skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The New NASA: A Path To Anywhere, And Everywhere
This seems more like a press-release. flagging it.
"Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack." - George Patton
Other similarity: I've used Facebook free for 1000 hours.
How Do California and Greece Compare?
The problem is exactly that it is a moral judgment. You can't apply your moral standards to others. Should be people paying for crappy apps? Should they be paying for porn? Who are we to decide?
Ask HN: collecting usage statistics
Many tools collect usage statistics (Eclipse, for example). What kind of data do they collect? I understand that the data is going to be different for different tools, but in general what kind of data do these companies collect? How do they decide what data to collect, and do they really use it to improve their products (or what exactly do they do with the data)?
Upvote isn't enough, I've to say this: "Beautiful writing".
> HN is also running really pretty slow today.

Just my luck. As soon as HN took a little while to load for me, I knew that someone would mention it in this thread.

I made hn-api understanding that scraping HN is frowned upon, but also hoping that programmers wouldn't do dumb things with it. As I [said][1], I minimised the number of requests hn-api makes to HN.

In the readme, I say that hn-api is unofficial and unauthorised. I also tell people to be gentle with making requests to HN. Is there some other action I should take? Ideally I'd like to keep my work up, but if pg tells me to take it down, I will.

Great, now I feel all dirty like The Pirate Bay.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112267
I hopefully won't need to use it, since they removed emacs keyboard mappings :-(

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...
No. Just look at the major innovations on the web and you'll see it doesn't follow that pattern. Search Engines, Google, Web based email, Web based Applications, AJAX, Rebirth of Javascript, Horizontal Scaling, Tagging, Folksonomy, Wikipedia, Twitter, Blogging, all major innovations and some have occurred in less than 8 years of each other. Frequency of major innovations are fueled by how many people are working on it. Rates of innovation can be a measure of how hot a technology is. Every 8 years indicates a much cooler technology than say the web.
Ask HN: What do you do for Asset Tracking?
I'm trying to keep track of an evergrowing collection of hardware and software across several employees, and I'm curious what other people are doing to manage it on their sides.

We have physical software, such as Adobe Flex Builder and Office (Still need a few copies) which we need to keep track of licenses for, and hardware such as Macbooks and iPhones.

So far, I've been using a chart in Google Docs, but this seems a bit sloppy. How do you keep track of who has what hardware/software?
Use Java or C# (or F# or Scala or Clojure)?

Seriously, this is an almost solved problem. You don't have to deal with threads explicitly.
How to Buy a Phone System: Tools for Small Businesses
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=f...

I'm not seeing any relevant results on the first page
Note that this issue arose in an earlier HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=865297 which this post in part responds to.
America's 250th DNA exoneration: How often is wrong person sent to prison?
Disclaimer: I am an employee.

While I linked to the press release; I felt that it was relevant to HN especially given that Amazon S3 just announced versioning for S3, this is a versioned, encrypted file system on top of S3, and other cloud storage vendors.

Additionally; it's a startup using cool technology. Maybe I could have linked to: http://www.nasuni.com/resources/white-papers/ instead?
An engineer's quest to caption the Web
I wouldn't be myself if I didn't ask: where could I found any resources on this. I'd love to tinker with my TV, as it has lots of capabilities such as built in Wi-Fi and DivX support.
Just to make a factual correction, Greece has not 7, but close to 11m population. I expect the economist to get these things right.
Quick: Time to Stop the SWIFT Agreement
One important thing to note in this "pick three features" strategy is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. There will always be people happy to chime in that they don't like some GMail feature or other but that doesn't take away from the product's successes.

My dad chooses a generic USB MP3 player over the iPod but that doesn't say anything bad about the iPod.
Viewed 52096 times
Favorited 3 times

Posterous has a terrible conversion rate.
How many people used AIM at its peak? How many use it now vs. Skype / GTalk / etc.? Watching the shifting sands of Friendster / Orkut / MySpace / Facebook has made me believe that Facebook's hold on its currently vast user-base will always be tenuous. It will never be entirely irrelevant (same can be said for AOL) but has no guarantee that it will continue to dominate.
Normally they are looking for what features you use most and how you use them.

For example a program has a button on the main menu, after collecting usage stats they find out no one clicks this button. Thus they remove it from the menu. ect. Its normally all for usability.
IPhone development team - Julian Smith parody (video)
I wouldn't mind it being 50 years if it were non-transferable.

It is, after all, an incentive to create, not to seek rent.
Treat school like your day job. You only have to be there like 6 hours a day, 5 days a week - it's a pretty easy job.
that's a puffy piece, as it's called in journalistic circles.
Am I the only one that thinks someone is going to build a killer service on top of Twilio? Something to become a household name and be totally disruptive.
I know it's probably more reddit, but I don't do reddit and thought it was worth throwing in on HN due to all the app store vitriol that has been surfacing in the wake of this "app spamming" nonsense.
So, that means 72.9 trillion spam messages. So sad.
Grad school isn't just about in-class education, it's about making connections, opening doors, and demonstrating a certain level of seriousness about the endeavor.

If you have an MBA from HBS and an MS from MIT, there will be a lot of doors open to you that simply won't be available without those sorts of connections. This is not to say that they are requirements for achievement. They simply improve your odds of getting "lucky" at some future point in time.

That said, I shouldn't downplay the importance of the education aspect. The number of case studies I read and thought about during grad school did wonders for sharpening the way I think about my own business.
There's two problems with this approach:

1) A practical one: suppose you would be lenient on a test and allowed the students to be 5 years off. How much would that change? How many students are actually only a few years off? Is 5 years reasonable or should they be allowed to be 7 years off? What about the situation where a set of events are closer in time than your deviation?

2) One from generalization: if you have to know it was half a century after the reformation, you still know nothing if you don't know the reformation started in 1540 (I'm making this year up; it depends much on the country). Which still doesn't mean a thing if you don't know Michaelangelo died in 1480 (still making stuff up), which is 400 years after the Dark Ages started (...). Do you think they should know whether Raphael and Thomas of Aquinas lived in the same times? Should they know whether the Austrian-Hungarian empire existed already when Newton invented gravitation? The more facts you start relating, the more important precision becomes. The more you want to describe detailed chains of events, in which the details matter, the more facts you need to relate.
You have excellent taste; go now and grab a copy of Borges's _Ficciones_ for more.

http://books.google.com/books?id=4dPBlkL1dkIC
Supporting an underpriveleged childs college education for 4 yeas in engineering or medical school is meaningful work. Its costs only $2000. Give a bit every month and your doing meaningful (really meaningful) work.
http://www.ffe.org
Whatever you do is meaningful as long as it helps someone.
Bonuses boost activity, not quality
It doesn't just sound cold-hearted, it is quite cold hearted but most people's standards. That's up to you of course, it's not like you're actively killing babies in Africa, but it does mean that conclusions you reach are not necessarily ones which other people will reach, even assuming good logical thought between the two points.
Reminds me of "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. That was one of the most inspiring talks I've ever heard. Check it out if you haven't yet - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
It mentions 3c per message, is it the same price for international messages as well?
Help someone out on a constant basis and then whatever your doing is meaningful ... www.ffe.org
VMware Rolls Out Mobile Data Center
To my understanding, the financial picture of North American cities is essentially driven by public employee salary and benefit costs, which are out of control due to unions.

Whether a city is struggling or not right now, or will struggle in the future, is largely a question of how high they let the payroll and pension benefits drift.
People own their own creations. The power owns (the copyright on) his comment even if he posts it to your blog, unless you've made an agreement otherwise (e.g., in your blog's terms of service).

You control what your blog displays, though. There is probably a technical legal difference between deleting a comment (definitely right and legally permissible) and modifying a comment (thus creating a derivative work of a copyright work which you may not be licensed to derive from).
Yeah... me to (sans the Twitter)

Set up joes goals [1] with a positive "I weighed myself today" and a negative "I broke my No S diet [2] today" (can have multiple ticks against that last one).

The little chart that joesgoals makes for me is oddly compelling.

[1] http://joesgoals.com/
[2] http://www.nosdiet.com/
A lot of smart, well connected people read Hacker News. In addition to reflecting poorly on you, your comment reflects poorly on your academic institution (RIT). I doubt the people at RIT would be pleased. Try to put a little thought in next time?
What is ctrl-enter for?
Is this data public, in the case of open source projects like Eclipse?
No kidding. We only push changed files to S3 after every build, but it's still a lot of bytes that go across the wire. I wish there was a way to build a new file as a diff from an old one.
Manufactured Views, and Information the Public Can't Handle
Whether or not a function is atomic is part of its contract; forcing code changes up the call stack when a function's contract changes is perfectly reasonable.

In twisted, all code in normal functions is executed atomically, and code in @inlineCallbacks functions is only interrupted at yield statements. If any random function could release control to the scheduler without notice to its callers, certain classes of bug would require digging through all of the callee's code to figure out what's going on. I rely on that atomicity far more often than I change a function from nonblocking to blocking, so in my case, the tradeoff is a favorable one.

Also, if you don't care about the response, there's no fiddling necessary. Just call the function and drop the result; the operation will still happen at the right time, and the result will get dropped on the floor, just as you expected.

[EDIT: changed "blocking" to "atomic", since that's what I'm really talking about.]
I believe this guy misses the point of Klein's post. He definitely misses the point I thought Klein was making, which is: if you're having a hard time finding a market where there is money to be made, just try to enter some markets and probably fail lots of times. After a few dozen attempts, you are bound to find one in which you can make a buck. The methods you use to achieve that are not the main point of Klein's post and, frankly, irrelevant. This article cracks down on the methods Klein supposedly promotes, which feels like one huge straw man.
Yes - Facebook will become the next eBay or AOL.

Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well. Indeed, I'd go as far as saying they succeed in spite of themselves. Their interface is busy. Their app is always spamming me. The messaging infrastructure sucks. They have confusing privacy policies (and underhandedly change them). Their photo management is weak. I'm constantly being petitioned for scammy quizzes and second-rate games. The list goes on...

The only thing Facebook has, and it's tremendously valuable, is the social graph. They really were just at the right place at the right time.

Over the next few years people are going to gradually decide that dealing with all the shit and cruft of Facebook isn't worth the diminishingly interesting experience of half-heartedly stalking the people you thought were fascinating 10 years ago. And since the value of Facebook is the social graph - once the graph starts contracting, it will do so at an accelerating rate.

The social web will likely continue to be a growing plain, but it won't really get interesting until it starts dealing in standards and decentralization.
you cant talk about biased statistics, and then use admob as a better source.
FWIW, I don't think I'd do much different than I currently do (Which I think is a reasonably good sign). Would you?
Until cars have connectors to automatically upgrade their software without requiring a vendor to do it, having the code to the software wouldn't help.

Still, would be pretty sweet to be able to mod the firmware to suit each driver's tendencies.

Side Question: Doesn't BWM allow\encourage tinkering with the firmware on their cars?
(I know this was 17 days ago, but I just noticed this comment).

Being contained in a finite amount of memory does not give a list a size. Lists with cycles may take up a number of nodes, but saying they have a "size," despite the fact that you can iterate over them infinitely and never reach the end, is oxymoronic.

An infinite sequence (which a list with a cycle is) has no size.
Mind Bending
I liked this part:

"Is there any scientific evidence that this diet works?

Absolutely none. But I'm not aware that I have any competition in this regard. It is more or less how billions of thin people around the world have eaten for millenia, if that counts for anything."
Bank Failures in America (Infographic)
How To Split Up The U.S.
What are the benefits of a Sapphire? I'm not looking forward to the day I need to buy a ring, i'm way out of my knowledge domain :)
Neato's Robot Vacuum Is A Roomba Killer
If you are a startup you can get this for free via Microsoft's BizSpark program. Please contact me to get signed up for BizSpark.
Just as a minor addition to what barrkel says below, there's a good explanation of CPS transformation, and its use in compiling, in the first edition of EOPL.

I've heard the second and third editions had some of that material cut (too advanced?) - I don't know if that's true, but the first edition is typically much cheaper. FWIW.
I recently received a registration email from a website that I had never been to before. Apparently, a person with my same name beilieved HE owned $firstname.$lastname@gmail.com

It sent me his log-in credentials in plain text and I was able to contact him via his phone/address to warn him not to use my email.
People have pointed out in this discussion that its hard to actually live a meaningful life. Especially in the US it can be hard to learn how to lead one.

I've been delving into Buddhism over the last 5 months because of a family situation of mine that I have had to deal with and I think to be able to live a meaningful life all you have to do is help someone else who:
1. Really needs your help.
2. Can do nothing (by the nature of his/her predicament) for you in return at this very moment.
3. needs help on a continual basis. Ie, a long term commitment which then implies that you going to work everyday is helping someone else. That would be living a meaningful life.

I think thats why having kids is living a meaningful life.

My recommendation: Put an underprivileged kid in India through college who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. http://www.ffe.org (100% of your money is given to the children as the administration fees are paid for by a separate fund).

It takes a long time to get to this thinking though. I mean think about it: If you had only $2000 in your bank, the only way you could give $2000 to charity is to be able to either give up all your dreams/aspirations or at least put them on hold. That is very hard to do ...
I have a PS2 to USB adapter for keyboards my keyboard (& mouse).
Stay rates for foreign Ph.D.s rebound after decline
One social circle at a time.
If you really want to understand why it's difficult to lose weight, and "hack" your body like you hack on computers, I highly recommend a book called Ultrametabolism by Dr. Mark Hyman.

In the last 3 months I've lost 20 pounds, just by doing mainly these 3 things:

1. Eat breakfast every day, and make sure it has protein.
2. Eat only whole grains and no refined flour, pasta, and avoid simple carbs.
3. Eat plenty of fats, including nuts, avocadoes, olive oil, and other healthy fats.

I've done all of this while eating filling breakfast, lunch, and dinner, along with snacks in between meals and even dessert like chocolate brownies, dark chocolate, etc.

Not only have I lost 20 pounds, I can eat this diet for the rest of my life and be completely healthy. This is the diet that humans evolved on, whole grains, fresh vegetables, fruits, and lean meats. The diet is very similar to Mediterranean or Asian diets.

Some other benefits, since I switched to this diet, I have more energy, my cholesterol is perfect, and my blood sugar levels don't spike.

The entire secret to this diet is that by eating whole grains and avoiding simple carbs, you avoid foods that turn into sugar in the blood and cause your blood sugar to spike. These foods like breads/pastas/etc give you quick energy, but then cause a crash later, causing you to eat even more food. Also, your body can't deal with that much sugar in the blood so it stores it as fat. By eating whole grains, your body takes longer to digest them, releasing blood sugar at a slow, even rate. Thus, you have energy all day and don't crash, or get hungry between meals.

edit: I also want to point out that the author of the book has done considerable scientific medical research, and his diet is based on empirical research, not pseudo-science like many diets.
GFontViewer 1.17 su LinuX
I'd rather have a little ongoing deflation than risk becoming the next Weimar. Or China(s). Or Turkey. Or Yugoslavia. Or Zimbabwe...

And inflation imposes costs of its own just from adjustment and uneven inflation discourages investment on its own (holding debt comes to mind).
The Revolution Will Be Mapped
Twilio has by far one of the best APIs out there. Most APIs hands you back data, Twilio does "stuff" so you do not have to.
Dashboard Design For Metrics-Savvy Software Companies
I ended up expanding this into a blog post.

See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112500
I didn't think unfriending was public. Is that a new thing?

I've done it before and never noticed any public announcements.
Its probably optional, I don't regularly use Eclipse but for example Firefox just did it and it is optional.
The fallacy of fairness
Sorry to butt in all pedantic, but I was unable to confirm that Borges wrote this poem (it's usually presented as a poem), and found a few online conversations where it's claimed it has been attributed to several different writers and is of uncertain authorship.
Isn't the bigger point to be made is that Internet/Web applications should be platform _independent_?

That is, is there any merit for targeting a single platform -- even if that platform happens to currently enjoy a large market share? I wonder how many people regret targeting IE, exclusively, during the early 2000s when it seemed MS 'owned' the browser market at that time.
New England Journal of Medicine: From Wiiitis to Wii Fractures
It's not a new issue. Google has terrible customer service.

This is true for all their products and services, both free and paid.
Quick feedback. I have just spoken to a support person to learn status of my order and she was really good and helpful.
Google Android doubled its Smartphone Platform US Marketshare
See also: http://genderanalyzer.com/
I've been using ASP.NET MVC for a while now. I just can't get enough of how its changed my way of working. It really is a fantastic framework.
I mentioned earlier today that somebody could track the number of postage stamps they issued on a dashboard if they were worried about it. (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111711 )Someone asked "What do you mean by 'dashboard'?" Well, not that it is the canonical example by any means, but here's mine. It makes me more efficient at customer support, surfaces my metrics faster, and saves me time.

I'm sincerely interested in seeing yours if you want to show off (or even hearing what you have on it, if you don't want to show the numbers/graphs). This stuff is fun to me.
I just use Compass with a sample index.html to get the styles right, then punt the generated CSS sideways into whatever project I'm working on. Makes things nice and simple.

If I find a weird corner case where the style breaks, I add that to the index.html as a test case and repeat.
Well, in their defence, they're quoting an external source verbatim (of course, a footnote pointing out the error would have still been nice).
I'm not so sure that's what the focus of the iPad naysayers is. It's more "why do I want this?". Nobody questioned why everyone would want a tiny, pocketable device that held every song they would ever want. They questioned whether Apple's mp3 player would be the one people wanted (and, by the way, the first iPod was not, it took a few generations). Nobody questioned whether people would want a smartphone at all, they'd been popular for years, just where in the market the iPhone would end up.

The iPad's a different animal because it's trying to sell people something they don't even know they want. It's more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don't, but it isn't the feature set that's worrisome, it's the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between?

Only time will tell.
Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy
Well, at least here in Finland we have had these sms api services for a while. Not that cheap though.
On a scale of one to fucking nuts, this is fucking nuts.
How to test if your startup idea will succeed
Apropos of this, are there any decent sms payment services out there? What about sms payment api's? I know they are pretty popular in europe, but seemingly have not caught on in the states. thoughts?
Interesting. My blog home page is only titles, and that wasn't enough data for a correct prediction - it said I'm an ESTP. With more data (i.e. my rss feed) it was spot on: INTP.
Unlike personality classifications (which are essentially witchcraft with better marketing), gender is objectively verifiable (yeah yeah gender studies students, I passed the class too, thanks for your comment) and so makes for a much more productive area of research. Trivial algorithms (~60 lines of awk last time I did it) are very capable of pegging gender with 80%+ accuracy for some corpora.

See generally: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final....
A race to the bottom in prices. Model might be in trouble when Google gets in the game. Great company, though.