skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am biased about scientists motives, especially when you are competing for millions of dollars of grant money.

You raise legitimate points and I think the idea of open-source climate modeling (perhaps using BOINC or something for distributed processing) is an excellent one.

Unfortunately, I think the value of your proposal is obscured by comments such as the one above. Surely, scientists do compete for millions of dollars in grant money, but I'm also a bit biased about vested interests that are competing for billions (or perhaps even trillions) of dollars in revenue from the sale or processing of fossil fuels, with any inconvenient externalities dumped on the taxpayer. To be sure, such fuels have been essential progress and are an important factor of future economic growth, but suppliers are not necessarily altruistic either.
Tiger Woods Sexual Text Messages To New Cheating Scandal Girl | RadarOnline.com
Could possibly be a waste of power depending on the design. If you replaced all outlets with something like this that may have another transformer plus the power regulation circuitry your outlets would be burning power 24/7 (not just when you use it).

At least with an adapter you may only have one and unplug it when its not needed.
You mean "openssl rand -base64 12".
> 1)

The abstraction of "this thing" getting passed is certainly useful. However, things are clearer if you imagine two variables which happen to be defined in different scopes being set to the same object. Hopefully these questions are trivial to any Java programmer:

If you have two variables set to the same object, and then change the object, are the two variables still set to the same object? Yes.

If you have two variables set to the same object, and then set one of the variables to a different object, are the two variables still set to the same object? No.
From the video on their blog, about the x-ray stripes:
"The black lines you can see across the image are where the satellite that took these data did not collect any information."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7-6fQ9_48
http://blog.chromoscope.net/
ANSI C and Python grammars:

Nick said ...

@Adam: check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksieger/281055530/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksieger/281055485/. I can’t even imagine what a Perl grammar would look like
Does anyone know if there are any plans or way to add universal DC to the standard electrical system? It seems with all the electronic devices it is wasteful to generate AC and then convert to DC in switching power supplies and in wall-warts, etc. This plug device looks like it just puts the transform in the wall so does nothing to solve the conversion losses. Would it be practical to add a DC offset, say +5v to the AC sine wave to directly drive electronics in the home? I'm not an EE so maybe the idea is crazy but I hope someone can explain.
from the page:

"Please also note that the USB ports only draw power when something is physically connected to the port. We didn't want a vampire port that continually sucks and wastes power when not in use so this was one of the features on the top of our priority list during the design phase."
What's a "two-way hash"?
Doesn't node come with a built in chat server demo?

http://github.com/ry/node_chat
Why does the project have to pay back its 2 months' development costs in just an initial surge of 2 months' sales?

Sure, games are hit-driven and their sales peak early... but the iPhone/Touch platform is very young and still growing. These games will still be playable and sell in small quantities years from now, when the platform's installed base is much larger.

Maybe the only "problem" here is impatience?
Humanure: goodbye toilets, hello extreme composting
Beau Lotto on the Visual Cortex (TED talk, 20 mins)
Thx. Our specific searches certainly vary in quality, which is something we're actively working on. Actually, I think they are more of a curve where they are really good for broad and long (very specific) but are average on the middle range. We do semantic stuff on longer queries that make the results better. But in any case, you should be generally getting different results for specific searches. Sometimes these differences will be spot on; other times, not so much. I'll take a look at 'read file .net' now--please send other examples our way: help@duckduckgo.com.
But the connectors are plated in GOLD!
This is the way the World may look like 50 million years from now
From what you've described, there's a huge negotiation problem. You don't have leverage, and you're starting to sound desperate - everything they can use against you in the event that they contact you.

Lets say you asked them to acquire you. They're interested, they google around for anything about you, and find this post. They know exactly what your fears are, they know that you're not ramen profitable, and they know that you know that they're coming after you.

Which means, they can negotiate you down to a point where they're buying your company for pennies on the dollar. What's your BATNA? (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) - right now, it's just to continue on, despite the fact that you're losing money. Fix that BATNA, and you'll be in a much better position to either sell this off, or to even just continue running with it.

But just asking HN for help is huge. Most people never get that far. :)
Agreed. It's surprising that in 40+ comments, yours is the only one that mentions burnout.
The short answer is when we start running into collisions we'll change the parameters of this service, or perhaps sooner. That is, I'm fully aware of these limitations/issues and am actively monitoring them.

I wanted to try the extreme case (at least for a time) to see if a lot of schools and businesses that use one static IP would find the process super simple and just use it. After all, they could set all their computers to safe search in one click. This experiment is ongoing, but it will probably evolve into a program where we have more of a back and forth opt-in process.

I hope this addresses your concern!
Ask HN: Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit?
I'm asking this to test the YC mantra "make something people want."
Yes, but that is designed for a browser/web/comet chat demo.

This chat demo is just a bare-bones tcp socket netcat/telnet chat server. Simple. Elegant. Effective.
I often feel like service providers are hawks at these events. They just seem too me too esque and want to offer you things you probably shouldn't be spending on. The things I should be spending on like a lawyer or accountant (thats debatable depending on your stage/finances) I will get through a personal referral. I do a lot of events for MIT in Florida and it's often a large number of service providers that show up. It's good in one sense, because we can educate them on things that are important. On the other hand, it bothers me, because it detracts the value away from our main attendees- the entrepreneurs.
Amazon in secret plan to open high street shops
Gmail - Inbox (5) - bradmonk4@gmail.com
I'd say Microsoft's history is quite the opposite. The oft cited example is that Visicalc, from the 80's still works! I'd say that's a pretty reliable platform. How many apple products from the 80's run on Leopard?

And on the other side, lots of google products are already defunct and they aren't even half M's age.
Real books do not necessarily have to compete against TV, Internet surfing etc. Nobody cares whether you read the books you buy. And most people seem to have a backlog of unread books in their shelves.
The Body Language of Feet
> Also, the billions that governments are spending on climate change policy and research easily dwarfs money on the other side. That's a bit of FUD spread by the alarmists that doesn't pass the smell test.

Well, this looks to resemble a checkable fact, rather than the supposition and ad homeneim the rest of your post was filled with.

Data point: In 2006, Exxon alone spent 733 million in R&D (from their annual report). That's about 5x (edit: I had written 6x) the federal National Center for Atmospheric Research's budget. (153 million) (source: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf08318/content.cfm?pub_id=39...)

Data point: The American Enterprise Institute's 2006 income: 28.4 million. (From sourcewatch.org) Greenpeace USA? 11 million. (from the 2006-7 annual report)

Data point: Environmental & health lobby spending is dwarfed by that from energy groups: http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/climate_change...

Data point: Anti-climate research for cash: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagen...

I think that's enough for now. To claim that the "other side" is dwarfed is laughable, at least as long as you are speaking dollars and not facts or mindshare. At the _very_ least, it's an even fight (looking at research dollars); more likely the resources on the anti-climate-change side far outweigh those of scientists and climate change activists (including policy & advocacy dollars).

Edit: tsk, tsk. Reply, don't downmod!
Same link for Minneapolis. Retains the bump for C.

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Programmer%2C+Java&l1=Mi...
This is interesting because it draws the conclusion that women are more expressive with their feet than men; I'm curious about possible theories of why this is. Also, that "dishonest" people tend to have more still body movements is an interesting conclusion. Any YC news stories to back up these conclusions?
certainly, I am an erlang programmer and do love pattern matching, but as much as I pretend to hate javascript, I do love that modules/namespaces whatever are a first class citizen in a way they certainly arent with erlang, (they are at the vm level, but not so much the language, smerl is quite handy for that).

I should probably play with match specs more often
That follow up question and the end of the article makes the author look like a complete bozo. They should have edited it out.
No no no, I'm not saying it's testing a shell script, I'm talking about requiring bash for a script that literally says:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
prog_name some_argument

Or, worse yet, programs that exec a command by using bash internally.
Http://74.53.192.83/
"There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other product category. One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection."

Interestingly books are perfect for online sales for other reasons, they have a high markup and a high price to weight ratio. The former made them easy to discount beyond B&M bookstores (who, by the way, would happily order you any book they don't have in stock and get it rather quickly, even in 1994) and the latter made the cost of shipping not untenable.

Books in 1994 (and even today) were one of the few things you could sell for 30% less than the chains, add in $2 for shipping, and still both make a profit and decrease the cost for the consumer. There really aren't many things that fit that description, and I think it's why they were online shopping's first killer app.
I like the idea of making tiling window management more accessible. I'd be very happy if we saw more of this move into the mainstream window managers and operating systems. For example, when I open two terminals in OS X they have a habit of opening one on top of the other, when I invariably would rather have them side-by-side.

More intelligent window placement will eliminate a lot of mundane window-management work for the user, leading to a more pleasant computer experience.

If you haven't tried a tiling window manager, I suggest you do, and this looks like a great way to start.
It's still worthwhile.
> the USB ports only draw power when something is physically connected to the port.

Am I mistaken that this is a physically impossible claim?
Being a scientist and looking at the code that is written daily (and aware of the bugs that are found), I certainly agree that there is horribly written code going around. Most scientists aren't encouraged to learn about coding, it's something you do to get the job done. But like you say, that doesn't mean it produces incorrect output. Hopefully there are enough cross checks that mistakes are caught before publication.
Funny you mention Finland, it is often brought up as a model of success in Israel. Many say that startups should aim to imitate Nokia's success instead of preferring short term gains by selling out to major US companies.

I think one reason for the difference may be that in Europe (though I haven't been to Finland yet) there's a very strong sense of continuity/stability - companies and indeed nations have been around for centuries - while in Israel everything feels fluid and uncertain, so people rarely do long term plans.

As for small talk, it exists but isn't required. It's not nearly as refined & important an art as it is in the US. People are comfortable with or without it. BTW, I just realized that many of the small talk among Israelis that just met is finding mutual acquaintances - with the country so small, you almost always find some. Is that so in Finland?
I was reading it for free, and I am not a subscriber. But I appreciate your suggestion to check for that issue more in the future. How following Google links (as that link was for me) works for other readers with different cookies set is an issue I am still learning about.
A DC offset would have the negative side effect of causing AC wall transformers to saturate, redering them useless. Also, as far as I know it would cause problems for many kinds of AC motors. True, you could bypass the DC offset with a series capacitor, but then you would suffer efficiency losses in larger appliances, in addition to added cost and complexity.
The problem with having +5V centrally regulated and then distributed throughout the house is wiring resistance losses. Let's say you decide to use 16AWG wire, and have a run of 100' to a hypothetical outlet (not uncommon in even a mid sized house). that means your round trip length is 200'. Given the resistivity of copper, the resistance of such a wire is 1.26Ω, and with .5A of current your voltage drop would be .63V. Therefore, 5V would leave the distribution box, and only 4.37V would be available at the outlet. Worse, Pin=5V.5A=2.5W, Pout=4.37V.5A=2.19W. Efficiency of just the transmission system is 87%. You can get a good power factor corrected switching converter that can do better than this just plugging into the standard wall outlet.
How does HN handle URL with parameters?

e.g.

http://example.com/2009/23137321.html?from=rss

http://example.com/2009/23137321.html

They are basically both the same article.
I'm definitely interested, not sure about the time.
Medicine for the 3rd world. It's a big problem.
Both of those are fairly simple! It's refreshing. I know some python people claim that the more rigid syntax of Python helps you code better. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some motivation from the interpreter writers.
I think you miss the fact that to figure out what scientific code does, you also have to know the science. Yeah, you can look for dumb bugs like the one they show in that clip, but you have no way of knowing whether calculations are correct without knowing what's going on.

I found it disingenuous how they flashed a line of code that says "fudge factor" as if that makes the code incorrect. Unless you know what that fudge factor is for, you can't make that judgement.
Other: Mathematica
Lawful spying docs: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, et. al.
Both Ruby and Javascript seem be from the camp of adding more language features and alternate syntax to make it easier for programmers to express themselves. They are happy to put in multiple ways to do something and support multiple paradigms in an effort to make things as easy as possible for as many programmers as possible.

When contrasted with Python, C, or other languages that have more strict syntax you may realize that there's a cost to having so many features. The interactions between all those parts of the grammar get very complicated.
any good book is going to be pirated in the net.In fact,
it is today for those that know how to search.

How?
Also included is Yahoo's attempt to have documents removed under DMCA:

http://cryptome.org/0001/yahoo-cryptome.htm
This article says that as wholesale ebook prices drop (the predicted trend) authors will as a result make less money. I'd like to point out that this is an incomplete statement. They should have said authors will make less money PER UNIT. It is unknown if the overall ebook price reduction will result in a similar overall number of units sold, or whether the ebook price reduction will allow the author to penetrate the market more effectively getting improved sales numbmers. This could easily result in MORE money to the author for the title even though the royalty per e-unit is less.

I'd rather sell an ebook to everyone who reads english for $1/e-unit royalty than have a New York Times number one bestseller print book with a good contract even with the massive royalties that go with print. Electronic distribution simply cannot be beaten.
Verizon can ban you for posting off-topic info on forums, chat rooms or facebook
From their ToS:

(e) post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking
sites;

Had to massage it, to get it to fit in the title
Programming languages and tools.

There are some counter-examples (e.g. Franz, LispWorks), but I think it's best to just consider this sort of work a labor of love.
Amazon is losing $2 on each e-book. Sometimes forward thinking innovations take a while to get profitable. Sometimes the market is too small. There may be 5 people who want it, but it costs more than they can afford.
Presumably he instructed mathematica to approximate the roots to an error proportional to the resolution of the image; in that (likely) case the error doesn't have anything to do with the fractals.
Yea that's a good point. You really don't want to have someone else access your clarity installation. This takes URL parameters and runs them on the command line. Probably the most insecure thing invented by man. Hide it will.
SQL SERVER – Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide
Exactly right. They don't need a lot of whiz-bang features as long as they have access to the IP content. Imagine trying to make a site about Harry Potter and then J.K. Rowling announces she's going to do the same. She'll be able to give the fans a lot more of what they want, even if the presentation is technically inferior.

I've got a few ideas that might allow us to get legal access to that content as well, though. Still, I hate getting too specific on a particular RPG system, as there's a whole universe of systems and settings out there, and D&D is simply the most well known. Many of the others are much better, in my opinion.
Authors will start selling directly, as with music there is no need for publishers now.

I wish there was no need for publishers. Unfortunately, publishing is not isomorphic with printing/distribution. Editorial services and book design are pretty much vital to the process of turning a manuscript into something people are willing to pay money to read, and marketing is necessary if you want to convince folks to read your book, rather than Dan Brown's.

We may see a realignment of the way publishing services are applied to books (e.g.: author hires editor and PR folks to work for them, or literary agents hire editors and turn into virtual publishers -- they've got the accounting infrastructure to handle royalty payments), but we already have authors selling directly, and there's a reason most readers usually avoid self-published books.
Nope, that's OK; I just set my DNS to 8.8.8.8 and got on with my life.
The CrunchPad? Ignoring the legal problems, it sounded like people would buy it at cost but with any markup it would be too expensive.
"Make something people want" is primarily valuable as a negative test:

You probably won't profit if you make something people don't want.

But making something people want doesn't correlate nearly as well with whether or not your product is commercially viable.
mfg.com
Bankocracy
Compsci projects
It depends on your definition of profit. You can make something people want and end up with a business that makes $10K profit, but you won't be quitting your job to run that business.
OT: I did find it very interesting to learn that the second most popular book (up to the beginning of the twentieth century) was Euclid's The Elements after the printers were done pressing bibles.
While I am swept up in the argument and the author has my head nodding along to each point, this is clearly an act of gross generalization that uses the worst of the blogging world as examples.

A blog is simply a tool, or perhaps merely a loosely-defined format. No tool or format constitutes a panacea for every problem.

I'm glad that the author (and hopefully the reader as well) is thinking critically about how technology is best applied to real situations and problems.
As in other areas, the non-specialist bows down to the opinion of critics as to who is a good or bad artist.

I have to disagree. Or, at least, why doesn't he mention the much larger group of people who haven't the humility to bow down to the opinion of a critic in the first place?

This is as far as they get: "a piece of art is good when I say it is. If you say it is good and I don't agree with you -- and if you happen to have credentials that make your opinion weighted -- then you are an arrogant bastard. But if you have a different opinion than me, and you don't have credentials, stop trying to force your opinion on me. Don't you know everyone is entitled to their opinion?"

Cringe when someone calls Twilight good or art. They will say it is good because they think it is, and Thus! That is perfectly sufficient for them. Push the subject further, then you become an asshole and why cant you understand everyone's opinion is "valid."

I like the word valid. I really do. But uttered by the laymen is contrary to the word's essence.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and reading the works of critics is of the best ways to start. It will take humility to go over something 10 times until you're in tune with the critic.

Criticism is analysis and a bunch of other things. You need examples of good taste and good criticism if you wish to evolve your artistic inclinations.
Any non-excludable goods, which includes public goods (which are also non-rivalrous) are very difficult to profit from. These include lighthouses, laws, national defense, clean air and water, a sustainable population of fish and game, and so forth.

I say "very difficult" because search engines, for example, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in practice. They are "public goods". The trick is, access to the attentions of and data generated by search engine users is excludable, and this is the good that Google actually sells. But any sort of non-excludable good from which your consumers cannot generate an excludable good you can sell for others would be unprofitable.

Programming languages (mentioned by another post) are another good example of a public good: they are non-rivalrous, and while they may be excludable as long as you sell the only compiler/interpreter/runtime and sue everyone else who writes a different compiler/interpreter/runtime, in practice no one will pay for a programming language anymore so you have to make it non-excludable for it to even exist in the outside world. Likewise, Google is probably excludable in the sense that they can set up a paywall before you use it, but in practice Google has chosen to make the search engine non-excludable and it's hard to see how a paywalled search engine would work (though I won't rule it out as a possibility).
what are usb power ports used for? i mean, what devices use them, or is it that devices should use them for some reason?
... and you don't have to try them on.