skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never had a problem with roller coasters, even the ones that invert, even the ones that invert and the harness feels loose and you fall of your seat and know there's only a thin buckle holding you in place.

However swimming I had a problem with; I love to swim, but if anyone tries to dunk me I panic and I have the same reaction at 21 as I did when I was 7, but now I'm a 300lb man used to lifting 60 kilos while working so my reaction isn't usually pretty.

I do have a strong sense of self-preservation that I've always attributed to actually knowing the risks of the things I'm doing. You'll never catch me parachuting, because I know what the physics of a parachute failure mean.
There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for people who have personal experience of the topic, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for reprinting press releases of those companies that don't compete with their parent media group.
In my physics classes, we were usually only assigned the problems with the answer in the back. We were graded on solving the problem, not providing the answer. Being able to check your numerical result against a known-good one was invaluable.
Project Playlist Pushes The Line Between Music Search And Music Hosting
I'm not sure if I understand this one - can you elaborate?
nice. funny.
The technicality.

Technically, no-one gets denied care by insurance companies. The companies just refuse to cover the care.
> and god forbid you're American because you already lost half your U's before you were even born.

My spell checker thinks that every time I write colour, endeavour, or glamour that I've made some grave error.

I really can't stand that, it doesn't allow me to change the preferences to English (which I was taught in school) or American English.

Btw, any piece about spelling contains at least one spelling error, yours is no exception ;)
Doesn't Yoyodyne crop up in Gravity's Rainbow also?
There are ~420 million people living in Canada (33), USA (304), UK (61), and Australia (21) according to Google's public data. If 1/40th of a percent of those are interested in Google Wave that's 100,000 people. Now think about the rest of the people around the globe that also speak English and would be interested. If they don't have 100,000 people lined up I would be extremely surprised.

edit: Oh yes, and each of those 100,000 gets 8 invites. They should have a bare minimum of 100,000 active users and possibly closer to the half million mark. All speculation but it seems pretty reasonable to me.
Lowercase R, C, A, and E are also pretty easy giveaways. I don't use MS Office so I lack Helvetica, but it's still quite easy to pick out against Arial.
The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death
just logged in. I hope it's good. mint.com is too buggy to use. quicken online is heinously simple. amazingly there is no workable personal finance tool in 2009 (if yr on a mac anyway - on a pc, I've heard quicken is OK). good luck.
Dropbox also has a bit of secret sauce. They have some technology that can pick up which bits changed in a file and only sync those (which makes their service way faster than others)
On the Ballmer side, he is such "great" at this kind of sentences that two of his greatest hits: (Google is a) deck of cards. (iphone) does not appeal to biz customers.
Bad idea.

As a classified ad owner (2nd largest in my country), doing so would only give a chance to a newcomer.

The problem is to charge for the first penny...
http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
Aha! Glad to discover the name for the new font along the Beltline in Madison, WI: http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/opencms/export/nr/modules/news/...
I just finished reading this post. If you enjoy H.L. Mencken, you will enjoy this guys blog post.
and somehow when conspiracy theorists say that this health care system takeover is stealth eugenics we're met with blank glossy eyed stares.
Deport everybody.

I'm not too familiar with Greek politics, but I'm sure there's a sufficiently large bleeding-heart constituency which would oppose any cruelty to the huddled masses just offshore.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided.

Well yes, I'm sure they're militarily capable of doing it, but it's still enough of a headache that it seems to push the risk/reward ratio of this Aegean Manhattan firmly into the "not worth the effort" category.
I believe that there is a way to refuse "artificial life support" in your will all ready.
On the other hand, there are changes that could be useful. For instance, "rules about submissions" could be on the Submit page, and "rules for comments" could appear when actually commenting. A lot of the other things could be written or linked from a user's profile page.

Those are great suggestions for the Feature Requests thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
I think what you're describing is open-source code. It's free to those who understand it. Companies provide support to those who don't.
Immigrant founder of indee.tv stuck in Vancouver due to visa hassle
A post by an immigrant entrepreneur who's being denied re-entry to the US, in support of the founder's visa / startup visa.
"One sentence jumped out at me: "But no one wants the horror stories of denied care"."

And it doesn't happen - a close family friend of ours passed away about a year ago (cancer), and the Canadian health system threw the damned kitchen sink in prolonging his life.

In my years growing up in Canada I had never, ever heard of a single person being denied care. Period. I'm sure it happens in extremely rare cases, though.

Meanwhile every single day in the USA I hear about denied care - for both insured and uninsured! Hell, a coworker just paid $20K to have a baby delivered. That sort of astronomical cost is completely unimaginable in a sane country with reasonable health care policies.

In fact, I know someone else who was denied an ultrasound because the insurance company claimed she was just trying to check on the sex of the baby (which is not covered).
But at some level doesn't it cost Verizon more the more I download? Why shouldn't they be allowed to pass down that cost?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how this is any different from my electricity bill. Sure, I'd love an economical flat-rate power plan, but I don't expect to get it any time soon.

People conflate metered internet with Net Neutrality. They're not the same thing. There's a big difference between Verizon charging more for using lots of bandwidth and Verizon charging more (or blocking) VoIP services that compete with their main business.
We have mentioned Anchor:

http://twitter.com/github/status/4433287458

We'll talk about them more in the future, too.
I know about Canada, I've lived there for five years. But this story wasn't about Canada, it was about the US.

Shocking story about your co-worker, I've never ever heard of anything that absurd.
Hello, you can find a port here:

http://wiki.github.com/mark-moseley/ruby-debug
Most languages worth learning expand your mind. They really do.

Lisp lets you to see your source in different light. Haskell makes you rethink expressions. C lets you know how it all works under the hood. Factor makes you think both directions.

There are also languages that set the bar high for you. Ruby for elegance. Prototype or jquery for making complex ugly thing a paradise. Even Perl's CPAN shows you the value of cooperation and modularization.

Even bad languages teach you a lot about ugliness, bad decisions and denial.

The same can be said about quite a few frameworks or even tools.
strace makes programs transparent, for example, while tcpdump makes you see, you realize you were blind.

As for math and algorithms, you suddently know enough of them, they're pretty finite.
FiveRuns "acquired" by Workthink, Inc.
64 High-Ranked Blogs for Developers
I guess I'm just trying to say, you might change up your strategy competing against Cisco, Microsoft, Google, or even Salesforce.com. But an 8MM round from a competitor probably shouldn't alter anything about your plan, unless it's to capitalize on the attention their inevitable vanity launch will generate.
Sharan's a friend, but it also touches a nerve because this could have very well have been me. While I think there's a lot of awareness about this topic, there isn't really enough about entrepreneurs who are living through this now (as opposed to people who have somehow successfully transitioned from immigrant to founder), mainly due to the scarcity of these stories.
Hi, I wrote Mibbit. For me, last time I used campfire, it was pretty minimalist. That's great if 'chat' is all you need, but it seems like there's a ton of different use cases, and an absolute TON of feature suggestions. A lot of it may also come down to taste. Some people like minimalism, some don't.

>> "There are more people in the comments here saying Campfire needs to be superseded. Why?"

everything needs superseding at some point, it's how things improve. Surely. Unless they are actively superseding themselves with new versions. You can't really stand still.

Is campfire still being developed and improved upon? Is it really the best it can be? What features did they add in the last month?

There's certainly space for a lot of webchat apps, and I'm skeptical that campfire is 'the best webchat can be' (And neither is Mibbit for that matter).

I can't speak for the other webchat developers, but in my case, working on mibbit is just plain fun. It's somewhere I can think up fun new features and plug them in. Like the recent addition of flags/timezones in the user list (patent pending) so you know where/when people are. And (after seeing an example on HN ;) the addition of LaTeX rendering).
On Spotify, Deezer and music platforms ... in the rearview mirror
Big if.

Wikipedia:
Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.

Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
I've received a few via email. Pretty much the same wording too.
I also got all of them except Mattel. :/
These guys are obviously savvy marketers. This isn't their first stunt...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/05/apple-gets-pwned-sf-sto...

Now if only they had a product that did something beyond letting you use iTunes with non-Apple devices. The user base for this won't be remarkably large (non tech-savvy people who have owned iPods in the past but who are now switching to a generic player).
thanks for the pieces of info.
It's not that much that I'm a java lover, but more that I'm not so a techie... and my very little experience as a developer is only Java oriented.

thanks anyway
Thanks!! We're pretty young, but very flexible and so willing to make a great product. We built Budgetler as an answer to many problems we experience with managing personal finances, day to day. More then that, we strongly believe that you should not depend on your local computer while doing your accounting. I hate crawling through number of receipts to put them in whenever I get back to laptop. I want to do this "in da cloud" (if you wish). Please, don't hesitate to send us your comments. We're very open to suggestions and ideas.
Well, sometimes friction is good, sometimes friction is bad. So let some sites have friction, and let Craigslist be Craigsilst.
I did but was surprised how many others didn't (and still haven't). There were some hiccups but nothing insurmountable.

Of course I blew everything away upgrading to Snow Leopard so I'll have to replace/upgrade with 1.9 again (though I'm also considering Ruby Version Manager).
FEBE start page [pt-BR]
Non-hacking, race & religion in one article, that's got to be a record for flamebait.
Data Mining the Mint.com Demographic
New Visa Credit Card Processing Fees 2009
For starters, there are tons of indexes and snippets extrapolated from the data, and they're cached all over the place.

More fundamentally, why do you think any of the records are mutable at all? You reap enormous benefits at that kind of scale by making all writes log-structured.
Oh, this is great. I just took a screen shot and emailed it to Tim!
College Without High School
Free eBook download: "Do it Yourself Agile"
Maybe move ad from being right next the submit button?

I understand why you did it but if they get a lot of mis-clicks, you may anger the AdSense gods.
Things You Must Know to Become an Ext-pert
In a slight twist, and one that may only work for small classes of highly motivated students, I took a set theory class where the professor would sneak an impossible question into the homework. He warned us during the very first class that he would do that occasionally.

So every few weeks, the four of us in the class would spend days trying to prove the continuum hypothesis or something, and going over the homework, he'd get to the question and ask casually if anyone solved it. We'd all say no and he'd tell us no one could, and show us proof. But we all learned a hell of a lot trying. Sometimes an avenue we tried ended up proving something interesting on the way, and it sharpened our thinking.

Of course, we also got into the habit trying to prove something was provable before we started (which turned out helpful when, at the end of the year, we collectively recreated [with help] much of the groundwork for Gödel's big theorems).
Term counting is the hello world of map-reduce examples, so while that number is obviously not exact (exactly 687 million?), it's reasonably accurate, considering the actual use of the count, which is more useless the bigger it is. No one created the opposite of Google Whack, finding the terms that yielded the most results; that's largely uninteresting when the counts are in the hundreds of millions range.
Depends on why you have that test. If you have a function that's supposed to return a null value under certain conditions, then by all means test for it as part of verifying that the code behaves correctly. But if you're obsessively adding "assert the return value is not null" tests for every function, then yeah, you're doin it wrong.
If you write hard-to-understand code, you won't have many customers.
Stuck in Vancouver is hardly a terrible fate.

Run the company from there - the city is crawling with tv/film/media people who cost half as much as the do in Ca.
The Terminal Man In His Natural Habitat
It's absolutely worth campaigning for but if governments were logical and followed value, we wouldn't need this.

My original example used failed states, but can you image pitching this to Alabama or Massachusetts? Perhaps we can speculate that the difference between a successful charter city and industrialized world cities is too small to be worth it. I'd still like to see this in Massachusetts, but let's accept the premise.

Then perhaps a developing nation like any one of the East European states, I'm originally form one of those and would LOVE something like that. Too bad no present government in that area will let it happen. But think of all the benefits, why not? Because again, if the people in charge acted rationally according to economically beneficial facts we'd already have economically booming cities.

Even in Greece, the Mogadishu scenario would be the good outcome, not that EU human rights laws and what not would ever let it go that bad, but then at least people could be deported. But the bad scenario is success, now you have a bunch of economically successful foreigner on your home soil! The next best thing would be high taxes, the most likely next thing would be much worse and typical of Balkan history.

And the sad thing is this has been done. Mainland China did it with it's economic free zones, what now 20-30 years ago? And it has been spectacularly successful. So everybody's rushing to copy this, right?

Well India is dipping its toes in it. very slowly with tiny zones, and they are not nearly as un-regulated as they could be, but at least it's something. The only other example I can think of is actually North Korea, where because of Kim's train's tours of booming China, some tiny tiny faintly capitalist zones have been set up. And that's about it.

Best of luck to the effort, but I just think it's so naively idealistic, childish almost.
Craigslist’s Missed Connections As Art
Well, this is why I mentioned TDD. People (maybe not you) don't have a problem with their tests failing right away, and having to fix the test to go forward. In fact, they call it a feature! But when the compiler _proves_ you have a bug, somehow that is too odious.

The other thing with a type-inferring compiler is that you don't have to figure out all your types upfront. You don't have to declare any types at all (usually). If everything is good, the compiler doesn't complain. As soon as you start to make an error, it tells you. Personally, I use the compiler very much like TDD advocates use tests. Write a function, make sure it compiles, slowly build up the whole program. If I wait until I've written the whole program before I run the type-checker, it's likely to be pretty ugly. Better to catch the errors quickly when it's less work to correct them.
I totally agree, Thomas. I was just trying to take the bounds of the spectrum a bit further. I tend to work in areas with strong network effects, so tens of millions in funding or profits is really nothing. It doesn't affect our strategy at all. We usually just have to be wary of the true behemoths (Google, Nokia, Microsoft, etc.) that can wield enough force to actually change the market.

On the other hand, we sometimes also have to be wary of the tiny, unprofitable startups that have gotten enormous mindshare in the market for some reason. This, of course, is relatively rare - but it happens. The majority of companies are in the middle of that spectrum, and they're the ones that tend to piss away millions without affecting us in any way whatsoever. Except maybe for pointless patent skirmishes. I hate the US patent system with a red-hot glowing passion that knows no bounds.
I don't think they were disgruntled with the grades that they actually got. From what btilly said, it seems that the frustration occurred before they received their final grades because they didn't realize that the grading system was going to be fair. They expected to be graded relative to each other (on a curve), with A's going to a certain, pre-fixed percent of the class. Instead, everyone who did well got an A for their good work. I think the complaint was about the demoralizing effects of the erroneous assumptions during the semester, not about the grades themselves.
how much of that 48 billion worth of research is worth anything in the real world?

A lot of that research is useless. Take biology for example, they might spend 5 million, trying to find out why a certain tree has slightly yellower leafs. Useful for their field? Maybe. But there is really no feasible way for them to monetize it.
This is fine for university students, but for anyone else, it is deeply frustrating. I don't want to have to email the author of a book merely to obtain solutions to the exercises; after all, the author may have died since they wrote the book.
Robotic Pancake Sorter
Right. Likewise, American football and soccer are substitute goods as well. Americans don't dislike soccer because of any particular quirk of its scoring system, they just dislike soccer because they already have another sport which fulfills the same function. It's just a historical quirk.
And if your code is easy to understand, you won't get paid.

I still don't understand how this is a business model.
I'd argue that it's quite a hack -- Trying to discern an algorithmic approach to attraction via a large data set, and create a recommendation engine to a very fuzzy problem. =)
I'm sorry, that game is called "Grid Iron". The word "football" is reserved for Rugby League.

(Not to be confused with Rugby Union, which is "rugby" or Australian Rules Football, which is "footy". And definitely not soccer, which is "soccer".)
Indee.tv was incorporated in the bay area and has been operational for almost a year. He's being refused re-entry.

Like myself, Sharan's a first generation immigrant from India, and he doesn't actually have any connections/ roots in Vancouver. He just picked it because he was legally required to re-enter the country ("yes, to stay in the country, Alice, you must leave and re-enter" saith the INS), and Canada's a close "foreign" country.
To chime in from the ShopTalk team, I would echo a lot of what axod has said. As a Campfire user, I'm sure you understand how important persistent group chat is to your organization. Unfortunately, most people aren't like you (yet)! We think there is a lot of room in this space, because more and more companies will realize how useful apps like ours are over the next few years. It's a relatively young, growing market.

Aside from that, there are a lot of improvements yet to be made in order to polish the group chat experience. One thing that we do, for example, is to allow users to sit in multiple rooms and be notified immediately about activity in background rooms. If you have more than one team using your account, that quickly becomes very important. That's just an example of one cool feature we've already implemented. We're still in beta, so there's a ton yet to come from us.

Thanks for checking it out.
Has anyone had experience switching from Dvorak to Colemak?
I distinguished between them because most of the helvetica ones look fuzzy for some reason
18/20 - Didn't look at the letters at all, just looked at which one had fuzzier edges, and was therefore likely run through Photoshop more.
I wonder if this is developed in-house, or some rebranded product?
JetBlue Unlimited Flights Travel Sale Brings Crazy Stunts
Can we please avoid using hashtags in article titles? This isn't Twitter...
Actually you are wrong. Next time be sure to read the entire article before you make uninformed assumptions.

You've obviously missed important information such as this link below and unsurprisingly made a Haskell fanboy comment without verifying the truth to your statements.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Shootout/Knucleotide#On_m...

>This benchmark is completely bottlenecked by Data.Hashtable (in GHC 6.4.1) and this discussion is based on the assumption that I am using Hashtable optimally...The entry below runs 16 slower than the DMD entry on my powerbook G4. Profiling shows the bottleneck. I downloaded simple_hash.h and shamelessly optimized it to replace Data.Hashtable for exactly this benchmark code.
I've actually been on the fence about buying Psychonauts for a while, after reading his post and seeing how he's just a normal guy with ups and downs who's trying to put out great stuff I'm going to! What a great run-on sentence that was.
And that's why I have multiple downvotes and everyone else arguing against me has multiple upvotes...
Nexicon, turning fear into cash
Toyota got me!
Ha, it's ironic that they use crappy looking rasterized text images for navigation on a site trying to sell a premium font: http://clearviewhwy.com/_images/snav_01_LV-01/01_over.gif
Digging through and commercializing research in whatever field you may be interested in is one thing. But it would seem like you would be missing out on many more opportunities in unrelated fields. Many advancements in tech/science in general were born from research in other fields. How do you cross pollinate those ideas with other fields on a large scale?