skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of curiosity, are there any Wikipedia forks?

*BSD guys had a lot of similar arguments and they ended up with many flavors of BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD etc.)
Social media drives customer service job growth
Dow industrials for startups? Pre-IPO index opens
there's more than one form of rap
It was a metaphor, just google 'high tech pollution' or 'silicon valley pollution' or similar phrase.
I'm a very big video game nerd, but I'm also interested in stuff like dance and the outdoors. Has it not been your experience that your D&D-playing colleagues also do things completely unrelated to nerdom?
Make with your big time slices and focused attention, market with the tiny slices that remain available in spare moments
$130 wireless touchscreen hacking platform from Kodak
Well, if your startup starts to generate significant cash, giving up even a fraction of a percentage of equity as preferred stock (with typical preferred stock rights) is the difference between paying yourself a startup founder's salary and paying yourself as much as you possibly can. In other words, you're shutting the door on a very common way of getting wealthy, the one the vast majority of successful small business owners use.

Certain things about taking investment are binary - percentage ownership is nothing, investor's rights are everything.
Speaking of email address import/export, what are your guys' other favorites? Facebook Connect?
Does Redis block when writing to disk?
A system in which a software module called an event consumer can indicate an interest in receiving notifications about a specific set of events, and it provides an architecture for efficiently providing notifications to the [event] consumer

Hmmm, Smalltalk implemented this. All objects in Smalltalk implement listening and notification. Apple licensed certain concepts from Xerox, so this may or may not apply. How about Java? Do Java programs that use its notifications violate the patent?

Or what about Javascript libraries? How about Windows programs? It seems to me that event-driven architectures with listeners are everywhere.

This is the natural consequence of software patents. Just as the inner workings of a physical engine can be patented, the inner workings of software can be patented, which means things like patterns.

I wonder if future versions of books like the GoF patterns book will be annotated with warnings that some or all of the patterns are covered by patent and must be licensed?
This article has the clearest description of a "patent arsenal", and it's purpose, that I have seen.
To IDE or not to IDE: is a programmer's editor the best way to code?
Looks like you have a little more control over it, for one thing. Speed, pause/resume, etc.
25 Technologies That Changed the Decade
Writing an efficient Seive of Eratosthenes
I might have a really lame computer, but that thing really freezes up my browser
Azure doesn't run a lot of SQL Server functionality.
Confessions of a Windows 7 pirate
When I meet someone at a party or a random event, I find that I hit it off most with those who genuinely want to create things with love, passion, and stubbornness and share them with people. Even if they are amateurish.

I ride the train every day and I see so many people just consuming content. Be it whatever they do on their Blackberry or iPhone or book or the local paper. I always smile when I see someone crocheting on the train.

We are a consumer society. I think, most of us, as developers and designers are especially privileged in the sense that we can bring form to thoughts - bring them into actuality.

To create is to be happier. Yes, it's good to watch the occasional TV show - but if you're just sitting there consuming content all day, it's a net trade deficit for you in the long run.

Thank you for posting Kanye West's heartfelt paen on creativity and the impermanence of life.

EDIT:

If you have not ever seen this, Ira Glass of This American Life on 'making stuff even when you know it sucks'. The power of persistence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE

Related:

http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...
Tom Engelhardt on fear and terrorism
What about other concerts?
I guess it happens everywhere.. at the engineering college of the local Universidad de la República (Uruguay), there is a first-year course on advanced calculus which serves as a filter (1500 go in... maybe 50 graduate), because as it is a "free" (as in, you don't have to pay) university and resources are scarce, they need to weed out people somehow.

The result is that poor students from inland, whose parents make financial sacrifices to support them (living in the capital is very expensive for them, and the classes are structured so you can't have a side job) have committed suicide (2 in the years I was there) from being unable to pass that course (I never passed it either, so I switched what you would call "majors" in the US)
You do realize WP:N, WP:ATTP, WP:RS, etc. are all links to the policies being referenced, right? You're complaining that they're linking to policy pages to defend their opinions. If lawyers provided hyperlinks to every law they mentioned, I'd be ecstatic.
what's the new art form?

Autotune. He also assembled a team of people hipper than himself to do research and development for him. In this way he's similar to contemporary artists like murakami, hirst and koons in that he's more of a manager, while his employees do the work of figuring out what's hip and helping him incorporate that into his music, videos and fashion sense.
Earth's true colours in Nasa's Blue Marble images
It's weirdly like that scene out of the Jungle where the guy falls in the lard pit and becomes part of the product.
Who the f- is Kanye West?!
The Philosophical Cow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Miami33139 is trying to remove every free software from wikipedia (ejabberd, many IM clients, dwm…).
Everyone should see this, and read some Michael Pollan. FWIW Commercial pork is absolutely tasteless and shouldn't be eaten anyway, look around your local markets for some berkshire or other heritage pork, and discover what pork really tastes like.
Odds are, this can be subverted into a programming platform quite easily.

http://boingboing.net/2010/01/06/kodak-picture-frame.html

This has serious repercussions on the notion of iPad as an industrial equipment control device:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160975

It has wireless. It's 1/4th the price, and while the touchscreen might not be as capable, it's probably good enough.
Lawyers at least have to argue their points in front of a jury of laypersons. On Wikipedia, the only audience for this kind of thing is other wiki fanatics, so it just becomes more and more insular.

Also, that is kind of like the ultimate wiki defense: "any obscure terms are linked so my writing doesn't have to be clear".
Tell that to Bloomberg.
Unfortunately, no. I'm a programmer and sometimes a manager, not a designer. I don't know their pains too deeply. I merely keep seeing that the period between their "aha!" moment and the final implementation is definitely too long.

If I'd have to give any hints, I'd stick with what I wrote above, expanding it a bit.

Photoshop is a handy tool but it tends to attract people who are not web designers (there was a thread few days ago that you should hire a web designer for web design; a logo designer for logo etc.); also, it requires some experience with XHTML/CSS to get the fonts right, or realize that grid matters.

On the other hand, current CSS frameworks are rather painful to work with. I saw Blueprint hijacked million times, and the whole reloading concept is a big headache for non tech savvy folks. (unfortunately, the same applies to Compass)
The Pathologies of Big Data
He, essentially, wrote and performed a bunch of love songs and ballads on 808s and Heartbreak. Sure, they're Auto-Tuned out of their gourds, but they're heartfelt love songs, all about a girl who left him. On some, he's angry at her, and on some, he's doing his standard "I'm awesome" thing.

But, as you can imagine, most rappers don't do a concept album all about the girl who broke his heart.
What will hedge fund do with Novell? Resell?
Why we tweaked our copyright notice
Oh, "pork" the noun, not the transitive verb. Darn.
Dumb pipes are always on my mind. A little excited to see voice and SMS blend into data plans for mobile and home usage.
Ask HN: I've got an idea, but what do I do now? [UK]
This is my first ever Ask HN, so do be gentle!

Anyway, I have an idea that I genuinely believe would translate, given the right kind of TLC, into a viable startup. I don't want to give too much away in this posting for obvious reasons but it's based around non-profit and voluntary organisations, a field I've been working in for around five years.

Basically, it's a web-based solution to a number of problems I've come up against repeatedly and frustratingly in my experience working in the field. It's by no means a half-baked idea; it's something I've been thinking a lot about for a good few months now. I've done quite a bit of research and I can't find anything already extant that would duplicate what I'm doing now. From conversations with colleagues in the field and my own observations, I am genuinely and passionately of the view that it'd stand up on its own two feet as a startup were it to be built.

However, and this is perhaps where I'm likely to lose the HN audience, my technical skills aren't all that. I have a decent and very up-to-date knowledge and understanding of a lot of technical topics (thanks in no small part to HN), I can design websites to a high standard and fit an existing CMS into them and I'm generally a pretty technically-minded person but I've just never had the time to learn to code.

I'm not cheeky enough to come on here and say "can someone join me and code this app I've got an idea for?" because that'd just be daft, but I'd love it if someone would hand me a few pointers as to where I might find like-minded people with whom I could discuss things with a view to a possible collaboration (and even application to YC at some point in the future). My actual skills are more design and copywriting than coding. (I'm a trained journalist, but with the bottom falling out of everything media-wise I've ended up doing something completely different.)

Where I'm based might be a bit of an issue - in the rural UK (Manchester is the closest place with anything meaningful going on). If I was living in Oakland or Palo Alto things might be a little easier in this respect. (And I'd have a nice tan instead of shivering in the office in my woolly jumper).

Thanks in advance for any advice you might like to give. I'll be really grateful for all replies, even if they're "stop dreaming and get back to work"!

By the way, I'm a fairly seasoned HN member (~600 karma) but I generally post under my real name, hence the "cloak".
Faster to load: no separate http request.

Graphics is sub-pixel anti-aliased. GIFs are not.
Around 10 billion animals are killed each year in the United States. It's a truly astounding figure. Let's not kid ourselves that something unfathomably evil is going on.

It's great that some people get their animal products from the sustainable farm down the road. That is better. But let's also not pretend it even makes a dent.

During World War II, about 70 million people were killed over the course of the conflict (1939-1945). In just the United States alone, we will kill that number of animals in less than three days. If you were to compare the entire loss of American life in that war, it would take you about 20 minutes to achieve in our factory farm system.

If you still don't see it as evil, animal agriculture is far and away the number one source of global warming pollution (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=w...).
He's a rap artist who is in love with fish sticks
Perhaps they're going for the settlement to use as ammunition for going against Google?
Social Media helps Dave Carroll tell his customer service story
Ask HN:  How do you store patient information? (HIPAA Compliance)
I've recently been charged with the task of figuring out how to store the medical information of patients. A client of ours is having us create online patient referral forms, and the data needs to be stored online for viewing by authorized office personal and doctors.

I know that information privacy is important, and I also know that if something messes up, I can be held personally responsible for it. That being said, how do you transmit and store data in a HIPPA compliant manner? What are some good resources on the subject?

Our development environment is PHP + MySQL if that helps at all.
Turn them into meat-based cephalopods with Octodog

http://www.octodog.net/
Except it could hurt apple if HTC happens to also have a lot of nice little patents which the iPhone is infringing (not so far fetch). I have a feeling that this will never end up in court and a cross patent+cash deal will happen. Disclaimer: IANAL so whatever I just said could be total crap.
I've always liked the crafts of those who are perceived socially to be flawed in some manner. Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and now Tiger Woods to name a few. Even with their problems, I'm still drawn to them solely because their art is inspiring and creative.

What he wrote is interesting. He reminds me of the music industry's Andy Warhol.
The comprehensiveness IS one of the things on which Wikipedia has all other encyclopedias beat. Why in the name of hell would you want to take that away from it?
Yes, I definitely got this vibe when I visited, and that's why I applied to Stanford (and got in!) and not MIT.

I got there and I asked my host and many of his floormates how they liked MIT and the response from everyone was pretty much "I love it, but there's so much work." And my host (a freshman, which meant he should have been taking fairly easy classes and that he was taking them all pass/no record) talking about spending 8-10 hours on the average PSET for one of his classes didn't help.

I really got the impression that it would be hard for me to find significant time to hack/start a startup, which isn't ok with me.
A few weeks ago, German newscasts aired some footage secretly recorded from a poultry farm that was a major supplier of one of the biggest (and well-known) meat processors in Germany.

The material really was disgusting: workers beating animals to death, throwing transportation boxes (thus, breaking the animals' bones) etc.

I'm not a hardliner-PETA-animal-rights-activist, but I think there is good reason to not naively believe those statements of companies like Smithfield.
What could the Free Software Foundation be thinking about this, I wonder. Particularly patenting the hand gestures sounds really absurd.

Doesn't Apple know that one cannot proceed by clinging on the patents and legal protections alone.
If you don't need a clean victory to win, why would you pick a fight with the best paid lawyers in town and give away your hometown vs. foreigner advantage?
It really is sad how much effort is put into identifying and arguing about what articles to delete. It looks like there are about 100 of these each day.

Especially since there are still so many holes in the encyclopedia. For instance, parallel giant slalom is a snowboarding event in the Olympics. Yet it doesn't have a page on Wikipedia, just a one line mention on a general snowboarding page: "an event that involves head-to-head racing". I would not be surprised if someone had created a page at some point but it was deleted for not being notable or sourced or some other junk.
9 Amazing Writers and Their Strange Deaths
Could it also be because Statistics is hard and that a lot of researchers don't have a good grasp of it?
The whole idea with "NoSQL" is that you pick the best tool for the job.

Stop it. You're doing it again.

The whole idea of "Computer Programming" is that you pick the best tool for the job. It has nothing to do with NoSQL.
Dog DoorMats And So Much More...
Online B2B lead management tool for small businesses
I specialise in online B2B lead generation.My goal and business idea is to create an online lead management system for all small to medium sized businesses to help them grow their business and not suffer from time wasters.My vision is that a small business will log in to my site, purchase qualified leads and manage their leads online, recording the results and lead outcome.

From an execution perspective, I am in the middle of design of this system (for a client), it will be built from March to June 2010 and it should be deployed in July 2010 in the UK.

I have commissioned a design of this site, am overseeing the site build, am responsible for delivery of all commercial partnerships and overall commercial viability of project.
Narus develops a "scary" sleuth for social media
You're the only one that, however obliquely, answered my question ("Where would you draw the line?") so maybe you can explain to everyone else why you feel plot summaries from TV shows are not worthy, when the popular opinion seems to be that there is no reason to delete anything from Wikipedia.
I agree. However, I find this approach very rare. The current trend it that every erudite should read Hemingway, Nabokov, Catch 22, and many other books. I think it is worth time for some people, but not for the whole society.

My approach, shortly speaking, was that I've found most of the stuff not challenging at all. So, I raised the bar, reading literature critique. Then, I realized it is pure bullshit, and jumped into sociology, then into philosophy, then into philosophy of mathematics and it turned out that pure textbooks are much more interesting after all.

Shortly, I agree it depends on the goal. Keep in mind, though, that people's goals vary a lot. And that's my point rephrased otherwise: if you are not interested in reading something, give up. Unfortunately, the current trend is to read books, and if you find nothing in them, the problem is in you. I try to fight with this symbolic violence, whenever possible.

@klipt, I don't want to create so many responses so I will give you the feedback here.

Yes, I read all the books you've mentioned, except Pratchett, which bores me to hell. I've found Goedel's proof itself more enjoyable to understand than the books about it. The commentaries, in this particular case, seemed mostly unnecessary. (I don't like this fetish of Goedel's work that extrapolates its misunderstanding to all other ares; eg, Putnam)
10 tips to manage a customer crisis
Wikipedia Should Go For-Profit, Give Profits Away
Public Enemies: Bonnie and Clyde Game Download Free
You should check http://www.smartupz.com - it's already built and running.
Humans evolved eating meat. There is significant evidence that a diet high in meat and saturated fat rather than the neolithic agents sugar and grains is among the healthiest available.

Why is killing animals to produce food for people an "unfathomably evil" thing?
Agreed, and such subsidies tend to prop up factory farming operations, not small operations. In fact, the government makes life quite difficult for small farmers (again, read Salatin).
Some spammers mirror it.. But that's about it.

If you can work out a good way to share most edits between the forks --- because most edits won't be a source of argument --- then you have a fighting chance.
How trust and authority are changing
It turns out it turns out turned out into something else.
Who cares???

A superficial look suggests to me that in most cases, the "it turns out" could as well just have been left out (it turns out the "it turns out" could have been left out) without changing the meaning of the sentences. So it is more like a filler, like, really, (some English major please step in, I am not even a native speaker).

There must be software by now that warns you of "sloppy writing"? If not, might be worth looking into?

I have noticed that I tend to write "though" and "although" all the time, but have not yet found a remedy. I hope this doesn't invalidate all the comments I ever mad.

Didn't PG make his articles editable some while ago? So someone could just edit out those "it turns out" and we can bury the subject.
Does it apply to other sciences? (I think it does but I don't have any access to papers confirming it)
Because making animated GIFs is frackin' hard for non-artsy-types (and even then, they're not easy), and they can't be modified easily or quickly compared to this.

edit: imagine, for example, making 100 different GIFs to handle spinners all over where you want different colors, different sizes, speeds, etc etc. With this, it's just a stylesheet tweak, and they cascade so you can base it off what it's in.
Future Designer laptop - ROLLTOP [video]
There's actually no evidence for that position that was not produced by someone funded by a meat producer.
I quite doubt Apple's going to attack Google directly. Their weird App Store rejections and now the HTC lawsuit (read, not Google) indicate that Apple prefers a passive-aggressive stance.

If Apple sues Google, Google will stop paying Apple for Safari search ad revenue and make iPhone users hate Apple by blocking Maps and YouTube and breaking iPhone Mail's Gmail button. I'm sure Apple wouldn't want that.
Can't wait to procrastinate. It's about impatience
I wish more people would read the actual patent claims before coming to conclusions about them based solely on their titles. It seems that many news organizations have articles claiming this is a ridiculous lawsuit based on the titles which they claim are overly broad. If however they took the time to read the patent claims, they would see that they are relatively specific. For example: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=L-IeAAAAEBAJ&dq=5...

Now I'm not saying that software patents are necessarily right, but I am growing weary of people making broad generalizations based on the titles of these patents and having them perpetuated. That is somewhat like a book review discussing the book's title and deciding whether or not it's a good book without having read the book or having any knowledge of its contents.

In other words, leave it to the lawyers. If you went to LN (Lawyer News - doesn't exist, but let's pretend for my analogy) and there was a lawyer claiming that Javascript is stupid because it has the word Java in it and therefore must have all the attributes of Java and he hates Java, we'd all cringe at his lack of knowledge of the subject and wish he'd leave it up to the Hackers who actually know what they're talking about to criticize.
anti-aliased: that just made me test something, and yep, it also scales with zooming the page, which completely eclipses using GIFs to do things this can do. Hooray non-pixellation!
Over here in Uruguay we have 18 million grass-fed cows (they live better than many persons!), probably as healthy as any you have ever eaten.

Yet, we have quotas on selling to the US, because they have to maintain the subsidies on farming (it doesn't make sense if growing cattle in the US is so much more expensive). And the EU is way worse than the US in its subsidies - I've seen cattle in Austria, it is VERY expensive to raise it there - of course you want to maintain some local livestock for strategic purposes if nothing else, but it is still extremely inefficient.

And I pay about U$ 1/lb for very good grass-fed beef :)
This is misconception that is being repeated over and over. They ARE going after Google. It's very clear.

It's also silly to think that HTC is in this alone. If HTC loses, Google loses. They'll throw whatever money/support they need to to back up HTC.
Some time back on--I think--Overcoming Bias, I read that less than half of medical studies are verified when independent verification is attempted.

Does anyone have this reference? I can't find it again.
Excellently put! Especially the last sentence.
Mobile data explosion: Not the iPhone's fault