skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What freedom to feel you could pack up and move in an afternoon. I love the idea of knowing that is possible, even if it never happens.

Funny how so much of what we have is "just in case": not just space in our cars, but extra clothes, extra linens, extra plates...

The photos of your apartment are great. It looks amazing, not at all like someone trying to "opt out", but something out of a style mag. Though I shouldn't be so surprised as simplicity is an important element to good style, or what I see as that.
Apple's mindshare is far greater than its market share.
In my opinion, one of the goals of the AltDB movement is building software that fits in different parts of the CAP Theorem triangle. While relational databases are REALLY good (usually) at providing consistent data, things start to fall apart when you setup geographical replication. In the past, consistency seemed to be the most important thing for all applications. While it still is desirable and important, some users are beginning to prefer availability and partition tolerance over consistency.
Congratulations to Patrick! I sincerely wish him all the luck in his new endeavor. I have been following Patrick's progress from beginning when he started posting at Business of Software forums. I always thought that 'Bingo Cards' is a stupid product to work on. But hey, not only he proved me wrong(and I am happy to be proved wrong), he is able to quit his day job by selling this product. He is a prolific writer and is always offering valuable advice. [I have bookmarked his comments page which I check daily. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 ]
Of course, this is a very old idea (predating the invention of relational databases, even) -- it just gets reinvented every decade or so, with a fresh helping of media hype.
Probably not true. Dogs - the species - have a large amount of genetic variation. There's a lot to play with. Humans do not have as nearly as much genetic variety across the species. A stat I read is that there's more genetic variety in a group of 50 chimps than in the entire human species.

This points to a genetic bottleneck in the past 100,000 years or so. Our ancestors were the few survivors of some catastrophic event.
Right. Getting rid of the (constantly visible) filesystem could be a good thing if it's replaced by a metadata-rich database that lets you do interesting queries. But based on Apple's recent history they won't actually expose any of that functionality, and we'll be limited to what the apps are specifically written to do.
The file browser in OS X shows the iPhoto library in it’s source list.
From a recent blog post:

"Next Application: ﻿I have more or less mentally committed myself to my next application, although I should probably give it some more thought. Hint: it uses Twilio. Stay tuned to the same blog time, same blog channel for when I have something to announce."
I didn't know http://www.ask500people.com/. Looks like an useful resource. I don't care about the map though.
A sexy man/woman curled up in an armchair in front of a fireplace, wearing a robe/slip, with a glass of sherry and a copy of In Search of Lost Time?
Valid question that should be asked of any product and one for which I think Boxee has an interesting answer both from the perspective of the user and the developer.

The userbase for Boxee (which just eclipsed 1M unique users a few months ago) currently seems to be divided into two constituencies: high-end home theater enthusiasts and early adopters sick of cable. I believe if you asked either why they chose Boxee, they would respond that it is a superior living room experience to any that are available that works with the platform and media of their choosing. Win/Mac/Linux/ATV compatibility, a huge list of supported codecs and containers, and a singular social experience can't be found elsewhere. Like all people who use their television, they want to watch whatever they want and share that experience with their friends. Whether you want the slickest, smoothest interface for your home theatre rig or want to stop subsidizing Comcast's imminent monopoly, I think Boxee fulfills those demands uniquely.

The far more interesting question I think is who are the developers and why they would choose to hack on Boxee. As a freelance developer working on an Internet with a limitless amount of interesting problems to solve, getting that Internet on the television is a deeply interesting and still very nascent space. Television has lagged behind nearly every other medium by a decade in going online - the developers working on this now have the ability to shape how television will look for years to come.

Boxee is situated singularly among the different platforms a hacker could work on in three key ways: audience, ease and power. Few IPTV platforms have Boxee's popularity with a real critical mass to which a developer can connect his/her idea. Further, the API is very simple to get started with many developers getting something working in an afternoon's time. Finally, you have the power of a full Python interpreter on your hands. Unlike a lot of IPTV platforms that offer developers the ability to create widgets in a tightly confined API, Boxee is a very liberal platform that can produce real apps that can do zOMG awesome stuff.

As a developer, the question that got me hooked on Boxee was "What if the people deciding what television looked like looked a lot more like me?"

I suspect you'd agree it would look a shite sight better than it does now. I'm not sure that is a "Web TV thing." I think it's more a free-as-in-speech TV thing.
What about tab-completion?
This is exactly why I think "computers" (using the 'folk' parlance here: I know iPhones and iPads are "computers") are on their way to becoming, essentially, workstations.

Complicated tools to do complicated things.

I don't see any reason that the Mac should ever move away from having Finder and Terminal (though they will become less and less used by the average user), but the vast majority of things that "end users" do with computers don't need to deal with this sort of stuff. The tools to make end user tools (end user tools such as device OSes, apps, and server software for end user apps to interact with), will always necessarily be of another level of complexity.

Let the Mac stay a Mac (read: UNIX), I say. But I don't want to do most of my non-techie stuff on it anymore.
In this delightful future, how do I change the app I use to edit my photos? Or change the app I use to listen to my music?
I've spent a bunch of years in the sport, and I do indeed try my hardest every second. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm trying to neck crank a dude from the guard, but it does mean that I am always working. If you watch some of the great practitioners of our sport, Marcelinho comes to mind, they are almost always moving, always improving. Although he's not brute forcing his way into a position, I guarantee he is trying his hardest every second.

Maybe this is purely a semantic argument, but I hate when people say that as you advance you work less hard. You work just as hard, you just work in different ways.
Couldn't you just set up a cron job to ping your app every 15 minutes until you start getting some real traffic?
Article Summary:

AdMob is an advertising network that specializes in showing ads for mobile phones. Their ads can be shown in web pages loaded in mobile web browsers, or the ads can be embedded in mobile applications that run natively on the phones. AdMob does not segment ads in browsers from ads in applications so a single device running a browser and several applications with AdMob ads count count as several devices in AdMob’s figures. This likely leads to a significant inflation of the total number of iPhone and Android users.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/30/why-admob%E2%80%99s-reported...
[You, not I, are] killing people on a grand scale
One of the great things about Joel Spolsky's books is that they are not a series of bullet points. He tells stories, and I for one always find stories to be more useful than adages taken out of context. Sure, they take more time to read, but it's time well-spent. I'll take Joel on Software over Rework any day.
Check out the AppScale project: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

You can run your App Engine apps pretty much anywhere.
my theories are based on observation, and working/playing with hundreds of teammates and employees over the years and how ive seen on-the-field play translate to in-company behavior.

No. Your theories are based on the well-known principle that we tend to fairly rapidly imprint on a certain type of candidate as being "good" and then confirm our bias at every opportunity. These people are usually like ourselves in some key way. Because of this your initial biases tend to become fixed in stone no matter how much subsequent experience you get.

In this case your advice is particularly obviously wrong. For example you entirely discount people like me, who grew up in a family that doesn't play sports and who has a mild coordination problem on top of that, would have no chance at such an "interview". However my actual on the job performance has been extremely good.

But you would never consider hiring me so you'll never see that. Nor would I want to work with someone like you because your desire to have people "110% committed" probably blinds you to learning how to properly manage software developers. (I'd be willing to take money on a bet that you're prone to "death march" projects.)

There is one good thing about your strategy. You're selecting for a strong culture which improves the odds of a good cultural fit. But you will only accidentally select people on the basis of actual competence.
What are "good morals"? Morality is completely subjective. I would say, to humor the inquirer, that computers already have morals: the morals of their users.

They already make content filter software. What the question seems to be asked is "can we make smarter content filters" which is probably true though it's not as interesting to ask it that way.
Hey, awesome. We made Hacker News.

I'm involved in organizing this. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll respond and if necessary add them to the FAQ: http://minnestar.org/minnespark/faq/
What makes you think that humans are not already domesticated?
Brisbane, hi!

Recently moved to Brisbane from Canberra and starting knowtu. Looking at ilab and will make it to opencoffee sometime. Are there any good Brisbane entrepreneurship/tech groups someone could recommend? HN meetup?
Interesting only insofar as this article had nothing new, yet MIT found it timely to publish. Hasn't bayesian inference been around for a while?

I haven't followed Cyc in quite a while, but I think they tried incorporating some probibilistic reasoning. I wonder if they ever gave a shot at incorporating exception assertions? Using the analogy of birds, penguins are birds, but the bird assertion of flight does not apply.
This reminds me of City by Clifford Simak, nice story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)
Why do those scientists have to use the terminal?

Not a snarky question: I'm not very familiar with scientific computing and am curious (from a UI perspective) why, say, applications for office work manage to keep things essentially all in the GUI, but apps used by scientists can't. Is the problem that scientific apps don't devote enough resources to good/comprehensive UI or is it that what scientists do is better done from a command line?

Regardless: as I said elsewhere in this thread, this is why I'm starting to think of PCs/Macs as the workstations of this era. There will always be a need for them. But they're probably needlessly complex for most uses.
What if all software was open source?
Thanks for reading between the lines. That was my poi t too.
iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.

For mere mortals, the 'file' as a concept is further up on the pyramid of taxonomy; most people think about their stuff in lower classifications like photos, movies, documents, etc.

When you see a bear, you don't say "Look, an organism!" You say, "Look, a bear!"
I never said it was the same thing, and I'm a little insulted that you'd think I did. Of course a shell is different from Spotlight or even Start->Run. But they do share the basic UI paradigm of typing in commands rather than graphically navigating to them, because that paradigm is more usable for many tasks.
It's probably being downmodded because it's bigoted, but you're both missing the point. It's a niche-site for people who like reading fiction - for people for whom 'books you like' is a good way to be matched up.

Someone who thinks they like reading because they read the latest Dan Brown, or people who don't like reading, will be probably be disappointed, but they're not in the niche, so that's not really a problem.
It's semantics. I equate "tries his hardest every second" with people who are using all of their effort all of the time. I am not doing that, yet I am always working hard. I would call that "doing the best that I can every second" to differentiate it from someone going wide-open all the time to make up for lack of skill.

Knowing when and how to conserve energy is an important part of the game as well.
So you pay twice as much and have to do more work? Keeping my blog up-to-date is challenging enough as it is.
You could specify the sorts of morals you would like pre-programmed into your computer when you buy it.

There would be social pressure to pick morals that reflect well on you.
Added it to my creepy robot list: http://creepyrobots.tumblr.com/post/485102832/hubo-iis-strai...
GitHub adds comments to gists
@pmjoyce you'll find my contact info here: http://alikewise.com/About/People. I'm the first Matt. Drop a line.
I didn't mean they literally don't have any furniture, just that the place is really sparse, which I thought people on here would appreciate.
I am sorry - but the subject here misses the point. Just having someone else who can host a cloud MySQL database for you in what appears to be a single location doesn't solve the problem that people have running high-availabilty global internet services.

The challenges with MySQL are that scaling it effectively to a multiple-master, multi-datacenter solution is almost impossible. Especially if that's over a wide area network.
Considering it's 730 JST at the time of this writing, he's probably sleeping in as he's no longer a Japanese salaryman.

Congratulations!
I have had committed colleagues, and competent ones. I know which I prefer to work with.
Has this guy seen the video for the iPad announcement? It makes it pretty clear that Apple intends on keeping Macs as the high-end/advanced machines, the iPhone as a somewhat limited portable device, and the iPad situated comfortably in between.
Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved
I am reminded of the Judean People's Front from Life of Brian. Henceforth we shall call you AltDB, and we shall add geographical replication to your list of demands :-)

More seriously, we'll see what we can do meet that list with our tech!
Without patents, I see there being 3 possible outcomes for my employer:

1. Get screwed. The big players profit from our discoveries, using their name recognition and economies of scale to ensure that we get essentially no business from our invention. We don't recoup our investment. Anticipation of this scenario stifles innovation among start-ups and small businesses.

2. Treat our discoveries as trade secrets, and attempt to have a monopoly. We end up being able to sell enough to recoup our R&D costs. However, we're not able to meet demand, so most of the market goes on buying the current technology (more expensive and less efficient) until one of the bigger players can reverse-engineer our stuff or re-invent it. Clearly, this is sub-optimal for the market as a whole.

3. Treat it as a trade secret, but using only contract law, license it enough to meet demand. We are able to recoup our R&D costs, but without patent filings as evidence, we run a high risk of this deteriorating to case 1 with insurmountable legal costs.

All three options lack the guarantee that our findings will eventually become public domain.

What other free-market solutions do you see that would be better?
How does it scale? After some reading it seems to be just a hosted database service with several vertical levels of scaling. What happens if Tera instance can't handle your load? Can FathomDB scale horizontally without sharding?
I think it's a bad thing given two things:

- You're really trying to inspire some kind of substantiative, rational discussion and not just verbal sparring. K5 sort of was and sort of wasn't. It was both a discussion-place and a playground. HN is supposed to be much more a discussion-place.

- The harsh criticism doesn't give the poster any means to fight back. "Motivational drivel" isn't a criticism that someone can argue against, nor is "This kind of comment makes me wish we had a moratorium on signups or a $5 fee." So that criticism is useless for promoting discussion, or even for promoting any kind of further on-topic thought at all. It routes the conversation toward more flames.

I strongly prefer total Mad Max flamewar arguments, but it tends to drive away a lot of people who have a (well-meaning) tendency to try to take any criticism, and deal with any critics. I mean, you see threads on here complaining that people downvote things without explanation! Obviously the posters of those threads would be gone in an instant if trolls started outright insulting them all over the place.
Catching that moment is one of the reasons I'm building http://shutterscouts.com - an idea notebook and forecasting service for landscape photographers.

A pro landscape photographer will plan their shoot: weather, sunrise/set, times, directions. And then they'll wait, try, fail, try, fail, kinda succeed... and then come away a completely different shot ;-) Apparently, it's 50% planned shot / 50% unplanned (but discovered during a planned/failed shot)

I hope Shutter Scouts can make it easier for enthusiasts and professional alike to make the most of their time by pointing them in the right direction, at the right time, for their most promising ideas.
How to create a great website
Good luck. I look forward to reading more of your insights into conversion optimization. That's certainly one area where I lack knowledge and experience.
Your calling this morals; but really all your talking about is decisional logic. Any morals are just your own by proxy.
Indeed. The selection dogs have undergone is not, in the final analysis, artificial. The many breeds of dogs are simply seeking out ecological niches in a complex fitness landscape which humans partly define.

I'm not even sure the selection process is all that different from nature's. Is an odd feature in a pet striking a fancy all that different from an odd feature in a mate doing so?
Wikipedia to receive a facelift
Just found that, but it only seems to work with OS X mail. I use Thunderbird.
The new technology isn't based on MySQL. It's a fully distributed, no single-point-of-failure, scalable relational database. You can choose fully managed hosted traditional MySQL, or we'll be hand-picking early customers for the scalable technology. Contact me if you're interested.

We're starting with single-location, but we can certainly support cross-datacenter configurations. CAP seems to dictate that this will either require acknowledgement from the remote datacenter (choose consistency) or a window of loss (choose availability / partition tolerance).

Until we see customers regularly hosting their webservers in multiple datacenters, we're going to stay focused on optimizing for a single location. But maybe my viewpoint is out-of-date... How many datacenters are you currently distributing your webservers across?
Consistent, Available, and Partitionable on the fly. Choose any two.

Each choice is justifiable for different applications. But you have to choose. Anyone who thinks they can make the choice for me and then tries to tell me that they have met all my possible data needs is selling snake oil.
How is it pragmatic?
I'm part way through that book at the moment. It's a good read.
I don't know if this is a goal of the NoSQL movement in general, but I use Redis rather than something like MySQL because I need speed. We're using Redis to route web requests, and we can't add 50+ ms onto every request on top of the >300 ms request time we have already from the application itself.
A lot of people use Google.
I am aware of Hawking radiation, but it does not properly explain how a black hole would evaporate after reaching Planck mass, only that it would reduce in mass until it was unable to attract anything. (There is a very reasonable proposal that black holes thus reduced would actually be stable weakly interacting massive particles, and would form much, if not all, of dark matter.) Also, if a black hole would be created at CERN, it would be fed by a very energetic proton beam, potentially much faster than it could possibly evaporate by hawking radiation.

That cosmic rays also potentially produce black holes is also not a good argument against their production, but only against the danger they pose. A black hole with the mass of a few grams has a very tiny cross-section, and since momentum is conserved, would probably be moving very close to the speed of light. Should a cosmic ray hit earth and produce one, it would likely pass right trough earth without hitting any significant amount of matter or slowing down. This is of course also true for any black hole created at CERN -- The protons traversing the rings are doing so at roughly 0.99999999c. Should a black hole be created, it would leave the solar system in a rather short time, at least from it's perspective.
Omedetou gozaimasu!
I knew someone was going to call Godwin's, even though I don't think it's justified. The thing is, if you're going to make extreme claims (like that Beck is the worst kind of person) then you are really asking for it.
If multicoloured coats were a development in domesticated wolves and foxes, then are humans really that far away? We went from a species with a very limited 'coat' colour, to everything from a near-white to black and all the natural pigment colours between.

I myself have four pigments to my beard, red/blonde/golden-brown/dark-brown. Only a few dozen generations ago when my ancestors didn't live in mega-communities on the order of millions, but lived in a community of a few hundred they likely had black hair between them all.

We're a predator species that is capable of living in numbers (without outside intervention) only surpassed by migratory birds and butterflies. We're not domesticated, because our purpose hasn't been changed to fit another species needs, however I would say with have been made extremely docile compared to our ancestors.
The back button works! Hallelujah!
The fat lady is getting hoarse.
I'd love to see a quick diagram of what the protocol's look like on the network and compare them to various other MQ systems and other protocols like HTTP etc.
Sorry - it's difficult to be totally clear in 6 minutes! We have two offerings ... a fully-managed MySQL database-as-a-service which lets you grow up to the biggest server on the cloud, and a new database which we've built ourselves, which we've announced but isn't publicly available yet.

The scalable technology does horizontal scaling, and no - you don't have to shard. Of course, in some sense your data is sharded, because it is distributed across multiple machines, but we're not doing anything that you'd consider sharding in anything other than the most pedantic sense!