skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
and here's a follow up: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357429,00.asp
Not to self-promote, since I pretty much abandoned that site more than a year ago, but back in a day I wrote an article on this topic that was somewhat popular, and I think will be useful to a lot of HN'ers.

http://www.alexanderkharlamov.com/2006/12/24/how-to-make-and...
Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc...

Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software.

Wow.
Nearly every selector used in that mockup either: 1. Flat-out doesn't work in Internet Explorer; or 2. Requires certain hacks to align Internet Explorer's rendering with more compliant browsers. I can understand how it's much nicer to have a functional prototype, but I can't agree with it being worth the difference in the time invested.

Very, very few clients I've ever worked with use something other than Internet Explorer. It just doesn't happen, and I can't even count the times I've had to dumb down layouts because the requirements to overcome IE's limitations weren't worth the time investment.
It's a charasteristic of the real world that there are things not used in the solutions of the various problems that need to be solved.

It is one of the most brain-dead characteristics of school and university exams that one is not allowed to have extras - it's somehow "not fair."

I think not using some of the resources provided is perfectly reasonable.
Yes, wicd is great and continues to get better. After having no automated wireless support for so long, it's easier to manage wireless connections on my laptop with linux (Slackware, no less!) than it is with Windows (XP), and almost as painless as OS X on my Macbook. I'm sure my opinion is subjective, but it's worth applauding the contribution made by this excellent project.
Respectfully (and we've communicated - so you know I mean that literally and am not being sarcastic) we'll have to disagree. I think it's reasonable that the servants don't make off with things genuinely of no value, so locked padlocks without keys, and locked safes, are "safe" and not stolen. I think it's reasonable that they make off with anything remotely of value, such as a padlock and key, or (of course) the amulet, but not the amulet when it's locked in the safe.

I agree that the farmer puzzle is nice for kids, but it yields to "try it, oh, that works, ok, I'm done." There's no real insight from it.
I've heard about easy Wordpress upgrades, but never experienced them. Here's my cheatsheet:

* download latest.tar.gz and rename
* untar
* mv wordpress ../wordpress-x.x.x
* cd wordpress-x.x.x
* cp wordpress-current/.htaccess . [only if wordpress is in site root]
* cp -r wordpress-current/uploads/ .
* cp -r wordpress-current/themes/ .
* cp wordpress-current/wp-config.php .

What am I doing wrong?

(Also moving from a development install to production is also ugly. I have to search and replace hostnames in the mysqldump of the database!)
My lurking on HN is one of the best sources of information I have. Thanks to all of you for making me more rounded and better informed.

Cheers!
Well, if your only criteria for a CMS is making things super easy to use for non-technies, then I grant your point
The social networking phenomenon that is taking over, country by country
Even in the late 1990s they had powerful audio editing software. The first version of ProTools came out in 1991 and there were a ton of cheaper tools as well.

I'm not saying they didn't do this on thousands of dollars of equipment but in 1997 there's nothing you saw on this video that couldn't be done on a single piece of software (ok maybe two) even then. It wasn't the dark ages.

And get off my lawn.
Congrats to WePay on the funding, but I can't help but notice a similarity between our and their business cards! ;-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toivotuo/2857596922/ (scred.com)

http://img17.yfrog.com/i/f2w.jpg/ (wepay.com)
This is a clear case of poor design of the website hurting the sales of an otherwise perfectly decent application.

I am a designer and I can point out a 100 things wrong with this design.

PS. If you ever consider a redesign, contact me at mediarosh(at)gmail(dot)com
2010: Less spam, more hackers, more companies, more awesomeness!

ps: today is my 300th day on HN :D I have checked HN multiple times daily since my first sign-up. I estimate it amounts to over 7000 times. I definitely have to turn no-procasination on this next year ;D
We're probably playing right into Apple's hype/secrecy marketing strategy, but it sounds intriguing and quite different than existing e-readers.
I guess that's the right answer, but it's not really satisfying. If the servants can walk off with the safe to crack it at their leisure, how is it secure?
> It sounds like one of your gripes is that the post about Copenhagen showed up on reddit, then immediately showed up here. This is not a valid complain, I'm sorry.

My complaint is that a clearly political post is showing up on HN. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

My second complaint is that for going through to trouble to point this out, I get my karma hammered.

> Reddit and HN are completely different types of communities. To complain that a story appeared on reddit, then appeared here completely disregards the fact that many people that read HN no longer visit reddit.

That is absolutely correct. As per: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I don't think your comments have contributed much to discussion either.
FCC Commissioner slams Verizon on $350 ETFs
Someone has bought me "The Reasoned Schemer"! :)

I will now have all three books, reasoned, seasoned and little schemer. :)

Huge thanks to the person who bought the reasoned schemer!

Merry Christmas!
Google Employee Creates Closure Lite
Merry Christmas guys!
I had never heard about "The Art of Prolog". Gonna check it out!
Karma whores!
Yeah, he was. There's lots more I'd like to add, but it's well after midnight here. Just done stuffing stockings and finishing wrapping presents, then there's only about an hours work remaining till we can hit the sack for a few hours until the kids invade. Better run before my wife finds me in here again :)

Happy Christmas to you all
You may be missing the point. 100% of a mockup done in Photoshop won't render in IE. It's a mockup.
Precisly!

Just as I may want to share how much money I have in the bank to a business asociate to prove I have the assest to make a deal.

I'd do this by showing him/her the bank account information on screen, but I don't want to give him/her the transit, bank acount number and password to access said bank account.
Jajah acquisition by Telefonica shows how to make money in VOIP
may or may not. who knows.
I'm sorry, but I just cannot get excited about an Apple tablet.

I have a feeling that it is going to be like a macbook air without the keyboard: absurdly expensive, not all that useful, and replaceable with things in the PC world that are better and cheaper.

Apple got lucky with the iPod in that they were the first company to do it right. They carried this success into the iPhone, but their iPhone success is starting to wane in light of the Android.

I think that an Apple tablet is going to combine all of the things that I hate about the MBA with all of the things that I hate about the iPhone (appstore nonsense, restricting apps like spotify or anything with similar functionality).

Good luck to you, Apple, but I don't see this succeeding.

edit: I was mistaken about spotify, that is not available in the US at all. The point was that I was trying to find a subscription music service for the iPhone and couldn't. The general consensus among the people doing the same was that Apple won't allow it.
An introduction to scripting in Ruby for biologists
As long as everybody is learning about lsof this week, you might also want to check out a similar utility, fuser, which lists which processes are using a particular file.

http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/fuser1.html

It's really handy for some situations. For instance, if a process can't grab some port, you can use fuser to quickly determine which process grabbed it first.
We generally alter our environment to suite our needs, not to improve it.

I don't know about you but I think a house is an improvement over the trees that were here before. A forest can get pretty cold in winter.
> msysgit works just fine there

As someone who recently moved from a linux box to a windows one for his primary workstation, I can affirm that msysgit is shockingly, shockingly slow.

I'd definitely recommend hg if you have a lot of people on windows for that reason alone.
Film Junk’s Top Viral Videos of 2008 - Film Junk
You don't see it succeeding? If you'd ended your comment with "...but I don't think I'll be picking one up," sure, that would make sense. But do you honestly think 99% of Apple's customers care about, or even understand, the concerns you have?
Opera 10.5 pre-alpha
But do you honestly thing 99% of Apple's customers care about, or even understand, the concerns you have?

Yes, I do.

What will the Apple tablet be competing against? It's the MBA all over again. Unless Apple makes a drastic change in their pricing philosophy, this simply will not be something I see most consumers justifying.
BTW that link was posted here a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366738
your comment doesn't make any sense.
At the points in time when the securities were being sold, they were not known-bad

Do you honestly believe that? There is no reason whatsoever to suppose they didn't know these CDO's were rubbish. However, there also wasn't any reason for them to care: they profited a bunch, which is what an investment bank should do. If they hadn't, they would have gone down, instead of other banks and institutions. This is cut throat capitalism: there is no room for considering ethics or the public good.
you realise that airplanes don't flap their wings, right? (i'm just wondering exactly what those lessons might be).
Actually the solution to the 3 god version is clean and elegant, and long and convoluted reasoning doesn't shed any light on it.
but their iPhone success is starting to wane in light of the Android.

Are you trolling? If so, it's a good one because I'm falling for it :-) The iPhone's success is far from waning. Android as a term is barely known outside tech circles whereas even Mac haters at least know what an "iPhone" is.

Apple got lucky with the iPod in that they were the first company to do it right.

Far from it. The first generation iPod reviewed poorly and sold poorly. It wasn't until near the end of 2004 - and the fourth generation - that it really "caught on." Apple didn't get lucky.. they got it right after iterating and redeveloping a few times.

restricting apps like spotify

Did they? I have Spotify on my iPhone right now and enjoy it using it most days. It took them a while to approve it, but it takes them a while to approve almost everything.
although I'm less sure of that when it comes to cats.

I'm less sure of that when it comes to most humans. Their animals seem to train them, not the other way around.
> If it was possible to distribute secret keys during WW2, surely it's also possible in 2009 - probably a great deal faster and more efficiently.

Not really. Think how widely these keys would have to be spread to have any use. The drones are often used for immediate intervention: i.e. if needed they are launched to provide forward intelligence to units on the ground.

That kind of key management is a nightmare: especially when you think other nationalities/agencies/services might require the feed instantly too.

It would be a perfect setup to have encryption and key management - and I expect that technically a structure could be set up to do it securely. But one important feature of battlefields is that they get extremely confused and disorganised - it would break down at key moments, and regularly. The key to battlefield tech is always simpicity. So it's a tradeoff; one that doesn't seem to have worked out badly so far.
Great song, I have seen these guys live more than once. I never realized that it was mixed like this. Very interesting post. The mixer is a very talented guy indeed.
Apple’s products sometimes are relatively boring. The MBA is ok but not exactly revolutionary. Others are.

And as a consequence I would always wait until they show what they have. I have problems finding a place in the market for a tablet but I’m pretty confident that Apple could find a spot. Or maybe not.
Structures, Learning and Ergosystems
Haha, we'll see.

The Mac 128k could not run any useful program and was very expensive. You could not even develop software on it.

The iMac did not have a floppy drive, no serial ports and no printer port. It had though so called USB ports (whatever that was). It was immediately useless for many people who could not attach their printers and insert their floppy disks.

The 5G iPod was extremely expensive, had a firewire port and no USB. I did not even work without a Mac. PC? No chance.

The iPhone? Ballmer: 'the most expensive mobile phone on the planet'.

We know what happens, when PC enthusiasts predict the fate of Apple products...
Symbols.com
Yup. Here we go again. Four+ weeks of this stuff clogging the top of every blog aggregator.
What kind of hotel room has moveable safes? The ones in the rooms I've been in are fastened down. What kind of thief would steal anything except for a portable safe? Couldn't you kidnap one of the thieves, steal the clothes, and disguise yourself? How would exchanging safes in the middle of the night not be noticed? Couldn't the henchmen just open up every room looking for them?

Don't safes have built-in locks? My dictionary says a safe is "a strong fireproof cabinet with a complex lock, used for the storage of valuables." That definition does exclude some categories of safe, but "strongbox" or "lockbox" might be a better word.

Having now seen the answer here, I didn't even think that the clasp (shouldn't that be "hasp"?) might be big enough to admit two locks. That seems like a poorly designed safe, since that means the door probably opens enough to admit a crowbar.

Yes, I knew when I started that the answer was "public key cryptography." I'm just complaining that the puzzle wasn't well stated. Besides, if we're going along those lines, what if the henchmen start sending safes into every room to see if it comes back with an extra lock on it? That gives them idea of where the bad guys/spies might be, and prevents the spies from being able to make the exchange.
Movement Mechanics in “The Legend of Zelda”
The big question: Is this bigger or smaller than the Settlers of Catan boom?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944858
Exactly my point. This stuff was way harder without all these nice comfy ProTools and ACID GUIs. The keyboards never had interfaces that were easy to use when doing things like trimming waveforms. Must have been hella tedious.
Is that innovation?

The notion of landmark-based direction is not innovative. Using publicly available data sources to cover India in algorithmically discoverable landmarks so that you can give them from two arbitrary points in the nation, that is innovative. (And hard.)

I couldn't even begin to describe a cost-effective way for an Internet startup to discover that my apartment is the second one on the right after you take the left at the statue of Buddah.
Haha, no not trolling. Maybe things are different here, then? I'm in Phoenix and there are Android billboards/advertisements everywhere. One of the more brilliant ones was something I saw in a mall: it was a multitouch surface mounted in a poster-space running a game; kids were lined up to play it.

People are genuinely, organically (as in not prompted by a billboard they just drove post) talking about the Android. Cellphones are something that falls under my umbrella of responsibility at work and I have had several people jokingly beg me to lobby for us to switch from AT&T to verizon so they can get droids.

Also, on spotify: are you in the US? I was trying to find my little sister a subscription-based music service she could use on her iPhone and couldn't.
The lesson is that whatever flying machine we are able to design, it will always pale in comparison to Nature's flying machines. If humming birds had nothing to teach us, papers such as the following one would not be published:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7045/full/nature0...
> their iPhone success is starting to wane in light of the Android.

Qualify this, please.
Dude, Spotify isn't available in the US, period.
The moral here is that the more colorful you try to make your logic puzzle, the more implausible the correct solution will be.
If the movie ever mentions how long the Na'vi have been around as sentient creatures, I missed it entirely.

It did mention that before Jake Sully, there were five Toruk Maktos since the beginning of known history, and the most recent one was Neytiri's grandfather's grandfather. Based on that, we might expect recorded history to only go about twenty (or twenty-four?) generations back.
Presumably the choice of the word "safe" (and perhaps "clasp") was to make the solution hard to search for. Traditionally, the word "chest" is used.

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=chest+lock+key...
He makes ocarinas from other edible things as well.

Carrot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsboQ7cp7a4
Avocado: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtH9P-rtCPM
Apple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e37opEulwk
While I don't normally like to kick people while they're down, I am going to make an exception in this case.

I am sick of people thinking their tiny little feature tweak is a startup.

I am also sick of people thinking that computerizing things that people have been doing for tens/hundreds/thousands of years is innovation. It isn't.

If you have an idea for a startup, but your startup could be killed by huge company XYZ if they add one feature, you don't have a startup. If you try to pursue it anyway and finally XYZ Co adds it to their product and crushes you, this should be no surprise. Building a startup in face of such a scenario is an enormous risk, one that'd I'd bet almost never pays off. You should've known better than to waste your time and money.

I have no pity for you.

I am being harsh only in the hopes that more people will learn to respect this hard truth and actually invest their time and brainpower into something more productive and likely to yield returns.
Quit the day job. Use the 70 hours freed up and 15 hours of negacommute (weekly) to launch a new product, find a nice young lass, and do some travelling.
Maybe, but all I know is that every time I use my iPhone at home (not in a mobile situation) I wish it were bigger. A well-done tablet will be fantastic particularly if they find the right size. Such a produce will even spur development of similar devices from competitors, some of which may run Android.
The minimalism is fairly Apple-like.
Of course I can upgrade the software; and there's nothing forcible about it. We're talking about code I'm running on my server here...
Happy Christmas and Merry New Year, homies.
Lose a point for poor reading comprehension. (EDIT: Probably not comprehending muy actual proposal and knocking down your misread straw man.)

Encrypt the uplink/downlink to protect it against satellite eavesdropping, worry about the distribution to users separately. Uplink/downlink video keys need to be distributed to the same folks who need the control link keys.

Sorry, unless you mean something else, you are just wrong. Encrypting a video link drone->sat->base and leaving out the allies is the exact same key management problem that they are solving with the control link encryption. Basically, leave out drone->sat->allies and solve that another way.
This should certainly be interesting. Did anyone with a quant background here try the software yet? What are your thoughts? Do other similar software exist in market right now?
For the sake of Christmas if not our collective sanity - please stop posting this sort of crud. Who cares about posts about what a consumer goods company might market at some indeterminate time in the future?

I for one could do with a holiday from this sort of nonsense.

Apple fanboys click away!
I see a reference in this thread to it being a macbook air sans keyboard.

I think its much more likely that its a 4x sized iphone.
My point is that building a prototype that won't render correctly in IE (i.e., the browser likely in use by the commissioning client) as it's described in that article is counter-productive. If the client can't see it as it's intended, what's the point?

Building up the prototype to a point where it is universally compatible will have two end results:

1. The designer is building multiple functional pages and putting in all the labor required.

2. The designer is providing the client with a nearly fully-functional page/site prior to full payment being received.
While I don't disagree with you, and felt the blog post came across kind of whiny (cultural difference, perhaps), you aren't really responding to his point. He's not sad that he has to compete with Google. He's sad that Google's taking credit for thinking of implementing landmark-based navigation, and is claiming that he or his team met with Google reps a while and that at the time they praised his idea as innovative.
Ah! I am enlightened. Thanks!
HP camera 'can't see' black faces
> The lesson is that whatever flying machine we are able to design, it will always pale in comparison to Nature's flying machines.

Perhaps for aesthetics or mechanical and aerodynamic elegance, but never for practicality for human means.
In the Iraqi case, I'm guessing the bandwidth of the signal would be prohibitive to send out on anything other than satellite.

So, by obfuscating with a "new compression algorithm" you can also actually do compression and save yourself a little bandwidth. This also gets you over bureaucratic hurdles. "By introducing this algorithm, we are save X gigabytes per whatever."
Congrats on the acquisition!
>Why did RouteGuru never submit to Hacker News? Did they submit to Reddit, or Digg? How was I supposed to have heard of them?

Presumably, their target audience is in India, so expecting them to post to sites mostly frequented by Europeans and Americans doesn't make too much sense.
Twitter buys location tracker start-up Mixer Labs
NoSQL with MySQL in Ruby - Friendly
Depending on the OP's expectations and attitude, saying that it will take a lifetime could be a bit discouraging. Some say that seven years of dedication is all that is really needed to reach "mastery" in most subjects ("mastery" is of course subjective), and I tend to agree. Hardly a lifetime!

Seven years was roughly how long I took lessons on the piano, and later on the violin, and that, along with a knack for music, was enough to reach an advanced level and be able to play most of the standard classical repertoire.

Hooray for learning the violin! It is one of the most difficult instruments, but also one of the most rewarding.