skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh yeh; releasing it in a limited way is the best move in my eyes. I mostly suggested that approach because you said immediate money wasn't a huge concern (always good!).

The way I see it, if you make a limited initial beta for a reasonable length of time (say 3 months) and make sure you pick people who will actively use the service (that's the hard bit) then you:

- have an active user base who are very highly likely to convert to immediate paid accounts, especially if you sweeten it just a tad for them as beta users :D

- get final stage beta testing while still on limited release

- get your first real public product feedback; always useful for setting a price that is fair but not off putting!

(can I ask what it is your putting together? If it's too early just say no :D)
High production values, lighting, editing, music and so on. This is a professional mini-doc.
Getting vendors to be more compatible is a laudable goal but I don't see how it could possibly be the opposite of creating a new syntax when that's clearly part of what they did.

XML was a grand vision to unify document formats and it sparked an entire trend of opening up all sorts of data. It wasn't just some small incompatible change to HTML syntax.

I don't see what it buys us to go back to an HTML specific syntax, but it could have very broad ramifications. XML may have been overused, but if the W3C cannot make it work for marking up web pages then XML is dead.

Removing XML from the data integration world and going back to building parsers for every shitty DSL idea that in-house developers come up with is going to cost the world economy dearly.

Some of that money is going to end up on my bank account, so I'm seriously ambivalent about lambasting this historical mistake.
#000 is black and #fff is white, at least in CSS notation.
briliant. Most meta comics usually strike me as trying too hard - but that has such a rigidly set formulae it is excellent! Thanks,
100 internets to you.
Link to Brandon Wilson's site with the key back up: http://www.brandonw.net/

Link to a letter from TI: http://www.brandonw.net/calcstuff/DMCA_notice.txt
Does Scoble take into account that he is an edge case when he writes these things, or not? (Honest question) I get the sense that whenever he writes or complains about things he writes as though other people have the same problems he does. This is at best naive, at worst dishonest if so.
The Truth About Bender's Brain
I think it might be worth noting (much to the chagrin of the Apple haters) that the iPhone does pretty well in this comparison, despite its relative age.

That being said, my G1 is looking sadly impotent these days, and I'm wondering what kind of shenanegins I'd have to pull to keep my current T-Mobile plan, but use a Driod.
Basically, here's what's going on:

1) There aren't many free typefaces for daily use that are beautiful, so you have to buy (or commission) several and "open source" them.

2) Techniques for AA font rendering that maximize aesthetics and readability are protected by numerous software patents. Years ago there was a short-lived patch in Xorg that had a modern font-AA algorithm that held its own against the competition, but it turned out to step on several patents so it was axed out of fear of litigation. That fear is very real, as typography-related tech patents are one of the most aggressively guarded elements of tech-IP.

As a result, the Linux developers have been forced to re-invent the wheel from the ground up when it comes to typography in Linux distributions.
Could well be actually...

or could not -- but what's the point of wondering what they "truly believe" if in the end we can never safely find out? ;)
A pickup artist who lives in an RV with two pairs of underwear to his name. Does it get any classier than that?
Yes, and since 1920 there have been changes in pretty much all the inputs to the luxury car price function, wealth distribution, production costs of pretty much everything, and what the Joneses that you're trying to keep ahead of can be expected to have being the ones that immediately come to mind.
Opscode Cookbooks
(My comment is redundant with some of the others but I wrote it before reading them. I figure it's helpful to see concurring opinions.)

I think that you will find such short term rentals difficult but not impossible to come by. As a fallback, though it isn't a very exciting option, there are various hotel-but-with-kitchens businesses that specialize in short-term rentals.

The rental market is laid fairly bare on Craigslist for the SF Bay Area. There you might find, closer to the time of your travel, temporary sublet or roommate opportunities.

You don't make clear what you mean by "magic". I'll take two guesses that you mean either crazy Bay Area culture or insane Bay Area business networking opportunities. For culture, consider Berkeley (in the flats, not the hills) or, within The City (S.F.) consider the Castro, Haight, N. Beach, or SOMA neighborhoods (given your Kevlar aversion, I'd suggest avoiding the Tenderloin). For business, I am guessing a bit but consider SOMA or, for a complete twist into a kind of bland suburban hell (but close to a lot of VCs and start-ups) consider heading south on the peninsula to Mtn. View or Palo Alto or somewhere around there.

I'd caution against most of Oakland. In the hills you'll be isolated from action. In many parts of the flats, you'll wish for your Kevlar. There are excellent and peaceful and vibrant places to live in Oakland but if you are picking from afar, don't count on your ability to tell them from the not so good places. Similarly, sadly, avoid Richmond.

If you time your visit for early summer, after the Universities end their spring semester, the chances of finding nice short-term sublets or roommate situations goes way up.

I think some of the price quotes you got below are not impossible but you should expect higher.

Be very careful not to get scammed when negotiating a deal from afar (of course).

-t
Note that it "hijacks" search engine result pages just like Demand Media does... The source of evilness is different though.
Alas, my first thought was 0x0fff, or 4095, even though I use 3-digit color codes quite a bit in HTML and CSS.
Indeed. I went to a CouchDB presentation at a local conference, and afterward I asked about some transaction-related details. The presenter didn't understand, but kept repeating that the technology behind it was "way sexy". It was useless and off-putting.
but as always, I'm very scared to update.
I think you're trying to make a joke, but if not, I have no idea how you reached that conclusion.
The iPhone version of Reader is very annoying because it refreshes the page constantly when I come back to it. Thus I lose the place or folder where I was at.
Something along the lines of a highrisehq.com competitor.

We're about a 6 weeks away from a private beta launch.. So pricing is coming up quite a bit. =)
This reminds me of the tiny house guy:
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/
Ah. Snap.

I am having one of those days. I read 'VMWare Tools' as 'VMWare Server' for some reason. Cheers!
Not necessarily legal, just brilliant (the majority are legal I think).

From finance you reminded me about these nifty tricks: http://www.themistrading.com/article_files/0000/0348/Toxic_E...
I'll refer you to Lacan, if you don't mind.
I swear it's Aubrey De Grey :)
http://www.singularitysummit.com/bios/grey
William Cook (PL researcher and AppleScript designer) on industry and academia
Look at tptacek's other posts. He is making a joke here. It is a funny one.
I too, continue to use Google Reader, even though I've been lamenting its deficiencies for more than two years.

I go into more detail in these posts [http://blog.trevorbramble.com/past/tags/googlereader] where I try to glue together Reader and Yahoo Pipes because Reader can't do even basic de-duplication.

Despite my gripes about it, it's the best available. (Though I'm sure their lack of improvements has a lot to do with that fact.)
Teacher Whose Field Trips Are an Art Is Honored
I live in the mission. It's amazing to be able to walk between a dozen coffee shops and bike to work. But it's not for everyone, it's especially not for people who don't want to sell one of their organs each month to pay the rent.
So basically Scoble doesn't like Google Reader because it isn't Twitter.

Personally I really want "social networking features" to stay the heck out of my RSS reader, so I find his critique of that feature to be meaningless.

I'm a big Reader fan because it allows me to visit one site daily to read 50 occasionally updated blogs rather than visit 50 sites daily.
You may want to have a look at PLT Scheme, which does something similar. (Though I'd bet my nose that they do not use XML.)
Damn I wish I was there.
I teach mathematics at a college. Doing (1) for every type of problem is not feasible. In college algebra courses we now give problems that involve using the best linear, quadratic, or exponential fit. We definitely do not do these problems by hand. The calculator is a black box that spits out the correct approximation and the student is asked to answer questions based on what the calculator spits out for the correct fit.

Part of our jobs is to prepare students to use mathematics in engineering, physics, chemistry, etc. We don't want to always give problems where the numbers are nice.

Is (3) a problem? How many people can find interpolating polynomials? Very few. Interpolating polynomials are no longer needed by most students of mathematics because computing power is cheap and ubiquitous. The skill set for mastering mathematics has changed given this reality.

Think of it this way. Very few people can start fire without matches or flint. This used to be common knowledge years ago but is no longer needed. Fire making devices are cheap and plentiful.
The 3Gs came out the same time as the Pre, and after the HTC Magic.
Observations from a real-world Clojure project
I don't think this even matters to him since it seems like his greatest interest is self-promotion, not the-average-person promotion.
Air Conditioning – Don’t need it. It’s 100 degrees during the day here in Austin

Strikes me as an odd definition of "need" as well as an odd objection in the first place.. cars with AC and RVs with supplemental AC aren't at all uncommon.

Also, let’s consider what percentage of the world’s population doesn’t have air conditioning.

This strikes me as an invalid analogy, since one could say the same thing about potable water. I think I understand his point anyway, even though I disagree with it, but it's tough not to think he's just saying he simply doesn't want air conditioning.

Do you USE all the space between your bed and the wall?

There isn't any. Even as a child, I kept my bed flush against a corner. I'm not claustrophobic, though, so it's another objection that strikes me as strange.

Were these all just straw men?
I dunno...

http://i641.photobucket.com/albums/uu139/jsz0/fonttest.png
The Smartgrid Goes Open Source
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense.

Just to be clear, I wouldn't attempt to do this at home (so to speak). I was merely curious about the theoretical differences between the alternate approaches.
I was hoping he might actually concede and discuss some downsides of RV ownership. There have to be some.

Things that jump out at me after spending a few minutes thinking about the logistics:

sewer/water, vehicle maintenance (a biggy, if your house is in the shop should something happen to your vehicle), going to the laundromat every 3 days, having friends over, winter, RV cost vs tiny studio apartment, cost of mobility vs actual leverage of that mobility, etc.
Netwon also spent a great deal of time attempting to decipher codes in the bible...
Funny, Ubuntu always seemed much more responsive to me. I very much prefer it over Windows. OSX I haven't tried enough to form an unbiased opinion on.
A Job Posting in JSON
The difference in the cost of plans is a bit shocking. AT&T and Verizon are 50% more expensive than Sprint and T-mobile, and T-mobile doesn't appear to have a data usage cap.
It depends if they're writing crap that's below their station. If you're getting a heavy investigative journalist to pump out this stuff, it could hurt their credibility. If it's just a niche expert pumping out small news pieces that have some small insight behind it, I can't see how it could hurt.
Not exactly. There are a few things about memcached:
a) It's a database.
b) It's fast.
c) It forces you to use decent architecture.

a) Some types of data are stored only in memcached. For example user http sessions. There are also some other information that are stored only-in-memcached, like statistics. If memcached goes down, nobody will cry. Is it the same as normal database on HDD? No. It's because records are automatically dropped after a timeout. Can you emulate this behaviour in normal DB? Yes. By periodically going through DB and removing old sessions.

b) It's really fast. You can forget about optimizing your SQL queries, you can forget about slow ORM mappings. It takes a lot of pain from you.

c) Memcached nodes doesn't grow - you can't just add more ram, you have to kill machine and destroy memcached instance before. So you have to use reasonable architecture - shared nothing on the backend side, and consistent hashing on memcached side. When a programmer understands that data shouldn't be handled on one DB box, but should be partition on many memcached nodes - it changes the way of thinking. It's a big switch, like between desktop applications - with db tied to specific app, and cloud - with db that belongs to other parts of infrastructure.
Some pretty good points on both accounts. Would like to see perforamnce numbers :p
I personally greatly prefer Windows style font rendering (presumably #2). Fortunately Ubuntu is flexible enough that I can configure it for Windows style font smoothing.
Consider a Turing machine M1 of size X that, given an input value n, calculates a function f(n) such that O(f(n)) > O(BB(n)) and halts.

Consider a Turing machine M2 of size Y that calculates a number A and halts, where X + Y < A.

Combine the two machines, using the number calculated by M2 as the input for M1. The resulting Turing machine of size X + Y calculates a value f(A) such that f(A) > BB(A) > BB(X + Y) and then halts. This contradicts the definition of BB(X + Y), therefore no such computable function f can exist.
If he had played football in high school he could have met a life long friend. Or gotten a free ride to an OK collage. Or simply had a lot of fun at the time. Looking only at the positive outcomes it's easy to look back on arbitrary choices and think you made the correct one because there are many outcomes that could be considered positive.

Heck he could have become injured and still think it was a good choice, because he learned he was not invincible at a young age and focused on living a healthy life.
Turn a user into a passionate customer before making them sign up
What browser are you using? Have you tried from a different one?
let_in =let in'let'in=let in let in" let" in
let in let
let'in let_ _in =
let_>>_in in
in'let'in++
let in_let'in=let
in " let in let" in let'in
in_let'in in'let'in

Made me laugh.

But seriously, what's up with the heterosexist fake quote?
Word count is not an indication of the effort involved.

If it's for writing small news bits, it can be. Let's say you're a total expert with using GMail and you have to write a couple of posts linking to GMail news, the occasional tip, etc, each day - you can probably bash short posts out in no time.

You have the many hundreds of hours invested in actually become the expert in the first place, but I doubt anyone becomes an expert so they can write $50 a pop pieces - so that cash is extra value, not a payback for the time you spent learning (as is the case with a professional's fees).
"finding a square root on paper."

That's painful!
Ok, let me revise my statement: the cognitive load of the requirement is only negligible in comparison to the frustration not including the requirement would cause.

Apple puts the disk space requirements in every single installer. Disk usage is an important piece of information. I'd agree with you if it were something like "Ubuntu requires a Pentium II or higher".
None of my upvotes work either, such as the ones I made in this discussion. All this time I thought it was just me. :-)
Run, don't walk, to your nearest optometrist and get your eyes checked.

Ubuntu and OS X are not even remotely comparable from a typography standpoint. Using Freetype (the Linux/X11 lib for font rendering), tracking and stem thickness is inconsistent, ascenders and descenders get cut off, etc.

The Freetype team puts forth a valiant effort, but until they're allowed to use Adobe/Apple/etc.'s patented hinting algorithms, there's no comparison.
Thanks for the excellent explanation.
Is there source code out there for a patent infringing Ubuntu font fix?
Yes yes, I'm an avid GR user too and I can't believe how slowly it evolves.

There's a lack of keywords feed filtering, feeds personalisation, items expiration, some way to archive items for later and on and on...

My guess is that it's a very small team working on Google Reader and that they have the wrong priorities : the social stuff, at least it is for me.
There isn't a GSM version of Droid (only rumors of one coming out), so Droid on T-Mobile wouldn't work.
Another great resource are the Velocity Conference videos on Blip.tv Includes Facebook,Twitter and Myspace.
Just tell Ubuntu/Gnome to use the DejaVu fonts by default. They are much nicer looking than the "standard" fonts. Also, `aptitude install ttf-mscorefonts-installer` goes a long way towards making the web look nicer, as does changing Firefox's default font selections.

And yes, I wish Ubuntu would at least make DejaVu the defaults for everything out of the box.
relatedly, there is a javascript library for event handling based on arrows: http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/PL/arrowlets/
I'm using Ubuntu and my screen looks like the OSX screen in the picture. The default ubuntu install comes with only free fonts, and clearly HN has been designed to look best with non free. All that is required to make both look the same is to type:

sudo aptitude install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Being fair to the parent, you don't seem to have the MS web fonts installed on Ubuntu, so the two OSes are rendering different fonts.

Still.. even if you do install the right fonts, the results will be the same.
I just want to know how hard it is to get rid of the poo.
Clay Shirky had some acrid comments on this "semantic links to humans" idea five years ago:

http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/08/17/xfn_relationship...

One comment to that post remarked: "It seems to me that it's not just a solution looking for a problem; it's a problem looking for a problem."
Both Scoble's post and this rebuttal really boil down to one thing: different people have different information consumption needs. What suits a power blogger might not suit a social-consumption junkie.

Me? I used to be a blogger, reading RSS feeds for 2-4 hours a day (depending how quickly I found interesting things to write about, and whether it was a catch-up day). I honestly cannot imagine replicating that level of information wired-ness with a simple Twitter list. However! I'm now far more casual in my news consumption and Twitter lists are the perfect way for me to get a handful of headlines from a handful of folks I trust.

I haven't even set up a Twitter list just yet - only a custom group in TweetDeck. I manually visit four or five sites when I get the time, and get my news that way. I even set up these sites in Google Reader, but it's not all that efficient when you've only got a handful - I actually prefer to visit the sites themselves, as I can see things like Lifehacker's recommended stories more easily there. HN is the main place I go to for news outwith these sources.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202

... so that's the specific answer. the general answer is: pg does a whole lot of tinkering behind the scenes that is not obvious.
"You see, you'd normally expect explanations of jokes to be funny."

Who would expect that? It's a old cliche that explaining a joke isn't funny or entertaining. I certainly wasn't expecting humor when I looked at it.

(Nor did I find any, but then, the "it's funny because it's not funny" shtick is right up there with "Bill Clinton is a horny guy, amirite?" jokes in Dated Gag Heaven.)
Miss Manners has a simple protocol: a date must contain food, entertainment, and affection. In the early stages of the relationship, it's mostly entertainment and just the slightest hint of affection. As the relationship progresses, the level of affection increases. When the affection becomes the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances may the food be omitted.
"the androgynous figure has arbitrarily promised not to make humor out of referring to itself any longer. given the assumption that the 'blank stare' is funny, the promise has been broken and regret sets in."
>Do you USE all the space between your bed and the wall?

I can't see three-quarters of my floor. Does that count as "used"?
1) OS X. A tad fuzzy, but everything is rendered _accurately_. Consistent thickness and character tracking (spacing).

2) Windows. Everything is slammed into pixel boundaries, making it look clean. Verdana is optimized for this style of rendering, so it doesn't look terrible.. but it's definitely not accurate.

3) Ubuntu. Worst of both worlds. Fuzzy and inaccurate.
I find this cool. But I'm not in the market so it's little more than entertaining to me.
One of the conclusions you can draw from this that I love is that there are exponentially more complex things than there are simple things. The number of unique, 'elegant' programs short enough to store in 32 bits is 2^32, but the number of unique, 'elegant' programs you can store in 100 bits is 2^100.
Not to pg-fanboy out too much, but I really like his ANSI Common Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html . It's not the newest thing on the market, but is quite good. Obviously, it's a book, so you'd have to buy or borrow it. Also, Arc has a tutorial online: http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt
I love the mission. I wish I could move there so bad.
A Tale of Two Algorithms: Multithreading Matrix Multiplication
No, but yes.

It's not that the number is being used to protect copyright - it's a signing key that prevents you from installing different software on your calculator.

But yes. The DMCA has the provision about publishing DRM circumvention techniques and tools. This seems to be one.

Stupid and unfair, BTW. TI is hurting itself more than its user base.
I'm moving to the East Bay, taking BART into the city. While I know it's not a perfect situation, it's easier access to SF than South Bay. Look in Berkeley, Emeryville and Rockridge. Also try http://padmapper.com, it's been invaluable to me.
A "restraining order" semantic relationship (preferably, a three-part relationship: X has taken out a restraining order against Y, as officially documented by Z) would actually be useful, unlike this "date" and "crush" silliness.

Likewise "health-care proxy", "attorney", "executor of will".
Evil regulatory arbitrage is in the news thanks to AT&T and Google: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/googles-response-to-fcc...
But is the Android costlier than a GPS unit plus phone plus whatever equivalences you have as apps on it?
If xkcd is "unfriendly" to you, xkcdsucks is actually pretty damn funny. Randall appears to have actual groupies, so it's hard to feel too bad for him, even if Carl and Aloria can be pretty mean.
He is using deconstructionist language on deconstructionism itself. This is funny because it shows us that deconstructionism contradicts itself.
The iPhone (and Android) will unload Reader (i.e. the state of the DOM/page) when memory gets tight (when the browser is running in the background, or when visiting a resource-intensive page in another tab). As devices get more memory (e.g., 3GS is better at this than first-gen) things will get better.