skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?

Writing a novel. :)

Seriously though; for every successful writer there are 10's of failed ones. Most get "found" some time after they are first published (fad's like Harry Potter et al tend to be exceptions).

If you have a reasonable amount of writing talent and the spare time to put it down into a book then it's worth doing as a bet against being noticed at some time in the future.
Google Architecture Overview
The way this interacts with Analytics is especially confusing: if any of your "additional email addresses" have permissions on Analytics domains, the accounts get effectively consolidated.

Logging in with either my personal or work email was logging me into what looked like my personal account. It turns out that they both just defaulted to showing the same domain.

For added confusion, Analytics has its own built-in system for sharing+consolidating permissions across accounts.
Right. Mahalo had a call out for 17 or so "interns/volunteers" a few months back... thats who replaced the editorial staff.
Fluffy -- if you know the story, there's nothing new here.
Online TV 1.0 su LinuX
He's certainly not worth trying to sue. But he's worth reporting to his school, publicly nailing to the wall, and the resulting story posted on one's website to discourage anyone thinking of ripping off future apps, if that can be done. Remember, the expectation of punishment for misdeeds like this is an expensive public good, those who maintain it are social altruists.
Ask HN: Mass SMS text message services?
I'm asking a question on behalf of my brother who runs a youth non-profit org in Providence, RI. He's looking for a way to send text messages, en masse, to an opt-in network of constituents (mostly teens).

Can any recommend any good services to handle that?

He's looked at the follow:

http://www.sumotext.com/

http://www.eztexting.com/

http://www.txtmobster.com/

He's also looked into working with carriers directly. I really don't know what is the best way to handle an opt-in, group text alert list, or if any of these companies are reputable, so I thought I'd ask the HN community.

Thanks!
Not really. In my subjective(+) opinion, Hg Queues are designed to work around the suboptimal design of branches in Hg.

Mucking about with a lot of small commits is a Good Habit and very useful when working from two different computers, but makes the Hg repository log terribly noisy. Eg. it invariably results in several "Oops, I forgot to add imgs.idx in the last changeset." or "This does not compile, but I committed it for backup purposes because I'm updating from Vista to Win7. Please check out the next changeset if you want to compile.". Git naturally supports squashing of commits to solve this, while Hg sans Queues does not. Git also allows you to kill off experimental branches that lead nowhere, while in Hg they live forever unless you make the "branch" in a queue ecosystem.

I will also pre-emptively counter a counter-argument which tend to always come up when I talk about this: "Swallow your pride; allow people to see your mistakes.": It's not about that; it's about keeping the repository history somewhat readable. Next week, someone on my team may have to look through all my changes for the code review, or in a few months when I'm on holiday someone might want to know what all the rework between versions 2.5.2 and 2.5.3 was so they can double-check that the release notes have been updated. Leaving these people to wade through piles of "Ooops"-es and half-commits is just sloppy and unprofessional.

(+) Disclaimer: I use Hg extensively at work, and Git extensively at home. I am frequently branching, merging, cloning, rebasing, squashing and generally mucking about in both, so I believe I know them fairly well. I prefer Git by several orders of magnitude.
You look at me and say "troll", I look at you and say "delusional."
The problem with this argument is that sometimes people, governments, businesses or whoever else do have something to hide, and sometimes they are hiding those things for honest, legitimate reasons. But sites like Wikileaks don't tend to pay much attention to that.
Very nice plugin for photoshop!
I don't have a lot of experience with this, but anecdotally I've had better experiences using git with bunches of binary files than SVN. Maybe it had something to do with the structure of the binaries, but I was always and forever getting conflicts and such in SVN - or maybe it was the way my old company set it up, who knows.
Ask HN: Please review my site favilous.com
Hi,

We recently posted our new site on HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060022 - and got some fantastic feedback. We have acted on this and so have improved the site. We would love to hear what you think and where we can improve it further.

thanks
That’s just a red herring. Democracy isn’t being thrown away because the treaty negotiations are closed. A democracy does not imply absolute and unmitigated transparency in all steps along the way. As I already said, democratically elected representatives will have final say on the finished non-secret treaty.
...people don’t understand that something very dangerous is taking place behind the scenes.

Fear.

This means that something that’s free today might not be free tomorrow.

Uncertainty.

But I, like many others, have reason to believe that H.264 will not be Google’s final choice.

Doubt.
I would guess the hardest part is teaching non-technical types the concepts of version control, especially one like subversion.

Were there any tricks in doing that kind of teaching?
This Philip Kirwan is a real class act: http://www.philipkirwan.ie/site/android.html
Auto-Compile Sass Files with Sass 2.4
Interview with Erik Spiekermann: Why are typefaces legally defined as software?
Ask HN: Consumer negotiation tactics - how do I avoid being taken advantage of?
I'm buying a house. I hear it's a good time to buy -- rates are low, tax incentives. Real estate and its agents are tricky.

I recently went into a nice new community being built that is essentially perfect, and I want to custom-build a house with the builder.

I was going to give them a call and start the process, but I forgot their business card. I remembered their names, so I googled them and found a blog post where they were mentioned as being star students of a very shady real estate sales course. -- http://newhomespecialists.blogspot.com/

It's tough going out there for consumers -- there's a lot of information asymmetry when negotiating the sale of a car, a house, or even medical treatment.

I was able to find plenty of sales strategies on how to trick and confuse potential customers, but what are some great counter-examples we as consumers can use to not get had?
That works just as well, and it certainly proves you're right.

What I'm wondering is if this was done on purpose or not. If it was on purpose they're lying bastards, and if it wasn't on purpose, it seems they know jack shit about encoding, just like me, and should leave the technical discussion to those who know what they're talking about.
MP3 pioneers launch 'deluxe' file 
A new music file format has been unveiled by some of the key figures behind the development of the MP3.The new file, MusicDNA, can include things like lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music.It has been created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the first MP3 player in 1993.And its investors include German researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg, who is credited with inventing the MP3. The new file, MusicDNA, can include things like lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html

He worked at Wolfram?
This is neither here nor there but the article as I had posted it was recast from its original title ("Risky Strategy Leads to Big Court Win," which I had used) to one that is actually inaccurate (since the legal case involved what might be called "issues advocacy" and not "corporate campaign contributions"). Just clarifying for anyone interested.

By the way, the interest of this piece lies not so much in its description of the underlying legal case as it does in the human elements associated with it - its theme might be summarized as "how does a government attorney so overplay his hand - by vehemently asserting at oral argument that the law would render illegal virtually all forms of traditional advocacy that an entity might use in this context, e.g., books, pamphlets - that it transforms a little-known case that should have been decided on narrow issues into a major decision that explodes in the government's face?" That is the real drama of what happened here and it is interesting to observe this as a matter of legal strategy regardless of what one thinks of the decision in the case itself.
Half the links seem to be broken.
Superpowers in Library Design
Here's why: http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/11/mind-games-ascen...
1. Make sure you stay online
I never said anything about cursing. I said mom insults were childish. So yeah, if I had said that, that would have been overreaching.
I found that horrifying. All I could think of while reading the article was what if this model takes off? Publishing houses put books together by hiring one meta-author to write an outline for a book, then bid out the actual writing to junior authors. The publishing houses would own the rights to the characters, series, and future books. When a particular series takes off, their only expense is hiring junior authors to "fill in the blanks" on future novels. Sounds immensely more profitable for publishing houses for the current model. Why would a publishing house develop individual authors if the new meta model is so much more profitable?

As interesting as I found the business model, if the end product is anything like Patterson's novels, I fear for the book industry. Would Harry Potter have been written by a down-on-her-luck JK Rowling if she could have gotten work as a ghost author for a publishing house? I could see this being a good thing, but I like my books and the direction scares me.
They gave me an UNLICENSED DRUG to induce my daughter
HTML5 will lower the use of CDNs for delivering JavaScript
Are You Trying to Pin the Tail on the Cloud Donkey?
Building Products for Mass Adoption
So basically what one can do is apply, then if accepted arrange the details for coming during the said three months in the US?
Doesn't mention Acorn or Archimedes or Psion or Symbian. Clueless.
Here's an ad by Patterson:

http://www.infomarketingblog.com/write/

And here's an interview with someone who responded to that ad, worked at JWT, and also decided to start writing novels, instead:

http://www.infomarketingblog.com/mystery-writer-interview/
Plimus are good.
What about long dead artists? what about recordings done many years ago, where the covering of recording prices has long been achieved

Software, like most intellectual property is a Non-rivalrous good. Nothing in software design prevents simultaneous consumption, indeed, we would not have any website if that was the case. A T-shirt or a Meal is a Rivalrous good, my consumption of the meal prevents your ability to eat it.

The law affords protection to non rival goods be enacting author rights, exclusivity for a period of time, copyright etc... historically the limits ware set to release non rival good to the public for its general use.

Software companies, entertainment companies etc.. seek to milk those rights to no end, it will be an interesting case to see what an early mandatory release to public domain will have on piracy as a whole
put false values in it yourself, if you notice them in the other app then he copied your database
Do you buy the Fed Reserve conspiracy theories?
The concept is that the Federal Reserve loans the government money at interest which according to the theory it creates out of nothing. I'm wondering if you have any good refutations or resources about this and printing money in general.
hg closes branches with `hg ci --close-branch` - or did you mean something else?
Just Hope
A better solution would be hosting it online and then caching it on the client.

With the added benefit of bring able to tell when someone else accesses your content by failing to supply a special request header.

I would start by trying to talk to him. If that didn't work, I would call his school and make them aware of their student's shady doings. Then I would go to Apple and point out Apple is helping this guy to infringe on your copyright (the database is comprised of public data, but your work compiling it is non-trivial).

If the data were kept on-line and cached in the client, you could, as a final step of escalation, render his app useless. Or worse: make it supply wrong routes.
It's not a history article. What's you're point? Is an article about, say, Intel's Beckton rollout this quarter similarly clueless because it doesn't mention the PC/AT?
Google says otherwise: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-...

No doubt they must use other indicators to ensure the authoritative source.
My guess is that the author wasn't the one who encoded either video, and the guy who did didn't know what hinting meant but enabled it anyway when exporting from QuickTime. (hinting is only ever used by Darwin Streaming Server, and only if you're doing live streaming from a pre-recorded file.)

The bad encoder comes from QuickTime having the lowest quality H.264 encoder out of any commercial encoder (and all of them being worse than x264.)
txtmob is at sourceforge now: http://sourceforge.net/projects/txtmob/

here's its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
First impression. Note that the tour is a slideshow, not a video. I sat there for 2 minutes wondering why your video was broken.

Second impression. It was a pain to get rid of "my links", which are not my links at all, but links you want me to have.

Third impression. The "Create new categories" button is very confusing. It acts like a drop-down menu even though it's really a button. I thought I had to try to maneuver my mouse to the legend and click there.

Fourth impression. If things I favorite are added to Favilous Buzz, and then I can make them private, then how is it really private? I should have a way to add links as private from the "My Sites" page that are never displayed anywhere.

Fifth impression. I will not use any bookmark service full-time that doesn't have an export option. I am not going to put myself in a position of having to manually copy all my bookmarks into a new system when I decide to change.
His skill when it comes to writing may not actually be that relevant. These days, people consume stories - and entertainment in general - in lots of different forms: novels, newspaper articles, blog posts, tv series, video games, forum threads and even tweets. Patterson may not be a master artisan when it comes to prose, but he's clearly dedicated to the goal of giving people interesting stories in an accessible format. Perhaps the use of co-authors is his way of addressing deficiencies in his own abilities?

at least when it comes to video games, one's ability to write prose is not a good indicator of an ability to tell interesting stories. I've personally seen talented writers work hard to deliver an ultimately boring game story while non-writers with a knack for plotting and creative thinking can come out of left field with a game like Silent Hill 2 (widely recognized for a gripping and unorthodox plot).
"I've never seen anything like how bad it has gotten."

Ever tried to make money with off-the-shelf software in the early 80's? ;-)

Well... At least, at that time, they had to swap floppies.
The author doesn't even need to be alive for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Sheldon%27s_Mistress_of_...
Most of the video delivered on the web today is in h.264, using Flash as a way of delivering it. This is why it's trivial for YouTube and Vimeo (and everybody else that currently uses Flash) to use h.264 in <video> -- all of their video is already in h.264.
ha yeah back in 1998 that would've rocked everyone's 486 CPU
I thought it was useful, I discovered I had forgotten to have a unique title tag for each page.
Taking In-Memory Analysis to the Edge
I'm not talking about taste, I'm talking about money.
When is a right time to start monetizing a web app?
Hi,
I'm new to HN, so I'll quickly introduce myself - I'm Stu, a web developer and designer from the UK.

I am starting a family of web apps which are supposed to be really easy to use tools for freelancers and small businesses. Project Bubble (http://www.projectbubble.com) and Invoice Bubble (http://www.invoicebubble.com - it's younger brother which is hasn't been launched yet).

At the moment Project Bubble is free, and has been since it launched in November. It's getting a lot of great reviews, probably mostly because it's very fluid in its development and I'm constantly bringing out cool updates. It's also very popular because it's free.

Obviously I can't keep it this way because I want to introduce SSL, Trustee certification, and work full time for the business. I want to launch a monthly billing plan for premium use but I'm not sure how to charge (though I have some ideas such as limiting the amount of projects). Most importantly though, I'm not sure when to charge.

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur from DC (and avid HN reader) suggests that I just start charging now, even though my 'power users' are only about 10% of the nearly 3000 users that I have, and they are the ones bringing the buzz in. If I start charging that 10% will they carry on raving on about how great the product is? If they don't then I lose a lot of my marketing.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you

Stu
@stulogy
I am perfectly fine with political ads that look like political ads. I am not perfectly fine with political ads that pretend to be impartial depictions of reality.

I can't watch NBC because my cable-TV doesn't carry it (I live in Brazil - for English news, I have BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and - gulp - Fox News). Is it really that bad?
I think this is an overly extreme view and you may be able to see it from another light is you take a second to think it through.

First, let me say, I'm not defending the past or present practices of the major labels. I agree that their tactic of suing file-sharers was too heavy handed and did more to harm their business than to help it. That being said, what would you do if you had a business model that successfully created, delivered and received value and suddenly new technology made it dead simple for people to illegally obtain the end product you relied on? Sure, they could have released an early competitor to Napster, but they would have had to drop the price to free, and that wouldn't have sustained their model.

And don't forget, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all without the benefit of the Label's old business model, because Radio Head wouldn't exist as it is today without early support and promotion from their original label.
I would argue that the open source software movement fits into the "black market" for purposes of argument. In many cases open source software is superior to commercial software. There are other ways commercial software competes, and they've tried to outlaw it in a roundabout way thru patent litigation, but in reality, they've just had to face the music.
More like Pentium II:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

The 486 came out 9 years earlier, in 1989.
That's not quite right - his example models execution as one thread at a time, switching on a cache miss because most of the extra work that gets done by SMT is when you get a cache miss, freeing up the rest of the processor.

While extra work can also be done when there isn't a stall (for example, when the processor is unable to sufficiently parallelise execution of the one thread), his argument is that this is a relatively insignificant fraction of the gain produced by HT, so his model is sufficiently accurate. Now, I don't know practically whether this is true or not, but ulrich drepper ought to :-).
> The first, most recent example, is Android 2.1's pervasive use of voice input, a compute- and storage-intensive task that the phone can simply offload to Google's servers. There's enough network bandwidth to make the turnaround time for voice recognition fairly snappy, so that a phone would never need the local storage or cycles to do this itself.

Really? I hadn't realized that...
"Having a clean history where each commit does one thing and only one thing saves you huge amounts of work when you are trying to find a bug in the code"

Especially when employing 'git bisect': http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git-core/docs/git-bis...
Dublin is the capital city of Eire.
So what if a company did the research and found that there was a patent. There are various reasons why they would not announce it.
Do you have features that you could be charging for? If the answer is yes then you should probably be charging for them.

If you haven't read "Getting Real" by 37signals, it might be worth your time to spend an hour or two reading it. 37signals are big advocates of charging ASAP, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them.
Google Chrome now Stable, 40% Faster, Extensible, more Feature-ful
Ask HN: Any new hacker podcasts?
I like to have something to listen to on my daily commute. So far I've found Mixergy to be the most reliable entertainer, followed by Stack Overflow. Anything I'm missing? I prefer listening for the simple reason that I get sick on the bus if I try to read something.