skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep in mind it's not 1976 or 1984. Things are different today. Technology is no longer reserved for the technical elite to enjoy or fetishize over exclusively. If you want to draw a line in the sand to figure out when things changed I'd say 2001 and the introduction of the iPod -- an incredibly closed but amazingly compelling and easy to use mainstream device that smashed its open competition with no mercy. This was about the same time we saw the rise of the cell phone in every pocket which was similarly closed and restricted. Around the same time we saw the release of the Playstation 2 which, again, is a closed and restricted platform that has gone on to be the best selling gaming console in history. 3 years later we see the release of the Nintendo DS -- one of the most successful mobile electronic devices in history. Closed & restricted.
Valencia, Spain
What devices exist that you can touch type on but not use dvorak? I don't think it's a long list.

There's no point using it on the iPhone for example as you're using two thumbs. I suppose the iPad might count since it can use external keyboards but if they're going to support qwerty and azerty etc. it wouldn't be crazy to support dvorak too?
Funion - a unioning filesystem written in Haskell
I never realized this until I was living in a house with 3 girls. One day, one of them walks in a starts telling me about some problems she was having with her boyfriend. I gave her my advice on the situation.

She responded by telling me that whenever anyone comes to me with problems, I try to give them an answer (why else would they be coming to me, right?!?). She told me people don't always want solutions to their problems, they just want someone to listen to them. She didn't apply this to only girls, as some guys I know seem to deal with their problems in the same way. This is something I still don't really understand but this article sheds a little light on the subject.
I'm in.

The Rhino is a popular hacker meetup place. Both Ajax pubnight (http://www.ajaxcamp.org/ajax-pub-nite/) and Rails pubnight (http://unspace.ca/innovation/pubnite) are held there. Many of the attendees of those events frequent hacker news, maybe a combined night might be a good idea? (neither event is entirely focused on Ajax or Rails, more about tech, startups and such)
I think they are white label since there's no mention of it.

Only the email confirmation is likely to officially come from Amazon.
Yeah I like this guy's tech-stuff-plus-marketing style, still it would be more honest to at least mention points where Cassandra has its rough edges (and it has quite amount of them)
From a practical consumer standpoint you can also buy lots of accessories to enhance your iPod/iPhone/iPad. Apps, cases, car integration kits, home players, even a little dongle you can stick in your shoe for running, a credit card swiper, etc. Obviously it's not open but it's the same practical effect in the end. The ecosystem around everything i____ is a big part of Apple's success today.
My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method.

But if you recall what Hypercard stacks were like, then putting it on a website that's specially tailored to make it easy, combined with a local app to make things more seamless, might actually be a money making proposition.

Put the hacking open/closed politics aside. What do you think about the idea as a business?
But last year, CouchDB was the future. Today it's Cassandra. In a few months, it could well be MongoDB or Redis. Even if Cassandra ends up the NoSQL winner, I'm pointing out that you'll have your hands full dealing with 'must have' feature contributions from the 'losing' NoSQL store users, and that this will be painful for existing Cassandra users.

As for the Drizzle thing, you've crossed the line into misleading marketing there. There is a plugin to integrate Cassandra as a Drizzle engine, just like there's a plug-in that logs MySQL error messages to Twitter. That doesn't make it the official strategy, nor does it automatically make it a good idea.

(Edit: fixed my MongoDB/CouchDB confusion!)
At the time, you weren't allowed to hook arbitrary equipment up to the phone system -- everything had to be approved by AT&T. IIRC the hardware Woz used for his dial-a-joke setup was homebrew.
I helped a friend get up and running with clojure this weekend. It's pretty simple with leiningen, just add swank, elpa and one is good to go! Of course I've wasted inumerable hours myself in the past trying to get it to work in the past but now I think it easily just works without much tweaking. We set it up two good on two OSX machines in just 20 minutes each.

It would be nice though to just build a little ruby gem with the lein binary. "gem install leiningen" but that would be violating the language barriers :)
I will second Duboce Triangle, I live in this area and find that it has excellent bus and train routes to just about everywhere in the city.
I'm not sure why it matters that you're 17...?
John Gruber: The iPad
"Where men used to play baseball and football, they now control avatars who play for them. Where men used to play an instrument, they now press buttons on a plastic toy."

How is pressing buttons on a plastic toy inherently worse than pressing buttons on a wood and ivory toy? Given time, some of today's toys will gain prestige, too.
They want me to listen, I want them to shut the hell up. I think they should compromise and shut the hell up.
This isn't "intro to cassandra 101," this is just fud busting.
I am totally interested.

Edit: I'm not sure how well the "vote for a day you're available" thing is working. When I checked on the spreadsheet, there were 4 names but 7 votes for April 29. That made me suspicious.
My thoughts exactly. This is the one feature that could be very big.
People in this age are expected to read and write, but using a computer in powerful ways is considered magic and unobtainable, this is to everyone's detriment.

I think that's just it: it seems (and for most people, actually is) far harder to learn to work a computer in a powerful way than it is to learn to read and write. The number of facts you have to know to properly administer a modern OS is staggering. One could reasonably argue that the iPad has gone too far in the "easy" direction, but it seems difficult to argue against the idea that computers thus far have been "too hard". If we can provide the ability for people to achieve powerful results with their computers without having to learn the intricacies of their OS/hardware, we're doing good and unleashing precious talent. Every minute spent (by anybody who's not a sysadmin) dealing with file system errors and driver conflicts is a minute not doing productive or creative work.
It might overrun Sony and Microsoft in computer gaming

I don't understand.. how?

At best, I see it appealing to a small niche gaming market, but as it stands, I can't see how it would overrun Sony or Microsoft - for example, the iPad is hugely underpowered compared to todays popular gaming machines and you would definitely need to couple it with some other input devices, like keyboard & mouse or gamepads, since multitouch alone doesn't seem all that suitable for a lot of games IMHO.
Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't.

To play on a level field with native apps? No. Wrong discussion! What about for the same sort of tinkerer/hobbyist who wrote Hypercard stacks? Seems to me, with a little hosting and a few tools, Javascript would be dandy!

(And as for commercial apps on Hypercard -- hey, you're free to try. But I'm not talking about targeting those folks.)
Well, ok Mr. Capitalist, why hasn't that happened yet? It's certainly not because the existing cable companies' sterling customer service leaves no room for improvement.
Google Voice Invites/Requests
Google Moderator works well for this sort of vote. We use it for the San Diego HN Meetup group frequently.
RailsDispatch.com: all you need to know about Rails 3
This article is basically fluff. It is trying to turn Apple's evolving business strategies into some sort of personality conflict. One that guys like Woz probably wouldn't acknowledge is real.

From the moment they were selling real products and not kits, Apple has always wanted to control every aspect of the computing experience. For a while, at Apple, it was considered heresy to be an "Open Mac" supporter -- that is, you thought it was okay to allow third party companies to produce peripherals like disk drives or printers. It was only around '87 or so that the idea of an expandable Mac saw the light of day (the Macintosh II) and that product line slowly petered out in the 90s.

People on this thread are suggesting that the OS was hackable with a floppy disk out of some desire to be friendly to tinkerers. Don't be silly. It was that way because there was no other conceivable alternative for software distribution.

If we disregard Apple's mid-90s confusions it's been on a steady road towards the iPad since the beginning, in rhetoric if not always in reality.
* I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days*

indeed, the days you could buy four microswitches and some wood and have a joystick that worked as well as one from the shops are long gone, yet people still compare the iPad to a >30 year old computer which came with schematic diagrams.

What would most computer hobbyists do with an iPad schematics? Why would you buy an open ipad chassis? Did you buy an OpenMoko phone?
Edmonton, Alberta... :(
AT & T to Offer at-Home Mini-Towers for Improved Cell Signal
"'I wouldn't talk about my insecurities with the guys,' says Mr. Schulsinger, a consultant. 'All my real insecurities about work, finances, the kids those I share with my wife.'" - i.e., the wife bears it all, and the guys just have fun. Of course, the wife is usually uncredited for this work.
The email to SMS gateways are much slower in my experience than sending an actual SMS message through a quality service like OpenMarket.
The female engineers I know seem to approach "everything as a problem to be solved" too.
Completely agree with you - The number of times a day my Fans scream up to full pitch on my Macintosh has basically dropped to 0 since I installed the Click-to-Flash plugin. I, for one, appreciate having an iPad that is still at 50% Plus battery life at the end of a 10 hour day. (I'm not watching Video NonStop)

There were certainly ways that Apple could have brought Flash onto the iPad, but, the author has to acknowledge that two valid reasons _not_ to do it today were:

o Flash is Buggy - used to crash my browser/freeze it up all the time.
o Flash is a Battery Killer/CPU Hog.

Apple could have _worked_ with adobe to fix these problems, but the author needed to recognize they are very real problems with flash today if he wants to have any credibility.
Given all we've heard about the App Store approval process, some reviewer cluelessness sounds likely.
Causation could go either way. Comfort may work best when it comes in a familiar form.
What's happening here is probably similar to Apple's position on coverflow imitations - there have been lots of rejections for apps that imitate coverflow poorly, even without private APIs.

Speaking with somebody directly about this, and basically, their stance is: coverflow is an experience owned by Apple. If you imitate it poorly or inaccurately, users will have a bad / confusing experience (Apple's call what 'poorly or inaccurately' means, of course).
Currently, there's not that much difference. But, that is the direction that console makers are pushing in, building out web integration and media libraries. They're trying to become less peripherals and more primary, universal devices. I'd say that ipads and consoles are moving towards approximately the same target, from different directions. Although, it's fair to say that consoles haven't made much headway in getting people to take advantage of these new features the way the ipad has.
Addressing The Outmoded Swapping And Paging Strategy in OSX
Tic Tac Toe in Haskell, and a cry in the wilderness
Apple 's attitude of power is therefore ridiculous, they seem to think that their tablet PC is something only they can develop and master, however it's not. Soon there will be millions of free and of equivalent quality Tablet PC's around and Apple 's iPad will only constitute a minority of them.

If nothing else, some non-US company is going to come up with their own tablet tailored to the local language and use the dual advantages of openness and cultural expertise to trounce them in those markets. In face several companies could do this at the same time. It's very easy to see how Apple could lose market leadership on the international stage this way.
There's not a single statistic in this entire article. I'm left with the conclusion that it's nothing except anecdotal sexist rambling.
jQTouch, a jQuery plugin for mobile web development
I have the Airave, which is Sprint's in-home tower. I got mine for free after complaining to customer support that I had to walk down to the street in order to complete a call from my office in Malibu. I would suggest calling AT&T support to try to work out a similar deal.
I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones.

The Kindle app for iPad already supports color. I downloaded the Kindle sample of the graphic novel "The Impostor's Daughter", and it displays in glorious color (and has more pages than the iBooks sample of the same work).
There's absolutely a lot of legal strategy in developing claims. There are very good reasons that top firms hire specialized IP lawyers. All that is, however, an aside.

The original point stands: If this patent issues, any competing invention that merely contains all the elements of that broad independent claim, would be infringing.

Those more-specific dependent claims are only a concern if you plan on prevailing in court against the broad one. As setting foot in a courtroom is a net loss for most innovators, the very existence of those dependent claims is essentially irrelevant.
If you were a junior programmer at id, would you torrent your work? I doubt it. Leaks nearly always come from outside the company, meaning copies sent to reviewers etc.

If you have a guy working for you who would leak something you're working on, the solution isn't to not allow people to take things home, it's to fire people who would harm your company.
I think one of the problems is that the solutions people offer usually don't make sense for some reason, possibly complex, emotion driven, with a lot of past history that's difficult to reveal, and difficult to communicate. Offering a solution that ignores all of these issues, which are likely present but would take days to untangle, seems slightly arrogant and ignorant, and thus annoying. Often times the advisees are too nice to explicitly say that the solution doesn't make sense, or are too reserved to explain the reasons why it doesn't make sense, so they just get annoyed. This annoys the advisors, who just want to help.

This isn't confined to boys and girls. Imagine parents saying -- "Kids! Do X! It is good for you!" The response is of course "but you don't understand me!"

This is the problem. It's hard to hear advice from someone you don't think understands you. For whatever reason, boys in this culture have a lower threshold for giving advice (though who knows who's more likely to actually take it).

The process of being listened to isn't mere venting. Being able to tell your story helps you to understand it. The solutions you come to will be your own, and you'll feel more confident about enacting them. Hardly anyone follows advice anyway; the storytelling and listening process seems just as a effective as a collective decision making strategy as giving advice directly.
The iphone and ipad lack virtual memory? They can't be serious... it's a Mach kernel. Maybe he means swap?
"With all inlet doors tightly shut, at 3.24 Mach, the J-58s are more like ramjets now, gulping 100,000 cubic feet of air per second."

Wow... what an awesome job to be able to fly one of these birds!

I had a friend in Boston who first flew fighters (F-16 IIRC) and then managed to switch over to the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Apparently it is not common to switch between the two types of platforms. It's a shame he was retired from the AF or I would have begged a ride. :-)
"They are hardly on equal footing for a purely numerical battle for superiority"

Thats Apples choice. Those chose to lock in with AT&T they could have not locked in and sold many MANY more. So yes it equal if anything its less equal for the android because it came in later.
I would be careful using PastryKit. I know after John's article when some people hosted un-minified versions on GitHub they were soon met with takedown notices from Apple. They may have decided they can't stop everyone un-minifying it but I can't see them letting anyone make any money off using it. Doesn't stop you learning from it though.
Ask HN: Tiny things that make a positive difference in your day?
This submission is inspired by this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244504

There are a lot of things in life where you need to put in a lot of effort or make a major change to get the result you want. But sometimes, it's possible to get a good result with just a tiny change. The author of that story recommends buying a proper kettle to make tea; an HN user suggested buying a second laptop power adapter.

Here's one of my own: I used to put my laundry in a mesh bag. In order to put something into it, I'd have to find it, open it, and put in the clothes. Yeah, it only takes a few seconds, but it was enough that I'd often just put clothes on the floor, especially when I was in a hurry, so my floor would almost always be covered in clothes. Then I got a laundry basket. Now all I had to do was throw the clothes in. Overnight, the problem disappeared.

Have you encountered anything similar? Mediating 15 minutes every day, kitchen appliances, a water bottle at your desk, saying hello to everyone you meet, etc. Maybe it saves you 10 minutes every day or maybe it just puts a smile on your face.
I'm in. Great opportunity to network with like-minded people
iPad review: It sucks.
I was recently pondering on this after another HN article about 'whiteness workshops' (http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2758198). I felt that what both these articles are saying is very wrong, and I guess it comes down to this.

In the UK we have plenty of immigrants who are never going to have the same life as me. Virtually every phrase he uses in this article applies to them.

And they're white. They're from the old communist block.

We also have plenty of people who are poor, can only go to bad schools, are let down by the system and end up living in crappy council flats.

A lot of them are white too. We call them chavs. They are just poor, not a different race.

So no, I am not a racist because of where I was born, or my education, or the innumerable privileges I have received. Because if the sentiments in these two articles are right, I am racist against my own colour, which is impossible.

I am just lucky to be born in the country I was born in. So are you. If this really made you feel guilty, go do some volunteer work. But never think yourself a racist because of poorly thought out drivel like this.
Example: Anything that printed out something anywhere automatically generated a hyperlink to open an inspector on the underlying objects. No additional coding necessary. The facility was provided through around inheritance in MOP.
@thecadmus will be there.
My wife and I engage in conversations about tasks.
And if you want to crash ie 8, try this jquery plugin http://haecker.me/trac/blog/2009/12/crash-ie7-with-javascrip... to get them to upgrade to a decent browser </shameless plug>
"But last year, CouchDB was the future. Today it's Cassandra. In a few months, it could well be MongoDB or Redis."

There's a reason you didn't see Twitter switching to CouchDB last year, and the reason is Cassandra is the only one of those four that does scale-out. So... no, "one of these things is not like the others."

"That doesn't make it the official strategy"

It makes it their only strategy at all to make it past the vapor stage. I'm not a Drizzle expert, but I do work with the core Drizzle team.
The iPhone is really open and functional compared to the phones that preceded it. Just downloading a ringtone for most prior phones was more expensive than full-fledged games on the iPhone. The app store is far from perfect, but it's a very open market compared to anything I've seen out of Nokia or any of the Japanese handset makers.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water — in Legos
Live: Digital Economy Bill
How to succeed as an intern
Merrian Webster definition of "News"
1 a : a report of recent events

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/news

In the information age "a week old is not recent". This is contextual. (Some living in Indonesia would find a week old report on US politics to be "recent").
Relevant if you're on linux and want something more mature:

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html
Relevant project "Long News" - http://longnow.org/ - "How many of today's headlines will matter in 100 years? 1000? Kirk Citron's "Long News" project collects stories that not only matter today, but will resonate for decades -- even centuries -- to come." via TED Talks - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kirk_citron_and_now_the_re...
Logarithmic calendar view
This is very cool ... I'm almost done with an iPad-specific portfolio solution now.

Right now, I'm using jQuery to detect rotation and adjust the attr/css of things accordingly.
I don't know about putting into production, but it took me a couple minutes to get a 4-node cluster as virtual servers under Debian and OpenVZ. It's very, very easy.
I think it has more to do with pinch to "peek" at photo albums.
The idea that you can expend an icon to reveal a preview of the content is an innovative idea, which differentiate their products / apps.
It makes sense for them to protect it.
WebGL Tutorials
That explains the lack of multitasking. Multitasking would work if background apps just swapped to disk and slept. The current guidance for developers (on exit, save state; on startup, restore state) is a poor man's version of swap.
I'm from Ottawa but I'm definitely in. Any other Ottawans want to car pool?
Ron Conway Explained
yep, here too
The problem with these sites are the stupid jokes. Half of the ideas on wrappr are meant to be funny or ironic.
UI Focused iPad Game Changer in Electronic Design iSuppli Teardown Reveals
http://help.apple.com/ipad/mobile/interface/
It also doesn't make sense to spend the ridiculously high amounts of money required to fly things through the air (what are we, birds?) when trains do just fine.

It also doesn't make sense to store all of those files in a mainframe when the filing cabinets do just fine.

It also doesn't make sense to spend the absurd amounts of money required to develop a packet-based communication network when telegraphs and telephones do just fine.

It also doesn't make sense to go to the moon with humans when we can just send a probe there.
engineering school tends to fix you like that.
When you take a job, it's an investment. You want to make sure that the company you are investing in takes itself very seriously. Asking for Ninjas and Rockstars to fulfill an important role? Works only if you're casting for a movie.
If you'd like to get a close look at one, there's one in the SAC museum, just outside of Omaha, NE.

http://www.sasmuseum.com/2008/11/21/sr-71a-blackbird/
UTorrent Download Speeds Beat Vuze By 16%
Mission Blue: filling in the blanks...