skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "It's wrong for you to steal from artists. We're the ones who get to steal from artists!"

Got it in one!
Thanks very much for bringing this issue of the OS X selection colour to my attention! Based on your feedback I am going to change the table hover colour to be a shade of grey.

I also feel mortified that, of all things, I did not wrap the site's tagline in proper quotation marks. This will be remedied!

Thanks again for your feedback.
That's an urban legend, kind of like saying a dinette set called "Notable" would flop in English speaking countries because we would assume it has "no table".

Here's the snopes: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
I disagree with your assumption that this is an engineering crowd. I would say entrepreneurship is at least as important to the HN culture as engineering.

You ask a huge question, which is discussed every day all around the internet.

But to take a high level stab at it:

Marketing is crucial to an early-stage hardware startup to start to determine if anyone actually wants to buy what you're proposing to build. Good luck getting money from a VC, much less a customer, if you can't talk intelligently about your target market, and demonstrate an ability to connect with it.

Sales becomes paramount after Version 1.0 is released, when you have to demonstrate that your business is actually profitable. Many engineers are under the impression that, if the quality is high enough, the product will sell itself. While this is true for the (tiny) subset of your market that cares enough to really investigate your product, it seems that a great sales team with a mediocre product will outsell a mediocre sales team with a great product more often than not.
Honesty is NOT an asset in a lot of corporate jobs. Someone who answers honestly in a way that makes them look bad, is more likely to be honest when around customers than those who avoid really answering the question.
Virgin spaceship bared
DreamHost completely down?
This was asked in regards to the RV link posted a month ago. He said most places that service RVs and vans are setup to work on them during the day and allow you access to it at night. Otherwise you spend a little more that week for a really cheap hotel. Big deal, it's a lot less than what you'd pay per month on average.
there's some scary future uses for this.

getting someone's number at a bar will be so much easier.
- the real and apparent motives of the AI can be completely different. If the AI is evil it would argue the exact same thing in order to deceive us meatbags. So we can't take the word of the AI at face value. If the AI does break out of its box, it could dominate the world if it wanted to. There's nothing we could do to stop it -- it's smarter than we are.

- a mathematical proof is only a proof in a certain context. It would be easy for the AI to get one of the assumptions subtly wrong, to abuse a flaw in our proof verification software, and so on. The correctness proof of a program can easily exceed the complexity of the program itself. Even if the proof were correct we cannot prevent it from doing evil things because evil is too difficult to define. Perhaps it has the "good intention" of liberating the earth from humans to allow for evolution of a more humane species.

- yes, but by allowing it to talk to the outside world you've completely freed it. Freeing an infinitely powerful being (compared to us) still seems unwise.

- it can give those reasons, but unless we have reason to believe the AI is trustworthy (and an evil AI is likely to fool us into believing it is) we'd be safer with the AI stuck in a box.
Think about it this way.

If you have no product, having the best marketers in the world will not make you a single penny (unless you do preorders, which you still need a product eventually).

If you have a product and no marketers, will you still be able to sell some units? Most certainly.

Because of this, the actual engineering of the product is more valuable than the marketing if you were forced to choose between all engineers, or all marketers.
I like the bit where he's paranoid about being discovered so he lies about where he lives, etc. Perhaps Salon has less readership than I'd imagined...
Restricted TinyPy to C++ compiler
In an information-scarce world, they controlled the gateway between musicians and fans. The net is putting a stop to that.

Has there ever been an industry whose downfall is more deserved?
Google's relentless focus on speed within search is going to play perfectly in the realm of augmented reality.

I anticipate a video version of this soon.
Wow, all I can say is if they had nothing signed, Arrington committed a pretty amateur mistake. As a lawyer, he should have known better. That's assuming we know everything.
Tried it out searched a book cover...worked searched some text on a page worked... I wasn't going outside in 20 degree weather to check on the locations but from inside it kinda worked... not bad
I have two more trips to Europe this month for exactly this reason. (Well, I actually flew 70,000 miles on American legitimately this year. Seemed like a waste to not go for 100,000.)

Last time I was checking in at Chicago, I had a conversation with the check-in agent and I mentioned my mileage run plans. She told me, "that's excellent". So unlike the Mint, the airlines, or AA anyway, don't seem to mind this. It fills up their otherwise empty planes over the Atlantic :)

I have a hunch, though that after flying first class all next year on American, I'm going to have a really hard time flying coach again. I'm afraid this might be a bit addictive.

This is a nice benefit, but it is not the best. Domestic first class is not that great. The seat is a bit bigger, and you get a $10 meal for free. The best part is the coffee cups your coffee is served in. AA just bought new ones, and they are very pretty.

Also, you don't lose the ability to upgrade next year. You will be in F for the next 3 years. Exec Plat drops to Plat even if you don't fly at all, and Plat drops to Gold even if you don't fly at all. You will have to use stickers to upgrade, though, it is no longer free. Back when I was Gold, I had pretty good luck getting upgrades, and as a Plat, I have only missed one. You get the ability to book exit rows either way, and on the MD-80, the exit rows have more leg room than the first class seats.

So you are set for a while.

worth $300-400 each if I sell them

AA is pretty good at shutting this down. I would not recommend it. If you're not going to use them, share them with your friends (or fellow mileage-runners on HN) instead.

(Search the Flyertalk forums for stories of people losing 1MM+ frequent flyer miles for selling their SWUs.)

Anyway, you might want to read the forums on Flyertalk: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/american-aadvantage-445/
(Seriously though - a friend was asked this, he used that answer, and the interviewer didn't laugh. Big sign)
Because you don't see a new desktop os, you assume that computing research is dead?
I will have to look at that. I personally was a huge fan of "A Mathematician's Apology" by Hardy.
More on Haystack: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919
I was just working on some things, and my FTP disconnected. I pinged the VPS, it was gone, my control panel is gone, and even the main dreamhost.com site is down. Am I going nuts here?
'Fake fingerprint' Chinese woman fools Japan controls
Whoops! Thanks for the re-education.
Just because you are a marketer doesn't mean you can't build some crap and sell it. Just because you're a prod dev guy doesn't mean you can build it and sell it.
If you travel regularly, the benefits you get for Exec Plat status are well worth this minor inconvenience.
cell phone cams + face recognition + facebook ==> super creepy

EDIT: since people post so many pics of themselves on facebook under all sorts of lighting conditions and angles, that might actually make face recognition somewhat feasible from a cell phone cam. of course, efficiently searching thru a corpus of millions of faces (each taken at several different angles) is an enormous technical challenge. i envision some app like Shazam being developed to recognize faces rather than songs ...
Former M.I.T. Dean Resurfaces, Leaving Scandal Behind
physics rarely matters for MMOs. The biggest MMOs like wow have almost no physics at all - just gravity and occasionally a single force vector being applied to a perfectly rigid, non-rotating object in a frictionless environment.
PocketMod: The Free Recyclable Personal Organizer
Just gave it a test and it works pretty well. The image needs to be clear, but it was able to read the American Express logo off of my bill, a website address off of a keychain, and the Time Warner logo off of the remote.

Edit: I tried an image of the Centrino and Vista logos side by side on my laptop and its top result was for a German book. It did get the Centrino logo in the Other results, though.
Everything you need to know about HTML5
Engineering is not the only story here. They got a lot of attention that they never would have gotten w/o the biggest name in tech news singing their praises from his bully pulpit. Imagine the uphill battle these guys would face trying to sell what is essentially a new computer on its merits alone.

It seems to me the FusionGarage people have gotten what they need from Arrington; attention. Now that he is no longer useful he's been sidelined. Kind of a Machiavellian move, since no lawsuit can undo the press they got.

Arrington was using them and they were using Arrington. Which, in the end, is the nature of all business relationships.
U.S. Still #1 "Most Attractive" for Renewables, But China is Catching Up
You can start here:
http://southeastvc.blogs.com/southeast_vc/2009/11/vcs-hear-i...

and

http://redeye.firstround.com/2009/11/lets-just-add-in-a-litt...
The article mentions that Haystack has been open sourced but that doesn't seem to be the case yet.
did you consider that it's not a funny answer?
Ask HN:  How can I access Java from Lisp?
I'm working on a simple little utility that I want to write as a personal project. I want to use Lisp so that I can learn more about it, but I really need to access some Java code.

Obviously clojure is a choice, but I've already used that for a project and I'd like to try something new. I've looked at Armed Bear Common Lisp, but its java integration seems somewhat... verbose. Are there any other options here?
google just started a campaign for "favorite places" google.com/favoriteplaces that uses QR - I assume these are not entirely unrelated.
there's an Easter egg in the yelp iphone app that does something similar.
This is not a new concept, but rather just exercising good programming technique. If you are modeling a collection of elements, and the elements need to be aware of themselves in relation to the other elements, then you need to model the container.

A simple example is an array. You don't ask an array element for the array's length or for the i-th array element; you model the container and let the container do that.
I wonder if I could find someone willing to fly on fake papers to take the actual trips to Spain and Germany. Airline security blows; they'd use their own papers in (say) Spain.
It's lots of test code, and lots of microcode that gets loaded onto the board when it inits.

Most of that code isn't going to be running directly in the kernel's address space in the shipping driver.
Thanks for feedback. What browser are you using?
blogs about politically charged topics are 'better source' than the NYT or WSJ? ;) I'd say they're equally horrible sources.

Blogs in general have a much worse average quality than the NYT, but a much higher peak quality. The links I sent you are among the best I have come across at making a clear case for the defense.

I don't in particular buy Shaviv's point about cosmic rays, but rather I agree with him on this point: "The fact that GCMs can fit the temperature increase is totally meaningless. Why? Because the allowed parameter space is so large climatologists could fit anything from a small temperature decrease (as was claimed in the 70's, before the imminent ice-age) to double or triple the observed 20th century increase."

Again, I have not studied climatalogy in depth. But I have studied economics in depth. I find the statistics and models published in peer reviewed journals and used by the central banks to be atrocious. I can read a very technical article and pull my hair out looking at the flaws. And lo, the predictions these models make invariably turn out to be crap. Yet these errors persist because the selection process in economics academia does not reward truth seeking.

I see the same pattern in climate science. There is a selection process that rewards conformity, not truth seeking. And a cursory look at the models and statistics shows that the scientists are indeed "fitting elephants". When you look at the raw unadjusted data, there is simply not much room for alarm. So until I can actually look at the data myself, or I can find experts that I actually do trust to give me an honest take, my default stance is skepticism.

(a) a widespread conspiracy to hide the truth and force predetermined conclusions; or (b) an honest but imperfect process gradually iterating towards accuracy.

or c) a priesthood. There is a big difference between a conspiracy and a priesthood. Priesthoods are very, very common in history, and they result in very widespread consensuses that turn out to be very wrong. See: The Catholic Church.
I agree-- if I get a non-bullshit answer (which happens, rarely) then all the better. I mean, it is a tremendous strength to be able to acknowledge your flaws to an employer and be open and transparent about them.
Ati's newest graphics cards support a technology they are marketing as eyefinity -- attaching up to 6 displays to a single card and treating it as a single large surface.
What were some of your previous ventures (regardless of successes or failures). I did a google on your username, and didn't come up with anything but a slideshow on VC capital.
WPA cracker in the cloud
the only way i can see this thing succeeding, is if its extremely hackable. Allowing users to run any os.. would be the first start. Otherwise as web client - could be ok , but again, netbooks are much cheaper, and does possibly the same. I would like it mainly as an e-book reader as the 10" from amazon is around the same price point, but with no pdf reader, no sd slot, or any idea of internal memory its a fail as a reader.
Mine are down, too. FWIW.
A brilliant response. Though I don't want to sound populistic here, this enterprise we are talking about is the one that created the disaster in Alaska with the oil spill. For those who don't believe in climate change (either the created by man, the created by man + nature or both), they may believe in the consequences of oil spills.
For those of us who may have done a couple searches on the Market wondering why this isn't showing up: google goggles requires Android version 1.6.
Actually it does mean you can't build some crap and sell it when your product is high tech.

In this case Arrington only had pie-in-the-sky hand waving ideas about a $200 touchscreen computer that could do everything. He clearly wasn't interested in putting actual effort and resources into the project until someone else started working on it. The project would have died if Fusion Garage didn't start working on it.

And in this situation, a "prod dev guy" actually did build it. And I am willing to bet you that he can sell at least one.
So, are PB locations franchises or are they all corporately owned?
The whole point is that they innately bind to one another -- they are, after all, monadic (gasp!)
impressive. Yet another reason to get droid. I wonder if verizon will get google to make these tools exclusively for the droid only.
I alleged a conspiracy between a few people at the CRU to hide data, oust critics from professional societies and have journals shut down. Is that even in dispute?

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise...Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?...We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

How do you interpret this as anything other than a conspiracy (between Jones, Keith, Gene and Caspar, not the entire climate science community, just to be 100% clear) to delete emails?

Rather than arguing against my simple, well supported conspiracy argument, you instead implied that I argued for some vast and implausible conspiracy. Why not just go for broke and act as if I claimed Phil Jones was behind 9/11?

Regarding McIntyre, whether or not he made a major improvement to the existing record or a minor incremental one, the point is that he is correct. A crackpot is a person with wild and incorrect theories completely unsupported by evidence.

Ah, so their internal shop-talk, posturing, boasting, etc. is part of the scientific endeavour, is it?

Ousting dissenters from professional societies certainly is, as is trying to get journals shut down.

Concerning antagonism, "I think you're a fraud" is the best kind to have. I wish it were more common, but it's too time consuming to use on an everyday basis.
Dreamhost says its nap time.
Buying guides and diagrams for tool parts and repair.
Here's hoping Scoopler can rise to the challenge of staying one step ahead of this...
You're being downvoted, but I think you bring up an interesting contrarian position that I'm surprised so many here disagree with. Couldn't he be working on a startup, instead of living off rice in an ant-filled van?
HORROR OF HORRORS! Been with them for 5 years... it's never been as bad as this year. Unacceptable!!!
It looks like it even the main site and the status site are down.
you are so cool.
"All that fussing ended up being a pointless waste of energy."

Well said, sir.
It seems that most MMOs, at least of the fantasy variety, tend to ignore physics. Mobiles have maybe three speeds, stopped, walking, and running and transition instantly between them. Jumping is just a pre-programmed arc that may have checks for colliding with other objects. Fall speed tends to be constant and non-accelerating.

However, space-based games would likely require a little more physics to be interesting.
Isn't this based on the questionable assumption one can be as productive with Java web frameworks as they would be with, say, Rails or Django?

Wouldn't the cost of learning a more productive (assuming the initial supposition is incorrect and that there is a difference of productivity between technologies) framework be diluted in the total lifetime of the product?

If all you have in your toolbox is a blunt axe, wouldn't it make sense to get a sharper one before you attack the forest?

In the end, it all depends on the lifetime of the product. If it's a one iteration release, then go with whatever you already know that solves the problem. If the lifetime of the product tends to infinity, go with the language that expresses the product in the most concise way and manage to learn it well. The vast gray area between these points is where you can place all those fancy languages and frameworks wherever your expertise and product dictate.
The best Crunch I know is a candy. And it tastes pretty awesome!
> So you're saying that single convenience is worth purchasing a significantly less powerful device for significantly more money?

Yes. Especially when the more powerful, cheaper device is really bad at whatever this single convenience is, whereas the new product is very good at it, and the single convenience is important to the user.

See: Kindle vs. iPhone e-book reading.
I was under the impression they kept the dreamhoststatus site hosted elsewhere. Did the entire state of CA blow up or what?
lol ..... dreamhoststatus page says: BRB
big surprise, they should change the name to Downhost...hahha
It's already on the market available for phones other than Verizon's droid (tested on T-Mobile / G1).
Hey, gota admit that its good that apple keeps tabs on such things. If only Ebay did these sort of things.
Because of GAE's odd architecture, a lot of things that you could get away with elsewhere (especially at non-mega-scale) will give you obvious latency hits.

The upside is that the issues are easy to find, and your code doesn't get any slower if you jack up the load!

It leads you to think about scaling in a most pleasant way.
The Best C++ Interview Question - Ever
This works really well. Picked out the KU logo and Swingline staplers perfectly. Choked on a big box o Jolly Ranchers. I'll prolly keep futzing with this for the rest of the day now.
well they changed the status page to BRB, what a great message... How about when I pay them the next time, I put in BRB on my credit card..
> Couldn't he be working on a startup, instead of living off rice in an ant-filled van?

Why does "working on a startup" equate with "making the world a better place?"
I'm on a laptop with a wide screen and it took me a moment to realize that the navigation links worked, I just had to scroll down to see anything different.
and now twitter
http://twitter.com/dhstatus
Math is the study of verifiable, undebatable truth. If a system is fully understood, it is susceptible to mathematical study.
Erm... this has to be a mistake: http://code.feicall.com/codes/search/import%20sys

A search for import sys that doesn't return any results? That has to be a bug. :-)
A better way to consume, visualize, and mashup web services
This is a great idea. Moxie Marlinspike is generally someone worth watching. I didn't do the math on his cloud hosting, but he could double the price here and it'd still be worth it.

What this site really says is, "don't use WPA-PSK on sensitive networks."
baby don't hurt me ...

don't hurt me ...

no more ...
wow. they have no (ie random) partitioning - it's just brute force. i hope their "Graph-based caching and storage systems" is coming along... :o)

[edit: although, given the exponential growth they give and the factor of 4 headroom they have left, they're going to top out in about 1.5 years anyway]
Took a picture of a Halflife 2 poster I have in my office (http://store.valvesoftware.com/productpages/prints/product_H...) - not only did it return a strider battle youtube but also a wiki article on it.
Well, that is predictable, from the time they bought stream from Twitter. They just want to index everything, so it's not any breaking news.

On the other hand it doesn't really feel like Google knows what they're doing. Realtime search is very different than "conventional" one, so for me it doesn't really fit together.

For example, in normal search you'd like to see stuff that has value - doesn't mean new. In realtime search you don't care about the value, you only care about it being "now". Who cares about Obama elections today.

Fitting this two kinds of data into one screen sounds tricky. Actually it's more confusing than helping. I suspect they're trying to put everything-that's-possible on the main results screen. But seriously, that's not what I want to see.

From my point of view it's a shotgun technique - let's reuse our business model with all the data we have. On the other hand I think it's not what people expect.
If you have no product, you wont make a single penny, Sure. But, if you have no marketers, you will not be able to sell enough units to make up for the fixed costs involved, and you would end up with a loss, which is even worse.
joojoo: "karma. bad luck."
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=joojoo
Other risks exist, therefore what?
Hm. I've not read it, but I have read a rather scathing review of it by Martin Gardner (whose opinions I usually respect). disagreeing with it on fundamental philosophical grounds.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981902

It's the same link but with different munging and more comments. I've flagged this one because it's redundant, even thought the URL dup logic didn't find it.
Is this not working for anyone else? The blog post made it seem like it should be live now.
Math is the study of verifiable, undebatable truth.

A certain Mr. Gödel would disagree with you there.