Fun lures to teach a little brother to hack?
I have a brother who has struggled with behaving at school since kindergarten; he is now 15 and, because of recent and increased upheaval on his part (I can't say I blame him) is now being home schooled. He's a very intelligent kid who loves computers and I'd like to take an active role in his education.

I'm currently a university student studying computer science, so I figured I'd put together a "Hack101" curriculum which we could work though during the course of the year as an elective alongside his core subjects; the class would serve to lure him into computing via subjects more appealing to his demographic, i.e. mischievous, (somewhat) deprecated tricks that would be exciting for a youngish guy.

Thus far I have a couple of topics in mind, two being buffer overflow and mail spoofing; of course, these two take some working up to---that's how I plan to sneak in some legitimately useful material like x86 familiarity, stack architecture, and maybe some TCP/IP stuff.

I'm seeking other fun, relatively innocuous topics we could cover and possibly some resources on them. Any suggestions? Thanks very much!
You can usually just search for it on Google (assuming the submitter doesn't change the headline...):

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22A+Pocket+Projector+to+...
The answer is no.

The downmodding is, I think, because people are sick of metaphysical misinterpretations of QM.
I suggest changing your password to something you won't remember.
I get most of my clients via the Web. Far to many of them for me to handle. They find me on the Web due to my SEO or they notice me due to my blogging and social media participation. Also clients refer new clients.
Please don't use hnreputation
A bunch of people have been emailing me asking to have their IP unblocked after using this script

http://github.com/brainkarma/hnreputation/tree/master

which apparently hits the server so hard that it gets their IP ignored.
Companies mentioned (four of them) : TipJoy, Lookery, Convoq, Actuality Systems.
But Windows 7 introduces several window tiling features to the masses! Try dragging a window to a screen edge -- it makes it really easy to tile two windows.
Americans rate nymphamic prostitution, vows of celibacy, as most attractive sexual lifestyles.
Good call. Back in the day, my family's business started through direct mail, at first with letters and later with colored flyers. The flyers worked better. We found mailing lists from funding agencies and other public or quasi public sources. This was exceedingly difficult and time consuming, but it worked.

Nowadays, a lot of our clients find us via Google and our blog at http://blog.seliger.com , but that takes more time to build. Still, we try and put a fair number of likely keywords in the titles of posts, which helps. We started ours after the Wall Street Journal ran a story on that issue, and it was like, "Why didn't we think of this earlier?"
40 iPhone Applications for Web Freelancers, Bloggers, and Designers
Request by pg to not use this script:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789469
Isn't memory just a couple of changed atoms? So erasing memory would be equivalent to making atom configurations unchanged. But if atom configurations don't change, entropy doesn't change. So the whole theory seems absurd.

(Disclaimer: I don't really know QM very well)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231191

"(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5
where p = points and t = age in hours"

But, it stands to reason that there could be a bit of extra juice someone can apply to get neat articles on the front page. Maybe someone who is 'trusted' was one of the voters.
Results of The Hacker Survey
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789469 (pg's request for people to stop using hnreputation)
I'm already working on a similar authentication system for a rails app and this just really motivated me to release it as a plugin...

That said, I'm sure lots of other Rails developers have already built their own solution. I'm also sure some are more mature than mine (i.e. in production). Isn't uservoice.com backed by Rails? Their social authentication is so pretty Google uses it as a demo.
I've had a Nokia 9300, E71, and other Nokia phones. I have been able to tether with all of them on AT&T.