skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a local application - it communicates via an HTTP endpoint, but it's a tiny little server that's cross-platform and whose only purpose in life is to make writing your killer SMS/geocoding/beer prices/petfinding application.

(disclaimer: I wrote it)
Interesting. I see bing fixed, at least partially, their very partial "Why is windows so expensive" embarrassment.
Seems dead to me - HN'd into in inoperability, perhaps?

[edit] Just noticed it's been posted to reddit, too. Surely it didn't stand a chance!
Microsoft bundled an anti-virus with DOS 5, IIRC. It was quite good for the time and ran under Windows 3.
I didn't know it was that bad, I have visited the US last in '97 and have traveled extensively in other countries since then (I also live in Vienna BTW).

I assumed that as long as you are not coming from some 3rd world country it wouldn't be significantly worse than entering the EU, but now I am rethinking previous plans of visiting the US.

I don't need to go there that badly & risk that sort of madness.
Defense Dept:  Remote Control Sharks
Uploads, Not Open Calls
Ask HN: Diskless or Diskful
Consider an architecture where you have 10 boxes per cluster. Its enough for me to have 2 diskful boxes that distribute the os images through netboot, make other boxes log remotely to these boxes. In essence I would save cost($200 per box) by going diskless than have disks.. What are your thoughts on running a node with every box haveing its own disk versus only a few master boxes having the disk...
Diesel is widely accepted in Europe. It used to have problems, because diesel had lower emissions standards often none what-so ever and it took a while for them to catch up, this was due to the fact that gasoline pollutes so much when compared to diesel.

New diesel engines like in the Ford Fiesta are considered to have almost zero carbon emissions, in the UK they don't require road tax IIRC because they're considered equivalent in emissions to an all electric vehicle.

Diesel's main problem is that it releases particulate emissions (unburned carbon), however in most new diesels these are handled by autoregenerating filters (they clog up with soot until saturation point and then quite literally set on fire, burning the soot efficiently and cleanly and leaving a clean filter). However, synthetic diesel (which is produced more directly from biomaterials than oil production and ethanol production, incidentally making synthetic diesel more environmentally friendly than biodiesel and ethanol replacement gasoline) produces 30% less particulates, so not only is it more environmental to produce, but it's more environmental to burn. Biodiesel is better to burn on the carbon front, however the nitrogen oxides they release are far harder to deal with than soot (IE your maintenance would require replacing filters, instead of the autoregenerating filters for standard diesels) and they still produce soot (so you'd need the autoregenerating filters anyway, so why pay for both on a new engine?).

Diesel is a lot cleaner, and can now easily perform sub-zero starts as a lot of new engines are coming with engine-block heaters (even gasoline engines are coming with this option now, both for efficiency and emission reasons, but also because in the far north gasoline fails just as easily as diesel). This is to increase the efficiency of the engine, but it also dramatically extends the lifespan as an engine wears most when cold.

Edit: I forgot to add two reasons why diesels are often liked in Europe. #1 is that they're more reliable, they have no electrical system (no spark plugs), so even when the starter motor fails or you have a flat battery, you'll never need a jump start, you just need a push. They require a rebuild generally after 250,000 miles, while a gasoline will require a rebuild between 100,000 and 150,000 miles.

#2 They now commonly come turbocharged, and now a lot are coming supercharged as well. This enables many diesels to outperform larger gasoline engines in both power and speed, but they also come with a better power-to-weight ratio than gasoline engines, in fact the highest power-to-weight ratio in the world (IIRC) is a V8 diesel.
Linux Magazine: On-line Backups: Flexible Enough for Home & the Office
Linux Magazine reviews solutions for Online Backup and Sync.
I fear the mpg stats are misleading because of the inverse nature, but as a rough approximation, 690,000 cars were replaced. Their average mpg went from 15.8mpg to 24.9mpg (these numbers were most likely calculated incorrectly by the DOT). At 10,000/year that is a savings of 230 gallons/car/year or about 1/6 of a billion gallons/year.

Very roughly, it would appear to have been a good buy purely from the import/export angle assuming that each gallon saved comes out of our imports.

(This also may be very wrong because the program only accelerated the replacement, so it isn't fair to assume that the clunker would still be running 10 years from now. On the other hand, it may have spurred people to more efficient cars to get the larger rebate. That could be a lifelong change when people realize they can get along fine with a more efficient car. I only rarely miss my 17/18mpg 3/4T truck now that I drive a cheap 25/40mpg tiny car. I can borrow or rent a truck when I need it.)
Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs
Let's remember that the testing cycles in Europe and the US are not the same, and that the 57 MPG number isn't explained (well, I just skimmed... but a search didn't find much).

Is it a combined or just highway rating?

In general, the EU cycle gives numbers 30% higher (and even more if you forget to convert imperial gallons back to US gallons).

So while diesel has benefits, lets be careful with the numbers.
Ideally, the alternate plan would be revenue neutral, with the payroll tax cuts offsetting the energy tax, but it would shift our priorities when it comes to energy consumption (see Pigovian tax systems). A natural extension would be a full on sales tax (aka FairTax) but I doubt the feasibility of such a program.

Another policy idea to consider was instead of MPG mandates, you pick a number for a certain class (30MPG on sedans, etc) and work on a rebate/tax system on the over/under. I feel this would be executed better on the state not federal level.
I am not sure how you came to the premise that free market does not properly price certain externalities.

And even if I were to agree with that premise, we should tax 'environmental damage', not energy usage. This way, if I use clean energy (e.g. solar power) I don't have to pay anything but if I use unclean energy, I will have to pay the price.
Web OS: Still in the early stages
Yeah, I cringed at that, and made me wonder how valid the rest of the article is.

Still, overall it seemed like an interesting bird's eye view of what people are talking about, as someone who doesn't follow the hardware industry closely.
Rather surprised that the article did not mention CrashPlan:

http://www1.crashplan.com/landing/index.html

Works under Mac, Windows, and Linux; everything is encrypted during transfer and storage; and it can backup to any computer across the LAN or WAN, including CrashPlan's own hosted service if desired.
> Intel recently had a chip design team in India create its Dunnington server chip, which was announced last year. That’s one of the most difficult kinds of chips to design.

Huh? What kind of chip is the most difficult to design?

That's like saying Windows XP is one of the most difficult types of Windows to design. That makes no sense.

{edit} There's also this gem: "It will be have 16 processing cores that can do for tasks, or threads, at a time." {/edit}
Why not just purchase your own portfolio of stocks? The min. buy-in for most online brokers is approx. $1,000.

I would recommend a solid foundation of known companies - Google, Apple, etc. Then take a gamble on some companies that have promising technology. People in their 20's and 30's will have more than even though time to recoup potential loses. Also invest in what you know!
OpenID worth implementing?
A few users (very few) are asking us to implement OpenID on our website. It seems just a little while ago everybody was talking about it. Now I never see anything about it except for the occasional login.

We don't want to know if its 'cool' to implement it, easy to implement, or if its still the latest hotness. We're curious about actual stats. Do people actually use it, or is it just a few evangelist who would just a soon use a regular login if they had to?

Be honest, is it just the hacker crowd that uses OpenID? People that will abandon you in a second if your competition suddenly offered an iphone app with voice recognition, or got on techcrunch because somebody was throwing money at them.

As many of you know, its not a matter of how difficult it is to implement. Its a question of having to keep supporting it far into the future.
Once you give users something they get irate if you take it away, even if they don't use it. And switching back to regular accounts will probably be awkward. So if we go forward with this, we're probably stuck with this ball of code forever.
I suspect that Google's results will correct themselves over time, if Badabingle proves popular or even just has an interest spike.
It's a joke that he took seriously enough to actually program a mars rover in TeX. I am both amused and awed.
Why wouldn't a diesel car have an alternator? You need to generate electricity for all the electrical systems (lights, ac, radio, etc). And instead of spark plugs, you have glow plugs with diesels.
I use this rule too with a slight modification. I always try to keep an older vehicle in front of me and a newer behind me, without overtaking anyone if possible, in order to take advantage of the different braking distances of each.
You are reminded to ship a case of the Sierra Nevada Hefeweitzen to Engine Yard.
Are you saying that no sober person has ever been tested? If someone is corrupt enough to manipulate a test to make someone test more inebriated, then they are corrupted enough to make a sober person test drunk.
It runs on an iPhone? Odd; last I checked, the SDK's license forbade compilers and interpreters.
And then what? You tell the officer that you really haven't been drinking, and that they can trust you?
Your ignoring the real point here.
Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?
Now Google shows this comment page first and the Badabingle search engine second.

It's funny how quickly the updates come.
Google Cache: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:_OIX7VMqqToJ:deepaksurti...
<blockquote>"There's a much simpler way to accomplish the same effect: tax energy."</blockquote>

Yeah, but then you get all these black markets for energy. The Electricity Mafia charging protection money for the plug-your-car-in speakeasies and whatnot.
Google cache has it, but at least for me, it's just as slow as the site itself: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:_OIX7VMqqToJ:deepaksurti...
Nokia E52 Unlocked
Nokia E52 has been introduced with a mission to provide excellent talk time and that is about astounding 8 whole hours way before you require to recharge it. a powerful 3.2-megapixel camera to click fabulous features from.
>the Ford Explorer topped the list of most traded-in clunkers

We helped with that. I had a 2002 Explorer with 145K miles that we traded in for a Honda Odyssey. Since we went from the SUV class to the car class, the mpg rating difference only had to be five mpg to qualify for the $4500 subsidy.

As a libertarian, I oppose this program, but it certainly was an appealing proposition considering that I would have likely gotten $3K max if I sold the Explorer outright. What is sad is that, while there were a bunch of things I didn't bother to get fixed (air conditioning, etc.), the vehicle was still quite drivable and probably would have lasted another 100K miles with three or four thousand in maintenance. A huge percentage of the world's population can only dream of one day owning a car that we as Americans are sending to the scrap heap.
What about socially determined "meet a date" nights?

For an area, you have each user pick a place.

All the places go up for vote.

On whatever night, it's date night at that place and it's like a flashmob meets speed dating.

I would think you'd only need a handful of people in any given geographical area for this to work (though I could be wrong).
There are tons of sites like this that aggregate search engines in frames, so is definitely nothing new. He just happened to pick the two popular search engines of the time.

Yeah, tabs for the win.
Hot dog this is excellent. PXE/Kickstart servers are something I'm sick of implementing over and over at home and work. I can't wait to try this out.
It's important to remember that diesel's carbon content (generally what people actually care about these days when they talk about fuel efficiency) is about 15% higher than gasoline's. So the CO2 emissions of your Jetta are more comparable to a 35-39mpg gasoline car. That's still good, but not that much better than a typical compact (say a Civic or Corolla). My '99 Saturn gets about 32-35 under similar highway conditions.

Basically: there's nothing wrong with your car, and it's a fine choice (as long as you keep it tuned! Diesel's particulate emissions can go south really fast if they're not maintained well). But don't be fooled by volume metrics. It's still no Prius.
Coincidentally I was just checking out a v8 air engine someone made: http://jalopnik.com/391187/lego-maniac-blows-minds-with-1440...

Also a sudoku solver out of Lego: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94177-Swedish-Hack...

Equally impressive :)
Both: He's not seriously proposing that TeX is a good choice for the task, but he was serious about accomplishing the task, and he managed to turn it into a paper for publication.

In this case "controlling a rover" was the task of the 2008 ICFP programming contest, and he thought it would be "interesting" to write an entry using TeX. While he wasn't the highest scoring entry, he won the judges' prize for his unusual approach.

A more practical explanation of the project, from his blog: http://sdh33b.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html
Being able to create custom chips in your garage is still many years away from being possible... note that the MIT team working on this is aiming for a $50K price for a garage fab, not a lot of people will be able to afford that (startups, yes).

I think what the author is trying to say is that in the meantime the whole custom chip thing is in trouble.
I drive to work but my [sales] taxes have been used so that you (or the Boston equivalent of you) can have public transport available. So what?

I agree that it's an abuse of taxpayer's money, but not just because I don't personally benefit from it. In fact, I have a clunker-eligible clunker-in-reality Jeep, but it is so much more financially advantageous to me to keep driving it than it would be to pay new car prices for a new car. I wanted to take advantage of the government handout, could easily have afforded any new car I wanted (even ones well over the MSRP cap for CARS program), but my judgment was that chasing the $4500 rebate would cost me 3-5x that and it wasn't worth it.

THAT IMO is why it's a bad program: it encourages consumers who are marginally making it to burn up $15K in economic value over a few years in exchange for a $4500 government handout now. On one hand, that's exactly what makes the program stimulative. On the other, it's borderline preying on not-quite-poor people and their (as a class) inability to make rational economic choices in their best long-term interest. When I look around at my friends who took advantage of the program, the ones who could least afford to do so, did so, and the ones who could most afford to, chose not to...
org-mode works well for managing just about anything.
When you are observing about 300 million people as a single abstract entity you are almost certain to find contradictory behavior.
Went portrait about a year ago and I ain't looking back. http://www.flickr.com/photos/10026788@N00/3478203761/in/phot...
Landscape is for video. Portrait is for data. And 99.9% of my day is looking at data (aka web pages, word documents, spreadsheets, tweetdeck, email)
Sorry, I'm tooting my own horn. An article about my site massify.com.
That was exactly my reaction when I read it: "Maybe I'll never have to setup netbooting ever again!"
I think that going from Scheme to CL is much easier than the converse; Scheme's syntax is more straightforward (e.g. there's no #' for funcall), and there are fewer conceptual edge cases. If you use PLT Scheme, too, you get Lisp-n (not Lisp-1 nor Lisp-2) with the module system.

Scheme is a conceptual superset of Common Lisp (cf. continuations), although CL has more built-in practical functionality (CL is typically faster (exceptions include Stalin, Bigloo), and has possibly better-implemented libraries).

One might learn both concurrently!
Diskless is great if your base OS image is constantly being modified/tweaked like crazy, and you wouldn't be able to accomplish the same thing by running a shell script at boot that was pulled remotely (each node having a standard shell).

The downside of going diskless is you are trading off valuable memory for the ramdisk. Memory/$ > hdd/$.

Have you considered just getting cheap/small hard disks for each node, and having a central shell script that runs on all of them on boot to bring them up to task?
I'm interested, too. Reading the documentation now (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Prophet/lib/Prophet/Manual.pod). I must say, the linked presentation on how Prophet came about is hilarious (http://www.slideshare.net/obrajesse/web-20-is-sharecropping), full of vintage screenshots.
The Longest Poem in the World
These keyfobs number generators are actually pretty interesting devices. The basic principle is that they generate a pseudorandom sequence of numbers. The starting seed of each device is different, and each device's seed is known to the authenticating server. Given the initial seed and the current time, the server can predict what is the number that the token will show.

Due to the properties of the pseudorandom algo, it is impossible to guess the seed by observing a token's digits.

And these sealed tokens self-destruct if tampered with. No, you can't change the batteries. :)
Andrew, I love jamlegend, but until the Flash hiccup bug can be solved once and for all, it really throws a dagger in my rhythm-playing abilities.
Not the best written article out there, but there are some valid points. The part about design tools not being up to snuff is quite true. As is the reason: not enough money is being invested in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) field right now. Most of the VC has been going to the web space for years now and that's sucked a lot of the capital away from very important things like chip development and chip design software.

I would also suggest that the brain drain isn't actually H1B's moving back to their home countries: a huge amount of talent has been sucked into the web space. EDA software is one of the most challenging areas of software development - all kinds of interesting problems to solve in chip layout, power minimization, high level synthesis, etc. Yet hardly anyone graduating with a CS degree knows that it even exists - they graduate expecting to work for a social networking, web company. To be fair, it's not like EDA is a big enough field to absorb that many CS grads in any given year - in fact EDA is rather stagnant right now... but I think that goes back to the lack of capital going into EDA at this point. Given how important the semiconductor industry is to the US it does seem like a major misallocation of resources.
What vehicles has Congress made illegal to sell based on mileage ratings? (I'm pretty sure the answer is "None, but some get slapped with a gas guzzler sur-tax.")
How can you tell a person is a programmer
Try to imagine yourself at Montreal's McGill University. You get your first look at this "six foot chicken" as you enter a laboratory. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex - he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velocichicken. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side,
Am I the only one tired by all those two-frame tools that "compare" two search engines which are being published at news.yc?

GoogleAskYahooBing... that's enough to compare, we can do it ourselves.

(In fact, I used to do that kind of things when I was eight, using frontpage. Not now)
Japanese Robotic System Shows Off Impressively Fast Movement and Dexterity
Need better ideas for your startup? Don't use these methods...
I have a problem with this from a strictly financial standpoint. Most people shouldn't ever buy a new car, they should always buy something a couple of years old. Cars are an expensive depreciating asset, and buying two years old lets someone else take the hit for initial depreciation. This encourages a behavior that is the wrong one for most people. I also cringe at the thought of all of those perfectly good cars being destroyed, when they might still have years of use left in them. Ridiculously wasteful.

(Yes, I know that if everyone bought used, there wouldn't be enough new car purchases to provide used cars for people. But we all know that's not going to happen.)
I probably wouldn't implement it. I like OpenID, but I rarely use it these days. The only time I use it is for setting up quick admin only interfaces on my own sites.

First, you're only getting a few requests for it - you'd probably be better off working on other issues and features that affect a broader audience.

Second, it's also not going to draw many new users into the site. Lack of OpenID isn't a barrier for most people; instead, keep your registration simple and work to increase conversion in other ways.

I do think the OpenID ship has sailed, and with only a few people on board. It's a cool technology, but lets face it, no one but the tech community 'got it'.
If, merely by deciding to do so, GM were capable of putting a car on the market that would be more attractive than those competitors, wouldn't they have been doing that before Nov 08 and thus not been in need of the bail out in the first place?
I have a feeling that if someone ever found that P=NP, it wouldn't be game-changing at all, but it would be like a proof that you can express the problem as O(x^2^2^2^2^10,000,000). (Or with the exponent being an even more absurdly large number, of which there are many.)
I've been taking micronized resveratrol through the buccal mucosa for over a year. Taken this way, it is pretty economical and has effects. It goes directly into the bloodstream this way and has 100x the bioavailabilty than swallowing a capsule of regular resveratrol.
my own tests, i had bing: 3 yahoo: 2 google: 1

which surprises me because I've taken bing for a spin a few times, and in the wild it just doesn't align to my expectations.
Instead of a tax, you could simply make it illegal to sell vehicles under a certain efficiency rating.

That doesn't work as well. It's much better for someone who lives 50 miles from work to move 45 miles closer than to trade their Hummer for a Prius.
I remember reading Joel's articles a couple years ago when I was studying for job interviews, and thinking, "Wow Joel sure is smart - Fog Creek must a really badass company." I had no idea what products they made. Now I'm working on my own company, and one of the first things I did was sign up for the 45-day free trial of FogBugz.
Have a real desk and use it when you're working. It works right in with the routine idea: "this space is for working. I'm here, therefore, I need to stay on task".
War on Drugs is like the Catholic Inquisition
Startup Drinks Tonight In Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa
Very 'on message' piece: it's clear to HN crowd that most of Zoho's monkeymakers are non-web2 tools yet it is also clear Zoho wants more focused media for their web2 stuff and they are getting it.