skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why I may be going back to incandescent light bulbs
I'm considering going back to incandescent light bulbs, even though this will mean my energy bills will go up, and I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing as I am:

At our house we have had CF bulbs for something over five years. We have now had three incidents of bulbs spontaneously cracking open at the end of their life. Why is this a problem? Mercury exposure. I have no idea how much mercury we have inhaled since this began. We have also had some bulbs die without obvious cracking [edit: and I wonder if maybe they have leaked too, since I wasn't looking for the problem until now], but the most recent bulb to die did so while I was in the room, and I noticed it happening, so I got to see what was going on.

The bulb was flickering and the gas at the base of the tubes (where they enter the body of the screw-on portion) was turning orange. I decided to remove the bulb before it had a chance to break. Very shortly, in the few seconds it took me to remove the bulb, the bulb started heating up. At first it wasn't even warm to the touch, and ten seconds later it was so hot I was starting to wonder if I would get it out in time to not need a glove or cloth. At that point I turned off the power (should have done that to start with) and noticed acrid plastic-smelling smoke coming out near the base of the tubes.

I'm guessing some sort of plastic or epoxy/resin material is used to seal the tubes at the base, and this was melting. And the next step, had I not been there to catch and prevent it, would have been the heating of the glass to the point where it broke.

I'm not really super thrilled about myself or my children breathing mercury vapors repeatedly as the light bulbs in my house expire one after the other over the years.

Question for HN: Has anyone else seen this? Since these bulbs are supposed to last for seven years, maybe it's a hidden problem until now? I was hoping LED lights would be the solution, but they are so dim they don't really act as an adequate substitute.

tl;dr: Upon aging, my CF bulbs have been cracking open, presumably releasing mercury vapors into my house. With 50+ light bulbs in the house, I'm concerned about this and wonder if others see it too.
Not just by the company; by the market too. Getting paid to do something you know is actually not economical never lasts.
The parser correctness is not trivial. The RFC2616 contains the complete grammar you need, so it's fairly simple to implement. OTOH, if you write a parser on your own, you're likely to miss stuff like section 4.2, which explains that header values can be multiline if they include LWS. The parser from this article will fail on (just looking at the source, I'm 99.5% sure of this):

abc:
def

It also doesn't like tabs and will not support comma-separated header values. It's not rocket science to write a "good enough" http parser, but writing a fully compliant one is something completely different. There are also cool parts of the spec that you can read 10 times and come to different conclusions - for example what does the "\" CR LF section mean if it's inside a quoted string and does it finish the header value or not. Writing a "correct" parser is a LOT of fun...

Keeping separate states for characters in HTTP saves you a couple of cycles probably, because you match as you go and can reject the message early and with the exact place that didn't match. It's a bit useless for a 4-letter string though.
The Mutual Fund Fraud
Brand Power (and Pricing Power)
I never realized that they made it so you couldn't jump over the mushroom in SMB. That is so cool, and I need to somehow make my brain have those kind of ideas.
Thanks for the info, smiler. I can tell you PDF will definitely be there, so printing will follow. It would be helpful if you could share more about your use cases. Dundas looks mainly aimed at .Net development; is that what you need it for?

Email me at hrishimittal@gmail.com and I'll put you on our early adopters discount list.
You can't speak a $3K piece of equipment.
How to turn a technical screw up into a "delighter" feature
I received this recently from Xero.com. Because they reached out honestly, pro-actively and generously I ended up actually feeling happy as a result of their (initial) failure. Kudos.

----------------------------

Hi Peter,

We have found an error in our billing system which caused your credit card to be charged twice for your monthly subscription to Xero.

This occurred twice on the same day, 30 November 2009.

We’re really sorry about this. We have investigated how this error occurred and are making system changes to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused your company.

We want to rectify this error for you as quickly as possible and would like to offer you two choices:
1. We can make an immediate refund of this amount directly to your credit card
2. Or we can apply the overpayment to your next invoice.

Regardless of which option you choose, we’ll also give you one month’s subscription for free as our way of saying ‘Sorry’.

Please let us know which option you would prefer, however if we don’t hear from you we will apply the overpayment to your next invoice.

Once again we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards
Ben
I read most of the thread here but not all, so I hope I'm not repeating anything yet said: I'm convinced that once we can produce meat rather than butchering animals, why in the world would anybody want to farm animals? I guess cows and pigs would be the next animals going to be extinct soon.

So I doubt it's that a good idea to be able to produce meat.
The student missed the most important part of the spec: the intent. 99 Out of a 100 times, you aren't implementing a rigorous spec. The ability to understand what is requested is much more important than the ability to be a wise-ass.
Seems okay in Safari.
One feature that this article overlooks is Oracle's Automatic Storage Management feature (ASM) which is very commonly used with RAC. This feature is basically a software level RAID alternative in which you can define striping and mirroring independent of what the hardware reflects.

This article also does not really reflect what is commonly done with SAN implementations.
You can make sure an image appears in place of the chart with a css-file for printing-purposes only. (Or do it the other way around. By default show an image and use JS to replace that image with a chart when possible.)
Only thing I can think of would require uploading malicious software with a modified version of the square device but that doesn't look possible, yet.
Why not just use your phone to pay, for example the business owner gives you a qr code that you scan in then use an app that interfaces with your paypal account that pays the business they get confirmation you don't have to worry about using extra hardware,
or why can't the business owner give you a number to text and then collect payment through that then you don't even need a smartphone any cellphone will do.
Really things would be more secure if I could send money to an account rather than have them remove money from mine.
Music Consumption in a 180°-Terry McBride Interviews.
At first glance, it fells like a joke.
I've had three cf bulbs crack at the bottom and had the same concern about mercury vapors. One thing I've noticed is that the bulbs that failed were all very inexpensive bulbs from the multipacks I picked up in discount stores. I have never had one of my more expensive bulbs break (name brand sold in a single package usually, I get these for dimmers and for spotlights.)

GE has this to say about the mercury and safe handling of broken bulbs: http://www.gelighting.com/na/home_lighting/ask_us/faq_compac...
Good lord, the article doesn't actually contain the proper titles of the books!
and our paths cross again :). My effort is http://10balloons.com and http://twitter.com/10balloons.

I'm curious though: as I've worked through this challenge, my focus has been drawn to post-contest plans, using this contest as a short run experiment to achieve a bigger goal. Do you have similar ideas, or are you just going to be done when the contest announces a winner?
With Canvas, you might have a point, though it makes a poor justification for the rest of HTML 5. I've yet to need Canvas for anything, though. Video is silly to even ask about. Google Gears rather predated HTML 5 local storage.

Now, give me something I couldn't do before with nearly-universal plugins.
As I see it, Knuth is to computer science what Tolkien was to literature. Neither man is what you'd call "hip and creative", but both produced a life time's worth of high quality, painstakingly careful work. (In fact, it'd be interesting to compare TAOCP and LOTR in more depth.)

If you try to be creative, you'll end up with nothing but emperor-has-no-clothes modern art (which won't get you very far in computing). But if you do quality work, you may well get creativity thrown in as a bonus.
How to Reduce Javascript Libraries Loading Time: Best Practice
Infographic: The Evolution of Storage
I am excited about this ... at the same time, it would need some specific features for me to be a customer.

This would be ideal for us at tradeshows and seminars. We attend/sponsor about 5-10 per year and do quite a bit of business at a few of them. Instead of having a dedicated laptop in the back for sales, this would be much easier.

On the other hand, we already have a merchant account (with Brain Tree). Plus, we have older clients still paying us with PayPal subscriptions. The last thing we need is another gateway/merchant company.

I suspect there are many other businesses like us.

I hope they are either very flexible or license the technology to other companies.
Climategate and Scientific Conduct
I bet a lot of 100 yen coins were spent on Super Mario Brothers 2 (Japanese version, 'The Lost Levels' in the States)
HerWay.com Announces Beta Launch of Revolutionary New Dating Site
Very cool. If I saw a piece of code in a commit that was bad, is there an easy way to post the updated code in the comment? Maybe also use diffs, gist, etc... and have renditions that can be accepted and auto-merged. Just thinking aloud :) Great job guys!
Magstripe readers have been within the reach of any reasonably-clever fraudster for a long time. Attaching them to an iPhone and using audio modulation for the signal doesn't magically open the floodgates to card skimming and duplication.

This isn't even as big a threat as, say, making people acclimated to the idea of joining open wireless networks at coffee shops -- card skimming at least requires physical access to the card for a few seconds.
Obviously someone thought not enough women were using vim, duh.
"think it's pretty safe to assume"

Hope doesn't scale.
Sorry, misread the parent post.
> don't read anything about patterns or refactoring

Actually, I wish I had done so. Then, after dumping it in disgust, I wouldn't have allowed programming to burn my youth, and would perhaps now be in an honest and not yet intellectually-stunted field like chemistry - where cube farms are unknown and the subject has some actual (vs. accidental) depth (see: http://tinyurl.com/lfzb58)
yes, a consistent policy will help.
At the very least, I hope Apple makes this particular api public.

More importantly, I wish Apple improved their overall review process and transparency (e.g. with a queue number for app store reviews) and clear rules on what will be approved, what will be rejected etc.
Where do these uber nerdy programmers with poor hygiene habits work? I've worked at a large corporation and a small start up in Silicon Valley, and I'm hard pressed to think of any. Is this a minority that's somehow become the stereotype for everybody?
AT&T Ranked Last in Consumer Reports’ Best Cellphone Service Survey
How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web
Hey there! I've definitely been looking at this through a larger context, as there's a huge real-world application for things like this. You should send me an email: dloewenherz@gmail.com
Just took it for a ride with a coworker.

One thing we noticed quickly is that we can't see each others highlights.

Also when we were done, being able to see a quick diff of the change would been nice (but perhaps it's in the 'save as' options?). We had to end our chat with 'so, what did we change again?'.

another misc. suggestion: resizable chat window.

Beside that, looks pretty solid. Congrats!
The original, non-linkjacked page is strangely barren compared to the Boing Boing attention-a-palooza. http://blakefallconroy.com/18.html
Getting an asteroid-sized mass to lase gamma rays all at once is probably much harder than preserving the quantum state of a 100kg person.
oh, and free plan says '1 user', but I can still invite coworkers, so what's the '5 user' plan for?
Note to self: avoid everyone, just in case they've got contagious loneliness. Problem solved!
that's not the flow. the reader is plugged into the merchant's iphone/ipod.
RAC + Dataguard if you use Oracle
We use it for graphing work queue size in CloudCrowd. Here's a screenshot of it in action:

http://wiki.github.com/documentcloud/cloud-crowd/getting-sta...
I agree. For soft lights/ambient lights used with a dimmer, there is nothing yet to substitute the old incandescent.

I did some shopping last night, and for my ambient light I decided to go with an incandescent. The extra energy cost is well worth it to me. Sorry environment.
Thanks for the insight. Thinking of it, most of the female programmers I've worked with have been of foreign nationality. You're dead-on about the inhumanity of most working environments, and the challenges that we face institutionally.
Study Finds Ozone Hole Repair Contributes To Global Warming, Sea Ice Melt
Looking over the shoulder of Dickens during the creation of 'A Christmas Carol'
More like "Star Wars intro using Webkit CSS extensions (need Safari)"
This may come as a shock to some, but:

Magnetic cards (and all existing RFID equivalents) are bad.

Instead of encouraging their use, we should be creating the mostly fraud-proof obvious alternative: one in which a single transaction does not give the other party permanent access to your wallet.

Picture a card with a key pad on it, for entering a dollar amount. The transaction (through RFID?) would be valid for only that amount.

All of the required cryptographic math has existed for decades. All we need now is the hardware and some infrastructure.
Replace Spock with Janeway and see if that helps.
I do not think that was an arcade game.
How we increased ecommerce sales 100x
There are intelligent men who could make CS breakthroughs, but do other things. Why focus on women? That's sexist.
You should really take a look at Ajax.org, they show some of the smoothest interactive 3D javascript plots i have ever seen. I have just submitted it in the new section.

http://www.ajax.org/public/presentation/tae/presentation2.ht...
I am convinced that the climate does warrant it. I just don't think the science is a closed book.

There are other reasons to stop the burning of coal, for example: respiratory illness.
It is nice, those rare moments, when a company has a clue.
I've never heard ofr webroar before, but I'm not surprised that the people who wrote it can set it up better than they can set up passenger.

At least the bias is transparent, but I can't take benchmarks directly from the creator of any piece of software too seriously.
> Magstripe readers have been within the reach of any reasonably-clever fraudster for a long time.

If today a beggar extended his card reader-equipped iPhone to you, would you swipe? If this company takes off, in a few years you very well might.

Payment methods which give third parties permanent access to your wallet are bad.
Patterns are primarily useful when you refactor to a pattern once you've gotten through the implementation to the point where you realize that applying the pattern would improve the code you've already written and make it clearer/more flexible/easier to extend. Starting with the intention of implementing a given pattern is almost always the wrong thing; recognizing when you've inconsistently half-implemented something very similar to a well-established pattern can actually help improve your code.

Unfortunately, people do often attempt to start from the pattern, which gives the whole idea of patterns a bad name, since most people's primary exposure to them comes from Some Guy In The Office Who Just Read The Gang Of Four Book And Now Tries To Use Patterns For Everything He Does. And everyone, rightly, hates working with that guy or his code. The same thing happens with XP/Agile/TDD, where most people's exposure to them is from some annoying zealot rather than someone a little more experienced and pragmatic.
I saw this headline and flashed back to the Gunbuster Science Lessons.

"Dimensional Wave Super String Excitation Degenerated Radius Jump Gravitational Field Super-light Speed Navigation. WARP for short."
Anyone diving inside the chan_sip is a brave, brave man. My general feeling from working with asterisk code is that if you ever, in any situation see code like this:

while(pkt->owner->owner && ast_channel_trylock(pkt->owner->owner)) {
sip_pvt_unlock(pkt->owner);
usleep(1);
sip_pvt_lock(pkt->owner);
}

run! Run away and don't look back!

The code basically translates to - "as long as noone freed our important structure's owner-owner (but someone works on it) unlock our owner for a split-second so we don't deadlock and pray we don't crash" (if you want to know why we don't crash, ask oej, because he's the only person who can actually explain who holds which lock at this point and why the owner won't be freed - which of course leads to other people making modifications that break this rule).
Entering an amount per transaction might be burdensome to the average consumer, which has a great time with just swiping cards and having all their transactions insured by the credit card company. Having a bulky keypad and a higher barrier of entry to buying that soft drink will have the majority complaining and opting out.

If your goal is verification, an alternate system might have a display on the card that simply verifies the amount charged on most recent transaction, signed by the card processor. Crypto on cards is cheap and tested. This will add no new tasks to those that don't care and provide for a peace of mind to those who do.
Yes that is a funny image - and I agree with your overall point.

Following that quote is one of the most incoherent metaphors I have seen in a while: "It’s been barely a decade since the Internet bubble burst on the information highway to the digital future." That's almost 'internets and tubes' talk.

Sloppy thinking in this speech in general - embodies the 'middle-age dad trying to look cool' even as he seeks to warn others against that trap.
Oh! Okay, well that's good. Thanks for the answer!
Huh, maybe only SMB was.
A fairly classic case of the Streisand effect. If Comcast and Cox already agreed to the disclosure, why bother raising further attention to it?
I guess there is nothing like packaging a short post in tons of advertising and brand name. Thanks for the link.

Edit:

There is some really interesting stuff on the rest of the original site as well, at http://blakefallconroy.com/

A printing calculator rigged up with looped receipt tape:

http://blakefallconroy.com/11.html

A box which records the date and time of everything that takes place in the vicinity:

http://blakefallconroy.com/08.html
How about hooking this up to the power grid and paying you for how much power you generate into the grid? They already do this with solar panels.

You'd make a lot less than minimum wage though. Say .5KWH in an hour, that's 5 cents.
Why exactly do you assume that a credit card reader is a "closed box that is obviously provided by a bank"?

I've implemented point-of-sale systems before, and lemme tell you, there's nothing magical about a magstripe reader, a microcontroller, and a bit of firmware.

Think for a second about recent credit-card purchases you've made. If your habits are anything like mine, aside from gas stations (where the reader is usually integrated into the pump), most card "swipes" happen through either a peripheral device connected to a generic PC, or a compact card reader with little more than a keypad and phone jack, with no visible branding, certification, or tamper-resistant seals in sight.
Like this?

http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
Ask HN: Rate my startup, Gradifi.com
Great article. Similar to the author's observation, my own experience is that consumer patterns have changed dramatically in recent years and a new generation of entrepreneurs is now at the best and unique vantage point to visualize what their peers need and want. So this is not about solutions looking for problems or problems looking for solutions. It is about creators of solutions being also the consumers of solutions ("entre-sumers"). There is much less need in gambling lots of money and wait to see "if the dog would eat the dog food". Entrepreneurs are the "alpha" dogs. We are our own "surrogate" customers which means that we don't need a lot of money to "supersize" our company anymore. As struggling entrepreneurs, I agree with you wholeheartedly that our first directive is very simple which is not to get funding but to acquire customers.
> Entering an amount per transaction might be burdensome to the average consumer

Shoppers have dealt with counting out money for millenia. The time spent is a small price to pay for total security against remote theft. At the very least, those of us who are not terminally lazy ought to have the option of paying it.

> a display on the card that simply verifies the amount charged on most recent transaction

Ever have your credit or bank card stolen? Thieves typically split their theft into numerous small transactions.

Keypad or not, information sent to conduct a physical, face-to-face payment should not be re-usable in any way.
That isn't work. That's subsidized pseudo-work in the Roosevelt New Deal tradition. Some poor schmuck has to pour pennies in the top hopper, and gets nothing for his pains.
LA event (12/9): Jobnob Docstoc Happy Hour- connecting jobseekers & startups
If you want real integration possibilities, look at Yate too. It's got a bit steeper learning curve, but seeing the whole PBX as lots of completely independent modules and the core as a message synchronisation engine only is very refreshing. After having fun with all three solutions, Yate is my favourite (even if it has a much smaller development group and community currently - these guys are serious about what they do).

You can also integrate with everything, because the external module interface is a simple text protocol (no - a sane one - not sip kind of simple). Use php, perl, bash, python, java, etc. as you want - helper libraries are provided.
That is often the case, but have you seen the Asterisk code base? It's amazing that it compiles, let alone runs for more than 5 minutes.
I don't get it, why would you want to tweet your credit card number?
In short:
* It has C-like syntax with cool features like prototypical inheritance, an excellent object-literal format, first-class functions, and closures.
* Everyone knows it (or thinks they do).
* There are some really smart people in multiple different camps working on making extremely fast interpreters.

Still skeptical about JS as a general purpose language? Watch Doug Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts". If he can't convince you, no one can.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/630959/2974197