skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are so right about the 'can gain new ways of thinking by learning a new language.'

I took an APL course once. I SWEAR I could feel myself growing new brain wiring...
So, the income can be counted before obligations are resolved? Tradesmen can "earn" large amounts of money in short periods of time under this definition, as they're often paid half up-front to fund materials, but they still need to do work in order to "earn" that money.
The point of the Coke vs. Pepsi article, IMO, is that the logo does matter, and you should invest the time to get it right the first time.
I recently bought a power adapter kit for my Mac's charger block, which works as a transformer as well, and it's made my life much easier travelling in the EU and US. (Except that I can't plug the block directly into the wall in some cases due to size. D'oh.)

If more plug adapters supported interchangeable ends, life would definitely be simpler. You can pick up kettle leads or figure-eight leads for $country quite cheaply, I guess. The transformers are the biggest pain. But as the article says - we're pretty much stuck with the system...
I answered myself on this other thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913284

Every other part of the URL including the rest of the domain name can already be Unicode encoded. This is how spoofing attacks are formed by using non-Latin characters in domain names that look like the Latin characters they replace.

This latest ICANN decision doesn't seem to make anything less convenient for the English speaking world than it already was.
Internationalized Domain Names
I often find listening to music while I work increases my focus and productivity.

Have they done comparison of attention with phone held up to ear and hands free? Seems like hands free can simulate talking to a passenger, which is shown to not be as distracting. But I'm thinking the distraction from a phone may come from the anxiety of knowing you have to a) hang up, b) don't want to keep the person on the other line waiting so you attend to them more.
Why virtual economies defy the rules of your old college textbooks
oh please, like we are supposed to believe ICANN cares about internalization. The only reason they want to do this, is to make more money off the fees from the idiots who'll buy these crappy domains.

We've seen hundreds of TLDs launched that were touted as game changers. .info, .biz, .us, and those are the big ones, and noone wants them. .COM is king, it is ingrained in internet users worldwide.

Yes local countries have their .rus and .chs but that's the whole point. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Trying to bypass that, just reeks of opportunism
Microsoft Office Accounting dies this November
But... the keyboards.
maybe they'll be some kind of coolant to apply, perhaps a type of thin silicone lamination.
You'd be surprised. I'd say the vast majority of URLs I see around in Japan end in .jp. Hitting ctrl+enter after an URL will add www and .co.jp on most computers, not .com. Few people understand english sufficiently to browse the english-speaking internet; the best example is probably Facebook, which is rarely used here, while its local equivalent mixi.jp is extremely popular.

Also, the QWERTY keyboard is just not the standard worldwide...

That being said, I don't think people will start using japanese URLs much. The alphabet + .jp is already ingrained and more convenient. Also, most phones will refuse japanese characters in an email adress and perhaps in an URL, which is a game breaker here.
I would be very curious to know whether listening to music has less distracting effects as listening to say, NPR for instance. Also, whether music with lyrics is more distracting than music without lyrics. In other words, does the distraction increase the closer you get to "conversation".
Peldi keeps impressing us with his carefully written and useful articles. I have followed his blog since he released his product and I am convinced he is a great role model for bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
The thing I am most grateful for is that Peldi actually took the time to document the whole process all the way back when he still was working at Adobe and secretly planning to start his own business.
Just go back to his blog and check all the postings from 2008.. a great story. Good work and thanks for sharing how do you do run a great company!
Strunk and White - 50 Years of Really Bad Advice on Grammar
To elaborate a little: you don't sense the oxygen level in your blood. You sense the CO2 level, using acidity sensors in your aorta. CO2 dissolved in your blood reaches an equilibrium with carbonic acid, which means that the acidity of your blood is proportional to the amount of CO2. It's stuff like this that makes physiology fun to study.
High-definition audio cell phone system deployed in Moldova
How to Recover Deleted Files?
Accidentally deleting files happens all the time. This article explains why a deleted file can still be recovered. And it tells you what to do to perform better deleted file recovery. A good file recovery is very useful for recover deleted files.
Perhaps. But more often than not it's an inherent complexity in the problem space itself.

That isn't to say there is only ever one way of performing an action or that it is impossible to make it clearer how to perform a task. And if you make it difficult for users to give you their opinion, it will be that much harder to know what needs to be improved.

IRC is real-time and ephemeral, which makes it considerably more difficult to engage in conversations with contributors in other time zones, and refer back to design discussions that occurred 5-20 years ago.

There's not very many projects that date back 20 years ago that also have the complexity that you're talking about. X11 and the Linux kernel are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. And I would hope that a 5-20 year old project that's continuously under development would have more documentation than posts from a mailing list about its design.

I thought we already established that project communication channels are primarily optimized for the project contributors who use them daily, not for once-off questions from end users.

I would be interested in seeing how many projects — open source in this case — have > 1 or 2 contributors.

I may be off base, but I'd guess that you're optimizing towards large, highly visible projects and not the small, norm of an open source project.
I'd like to see more studies related to increased attentiveness while listening to music. All through high school I played tetris on my calculator during class. I swear I could absorb more information while playing tetris than while not playing tetris.

The only explanation I could ever imagine is that a small part of my mind was tied up thinking about the game, so I was less prone to day dream while playing. However, I had played so much that I didn't really have to think about it any more, so enough of my brain was free to process what the teacher was saying.

This study indicates that something similar is going on while listening to music. I think this could be a powerful discovery.
The article quoted Celsius scale temperatures.

140˚C is 284˚F. At that temperature, the fact that the ink is melting would be the least of my concern if this is intended for wearable electronics.
Nobodies ftw
I think you really missed the point. It has nothing to do with ethics, and everything to do with creativity.
seems like andrew stopped spelling out hacker news and is just using a bitly link instead. I still don't get why people on here complained that he asked people to vote his interviews up.

it's not like it's crap recycled content.
ok...Am i the only one ?
How is this HN stuff...For me it should be in digg...
The main purpose of the educational system, up to and including graduate school, is to produce obedient workers. We're fortunate to work in a field too young to have developed an orthodoxy. That's how we can get away with thinking so much. Most people are not so fortunate.
Twitter account breaking news to be sold for 6 figures, 1.36 million followers
I am now thinking about every "problem" in my life, its borders, and whether those borders mean ANYTHING. Is everything this artificial?
CSS on window borders experimental layout language
I think this is how most equity investing works anyway. You get the feeling that one or more of the founders are "superstars" and decide to back them, not the idea or product that they pitched you with.

The lifetime contract is an interesting spin. Kind of reminds me of a classical artist having a patron. It's a great deal from the perspective of the individual...3% is always a trivial amount of your income. I do worry about it from the investment perspective...it seems way too easy to let personal biases and an individual's charisma get in the way of making rational investment decisions. While most investments are made on the basis of "I really like this person", it probably isn't the best criteria.
I don't understand the author's point.

One of the traits of the human species that differentiates it from many other animals is its capability to transform its environment to suit itself. We long ago developed this ability to an even greater extent than any other animal on our planet, and we are still further developing this ability.

So, in dropping a mindless "meat probe", he's experimenting with something that isn't really human. It isn't bringing resources with it, or building shelter, or altering its environment. He's instead artificially limiting the terms of the experiment to environments that are between 40 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with arable soil, no predators, and readily available food and (clean) freshwater sources.

Well, hell, under those conditions, many of the places that we live today aren't supposed to be habitable.
12 kilobits per second is high definition?
Most of the anti-vax crowd I meet are so wrapped up in trying to convince everyone of the autism link that they don't stop to think if it matters. What if the worst is true and they are right? A small percentage of children vaccinated become autistic. Is that worse than 21,269 (American, many more globally) children per year left with mild to disabling paralysis from polio? Measles, mumps, rubella, Tetanus, Diphtheria?

As hard as it might sound, even if the current vaccines actually are harmful to some very small number of children, we should still do it. The alternative is much worse.
I remember reading a study done about doodlers and their retention rates. The study found that people who doodle when listening had a higher retention rate of the information. I cannot remember where I read it so I don't know how rigorous the study was though. But this seems in line with your anecdotal evidence.
A good friend and I are in the process of agreeing to something vaguely similar. We each get x% of the others' proceeds if we're a founder at a company that has an exit. So it increases our chances of seeing a payout and decreases that payout by x% (but x is small.) Ideally we'd have a couple more good friends-who-are-equally-likely-to-be-founders join in, and we'd really have a good pool...
I agree. I wonder if they are worried that the people that have not been to hacker news before might "dilute" the culture here. I would think that the people that are on his site before finding HN would be exactly the type of people that we would want to attract here.
From the article :
The problem does not derive from using a hand to hold the phone, but the diversion of attention to the conversation.
Download bluesoleil - Google Search
Halloween Jokes, Twitter & Google
> That isn't to say there is only ever one way of performing an action or that it is impossible to make it clearer how to perform a task. And if you make it difficult for users to give you their opinion, it will be that much harder to know what needs to be improved.

Not to berate users, but sometimes when people run into an issue they want a solution yesterday. So they hop on to the mailinglist/irc and demand to have their problem fixed... Only for more informed people to point them at the FAQ which probably results for the first Google search on problem.

I'm not saying that the software could't have flaws. I'm saying that if people are armed with the answer to their issue, then they are more equipped to make suggestions at the future direction of the software. When they still don't have an answer they are still in, "FIX THIS NOW!" mode.
How much backwards compatibility is too much?
Interior Decoration
When it comes to crucial things such as interior decoration, it is best that you get it done right the first time. Most of us don't really have a lot of experience that can be bragged about when it comes to interior decoration, so it is best to hire a person or a firm who is well experienced in interior decoration of homes and offices.
Americans understand your last line. In America, money is far more important to the vast majority of people than education. I'm pretty sure that's one of the reasons Euros use to feel above Americans. Education starts becoming important to how people perceive you when you're near upper middle class or above. And even then your success is more important.

When you say all these people have done all those successful things, are you talking about the entire history of your school? I couldn't understand if that is what you were talking about or if you were saying all those accomplishments happened with people who were in school as the same time as you (this is what I doubt).
But do the goats have union cards?

No seriously, that was a problem when they did this in California: http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SL... http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Wc0PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=c...
Hey, hey! Don't be putting down .info. It brought about millions of spam sites!
> IRC is real-time and ephemeral, which makes it considerably more difficult to engage in conversations with contributors in other time zones, and refer back to design discussions that occurred 5-20 years ago.

Lots of places log IRC and host the logs. That might not be your cup of tea, but it's far from hard. And I think that the reason that most design discussions (other than one-off decisions) still happen in email is that you can't really 'write up' something in IRC the way that you can compose an email.

> I thought we already established that project communication channels are primarily optimized for the project contributors who use them daily, not for once-off questions from end users.

Why not create a web forum/usenet/mailinglist gateway? Launchpad is semi-like this. I haven't pushed the bounds of it, but I can sign in through the bug page and post something. I can also subscribe to the bug and get an email for each post, which I can reply to (though it is limited in that there is no threading, but bug tracking is fairly topical) to post back to the bug page.
Bolton Wanderers v Chelsea Live
Bolton Wanderers v Chelsea Live
> I reiterate: If different users are asking the same question repeatedly, perhaps its an indicator that there's something wrong with your software, not your users?

Sometimes the issue is that people have different assumptions about how something should work. Sometimes there's not always an intuitive way to make something easy for every person on the planet to immediately grasp. But this is all a little too abstract without solid examples.
Kylie Minogue's fans tag her new look in Oz mag 'fake, weird'
Yes, the new vaccine is novel and it was rushed. That's not saying it was imprudently rushed, but producers have been racing to get these new-strain vaccines ready on a schedule more compressed and on a scale much larger than the usual seasonal process.

For example, reports indicate:

- Vaccine producers haven't been able to accurately predict the yields, as is typical of a new process.

- At first it was thought the new vaccine would require two shots, now it's thought one is enough.

- Different nations are preparing the vaccines differently -- for example in their varying use of adjuvants.

- Much of the initial supplies are a nasal vaccine which uses a weakened virus. Nasal vaccines are themselves a newer technology than traditional dead-virus shots. (Nasal vaccines have a good 6-year record; I prefer a safety record of decades.)

Advocates of universal vaccination can't have it both ways: that this virus is so new and unpredictable we should hurry to be vaccinated, but the vaccine based on that same virus is so old and reliable we can treat it, after just a few months' of trials, as having the exact same risk profile as decades of seasonal shots.

If the new vaccines were identical to seasonal vaccine plus the new strain, created completely via normal processes and schedules, then there would be just one seasonal shot, and 2009-H1N1 would be one of the added strains. (Last year's seasonal shot already included another H1N1 strain.) They chose not to follow that process, so they don't get the same decades-of-safety presumption.

No amount of short-term studies or expert assessment can replace years of aggregated experience. Medicine takes decades to converge on definitive answers, and has called many things wrong for years before correction.

So please, take my place at the front of the line. There's no right answer for everyone; searching the solution space requires a diversity of individual strategies. I'm not pregnant and I'm old enough that I've almost certainly had cases of, and vaccinations for, lots of cousins of the new virus. (I may have even already had one of the "so mild treatment isn't even sought" cases earlier this year, which is the best vaccination of all.)
AIG may get saved... by Credit Default Swaps
I suspect music with lyrics affects a different part of your brain than conversation. Especially if it's music you're familiar with (ie: you're probably not actively interpreting the lyrics).

On a related note, people who stutter can often sing perfectly fine.
I agree with you, but I think I can also predict the responses of the anti-vax crowd. To them, they have a strong bias between "naturally-caused" and "human-caused" effects; they would see 21,000 cases of polio as, "Oh dear, well, that's nature (or God), and it's too bad we can't do anything about it."

But, transform those 21,000 cases of polio into 2,000 cases of autism, and you get: "Someone did this! Someone inflicted this, this is someone's fault, see, we're not supposed to be messing with nature."

From the outside looking in, it's a strange bias, but it's the peculiar result of a sort of comfort in helplessness combined with poor education and a preference for emotional responses over logical thinking.
... which is why it is best delivered from a rooftop, with darts, from a high-powered rifle.

(I have often threatened to do exactly this if such a thing were possible.)
Peter Bell: Founders should meet candidates for first 200 positions
In the voice world, they call anything above an 8kHz sampling rate "HD audio." It's the next big thing in voice conferencing: 16kHz sampling rate! The comfort noise (noise played by a phone so you know it hasn't disconnected) never sounded so clear! Naturally, it's all patented and proprietary. Meanwhile there are open source systems capable of CD quality audio at speech latencies (http://www.celt-codec.org/), but why use that when you can pay for an AMR-WB license?

Actually, I set up an Asterisk PBX once for a demonstration of an HD voice system with a 48kHz/24-bit AEC system that was shown at Infocomm, and it does sound nice.
I don't know your situation, but I think making more connections with other people is innately and completely a good thing. I didn't want to go to a happy hour the other night, but followed my rule and dragged myself down there. Turns out I met the media buyer for an advertiser I've been trying to connect with. Completely random luck, right? Well yes, except that I put myself in a position to meet this guy by stepping out.
Alexandra Fortune: Mystery of the Lunar Archipelago 
Join Alexandra Fortune as she sets out to find her missing grandfather! Unravel the age-old mystery of the Lunar Archipelago, a cluster of islands that contains remnants of every great civilization throughout history and hides a treasure of unimaginable worth. As you guide Alexandra through this thrilling Hidden Object quest, you'll solve ingenious puzzles, enjoy visually stunning locations a
Huh? What he says makes perfect sense.
I hear you loud and clear. I'm an introvert myself and believe that people like us 'recharge' through quality time alone.

That said, I think it's a real handicap that can be overcome, like any other, by consistently pushing ourselves to go out and be social in some appropriate way, on a regular basis.

If you're making something truly cool, I guarantee there are people out there who might not be your target audience, but might know someone who knows someone who is. You'll never make that connection unless you go out. It sucks but extroverts have a big advantage in these areas.
Well, that's exactly right.

The (real) dangers of the flu are greater than the imaginary dangers of thimerosal.

Since the anti-vax folks seem to love anecdotes: my entire father's side of my family has used thimerosal topically to treat cuts and wounds -- under its trade name Merthiolate -- for a very very long time, at least since my father was very young. There have been no ill side effects.

Other than insanity. (I kid, I kid. Maybe.)
More Fun = Less Stress
This has been an interesting turnabout in H1N1 news. I first started following it closely in the first days of its outbreak, because my girlfriend happened to be visiting family just outside Mexico City at the time.

Initial reports said that one of the main concerns of H1N1, over "normal" influenza strains, was that it seemed to have a greater effect on those with healthy immune systems. At the time, there were some guesses that it might be triggering cytokine "storms".

Since then, this has been subtly altered to the usual "most dangerous to the less healthy" property of normal influenza.

I don't really have a point, it's just an observation that's made me go, "huh."
"Do not use a sensitive password because it will sometimes be mailed to you in cleartext" and "This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your python.org mailing list memberships."

Blame GNU Mailman, the absolute worst mailing list daemon ever written: http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailman.html
Yeah, this is the biggest problem with the proposed change to URLs. When you can have two different characters that are visually identical but have different meaning to computers, you have a serious security problem.
I'm glad to see Yahoo put this project out in the open source world. What I'm having a hard time with is understanding precisely where it fits after having read through all the public docs. Despite the comparisons drawn on the intro page, Traffic Server seems close to squid and varnish functionally, but really only close to squid in actual implementation: a highly configurable split ram/disk caching proxy. Varnish is quite a departure from this approach (http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/wiki/ArchitectNotes), and nginx at its core is not a caching proxy at all. This doesn't diminish its value as a system that's served tremendous traffic volumes over the last decade, but I'd love a more complete description of why I should choose TS over the alternatives in caching and reverse proxy roles.