skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's exactly what their video is trying to address: making it seem cool before an initial superficial reaction to the unfamiliar seating makes it seem dorky. It's a steep task, though.

I think the Segway faced the same issue -- and an even simpler orientation for such personal devices, seated in a forward direction, is terminally uncool because it's so closely associated with the elderly and others with mobility problems.

I wonder, then, if units which are different for the sake of looking trendy could take off. In particular, whatever the safety issues, what if a personal motorized device expected the rider to face their body perpendicular to the direction of travel, like a skateboarder (able/cool), surfer (able/cool) or snowboarder (able/cool).

Would the rider then be sending a signal of 'fitness' even with their motor-assisted personal-travel, and could that then be the margin of approval that drives adoption where other units have failed?
On the face of it, this comparison seems pretty absurd. I haven't been to Mississippi, but I have been to many European countries, and can attest that Germany is pretty rich on the face of it, personal incomes aside. I wonder how such comparisons value public goods, and how well their basket of goods (for PPP weighting) is balanced.
Zappos CEO looks ahead to life under Amazon after acquisition
Exactly. PPP is calculated in such a way that makes such gigantic jokes like this possible. You simply have to travel to see how funny it is. Has that person been to Mississippi, and has he been to Switzerland or Norway? I mean, come on.
I have always had a lot of trouble getting up in the morning, and when I started working at a company where I'm expected to put in normal hours, I changed my wake-up routine quite drastically.

I use my computer as an alarm clock. This has a few benefits:

(1) It's on the other side of the room. After 10 years of having a clock/phone by my head and hitting snooze (I'm capable of snoozing easily for 1 hour) or, worse, off, having to actually get out of bed to turn off the alarm is enough to wake me up past the point of getting back into bed.

(2) I have a different alarm noise every day. I found myself getting conditioned to whatever sound my clock/phone was using, and especially with snooze, after hearing that 30-odd times a week, I'd just sleep through alarms. A different sound each day is excellent. Highly recommended.

(3) I keep a small bottle of water on my desk, which I drink right after turning off the alarm. I once (and only once) tried this when my alarm was by my bed and soaked an iPod in a groggy swat to snooze my alarm. I find that the water makes me feel much better. The first week or so without this, I walked around like a zombie until I got to work, but simply drinking the water makes me feel better. There's probably some logical biological explanation to this.

I'm still not really a morning person--I miss my sleep schedule from college--but it's the most effective solution I've found to waking up at 7am.

The easy solution is obviously just sleeping early, but I find myself unable to sleep before midnight at the earliest.
Facebook's lex-pass tool : automate changes to a PHP codebase via Haskell
It's even cheaper if you build your servers yourself and colocate them at a datacenter. Of course, not every company has a sysadmin, but if you do, you will save a bundle. This also means supporting them yourself, though, which at times can suck a fat one.

At Clicky, we have almost 30 servers, all of which we built ourselves. Up front cost is about $1500 per server, and monthly cost is $75 each. If we were leasing servers of similar capacity (RAID, 8GB+ RAM each) they would cost us a minimum of $400 per server per month, which would total close to $12,000 per month. By doing stuff ourselves we instead pay around $3500 per month (~$2000 hosting, and approx. 1 new server installed per month). That's serious money in the bank. I'm not counting sysadmin salary in that figure though, because I am the sysadmin. Still, if you have the capability, it's worth it.
I was waiting for someone to debunk this, but I have to ask --- everyone in Jackson has a Wal-Mart within a 5 minute drive, and the average home purchase price is $129,000. It isn't possible that people in Jackson have approximately the same standard of living as Germans, at a much lower price?
One thing to remember is that a country where one person makes $120,000 and nine others make $20,000 has the same per-capita GDP as a country where ten people make $30,000 each. Also, as m_eiman points out, PPP does not account for social costs such as increased greenhouse emissions or declining infrastructure.
But but but a coffee and cake at a Swiss Starbucks will cost you so much more! At least that's the way it was when I was last in Lausanne, but the views and free wifi (city-wide IIRC, judging by the SSID) made up for it.
In college I used to have $1 prizes sometimes for people who could write the entire alphabet in cursive within a minute (lower and uppercase). The success rate was probably about 10%. It's always things like uppercase z's and q's that kill people. Best with a group of people racing.
A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board
I can eat on the bike, actually. I did 210 km one day, a number of years ago, and only really stopped once (I had plenty of food that I ate as I went), but that wasn't with the city bike, for sure. Even the nice bike costs half of what this thing does, though.

Bicycles, on reasonable terrain (i.e. roads of some kind, or rideable trails) are the most efficient form of human transportation, in terms of energy / km.
I think cursive handwriting is faster when mastered to the degree that a literate person in the pre-typewriter, pre-computer age would master it, but in this day and age, it is probably as hard to find a master of cursive writing as it is to find a master of tracking. We're hobbyists by comparison, and hobbyist-level cursive writing is worthless.

Cursive's death is widely accepted now. Even after cursive became obsolete, there was a time when people really aspired to have a beautiful, flowing hand. No more. My girlfriend's daughter writes a beautiful, extremely slow cursive script for her homework assignments and illegible chicken scratch for all her practical purposes. She's a serious and studious kid, but she already realizes (five years earlier than I did) that cursive script will never have any practical value for her.
It must also be used as a verb to mean "to do good deed" by itself. Not sure as I just translate from turkish to arabic :).
The Internet devalues everything it touches...
"Ever since I first heard about the Internet and then saw its incredible development and application across industries, I’ve been on the look out for the economic effects of this powerful platform technology. The specific economic influence I’ve been looking for is a strong deflationary trend. That’s when we will know when the Internet has truly begun to reach its potential."
It's not obvious to me that the infrastructure in Mississipi would be declining faster than the infrastructure in, say, Italy. At the very least, Mississipi is bound to have a much better road system.
Anonymization is in essence a cryptography problem, so any anonymization scheme should by default be considered insecure without extraordinary evidence to the contrary.
before someone gets up from their desk and walks down the hall, Mars is able to sell that person the idea of a 50cent Snickers. While this is not completely realistic - many times that snickers slot will be empty - it's enough to convince someone to get out of their chair, walk down the hall and 'check' the machine. At the machine, they've not only decided that they probably want something, they've begun to exert effort to achieve their goal. Upon finding the machine out of snickers, they either have to walk back disappointed (and now maybe slightly hungry, by suggestion) or they can get some other similarly priced snack to fulfill the need they created for themselves.

If, instead, at the beginning of the decision tree it was a 75cent guaranteed snickers bar then it would be a simple, rational decision - do i want to pay 75cents for this? The argument the marketing department makes is that there are are fewer people who rationally want that 75cent snickers bar vs. the people who can be sold on the dream of a 50cent snickers bar (that strangely looks and tastes more like a high-margin cookie).
The Top 20 VC Bloggers (September 2009)
Hey I love it so far -- question: do you think you guys will have laptop stickers anytime soon?
Objective-J on the backend is still in it's infancy, so I'd recommend it if you enjoy being on the bleeding edge.

We don't have any sort of Objective-J server-side framework, but you can use emerging JSGI-compatible JavaScript ones, like ActiveJS (Rails-like, http://activerecordjs.org/), NitroJS (http://www.nitrojs.org/), Bogart (Sinatra-like http://github.com/nrstott/bogart/tree/master) or just write raw JSGI application using Jack or custom middleware, which is actually perfectly adequate in many cases.
Hm, the problem with PPP is that it's very unclear what it's measuring. Someone with a wal-mart nearby has a higher "PPP" than someone without it. Definitely Americans have access to a lot of cheap crap; it would not surprise me if an average income earner in the Mississippi could indeed buy more random junk each year than your average German.

Purchasing power and quality of life, though, are two very different things. The idea that your average "Mississipean" has a higher quality of life than your average German is laughable. Intuitively, I would have thought Germany was higher overall than the USA, quite a lot higher.
Italy's roads aren't that bad, actually (at least in the north). The problem is that they are covered with Italian drivers, and there are an awful lot of them: 60 million in an area a bit smaller than California. (Well, 60 million inhabitants - not all of them drive, but more drive than they ought to)
Hands-On With Spotify for iPhone: Is iTunes Dead?
Thanks so much for the detailed feedback!

1. Good advice.

2. Thanks. Yes, we've had a lot of conversations about what the priority should be on the home page. We decided that selling products was 1, customization was 2, and the ability to set up storefronts was 3. We could do a better job of balancing this out.

3. People can certainly save their designs. You can save it as private or public. If you save it as public, you can decide whether or not you'd like to earn a royalty from the sales. You can also comment on each other's designs and send fellow users messages.

4. We have this: http://www.customizedgraphics.com/shop/Wall_Lettering/Quotes..., but of course it has only started filling out.

5. Absolutely, a lot of testing is needed. Thanks again.
Kudos to all who are trying to make bike-like commuting practical. I'm looking forward to practical ideas.
Of all the European countries I've been to, Germany is the country that most reminded me of the US in terms of road patterns and layout, car orientation, big marts / malls with a lot of choice - far more choice than the average UK supermarket, in which it's unusual to see more than about 4 choices for any given commodity.

For context, I'm Irish and currently living in the UK, working for a US company and regularly visit the Santa Cruz area; I've been in Paris, Barcelona, Seville, Lisbon, Sicily, much of Italy, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, Athens, Lausanne, etc. I know my German girlfriend and her friends disagree with my perception - they see UK & Ireland as being quite different from the continent.
Recursive handwriting considered harmful; bring back recursive handwriting.

Anyone? :)
Doesn't PC-BSD do all the hard work for you with it's package system?

http://www.pcbsd.org/
Let's not blithely discount the judgment of all the people who pay twice as much for the same house elsewhere.
I guess this is analogous to a Heisenberg principle for computer science. You either have information on a person which increases the likelihood of identification, or you can have no information at all.
I thought it was a pretty rational response if you're not interested in seeing this site filled with flame-bait like this.
EMP & You: The case for building more resilience into grid
The "sleeping early" solution requires a few tricks, the most recent of which claims that you shouldn't eat between 12-16 hours from when you need to wake up.

Of course, the real reason you can't sleep early is because the most "interesting" stuff is done just before you fall asleep. You need to move the interesting stuff to the morning, even if it means watching a silly children's cartoon; when I stopped watching said cartoon, my wakeup time drifted to beyond 8am, since I was only barely interested in going to school.
What Is Really Happening To The Venture Capital Industry?
While the first example that uses separate if and foreach structures is more lines of code, I find it easier to read. It quickly makes sense to someone with just a basic knowledge of common code structures.

I prefer to use something that is more readable, even it is more lines of code.
Yes. In fact, CPU's are still increasing in performance exponentially faster than RAM or disk (hard or solid-state) storage.

Fetching something from RAM still takes hundreds of CPU cycles. Even SSD's, which are much faster than hard disks in most metrics, are orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

So yeah, this isn't happening anytime soon.
This is probably accurate. If I want to make money I go to the US. If I don't want to have concerns over money I go to Europe.
100% from donations, 0% from AdSense. Donations facilitated by http://pledgie.com/ .
also the good thing about getting your own servers is having hardware options (like getting SSD drives instead of the regular ones, having a video card (if you do media transcoding), etc.)
Thanks! Yeah, at Customized Graphics you can do a TON of stuff. So it's tough to balance exactly how much to say on the front page. I think the overall feedback seems to be: tone it down. We can probably think of a way to say what we want and be less busy.

And snap. This is what I love about HN. Thanks so much for going to the trouble of posting the screenshot online. You didn't have to go out of your way, but you did because you're awesome. Cheers.
good catch, but the fundamental question is magnetic monopole as an elementary particle.
>> The worse the disparity in income, the worse the economic mobility and the worse society is as a whole.

Maybe. Mining towns come to mind.

In general disparity in wealth is good, driving people to compete and innovate. However, as in the mining town example, there could be point at which the disparity in money/power becomes too great.

Edit: I intended to be referencing Company Towns (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town). Mining towns of the past are typically a good for-instance.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "standard of living".

I can give you a triple gold plated guarantee, though, that the Germans would not consider living in Jackson in your $129k house next to Wal-Mart a "high standard of living".

So, in summary, no, it's not possible. You should travel a bit. The whole idea is a complete joke. I mean seriously, would you rather live in Berlin or Jackson? Seriously? Berlin has a 24hr tram every 15 minutes, go whereever you like for like a euro. Some of the best nightclubs in Europe (America has 0 good nightclubs). What was that about cheap jars of pickles at Wal-Mart?
I don't remember if you guys already did this, but would you mind posting your itinerary with exact dates and cities? Preferably in this thread or with a link.

Dinner and drinks on me, maybe even a place to crash if we're in the same place at the same time. I imagine other hackers would do the same if they knew.
He's not causing the planes to fly, he's just taking advantage of them.

Better to make sure that ozone layer didn't die for nothing :)
Skins! Yes, it was actually in the original gameplan to launch with device skins. We'd like to add them eventually, but probably not until 2010.
Computer science lacks women, minorities
The National Science Foundation says that women and minorities are not seeking jobs in computer science. A job shortage looms.
I have a Palm Centro and I just have to tap the screen anywhere to snooze. To turn it off then requires a second tap to a specific button on the screen. Best I've used.
Lausanne!? That's practically in France!

edit: well it is!
Very handy. Now if only there was a way to have multiple API keys so as to handle more API requests (even beyond batch requesting).
I don't need a shiny car, but I often feel like I want one. That is what Russell is talking about and that is still something that is very wrong about our society.

Interestingly, I'm in the same boat (car?) WRT utility and being happier with an ugly, scratched car.

However, I have no trouble avoiding being given feelings about my car by someone else, since my feelings are mine alone, and I am secure in them.

This means that I don't feel like I want a shiny car (how is feeling like one wants different from actually wanting?), but I don't think it's wrong to attempt to dissuade me.

In fact, I consider a good salesperson to be someone who discovers something I want, but had been unaware of, and points it out to me. I may lose some blissful ignorance, a trade-off I consider well worth it.
GWT is a java library. To me it seems sick and crazy to code java that generates javascript. It's like using assembler to generate C code.
The total width and height of what you are buying is not clear at all.
We only settled on the final itinerary this morning, and we'll post it soon.

I think we have overnight stays in Ft Lauderdale, Denver, Chicago, Long Beach, San Francisco, and Burlington, VT (tonight). Most of the flights leave the early the next day at 6:00am though, so they're not much of "stays".
Passengers are weight. Carrying weight requires fuel.

Given how lucky we are in the west to have the resources we do it would be nice if we tried to use them responsibly.
Some comments; I'm focusing on the negatives below, but I'll note that Cappuccino is a truly fantastic idea and exactly what web development should be.

Obj-J is more verbose than regular JavaScript. More use of objects and method selectors than callback functions. I usually prefer callbacks to delegate objects. It's easy to just make a catch-all object and use that with an anonymous function if you'd rather not specify a class for something that requires a delegate method, though it's not idiomatic Cappuccino/Cocoa.

I have to agree here -- delegates are a really poor replacement for closures, which is one thing JS can do pretty well. Delegates are definitely idiomatic Objective-C (although, Obj-C now has blocks), but it'd be nice if the standard libraries embraced closures.

Awful debugging. Worse than regular JS debugging. Usually can't even easily tell what line a syntax error is on.

I found this to be an enormous issue, especially due to the fact that without a compiler, I tended to have stupid type errors cropping up that took way too long to debug.

Mostly non-existent documentation. Still in rapid development, things change a lot. If you don't already know how to use Cocoa, expect to be totally lost.

The lack of stable releases, a clean binary installation (don't clutter up my system), proper documentation, et al, makes the project fairly difficult to approach -- especially without a type-checking compiler and poor debugging support. It's a bit of a moving target if you're going to try and use it, and there's a lot of gotchas that will require you to go to the source to figure them out.
jsgi & jack - web server interface specification for JavaScript
Great feedback.

1. We're always thinking about this issue. Good point.

2. That's a really interesting idea. You're right, we are trying to satisfy both business and consumer markets. The nice part of having one site is that you have one domain. All the links you get from users and other sources help your SEO a lot, and you sacrifice some of that if you're splitting your user base. But the point is still a good one.

3. Yes, it's important to us that "Design Your Own" means both "Design from scratch" and "Personalize one of our cool existing designs". We try to make personalization easy and immediate by taking you right to the design center when you click on an item. I think we need a lot more designs that say "Your Text Here" or "Your Logo Here".

The blank canvas is a problem. We are going to implement an overlay that says "Add Text, Add Art, or Upload Your Image."

Thanks again!
Yes, there are many factors to consider. For instance, the average European probably enjoys much better weather than the average Mississippian.
Already beaten to death. You can catch up here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782418
Have you actually tried to write anything with GWT and/or used Java and it's wonderful tools? And how does it make more sense to basically have a pseudo-VM running on top of JS than to spurt out heavily optimized JS code like GWT does? I'm really interested in answers to both questions.
> Real estate that has collapsed in value

The value of the collateral is meaningless. Either there is inflation or not. If there is no inflation the increase in the money supply is good because it prevents deflation. If there is inflation you're out of a liquidity trap and there is no need for these special measures.

> How do you know?

Not me. We. Regression analyses on the relationship between employment and inflation/deflation levels are measurable and can be calculated with robust large scale data sets. This is called the Phillip's Curve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve
It'd also be just as nice for you to apply your commenting skills strictly to pen and paper instead of using your monitor, computer, and internet to waste energy by the second. But even then, you'll be destroying the forests if you used pen and paper. Seems like any option you take will ultimately result in some sort of pollution/destruction of the environment. It's best that you just stand still and breathe - ah nope, never mind - that's CO2 production.

Point is, he's not actively destroying the ozone layer and almost everything we do, from daily tasks to journeys like these, comes at some cost.
Someone forgot to put all the EU countries that have higher PPP than Mississippi like Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg, Sweden, Belgium, Finland. Luxembourg a PPP of $~80k which is more than DC which is on top of the US list with its $65k.

Better read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...

and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

and make your own conclusions.
I've traveled a lot, including to Germany. My wife lived in Zurich. Please don't assume I'm being parochial.

You and I are not the right control group for this experiment. I'm not going to move to Jackson because my favorite bands will never play there, and because I like high-end and ethnic restaurants. But a 44-year-old schoolteacher might not care about those things. The decision between Jackson and Chicago might not be cut-and-dry for him.

(Also, have you been to Jackson? I have. It's not squalid. It's not hickish. It's just a small city. It has several large colleges, and is the headquarters for a couple large companies.)
When rich people get that way by creating value instead of gaming the market or winning the genetic lottery, everyone benefits.

There seems to be some question as to whether the good of incentivizing this kind of innovation by protecting wealth outweighs the bad of promoting plutarchy and fraud.
Yes, we are adding a (w) and (h) into the dimensions. Which brings up a question. We discussed this a lot. Should it be:

a) 5 in (w) x 10 in (h)

b) 5 W x 10 H inches or

c) W: 5 in x H: 10 in ?
You do have to configure 2 and 3, but it's easy and well worth it.