skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More generally speaking: set up the right infrastructure and own the right tools for common tasks. If you can save yourself a few minutes and a bit of frustration every day for a ten dollar investment or for a bit of effort once, it's worth it!

Some examples:
- owning extra power cords, batteries, memory cards, etc. for electronic devices
- setting up a power strip and various charging or connecting cables where they're easy to reach (consider the recently-circulated pic of the cables clipped to the edge of the desk.)
- own the right cooking utensils, pots, pans, maybe a slow cooker or rice steamer, and so on. There's no sense in frustrating yourself day after day because it's harder than it needs to be to make dinner.
- have appropriately-sized and located garbage cans, recycling bins, clothes hampers, toy boxes, file cabinets, and other types of containers.
- repair or replace broken stuff that regularly causes annoyance, like sticky file cabinet drawers.
HBase Digest
On the other hand, a domesticated platypus would be pretty awesome. You know, if they weren't poisonous.

Which is to say, a platypus isn't always the wrong choice, despite being goofy and seemingly impractical.
You can add my 'empirical' confirmation of your datapoint. We did the same thing with a webcam-in-a-frame using the webcam component, the link was left in-tact in almost all cases.
> Unlike the non-functioning spam-filters you speak of, the AppStore approval process actually has a flawless record of keeping it out.

Those non-functioning spam-filters also kept spam out when all you had to filter on were the words 'real estate,' 'viagra,' and 'cialis.' Lo and behold though, the world does not stagnate and those same filters are woefully inadequate today.

> Most likely, it's just as much or more because there's a paper trail from every app to its publisher

There are marketplaces out there where a person's entire identity (not just their credit card number) are bargained and traded. How closely does Apple monitor the information that is given to them? Does Apple continually pull credit reports on people to make sure that their information does not turn up stolen?

> a long with the fact that someone is at least going to make a cursory review of the app before giving it the 'OK'.

That cursory review means nothing. There are many apps which are nothing more than wrappers around websites. How long does it take to to build an app that is such, but waits for a trigger (at some point after the app is approved and has an installed base) to enabled its malicious features?

None of this even addresses possible zero-day exploits in apps that access external content (email worms, browser exploits, etc). If jail-breakers can run unsigned code on the iPhone, so can someone that exploits an app.
One of the things David Simon (of Homicide and The Wire fame) cites as a reason for newspapers declining is poor reporting. He says that with year after year of cuts, the number of journalists become smaller and smaller.

Plus, with older reporters getting booted, newer reporters are without good sources and usually have to cover more ground. Meaning, whereas in the 1980s a newspaper may have had one reporter for neighborhood X, one for Y, and another for Z; there is now just one reporter covering all 3. So the depth and expertise declines.

He cited a good recent case, where some police officers were involved in a shooting that may have been police brutality. In the past, the newspaper would have sent a reporter over to cover the hearing. But at that hearing, there were no reporters or 'citizen'-journalist bloggers. So without proper coverage, there is a risk that police misdeeds may go unchecked/under reported.
I may not be up to speed with the whole argument, but is there a middle ground that neither party seems to want to meet at?

Net Neutrality proponents seem to want to do away with QOS entirely, but this seems to be on the grounds of ensuring the big operators don't use it for evil.

QOS can be an extremely beneficial thing. How many times has anyone been on a Skype call when the video dropped or the audio came through garbled? How many of you want to ensure that when you're playing Call of Duty that the very milisecond you hit the trigger for a headshot, your packet doesn't get dropped and you miss your target? On the flip side, how many of you don't care if an email you send gets sent that very milisecond or one or two seconds later? And who would care if a podcast you have downloading from iTunes overnight takes 15 minutes or 20 minutes?

This kind of QOS ensures that video, audio, and gameplay get priority over other forms of data that are not as time-sensitive.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, because this overall issue does seem a bit complex.
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Small businesses are the ones most likely to benefit from preventing net neutrality -- via an acquisition by a content provider like Comcast or Verizon or AOL, etc.

It is the companies with > 30% market share that stand to lose, since ISPs would be able to pick winners and fragment the market further. This is why Google supports net neutrality.
It's never too late to give up
A. Point 1
1. Topic Sentence
2. Concrete Detail
3. Commentary
4. Concrete Detail
5. Commentary
6. Commentary
7. Transition Sentence
While it is a clear "win for property rights", when their property is delivering you, the subscriber, to a "free market", they should only be able to charge you for delivery, not say "I'll let you in the free market, but you can only browse certain stores or for certain periods of time, etc."

That is ludicrous.

Could you imagine flying USAIR to a city and when getting to the airport you were under USAIR's restrictions in that city?

Sounds like a crazy analogy until you really think about it.
The purpose of iPad is to make money for Apple shareholders and it shows all signs of being wildly successful. I'd never even seen this website until the link appeared here. "You do the math".

Incidentally, iPad is merely a netbook with a detachable keyboard. If Samsung had made this and called it the NC30, would there be as much hate?
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If you want to work on this bigger ORM refactoring I'm available for mentoring help with the App Engine backend (most probably others, too) and with non-relational DB concepts in general (if you need/want my help there). Like I said, we initially wanted to do something along the lines you suggest, but we couldn't really justify the significantly increased amount of work compared to the current approach. If you think it's worth the effort then please go for it.

In any case, the final nonrel backend API won't be much (or any) different from what we have now, so if someone wants to write a backend, please do so.
You are right. The reason Google supports net neutrality (for example) is to prevent Comcast from making a deal with Vimeo to offer QOS on Vimeo videos, allowing them to play at noticeably higher quality.

Comcast could even make a deal with a yet unheard of startup and suddenly Google would lose lots of market share to an upstart who was willing to accept Comcast's terms.
The issue isn't so much Apple and the iPad/iPhone, but whether this will start a trend. In 10 years time will all computer platforms be closed, unless you shell out top-dollar for a laptop/desktop computer? I hope to hell not.
Why is it that this Schneier guy is mentioned on HN all the time? If it's not Schneier it's this Paul Graham, both of which I have never heard of and that I suspect don't even exist.
Be clear, concise and to the point.

Entertain or inform. Do both for bonus points.

Be logical and honest.
John Carmack Archive - Interviews
ddrescue is a godsend. I actually had my backup drive bite the dust on me. All my live data was fine, but my backup drive ate it. ddrescue saved the day.

I agree with pretty much everyone here, though, in saying that "restore it from backup" is the right answer, and the fact that the parent-linked article doesn't mention it anywhere makes it worthy of ridicule. Fortunately, the second commenter on the article injects a bit of sanity into the situation.
Regarding your point #3: how would "scrub" work with interconnected user data? Comment threads like this one are a good example; my comment is dependent on yours for context. Should you be able to delete your data and leave my comment dangling? If so, should your deletion cascade to my related data? Shouldn't I have a say in that?
Avoid languages. I have yet to see a language presentation that didn't devolve into a discussion of some esoteric "feature" that was cool but almost completely useless.

Instead choose concepts, e.g., functional programming and use a well known language to illustrate its benefits.

Or choose a new, interesting and relevant technology to discuss.

What would I like to see? A presentation on what it takes, from start to finish, to develop and release a simple iPad application, along with a short sample app you've written for illustration. Fit that in an hour and you'll have a packed room.
I guess it comes down to how you approach it.

I had no reason to expect a statement trivially-falsifiable when held to the standard of universal truth was meant to be taken as such. So I assumed there was a particular context relevant to the assertion and was unsurprised to find that there was.

If you approach article titles expecting to find absolute logical precision, I'd imagine this is but one of many 'wrong' titles.
I believe issues are being confused among those passionate on net neutrality.

I don't think ANYONE here wants the FCC to have any further jurisdiction (especially over the internet) and power.

People view it as a loss for the net neutrality fight and overlook the implications of the FCC being the white knight to win the battle.

BUT, I think many here agree that the FCC should be able to enforce net neutrality in the sense of having jurisdiction over the delivery of the service known as the internet and it stops there, just like telephone. The FCC can't sensor what you say on a telephone, but they could have dropped the hammer on a telco for not allowing you access to certain area codes or making you wait longer to connect with someone just because they feel like it.
Or: let users influence tactics, but not strategy.
Also for those that just prefer reading :-)

So, yeah, thanks for the transcript.
What privacy concerns are there over outsourcing things that will likely require sensitive date; i.e., Searching for a dentist with insurance information, renting a car with credit card information, potentially making credit card payments with bank info, etc.?
I've actually tried the freezer trick in the past, even though I knew the problem was with a stuck spindle. I wasn't able to get any data off it, but the drive did make a completely different noise when it was frozen, so the cold did have some sort of effect.

A professional repair costs a minimum of $600, so if you know from the beginning that your data is not worth that much, then just go ahead and try it.
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"I don't want you using anything I might have done here to make money," said the guy who just got a bunch of not-free-to-create, not-free-to-serve content for nothing.

We can bemoan the current state of things all we like, but people still need to be paid for their time. The only real effect of the type of privacy legislation Schneier advocates would be to make explicit and thorough opt-in mandatory in order to access most content - the average individual would effectively have less privacy than they did before the legislation.
I wasn't disagreeing - just adding something :)
I've been using this technique to recover data from bad drives for 13 years. It's worked for me with drives from the following manufacturers:
Quantum (Fireball & BigFoot),
Seagate,
Samsung

It doesn't always work. When it does work, you'll get to read data off it just once after the freeze. Sometimes a refreeze allows you to read data again, but never more than that.
Wouldn't then there be a market created where you weren't locked into these restrictions?

In addition, how long will these cable monopolies last when we'll be able to erect wireless towers and get internet that way, completely superseding cable carriers?
That does not seem inexpensive when you take into account what you actually get.
But that is a defense of ORMs, not using ORMs for NoSQL solutions. The value of document stores for me is that I don't have to worry about JOINs or normalization - and thus the layer of abstraction between the object oriented system and the document store is no longer necessary.

This is opposed to relational databases, where you generally either go with a DAL if you want to be low-level or an ORM if you're willing to sacrifice some scalability. And the loss in scalability is not comparable to that of going from assembly to a higher level language. ORMs include often unnecessary JOINs and other logarithmic queries whose performance degrades with the size of the data set. With programming languages, performance loss is usually "constant" so it's a much less painful pill to swallow.
I had a laptop hard drive suffer a head crash on the lower platter, and it was able to seek past it. Further, the freezer trick seemed to work a little, but it may have been simply letting the drive rest for a while. I do know that I've never seen it take 12 full hours to reach temperature equilibrium in a hard drive. 3 or 4 usually does the trick just fine. I eventually got most of my important data off. This was before external hard drives were commonplace and frequent backups of laptops made much sense, though.
Do you think the FCC (or those who lobby it passionately) will stop with a small bit of power voluntarily?
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This also applies to writing email. You should be able to get your point across in your subject.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go shopping. I’m out of cereal, and—what? Cap’n Crunch is $2 off? Better make it two boxes.

I seriously bought two boxes of Captain Crunch last week because they were on sale. Now I am stuck much more sugar than I can handle. Ugh.
No worries at all- you're right! As a user, there's a ton of problems with the app, so if you want to search it's totally a one star app right now. I'm was just trying to point out the reasoning from a business/product perspective, which is usually the context of HN conversations.

If you emailed our support email I'd apologize for not having book deletion, and that we know how dumb it is to not have it, but we wanted to be careful in our first update without iPads to test on. Here, I'll explain the actual reasoning behind not having stuff.

Definitely check out the app in another week or so, though, we'll be rocking through the problems in the app in short order. We already have the code written in our iPhone app, it's just a matter of creating the interfaces.
I'm not saying they're saints and you have the right to be bitter, but from what I understand I don't think Jay would have let the VCs get so much control. But then who knows what's really going...
Maybe he's "right" in some sense, but I can't stand this guy. That level of anger and hate against Strunk and White seems strange and unwarranted. I think people shouldn't preach about style until they can write something that's not unpleasant to read.

Contrast this to White himself, who is quite enjoyable.
YouTube isn't exactly a shining example of high-quality grade video, but I totally get your point.

I'm just hoping that a tiering of QOS from a technical standpoint is not entirely ignored. Perhaps it's something already being addressed by Net Neutrality proponents.

Edit: Here's an article from a Cisco podcast that discusses this same issue I've mentioned: http://www.ciscohandsontraining.com/2009/09/need-for-qos-ver...
It's still far too easy to ask the wrong questions. One of my favorite podcasts, popSiren over at Revision3[0], had a great first season. But then they had a survey and asked viewers what they wanted to see more of. The second season turned into just another "cool websites" podcast, and completely stopped being interesting or entertaining. Viewership fell through the floor, and the show was dropped.

[0] http://revision3.com/popsiren/launch
I think ESR is respected more in the "philosophy of open source" department than for being a real developer. Kind of like the way I respect PG for his startup philosophies more than I do for being an actual Peter Thiel-style genius. There's room for both and I don't think it screws up your point.
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Ask HN: What are some alternative YC-like programs?
Our start-up got an interview at Y-Combinator last week, but unfortunately did not get in :(

I would say there were three major reasons we were interested in YC; in order they are:

1) Getting to know other people who are working full time on their start-ups.

2) A great network of people who could introduce us to the right people for our project.

3) Really good advice from very experienced angels/entrepreneurs.

What are some alternatives to YC where we could find these things? This info could be really helpful to us so thanks ahead of time!

-Ryan
I don't think we share enough common ground to reach agreement. I am surprised you don't see how Bush benefited from deciding to ignore the GSE's misconduct.
Hmm, it looks like that bug's still open with no responses, 4 yrs later: http://bugs.debian.org/351745
Publisher Realizes Google Books Isn't Evil, But Quite Beneficial
Probably not, but then again, Samsung would've had it running Windows.

Apple's form factors are gorgeous, if not the most ergonomic, and their hardware is solid, if not the most performant, but they'd just be another Dell if they didn't focus on usability down to the core.

And that's why there is both love and hate for Apple. Usability is a political decision that not everyone agrees with because to be usable is not to make everything possible.
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I hope so too. Surprisingly, I was watching youtube 1080p content via AppleTv the other day and was quite impressed. I certainly know why Comcast opposes net neutrality :)
I like the phrasing of the title, i.e. keeping track of what actually works.

One tip that's helped me: when something makes you feel good, add it to feelgood.txt. Over time, you'll start to see patterns (vs. the random, fallible memories/ideas we have about what makes us happy).

Every few days or so I'll have a random entry [7/23/09: felt good to chill with Andreas. played games, chatted, had bfast, etc. hospitality. nice to catch up. 7/15/09: Felt good to 1) post to BE and 2) exercise today].

Looking back, I can see what actually worked in making me happy.
I agree with the premise, that the iPad seems inexpensive because of anchoring, but I completely disagree with the analysis, that the keynote presentation where the $999 is "crushed" by $499 had anything to do with it.

Fundamentally, people expect the iPad to be expensive because the iPhone was very expensive. Because Macbook Pros are very expensive, and because Macbook Airs are very expensive. Because Apple DVI connectors are expensive, because iPhone headset replacements are expensive. Because basically, everything with an Apple logo costs an arm and a leg.

So when you hear that you can get an iPad for less than twice the cost of an iPod touch then of course, that seems like a really good deal. (And only $100 more than a high-capacity iPod touch.)

The foldable iPad case $40 + keyboard dock $70 + spare charging cable $30 = $140. That's 30% of the iPad right there. So relative to all other Apple products and relative to its accessories an iPad for $500 looks like a steal.
I can only agree with these points. I experienced all of them myself.
Just throw them away, dude. You shouldn't be eating that stuff.

Watch this: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
Slippery slope arguments are almost never persuasive.

Giving the FCC a mandate to enforce openness is in no way giving it a mandate to enforce censorship. The world doesn't exist on a 1-dimensional plane between zero FCC power and ultimate FCC power. There's other stuff going on.
Our whole app is based around making it really, really easy to browse and download all kinds of books, with custom collections bringing out specific topics and authors.

With iBooks you have the same content, but it's hidden behind the paid books, and there aren't any good ways of discovering new things to read.
Definitely will keep an eye. Since you're gonna have marketplace, you might as well have existing products out there as well.

Also, use your blog wisely by showcasing new products and some product screen shots. The same goes for your product lineup - screen shots! Think Apple App Store ;-)

Also, don't neglect SaaS side of things.
Isn't this the same old DRM/Terrorism loop where every breach of the pointless and/or ineffective restrictions is used as justification for the next round of pointless and/or ineffectual restrictions. And along the way you the honest consumer/citizen lose the ability to modify your device, to reverse engineer, to crack protection for any reason, and various other 21st century civil rights as collateral damage.
I don't think control / lock-in have anything to do with usability.
One cannot be 100% sure a CA isn't compromised by a robot coming from the future. You don't have to 100% trust a CA, but you have to know how much trust you'll give to the whole system.

Right now, I won't trust it that much.
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Dan Ariely gives a related TED talk: "Are we in control of our own decisions?"

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

Look around 11:30 for a few examples of how comparing options affects us more than looking at each individually.

On a side note, it also seems inexpensive because it's $499 and not $500! Psychological pricing is one of my larger pet peeves...
Another example: in my work group, "data" specifically means "measurements made in the real world." Numbers generated by a computer simulation don't qualify. So in our code, "data" could be a perfectly meaningful variable name.

Personally, the worst variable name I've ever seen was "C". This was a vector of concentrations. Unfortunately, the language was Fortran-77-- where a "C" in column 1 indicates a comment line.
Actually I find it quite different from high-school essays.

In the "5 paragraph essay" you have 3 ideas, in the middle, and you summarize them in the intro and re-summarize in the conclusion. This advocates the journalism focus of getting your big idea out early, and expanding if needed. Most high school essays wouldn't teach you much reading just the title + abstract (first paragraph).
Then I want my chunk of the property back, the amount that the taxpayers shelled out to subsidize the telcos laying down said equipment, and which Comcast and others readily accepted.
Well, instead of thinking about normalization you now have to think about denormalization. It's just the other extreme. This isn't really a philosophical decision. Either you want to have an abstraction layer that takes care of these things for you or you want to write your code manually. I prefer the abstraction because it gives me more time to think about the problems that matter.
This works the other direction, too -- adding features without changing the initially-quoted price.

That's often the tag on infomercials: after they set you up for the cheez-o-matic for such-and-such price, they "also throw in a free" mini-cheez-o-matic.

Or you get a year of free support, or the 3 megabit connect for the 1.5 megabit price, or some other "added features" that make you feel like you're getting a deal even if you're really not.
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