skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't help but feel rather put off by the reporting in the article, if not by the entire subject matter.

Mostly because it seems to imply that those of us with two fully-functional hemispheres are somehow deeply unhappy people, incapable of peaceful quiet.

Also, she appears to have made some reasonably large leaps in terms of what damage to one hemisphere has done to her personality and behaviour. A lot of those traits are whole-brain processes. It seems rather reductionist to suggest that the left hemisphere is some sort of ball-and-chain holding us all away from enlightenment and bliss.

And really, if the goal is to convince us to relinquish the control that our left hemispheres have over us, then why frame in neo-spiritualist terms that are so utterly unappealing to most left-hemisphere-dominant people?
I had this idea for a long time in my to do list: a place for everybody to download datasets of any kind, from list of countries, states, cities, names, etc, where everybody can upload a dataset and make money from every download in any format, csv, xml, json, yaml, etc.

Small sets will be free, as anybody can find them anywhere online, but they will bring traffic. Huge sets can cost lots of money, since it would be easier to just pay instead of typing the whole set by hand in a database.

For example, I was looking for all prescription medicines to build a med website, guess what, I would have paid good money to get all that info in an easily consumable format.

And like that, millions of datasets for as many different scenarios you can imagine.

The name of all known stars? you betcha we have it!

All movies ever filmed? yep, just $9.95

Is it a viable business? I have no crystal ball, but it has been a need of mine, many many times...
I had and have numerous over the years. I had a successful Contracting business (electro-mechanical) for quite a few years, a Consulting Business in the same field, a Computer School in the days that the masses wanted to learn DOS :), a plastic bags factory. The software business has always been my sideline even when luck was not on my side (running a couple of web projects now).

The Contracting Business found a glorious end when the Zulus were marching in central Johannesburg some years back and the Construction Industry just faded away. The Computer School ran out of capital when Windows came out and I had to replace 200 computers and I sold it to someone else (I hated mice for quite a few years after that). The Plastics factory was a big thing for me until they banned plastic bags and I cashed in! Oh! and I forgot and I had this great software that was used for designing Halon 1301 Fire Protection systems that all the big data Centers were using until the Ozone Layer appeared and halon was banned! I am now busy with the greatest thing after Primavera!

I guess I am from the Old Hacker School. Isn't that what you guys do? Just let your imagination roam and do things? Over the years two things kept being with me right through all the businesses, I take time to revisit my Maths twice a year and I program. It keeps me sane and now and then makes me some additional income.
In my experience Debian users are generally dorks who have very little concern for how things are done in the real world.
I'm not sure. It depends whether they'd use that kind of monitor at Google!

Having said that, all you'd need for a Google OS would be:

+Vesa VGA drivers up to big resolutions
+Ethernet/Wifi drivers (these are pretty much standard these days)
+Keyboard/mouse/sound drivers
+A web browser
Django is a web framework not a CMS. Django-cms is just an implementation of a CMS in Django.
It's my experience that this holds true over more kinds of things than coffee shops. Large chain stores do things even when they're a pain from the employees' perspective, but small, independent shops tend to have the owners as workers in the shop, and so they make decisions which sometimes look like the decisions employees would make, rather than those that maximize profit and goodwill.

I've found this to be so for specific examples of grocery stores, bookstores, coffee shops, and hobby shops, at least. Sometimes the product is enough better to make up for this, though (especially with coffee).
* Almost every other day I spend a few hours working at a Starbucks.*

This is, I think, the crux of the issue. Most indy shops don't mind this--it's the people who are there for 8 hours at a time, nursing a single cup of coffee. I work several hours per week at my neighborhood cafe, but I'm attentive to how much money I spend and whether I'm taking up table space.

I do agree that many cafes are, perhaps, over-reacting, but at the same time, I can understand the root problem.
Good point, but I would guess that the caves ecosystems are in flux over time. Another comment said something about guano being an influence so if the number of bats back then was not near the number now then it is feasible that the Egyptians could have gone further without breathing tools. That and the part of the cave that the Egyptians went down might not have been the where the present day explorers are trying to go.
Ask HN: Hardware business; preventing a competitor from using your driver
I want to start a company selling a piece of hardware I designed. The hardware needs a driver, and I'd like to give people who buy my thing the source code to the driver to let them modify stuff if they want to. The problem is that I'd be a small business, and as I see it, if I open source the driver to my product there's nothing preventing a larger electronics manufacturing company from building and selling something that uses the driver I wrote. So, to protect myself from that contingency, (obviously) I'd include something preventing the sale of hardware that uses that driver in the license to the code. So, I've got two questions:

1. Legalese; anybody law-knowledgeable here who can say how much protection provisions in the license to the code of the driver would offer?

2. Partial-drm solution: To reiterate, I'd really like to give customers the code, but I don't want to inadvertently help a competitor undercut me, anybody heard of a partially-proprietary driver created by a hardware company to solve the problem I'm describing?

Obviously, I don't mean to claim ownership to ideas, only their implementation; but if my thing gets popular I'd prefer it if the company that eventually undercuts me has to through the expense of designing their own stuff.
What are you talking about? I gave 3 very specific examples in my post.

Quote: Things like policy portability, a greater ability to create risk pools, the ability to buy policies originating in a different state.

The Government restricts all of these things.

In addition, the government could drastically reduce the barriers to creating new drugs and treatments. Do these barriers save some lives: yes. But they end up killing many more because the FDA is always going to error on the side of caution, thereby denying the treatments that work to people who desperately need them.
You can do that? I have tried very hard and can do part of it but always some word creeps in, even if is saying thank you to the teller.
> 2) You can't visit any time before your time machine was built.

I think this is a very strange assertion to make. I find it more likely that one of the following is true:

1) Time travel is not possible

2) We'll wipe ourselves our before we discover it
> Django is very much in the Unix philosophy of code re-use

I'm very much in the philosophy of not tying myself to a particular package management system or distribution. Especially not Debian.

If a package has deps, the documentation should state explicitly what they are, what versions are required, and the best way to make the application work with said deps, not attempt to hide everything behind some bullshit "installer" and then not document anything.
Never rent unless in a precarious situation or if just recently moved to a new city. Buy as soon as you can. You will never ever see a penny of what you paid for in rent.

If you buy, even if temporary, you get all your money back, sometimes more, sometimes less, but you always get some.

I lived most of my early adult life renting and I can tell you this, more than $100K wasted and no way at all to get one cent back.
I'm just a newbie pythonista, so I'll just nod and smile. :)
Unfortunately, at least France and Germany seem to want to start emulating the US in this regard. So they're increasing length of their work weeks:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124835745710975827.html

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090731-20935.html

Also muddying the waters is that, by some measures, Americans have more leisure time than Europeans:

http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-Examiner~y2009m8d13...
Most common languages (but not all languages) are basically equivalent, and choosing one or another is more a matter of taste rather than "the best tool for the job". If, for example, you want to write a web app and need to choose between Ruby, Python or Perl pick the one you know best and go with it.

One factor that can make the language choice important is the speed of the program: if you need to make a computationally heavy application, you'd better choose a fast language. This would rule out interpreted languages. In such a case, you should choose Common Lisp/C/C++/Java/C# rather than Perl/Python/Ruby.

Another important factor is the platform where your app will be running. If it's on your own server, you can use whatever you prefer. If it's on the iphone, the most abvious choice is Objective-C. If it's a small device with little memory and low computing power, languages with a low memory footprint and manual memory allocation like C and Forth would make a better choice than Python or Ruby.
Well, in general I make it a point to be as polite as possible in situations like that because it is not in my nature to be very outgoing and talkative. I tend to be shy with people I don't know well. From the perspective of purely my own personality, getting by with a smile and a nod doesn't present much of a problem to me and is really the default state.
It seems that DjangoCMS covers almost all of those comparisons. I would assume this is good?
I think an enforced, strict 60 minute rule is a bit stupid, but they are businesses, and ultimately they wouldn't be continuing to enforce these rules and block the power outlets if it wasn't working to achieve what the business owner wanted - i.e. less of the laptop users who generally use more resources than they end up paying for via purchases of coffee and whatnot.

I do think there is a balance somewhere and it takes both the business and the customer to work together to achieve...consider the POV of someone who has to deal with the subset of particularly bad laptop users (e.g. my earlier comment on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749680)...but I do wish more people would understand the economics of running a coffee shop. Starbucks by virtue of being a well-known international chain of coffee shops (and therefore a coffee shop where you know there is some sort of known baseline of drink quality, the menu is more or less the same, and you probably have some sort of drink you order frequently in the right words, etc.) has such an easier time of bringing in customers that indie shops do not have. That same name doesn't just appeal to customers, it also appeals to everyone from lenders to management companies when first opening a business and then to suppliers when continuing to run the business. Starbucks has the resources needed, if the name alone isn't enough, to negotiate better leases and spaces, prices for supplies needed bought in massive bulk quantities...you get the idea.

So it's nice Starbucks is reaching out to people like this during this time where many people are struggling, but so are many smaller independent coffee shops, and they don't have all those benefits Starbucks does - and just letting people do whatever they want on the wifi is not (usually) the answer. It's also one thing to restrict wifi to 60 minutes for all customers, and it's another to feel entitled to use free wifi and lots of power for hours on end after buying a small coffee. Both are frustrating. I don't know. I guess it's really up to the owner to figure out what works. As a laptop owner, it never makes me happy to see those types of restrictions, but as someone who has run these businesses before, I'm not happy to see the small but annoying percentage of laptop users who have entitlement issues.
Generally speaking, data analysis has to be tuned to the specific question and data you're interested in. What are you trying to do with this data? Would random numbers work just as well?
I think the purpose is to create a community meeting place rather than a laptop farm. So in that sense they do want you to go elsewhere.

There's a market for both kinds of coffee shops. I haven't had a problem finding local laptop-friendly coffee shops wherever I live.
MatzLisp
I really love Firefox, I even use it now despite the fact that it keeps on freezing on me, but is 'getting Started with Firefox' HN news?
It's interesting, now that I have run it through a couple more times. If I think about somewhere I can walk to/from, it's much easier than having to imagine driving, for example, and if I am less familiar with an area, I tend to think more in terms of streets and directions than with areas I know well where I am navigating based on landmarks.
I think wokhei is a bit hard for native English speakers to spell phonetically...

just my opinion, though...
uh, yeah, but the result is dead brain tissue :)
Use Python.

If Python is too slow, use C.

If you don't know C, use Java.

If you don't know any of these, you ought to learn at least one. Use Python.
Sorry, that line of thinking is dogma.

Here's an article that explores this argument:
http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/real-estate/renti...

Basically, take the "never rent" piece of advice with the same amount of skepticism that you would any other piece of advice that begins with "never."

Summary: average annualized return on investment on owning a home barely beats inflation, dating back way, and that's including the boom times.

Average return on investing in businesses (i.e. the stock market, your own startup), is a much better place to put your money.

Not saying there is no reason to buy a house, there are plenty. But never say never.
There is a class of things it's possible to be very sure of.

For example, I feel very sure there's no such thing as blue weight. The expression "blue weight" is syntactically legal, but that doesn't mean it refers to anything. "Time travel" appears to be in the same category. Syntactically legal, but you find that if you try to express precisely what you mean by it, you can't. It's effectively a type error, like asking for the square root of a stream.

Incoherence as a concept is a different sort of impossible from mere technological "impossibility," like e.g. a pill you could take that would let you survive in outer space without a suit. You can say what that means, even if you can't do it. I have never heard a coherent explanation of what "time travel" could even refer to.
The argument that lines of code is constant across languages is usually associated with Fred Brooks's _The Mythical Man Month_. I don't buy it, either. (Sometimes there is the added restriction of "lines of debugged code". That may be more likely.)

Here is a study of how lines of code produced annually differs across languages in a collection of open-source projects: http://sequoia.cs.byu.edu/files/pubs/Delorey2007.pdf

Of course, the correlation between lines of code and "productivity" is pretty nebulous. (Copy-and-paste programming is the most obvious example of a negative correlation.) LoC is an easy thing to measure, but not necessarily useful.
second time this appears in HN though... it's a good article but still. maybe we need a "best of" section, right next to "new"
Well, if the semantic web dream comes true, all someone would have to do is create a SPARQL query and run it against the web to obtain the dataset.
The AKS Primality Test
Hey thanks! We spent a long time getting the timing on the swoop and the bounce when it lands in the cart right. Cool to see someone notice. :)
Why so worried ? Is the market such that you think a larger company will do that ?

GPL the code if you are going to release it (that way you can sue if they modify your driver and only ship binary), keep the design of the hardware itself a trade secret.

If you can, integrate the design as much as you can (that makes it substantially harder to copy the design).

Another thing to remember is that if you use an embedded processor to blow the 'read' fuses so that you can no longer read back what goes on in the device.

In spite of all that, any piece of hardware can be reverse engineered.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/mcu_lock.html

I've seen a pretty nifty hack to read out programmable micro-controllers that were supposedly secure, it's only a delay tactic.

Legalese will only stop parties that are smaller than you and in a jurisdiction where they care about such things.

2) seems to be your best bet, stick some firmware on the board and have your driver talk to an 'abstract' and idealized version of your board.

Make sure you expose enough functionality for future development.
The Void of Liquidity Beckons Us To Action
I'm a little surprised. I always thought Starbucks' stores were set up to discourage people from staying there too long. Still, it's a smart move for them to appeal to that demographic. If I were getting turned out of my favorite local cafes and found a welcome at Starbucks, I think what the author says is true: it would change my perception of Starbucks and probably create some loyalty. Happily, though, that isn't my experience. I'm off to the second floor of Red Rock in Mtn View as soon as I post this!
Mathematical identity:

price to own = price to rent + speculative ownership premium + transaction costs

If you rent, you get to keep that speculative ownership premium and the transaction costs.

An additional problem with owning is that your investments are bound to your living situation. Orthogonality is good. I can change my living situation without even thinking about my investments.
i like this...
On average the owner does get something in return for the speculative ownership premium, though, so you have to factor that out.
Design an iPhone app that's a CMS pulling in data streams (XML) and displaying them to users. Set the first queried data stream to be the A/B switch and all other data is pulled into the app dependent on the state of that switch. This is all assuming you're talking about testing within the app itself after it has been downloaded.
(I'm an SEM/SEO UX guy, so this is out of my league, but I think that makes sense.)
More than the second time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365094

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370874

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42627

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677089

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75774
Given that her song repeatedly ascribes irony to things that are in no way ironic, I assume you're giving me a subtle jab.

Since this forum was (I believe) started to discuss startups and programming, then it's ironic that the author finds those are the things he wants to remove.

Please explain to me how I'm misusing the term.
How do you decide between two similar languages?

If two languages are truly similar, like Ruby/Python or Java/C#, it doesn't matter much which you start with. If I were you I'd pick one based on gut feeling or a coin flip and get at it.
Funny, when I was a beginner most people hacking on a computer at home had two choices, either some dialect of BASIC or, assembler. Today you can probably choose from literally hundreds of languages.

Here's what I'd recommend: start off with an interpreted language, maybe Python, and work through a couple of tutorials. If you want to be a little different maybe look at Lua. Then try to build something. Tutorials are good but not as motivating as your own project. I would avoid IDEs like Visual Studio at first, they have a lot of power but for a beginner they might be distracting and keep too much under the covers that you really need to understand.

Then start exploring other stuff. At some point you should try a functional language. Work through a book like the Little LISPer until you "get" recursion, currying, how the Y-combinator works (no not this site). Definitely take the time to learn C and pointers. Even assembly. Learn about object-oriented programming. Exposure to all these perspectives will make you a better programmer, no matter which language ultimately becomes your favorite.
Some Thoughts on WebFinger and Personal Web Discovery
Well, google has jaiku as well as gmail, of course. And there's plurk, and identi.ca, and several others.

identi.ca is promising as it's federated and all that, but when you go there, you see the same thing over and over again: "How do I use this with SMS?" I don't think users understand the enormous cost twitter is just eating for no apparent reason.

And that's the main thing twitter has that is hard to reproduce: SMS in and out at scale. It's not that that's a hard technical problem, it's just incredibly expensive to do that.
According to google, the Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux kernel and a new, simple window manager. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I guess maybe it will be packaged as a consumer appliance in a way that Linux hardly ever has been.
There's been a rash of nutrition articles on HN recently. Many challenge the traditional low-fat diet hypothesis. I am beginning to believe some of these articles. But damn, why do I always get the sense that all these articles are pushing some agenda? I feel like an observer in a war, and that I should take sides, but I don't know which side to take because everyone's trying to promote what they believe.

I tried googling "ketosis" today. Oops. All the results are apologists for the Atkins Diet saying things like "there is NO EVIDENCE ketosis is bad for you", with lots of bold lettering. Wikipedia has a "controversy" section, which is always a bad sign. Basically I don't know what to believe. There must be people who treat nutrition like a science, but I can't find them...
http://www.freebase.com/ ?
interesting opinion - thanks for your feedback. The 'stir fried logos' tag-line was added to make it a bit more catchy, but I am not behind those choices - also looking for usability feedback ( http://wokheisandbox.appspot.com/ it's a testing sandbox so you can try and submit fake orders)
Hmm, strange. I just tried it in Safari and it worked. Still not working in FF3.5 on OS X for me.
He has the composure of a man whom tens of thousands hang on his every word.
My guess is he'll be moving on from high school early.
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
I mentioned .deb only in passing. The same applies equally to RPM or any other modern packaging system.

The package explicitly specifies the dependencies. I agree custom installers are a very bad idea, but you seem to be arguing against the very idea of having dependencies, which seems crazy to me.
SLOGN is a new conference in theoretical computer science
All-Audio Game: Be the Wumpus
C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends?
Somebody needs to decrypt his encrypted haiku -
http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvv1/pht10.html
Economics of suicide
I'm not necessarily saying that people need to have a university education to be a productive member of the tech/developer community. But I believe that without a diversity of ideas, the tech community will languish.

Requiring a university education for everyone isn't necessarily the answer, but neither is diluting a university education by turning it into a vocational curriculum.
The rise of the $299 Wal-Mart laptop
fair enough... I guess the reason I have though of the idea is b/c of the resource focus of REST... where a URL means something... I realize that isn't the point of REST, but it's nice.