skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and no. People who observe people striking up a conversation are likely to react in that way, but in my experience people who are approached are almost always friendly even in Northern Europe when approached by a stranger.

In a way, striking up a conversation with strangers in Northern Europe is easier than in the US, as nobody expects it. "Everyone" will wait to hear you out. No matter how awkward and nervous you sound, people will tend to lap up the attention, because it is so rare.

I'm quite introvert, and a few years ago I decided that I was isolating myself too much, and decided to make some very basic changes. For starters, I decided to greet people as much as possible, and to aim to get eye contact. Not with every random stranger, but e.g. cashiers in a shop; bus drivers etc. or other situations where there was "natural" contact.

What I didn't expect was the outcome: Within a couple of weeks, the cashiers at the shop I used to buy my lunch in were pouring out their life stories to me, after I'd been going there for months without even recognising any of their faces before. If there was a queue, they'd rush past me and motion me to their till and open it. One of the bus drivers that had been on my route for years without me ever recognising him, approached me when he suddenly recognised me at the gym, and we now chat whenever we see each other.

I've since occasionally chatted up total strangers in the street too, and the worst reaction I've ever had was a single time when a girl just kept walking and told me "not interested".

Frankly, a bar is a far more brutal environment. For anyone that fear rejection that wants to talk to strangers, random passers-by on the street will be far easier than a bar or a club even in Northern Europe.

I think the mindset both in the Nordic countries - I'm Norwegian - and England where I'm now, is that other people will think I'm weird if I talk to them, while at the same time because of that, people see it almost as a compliment if they're approached by people that show a genuine interest in them (e.g. in London my experience is that you'll get a positive response from pretty much any random stranger on the street unless you come across as representing a charity; in England there's a word for people collecting for charities on the street: chugger - a contraction of "charity" and "mugger").
The reference to testing the sharpness of blades comes from an account by Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Spanish historian who saw it in person. [1] This particular atrocity isn't ascribed to Columbus himself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_de_las_Casas
'Meatless' meat to the test: Does it taste like chicken? [video]
I have a bunch of projects I built up which I consider "done" as far as I'm concerned, but at the same time they're basically free to run (AppEngine in the free tier) so I'm always reluctant to sell... I do wish there were people who wanted to take one of these and build them out to the "next level".

- http://www.tweepsect.com/ - Gets 300,000~600,000 pageviews per month (about 1/6 uniques), makes a couple hundred bucks from ads each month. Been around for almost 5 years.

- http://colorblendy.com/ - There's also a Chrome app (20k weekly users), website gets about 4,000~8,000 visits/month. I had some ideas for making a "Pro" edition with things like importing/exporting colors from/to CSS stylesheets. Probably need to do some more market research before diving into this.

- http://wedomainsearch.com/ - Few hundred visits per month, brand new (built several months ago). Fairly cool idea that is really valuable for founders/hobbyists, I use it all the time. Needs some love for promotion and monetization, though.

I love working on these little stand-alone projects (a few more here: http://shazow.net/, also my email address if you want to reach out), sometimes I wish I could just whip them out and sell them as a living but the code alone is never as valuable without putting in effort into growing the audience.
The chauvinism involved is the assumption that a type theory is the only legitimate way to assess the quality of a programming language's type system. Haskell is, of course, a near-ideal language when judged by the values of its creators and advocates. The inability to recognize that those values are subjective is chauvinism.
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Ah, but I wasn't talking only about startups.

NASA has received something like $800 billion in funding in current dollars. I suspect you would agree that, if that sum had been left in the private sector, some interesting and innovative things would have come of it. Obviously we can disagree about the amount.

There's also the separate argument that lavishing so much funding and authority on NASA allowed it to squash the private space industry for many decades, setting humanity back many years. This was the case until fairly recently, when the 1998 Commercial Space Act helped to change this.

Here's an article I wrote in 2007 about NASA. Unfortunately the original appears to have disappeared in a CNET site redesign last month but (sigh) FreeRepublic copied and pasted it here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts
Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology.'"

Also remember that government bureaucracies aren't exactly known for their careful use of funds. The Space Shuttle concept was pitched to the public as costing only $5 million a flight; it ended up costing $1.3 billion a flight, with a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch.
A filtering product: http://contexion.com/

Real-time engine in C, python-based tools. Language and encoding identification and classification technology. Primary market is filtering for kids, currently the only category is pornography. Manual support for violence.
He shouldn't need a passport but the cost is $110-135 (depending on if first time) not hundreds of $. Of course it does take up to 6 weeks.
What was the name of the Documentary? I would be interested in watching it.
StudyShuffle - http://www.StudyShuffle.com/

Contact: noah[at]noahlitvin[dot]com
I beg to differ! These editors are extremely popular because of lack of better alternatives and because of the great conservatism (it doesn't matter that there might be something better, I have already mastered this one tool). I give you Sublime Text as an example - it has exploded in popularity simply for its great user interface. A lot of the engineers I have met, that used Emacs or Vim, have either never heard of Sublime or never tried it. If they were curious enough to give me 30 seconds of their attention, they all agreed "this thing might come in useful". Some I have converted.

The same thing is true for Word, Excel, for that matter Windows, Photoshop. These are not the best user interfaces for the main bulk of their target market - they are simply dominating because of lack of better alternatives and/or the great conservatism.

My point is, just because you target power users, your software should not get away with a poor interface. As another example, look at the crippled tool we use every day - the shell (csh, bash) and compare it with something like fish (that is far from ideal but makes at least a bit of progress).

The video is the best thing I have seen on HN in long while.
About the error messages in GCC 4.8: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison
Muen Kernel: Trustworthy by Design – Correct By Construction
Meta: it would be nice to get an exception to the flame war detection for these threads. It seems like they're getting penalized.
Which television program is that from?
The impression I got from his statement regarding prior owners is that the "builder" was not building them a house, but build a small development or single home to then be sold. Often a general contractor will get a loan for a plot of land and construction and develop it into 1-4 homes for sale.
How much are you selling tweepsect for?
I have sympathy for the guy.

- He has faced some hardships.

- Obviously the Freelancer.com customer support team is giving him the runaround.

- It's hard to see anybody in trouble and not feel bad for them.

I do wonder though, why doesn't he plan better? Having found himself in a tough situation a couple of years ago:

- Why didn't he build some savings before becoming a freelancer? Doesn't he understand that is a really bad idea?

- Why didn't he test the waters of Freelancer.com with a much smaller project? Any time you have some middleman between you and your money it seems like you want to know that they are not going to jerk you around.

At this point, it seems like he should go to one of those "work for cash" places and do some quick manual labor to get at least some of his bills paid off. And then learn how to avoid this sort of situation in the future...
http://www.curate.im - content curation and discovery platform. It lets users create, share, and discover lists of links on whatever topic they want, to help people organise useful stuff and save people from having to trawl through search engine results for good links about stuff. Log in with the username 'test' and password 'test' to see the user dashboard etc :)
In the future, you should stop using freelancer sites, because the customers on them are substantially worse than you'd get otherwise. You will also want to note that not getting paid on time is actually quite common in freelancing. This is one of the reasons why, in the future, you will charge a lot more than you currently do, because you need to essentially self-insure against nonpayment in a way that W-2 employees mostly do not.

More immediately useful to you: you currently have a receivable against freelancer. That receivable has value and can be sold or borrowed against. The terms you get for it would typically not be that great, because they have to factor in both risk of non-collection and the costs of doing business in comparatively small dollar amounts. Still, that's likely the easiest option to make cash appear on Monday, unless you have consumer credit you didn't mention. (Get it if you don't, after passing the immediate issue. Cash flow issues happen frequently and consumer credit is often the cheapest remedy for solo freelancers.)

The magic word for selling receivables is "factoring."
Android app, adult orientated. 1millions downloads, 100k active users
The Search for Our Inner Lie Detectors
Kevin Rose does awesome interviews with startup founders - http://www.foundation.kr
I don't know of any complete rewrites, but there are some cleanup/extension efforts underway, which are increasingly displacing "classic" TeX. The pdfTeX / LuaTeX line is probably the most actively developed codebase. It's 100% C now (no more Pascal or WEB code), and supports modern things like UTF-8 input, the lack of which was one of the more frequent pain points of trying to use classic TeX today.
Groove Salad is the best music that I have found that I can work consistently to. Definitely recommend checking it out if downtempo electronic music is your preferred work music.
It's free to run, requires 0% maintenance or effort, and brings in money every month. Send me an email with a tempting offer and we'll talk. :)
in Argentina a passport costs ~$150 (ARS) but you have the choice of paying 10x (~$1000) and getting the document on the next working 24hs.
Though to be fair, that's how all the pre-Google search engines worked too.
> When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug?

I was about to say: "Good question. At one point everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer, as using an OS required programming skills. As that slowly phased away, considering issues which lead users into bad paths, documentation errors, and usability issues as bugs became more common."

Then I saw:

> "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?"

and

> In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.

Snark is unwelcome here. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That response from him is a textbook example of a sociopath in action. Despicable.
Kudos for the try. I'd really like to know why it must be $410 and not $500 or $250.
Ask HN: Idea Sunday
Last thread seems to have died. So, HN: what are your ideas?

Last weeks Idea Sunday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910

2 weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077

3 weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601
As the old saying dictates Mars certainly isn't a free lunch. However, I wouldn't necessarily agree that we have solutions to the problems I mentioned. I'd agree that we have some potential solutions most of which are in very early stages and often quite expensive. Both issues have kept wider adoption from occurring.
It suddenly changed to needing $1170. I did notice the page showing $410 when you first submitted this. I assume this is because also between refreshes, the support page shows almost $300 came in.
Hi,

I don't believe that it has died at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771
Can't you see I'm reading?! (your comment)
I really like this idea. What are your thoughts on monetization of this and getting more users on board?
This is all true, but the atricle says something quite different than what you are commenting on. The "original findings" which are being reversed were based on 4,000 pieces of peer-reviewed research.

After reviewing more than 4,000 studies, the [1997] authors were persuaded that green vegetables helped ward off lung and stomach cancer.

It's easy to dismiss a single instance as an arbitrary data point. When you can dismiss a large portfolio of such points--you have another problem. That problem is a core-weakness in methodology/approach/and institutional incentives. That seems to be the larger issue highlighted here.
I'm selling RearView (www.rearviewapp.com), and android app which is similar to the Frontback app. It's been online for about 5 months and there are 11.000 registered users and 2800 uploaded photos. I haven't added any sort of monetization strategy (no free/premium version and also no ads). The only cost that it has is a fixed $20 per month of hosting on DigitalOcean.
Your comment demonstrates perfectly why "DarkMarket" is a horrible name. You assumed we were discussing the market in the context of only drugs and went off on a rant about how you hate government drug policy. Now imagine if you held the view that the so called war on drugs was good policy and you can see why calling this thing DarkMarket sinks it before it can even get underway.

You don't have to play the politicians word games but totally disregarding their MO is playing into their hand.
How does this work? I just tried clicking through and it returned a list of friends who added me.

If there was no list of people who deleted me, does that mean it hasn't happened? Was it working properly?
According to Wikipedia this article isn't really very accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILC_Dover

They lost the contract because the suit didn't work, not because of bureaucracy.

The company that made it was already making pressure suits for the Navy and Air Force, they were not a bra maker (a sister division did make bras, but the parent was primarily a latex company not a bra company, they made life rafts, canteens etc).

This article is basically the Hollywood version of the story: i.e. just a small resemblance to reality, but mostly story, little fact.
He's in direct contact with the client. I'd just explain that he can't (not won't) continue to work on the project because Freelancer effectively stole the client's money.

I'll bet if he's doing as well for them as he indicates, the client will hire him outside of freelancer. It may violate some TOS, but I'd call that bridge burned already anyway.
https://www.chemical.io/ - Lab management made easy

Chemical.io is a free cloud based lab management system that lets you catalogue chemicals using a smartphone and automatically re-order chemicals when running low.

It's an excellent domain and the software is very polished so it would be a great investment for prospective buyers.

I'm also open to offers on http://www.libramatic.com/. It's a cloud based library cataloging solution that lets you catalog books by scanning the ISBN using a smartphone's camera. It's currently in use in over 1,000 libraries and has a number of paying customers on monthly and yearly subscriptions.

Feel free to hit me up at s@chemical.io
From the support page, it looks like it costs $35000 per month to run the radio. To me it seems to be a lot.
^ ditto
here's a tip (seriously). if you're ever talking real estate and someone even so much as hints at a "good faith" deposit, walk away.

absolutely NO money (zero, zip, nada) should be exchanged directly between the buyer and seller in a legitimate sale. there should be at least two outside parties (generally a bank and a licensed escrow company) involved in proxying the transaction. some people even buy additional protection on top of that.

if you decide to throw all these protections out the window, that's nobody's problem but your own.
http://learnto.com - A fun side project I worked on that allows people to learn and teach (in person) with those in their community.

Target market was medium/large organizations -- think large incubators, co-working spaces, companies. These separate organizations would have their own landing pages, learning cultures, etc.
I'm too busy for something like this too, but I want to work on this pretty bad because, well, embarrassingly I'm a Catwang user.

I think the 'insert randomly' is a nice feature, but if I were to work on this, I'd focus more on letting users insert their own content. Catwang sells 'Doodle Packs' but I think they're missing a couple of things which your image detection is approaching: the ability to make your own stickers (out of friends, perhaps) and the ability to draw on the image (like Snapchat).
Either this guy is unluckiest person in the world, or he is extremely poor in money/project management. I cant find much sympathy where you promise your lenders payment based on possible payment from Freelancer (you didnt even knew it takes few days to process wire for them which you would knw after quick Google search). You proved you are not doing your research properly and you are getting in situations like that. Previous lessons didnt teach you much imo and you are failing to research basics and you are putting all your eggs in one basket affecting you and your wife.

If you are good at what you do - contact guy you work for and ask him to send money directly. If you are really valuable to him - he will do this.

If you have time to write this piece - you could as well use your skill and do some content writing jobs that would pay you fair money while waiting for other payments/jobs.

I am not trying to defend Freelancer as they did a bad job here, but man - protect yourself, learn how to avoid sucky situations you are in constantly...
For my college project (2003?) I modded UT:GOTY and its map creator tool (UnrealEd) to work as an architects design tool when pretty much everyone was using CAD tools.

I was able to provide to an architect a tool that was very easy to use (UnrealEd was pretty cool), to create structures and allowed real time 3D visits of them, modify the textures and modify the sounds.

Funny thing, I didn't have the time to remove/hide a certain feature of the game: dying. So if a visitor of a virtual building dropped from more than a meter, the game would play the hurting animation or die if it wasn't in god mode.
Diggers Find Hundreds of Atari 'E.T.' Video Games in New Mexico Landfill
"Data scientist" just sounds more impressive than analyst and less boring than statistician.
All of these designs will require extensive guying, but most of the illustrations omit the needed guy cables. I suspect in reality these things would require more material and be far uglier (IMO) then the standard un-guyed designs in use today.
I don't think so - NYC is just that busy of a city.
A good companion book is "How Apollo Flew to the Moon", by W. David Woods. It fills in a lot of the technical detail that other Apollo space program books omit, without forgetting the human dimension. Amazing effort by a man who is not an engineer, nor affiliated with the original Apollo program. He just had an interest that grew over the years until he was encouraged to put his knowledge into a book. He wrote it like he was explaining Apollo to a friend at his day job.
http://quickseat.me/

Simple battle-tested assigned chart app for companies or venues to sell tickets to venues. At least $1m in sales has gone through it. I'll sell the code or the service for cheap, I don't have time to market it so it's just sitting there.

The coolest feature is that seat updates are "live" (using polling) to everyone, so none of that "you have 15 minutes to complete your order" crap you normally get when buying tickets. It's now a cross-platform HTML5/JS frontend, originally I made it in Flash.
By 'he', I meant the questioner, as did my parent post. Your post uses 'he' to mean Knuth. I've edited the post to clarify.
Because those things are incremental things, not all at once things.

We slows transition to nuclear power, not all at once. We slowly provide inorganic fertilizer and irrigation water to everyone, not all at once. We slowly increase living standards so that people have extra energy and money to care about pollution.
It sucks this guy has to go through all this. I used freelancer for a few years but it consistently got worse and worse. Eventually I had to move away from it. Customer service was one of the big problems and from reading the responses in that post it's got even worse. I'd highly recommend not using them. I use Elance an although I've had minor issues with them they've always got resolved. They still aren't great but they are 100x better than freelancer.com.
You are making your bias WAY too obvious by including a bunch of niche software with tiny to nonexistent userbases as "major killer project"s just because they happen to be written in clojure. Why is one of the official clojure guys so interested in spreading FUD about haskell anyways? Haskell people have largely positive things to say about clojure. Shouldn't you be more focused on spreading FUD about scala?
This happens all the time, unfortunately. Google Groups bans me because I open too many tabs at once and they think I'm a robot, there's no one to talk to about this. eLance refuses to close a job where a contractor has done no work at all, but keeps billing me. I call their support numbers and just get told the department isn't open no matter when I call. I used AirBnb for years then one host refused to let me come to the address, said they would pick me up, never picked me up, and happily charged me. I finally get her to agree to cancel the stay and she tells AirBnb to refund but they never do.

All these companies just have atrocious customer support because they don't want to pay for customer support. This guy's problems are probably due to support being outsourced to some foreign country not familiar with the fact that most people in the US have no passport or national ID other than a driver's license.
Well, both BitTorrent and Tor implement distributed client lists in a performant way. I wouldn't imagine this is much different or worse.
If you want to avoid partial functions, I guess you would use Safe Haskell.