skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After playing for a few minutes I'm very impressed with this, and I could easily see it becoming an essential part of my workflow.

In short, one keyboard shortcut will give you a shortened URL to share whatever you're currently dealing with. For example, if I select a file in the Finder and hit the shortcut, it's uploaded to my account and a link is automatically added to my copy/paste buffer. If it's a web page, just the URL is shortened and placed in the buffer. There are a bunch of plugins ("Raindrops") to decide what to do in each case, with included ones covering the basic Apple apps (iTunes, Finder, Safari) and extra ones for things like Chrome, Aperture and Photoshop.

The whole thing is presented gorgeously.
The Evolution of Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2010
This one made me do a triple take.

First I thought it had to be some crazy guy (holding in my heart, of course, that 1x10^-20 chance that it was a real time traveler).

Then I remembered the day and realized this must have been the guy's idea of an April Fool's joke.

Then I remembered I was reading something on the Internet on this day, and that the story itself had to be a prank.

Well played, CNet.
Very very cool, I just signed up, but I'd feel a hell of a lot better about the URLs for uploaded files if they were big, opaque UUIDs instead of short URLs.
The Technium: Twitter Predicts the Future
Agreed, I think the best part of it is how well it stays out of the way!

History, download counts, and web access to uploaded files sweeten the deal.
Not bad compensation for a start-up.
"address: http:/www.nytimes.com"

Aren't they missing a slash or am I missing something?
What is console command to draw fps in top right? I can only remember 'timerefresh'.
Yes!

But waiting for the mythical version that I want - where's my camera? Where's 4g? And where did that SD slot and USB go? And 1024x768? And why 16gb as the bare minimum ?
Hey that's better than me. I didn't get any of them.
The idea behind the short URLs is probably to encourage sharing (like via Twitter).

Why would you prefer longer URLs?
thanks. if anyone else is curious, this seems to be the thesis - http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1992/6267.html
Ask HN: I built this for my family's picture framing company...your thoughts?
This is a website I built for my family's picture framing company. I didn't know how or have the time to build a full blown shopping cart etc, so I am using Wufoo and a really simple pricing plan. We are advertising on Facebook - the largest photo sharing site on the web.

I wanted to ask the HN community what they thought of it since you guys have a different perspective than a lot of my peers. Any advice would be so appreciated!
Does now
The register page could use a short "Enter your email and desired password" somewhere on the form. I clicked the link and thought I was at the login page (with login being highlighted in black at the top right).

Or just something to make clear that it's the register page and not the login page (I thought the blue register button was a link to take me to the real registration page).

I'm usually pretty good with these things, but I got thrown for a loop at first.
That's really, really cool. I've never seen the stock options/equity listed on a hiring page before.
This is a website I built for my family's picture framing company. I didn't know how or have the time to build a full blown shopping cart etc, so I am using Wufoo and a really simple pricing plan. Or at least, I think it is a simple plan - you tell me!

We are advertising on Facebook because it is the largest photo sharing site on the web. Getting loads of clicks, but not many orders.

I wanted to ask the HN community what they thought of it since you guys have a different perspective than a lot of my peers. Any advice would be so appreciated!
Ruby on Rails Tutorial Chapter 9 (Updating, showing, and deleting users) is out
asl
6/m/battleschool
I AM SO PLEASED
The Elements of Programming Style
No, a versioned filesystem is the classic example. Once you empty trash, those files are gone forever. When you delete a file from a versioned store, it's only gone until you remember you want it again.
Not an April fools joke. http://imgur.com/JLfu6.jpg
The coming inflation wave
I'm reasonably sure this is not true.

Anecdotally, for starters, I've never seen a site do this for mobile.

Even sites with robust liquid layouts cannot be expected to condense to fit in 480px. At that width even ubiquitous things like a 2-column layout don't work well. Displays that small need a different approach.
if you request row 42, row 43 will be in memory by the time you need it

True, but this is rarely the case for OLTP workloads. What happens when there is a credit card transaction with a user ID 100731, followed by a credit card transaction with a user ID 8762592? Even for range queries, what you're saying is true only if you're walking through the primary index. The second you start walking through the secondary indices, you're back to random read land (my Facebook friends, for example, are extremely unlikely to be stored in the user table sequentially).

SSDs are better for random writes

Random writes are very tricky on SSDs because of the slow erase operation. The FTL controllers are getting much better at this on micro benchmarks, but it's very difficult to measure random write performance profile over different timelines and different disk space utilization scenarios.
Congratulations guys, you deserve it, and thank you to anybody else out there writing drivers or optimizing software for changes happening in hardware that we all take for granted.
Lock-free != data corruption. You just use atomic builtins[1] as primitives, instead of mutexes and semaphores.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.1.2/gcc/Atomic-Builtins....
My guess is that the address appears that way in the original publication. The web was new then, and the other slash had not yet been deeply ingrained into the culture as it is now.
They're still assholes offline, they're just prevented from being overtly so by social custom (at least that's how I see it)
I'm completely excited about everything that's happening in the html5 ecosystem.

It's been a plateau for the last 10 years, even with the buzzwords that have come and gone, not a lot of what I saw impressed me, and now it seems like all of a sudden, like you've walked round a corner and discovered some completely fucking mind blowing sight.

So brilliant that many of the things we have been trying to do but having to wrestle with the platform to achieve, are now supported and standardised.
Get Your Fucking Feet Off The Table
The funny thing is is I've never owned a server, and from the look of things, probably never will. Granted I've only been running my company for a ~6 months or so but the idea of owning a server feels pretty archaic.
I really wanted this to be true. Just for a second.
I agree. It took me 30s to figure out what was going on, and I run a web startup.
Getting started with Node and CoffeeScript
gzip ~= zlib, It's the same authors and the same algorithms.
Harvard Admits Record-Low 6.9% as Applicants Increase
I would jump on this immediately if I was in the bay area and didn't already have my own startup. As it is, I'll have to satisfy my (data)base urges by writing my own high performance SSD-optimized key-value store.
When we started DotSpots in 2007, we leased physical servers from iWeb. It was far cheaper than EC2, but you lose of ton of agility when you can't pave a server and rebuild it from the command line. We switched to EC2 and starting paying a bit more, but we've been able to expand capacity much more nimbly than before.

The only thing I'd recommend running outside of EC2 would be memcache, but that's only if you're really pinching pennies. If you're an early stage startup and you're not running virtual machines, you might be doing something wrong (IMHO).
Say that tomorrow!
"Non-technical", when said by a manager, usually means something like: "I don't know what you do, I don't want to know what you do, I don't respect what you do, and I'm scared of what you do."

Your "avoided the osmosis" part is essentially correct.
Getting in front of consumers looking for deals (i.e. ways to spend their money) must be a good thing -- consider it a "real world" slickdeals.

Just a few ideas:

Sponsored listings

Analytics

Commission on deals

Subscribers (early access to the best deals, or subscriber-only deals)
If you go to any engineer-focus start-up discussion site (JOS, RiR, Erik Sink, HN, PG, bothsidesofthetable .. you name it) that's exactly what they don't hear.

If anything, engineers are under-confidant about business things. They seem to think that selling stuff takes at least a 3 year degree (or equivalent experience) just like writing a program.
He mentions all of the overhead of running your own data center, but fails to provide a balanced analysis by omitting the significant expense of running an AWS deployment properly. Just as AWS solves some problems of dedicated servers, it introduces its own challenges which one would not have to consider when running dedicated servers.
Banco Itaú - Feito Para Você
AngelList is the real deal. I've heard quite a few people having some success there. Even as a YC company, there is a startling hole after Demo Day... It can take months to close a round (it took us 5ish), even loaded down with Demo Day biz cards and meeting invites. If I were doing YC again today, I'd try to get on AngelList right after Demo Day...
Are we talking about low-level or high-level locking? I am talking about high-level locking semantics, like transactions.
I can't get chromium or chrome to display anything WebGL. Has anyone not on Mac had success?

I got the server\code to compile in CygWin and run under windows7 64bit, I just can't get chrome\chromium to display WebGL.

I'm using the windows nighly build of chromium and "--enable-webgl --no-sandbox" as mentioned here:
http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/wiki/CompatibleBrow...
Obviously. If he was suggesting outright piracy, Windows Server and Oracle would be much more profitable.
There are going to be a lot of these arguments over things like this. Are you sure you're working with the right person? How long have you been friends?
I'll monitor this thread and answer any questions you have about AngelList.
Interesting, I haven't gotten to hear the thoughts of too many other telecom engineers when it comes to next generation languages and threading. I'm pretty convinced it has to be one of the hardest problems to get right.

Speaking of STM and locks, have you seen this epic debate?

http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/05/clojure-stms-vs.h...

The problem with telecom software (that I'm dealing with now, in my very humble opinion), and the reason it hurts my head, is because you're essentially dealing with a distributed system, each leg being a node
(since each action a leg takes needs to go out over the wire). Not only do you need to see consistent 'state', you also need to make sure your actions are handled correctly as well.
Quake 2 Ported to the Browser With GWT and HTML5
I giggled at that quote for ten minutes.
At least as they've announced it so far, RethinkDB is a back-end for MySQL; so you should still have all of MySQL's transactional functionality.

(I'm sure Slava will correct me if I'm wrong here...)
So is there a Linux version?
Shoes, Boots, Sandals and Bags from Shoes.com
I'm not convinced. Modern OSes use locking extensively and do perfectly fine on multicore applications (FreeBSD's pgsql performance scales linearly up to 16 cores last time I saw graphs).

Obviously you need to be smart about how you do your locking (no giant lock!) but the mere fact of having locking is not automatically a problem.
I think your landing page needs a bit of optimization. I think you should have actual product samples/photos higher in the fold. I'm not sure the big "easiest way to print and frame" text needs to be THAT big, it takes up quite a big of vertical height. Same thing with the free shipping in 2010. Unnecessarily big, I get that you want it to be simple, but its just eating up too much space.

Even after a quick skim of the text and prices, I don't really know what you're selling. Your selling me picture frames? I don't see any variety of picture frames on the main page. I have to click "place order" before I can even see what the products are.

Good luck!
This had a bit of a K-Pax feeling, even though K-Pax is not about time travel. And there's The Time Traveller's Wife if you want a less nerdy time travel story...
When a company is downsized to 0 employees it doesn't matter who were the most "bureaucratically adept" and were the last to turn out the lights.

It's "creative destruction", not "creative downsizing".
Well, I like two definitions.

1: From the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html):

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

2: From Kent Beck on Extreme Programming:

Simplicity is the most intensely intellectual of the XP values. To make a system simple enough to gracefully solve only today's problem is
hard work. Yesterday's simple solution may be fine today, or it may look simplistic or complex. When you need to change to regain
simplicity, you must find a way from where you are to where you want to be.

And a related one from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
1996 was quite a while ago if you think about it. 14 years is a long time.
Can I just say this made me admire the man even more...

But he never lost his interest in modern technology, even asking about Apple's highly anticipated iPad from his sick bed.

"He was interested to see one," said Roberts, who called his father "a true renaissance man."

That's how I want to go out...loving technology to the very last second. RIP Mr. Roberts
Just FYI, next time someone tells you the thick client is dead, hopefully you'll have the good sense to call them a fool on the spot rather than waiting five years for their foolishness to be proven.
To prevent stuff like this, I guess:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226313
I have the same problem with Twitter.
If a society has a complexity threshold, why is ours so much higher than, say, the Romans'? Perhaps scientific and technological development keep pushing the threshold higher, or mitigate the effects of smaller collapses.

Or maybe societies just collapse with some set probability, and we've been lucky so far.
here it is as a fortune mod file: http://db.glug-bom.org/lug-authors/philip/misc/fortune-mod-p...
Does this have permissions? Or is it intended to be open-sharing? The landing page is not clear.
$dig xkcdsucks.blogspot.com

Unrecognized service.
Really, I though creative destruction would be something more like, letting GM fall apart, so that several new companies could buy the pieces, cheap, and creatively make new and innovative automobiles.
From the way back machine http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...

Wow... sweet gif!
Color me confused. I signed up, downloaded the app (Mona Lisa?) and it's running (I see a blue cloud in my menu bar). I tried dragging/dropping an image on top of it expecting it to upload.... nada. Tried dragging the Cloud.app file to the dock and then dropping an image on that.... nada. What am I missing?
I agree. For the iPhone at least, I think the approach that works best is to be double-tap friendly.

I would rather have a site that retains its standard look and feel but easily lets me zoom into the content I'm interested in than a site that tries to squeeze it's multi-column layout onto a small screen.
Aw... I was hoping this was you, Jason.
IBM Launches Global Entrepreneur Initiative
This is relatively trivial compared to running your own physical server setup (colo or datacenter). Think about where we're at now with EC2: EBS-backed servers are about as easy to manage as a regular VPS, plus they can be regularly snapshotted (every few minutes if you want to) and moved to another datacenter in very little time in the event of an outage.
The former. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191694
Right, like the fact that an instance can have only one ip address. Virtual hosting for multiple websites with SSL goes right out the window. There are a couple solutions to this problem, but they're either impractical or just plain unacceptable for production boxes. All platform choices have these kinds of gotchas and/or extra costs for things that are just free if you own the server. I use AWS every chance I get, but sometimes a project requirement forces you to go dedicated.
and the headline reading
'Europe Betting on Self-Regulation to control the internet'
Microsoft Takes Issue With Chrome Feature That Can be Turned Off
The secret to Texas' success
My thoughts concur. To restate it in my own words:

As digital technology becomes more complex it tends to commoditize.

You can see the phenomenon across both software and hardware. For example, in music:

The Fairlight and Synclavier were monumentally expensive(priced in six-digits during the late 70s thru early 80s), being the earliest commercial computer-based synthesizers. By the late 80s multiple options existed to get similar functionality at a fraction of the cost(new hardware synths, MIDI, and 16-bit computers). And in the two decades after that, computer-based solutions grew better and started dominating. Now you can do all your synthesis, sampling, and processing "in the box" - and solutions with more flexibility than anything in the 80s are available for free. If you want to produce professionally and do things as quickly and reliably as possible, you can splash out for the cutting-edge commercial software, but it absolutely isn't necessary for amateur use. The most expensive stuff now is the analog bits: the guitars and microphones and monitors and preamps. But for a fraction of the old Synclavier's cost, you can now bury yourself in the top-of-the-line equipment of 2010. Apart from a few artisan works and rare vintage pieces, there's almost no "multi-millionare" grade equipment left to buy. Music-making doesn't need capital anymore, just talent.
Remarkable Images: Everyday Life In North Korea
Writing Good Shrek Essay
This is a very popular topic for school essays nowadays. A Shrek essay has the advantage that every student has watched the movie, or at least has some idea on who this “big, stupid, ugly ogre” is (actually, a brave, good hearted antihero of our time). So don’t freak out if a teacher asks you to write an essay on this topic
What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Corporations
I'm really surprised by the cost as well. I develop ArcGIS Server apps for a living, and basic software licensing to do anything interesting is equivalent to 2 months of service at SimpleGeo. And the ESRI data ecosystem is far larger than what SimpleGeo is providing.

I was hoping to see a product targeted at small businesses, but honestly I don't see the appeal. There's a great opportunity to fill in the market gap that ESRI is ignoring, but ESRI will no doubt be rolling out cloud services soon too. I guess we'll have to wait and see how this pans out.
Phuby 1.0.0 Released
Great job! I like the chapter 2 very much.The explanation to git/github and deploying it to Heroku is great. What I would like to see are:
1. Explanation to the main concepts of dynamic web application. Something like this:http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/basics
2. Make the example to a considerable complexity. And show it at the very beginning.

I consider it a tutorial on how to develop a web app more than a rails tutorial.
I read over their page more carefully, and I think I see what they mean by "no locks". It means that the database stays internally consistent regardless of read or write order. When you start a transaction, you see the data in the log before you started, but you don't see any changes after you start. Fine.

You can get more isolation that this, and you need to to really keep your data consistent, but all DBs except Berkeley seem to have this off by default. So I am not too bothered by this, but I would be interested in seeing how well Rethink handles concurrent OLTP applications that actually care about data integrity. Caring about data integrity is slow, and Rethink might not speed this up all that much. Or it might :)
Quake 2 came out in 1997, 13 years ago. So HTML is catching up... slowly.
Nice concept, there's also html2text(1)

One would have thought if people used their @media css correctly this would be even easier ;)
Does the iPhone really have an SSD?
Amazon Customer Service
In a word: wow. I just got off the phone with Amazon customer service. It's 10:15 PM.

I called about a UPS Package that couldn't be delivered because I hadn't specified the apartment number. Since the package had already shipped, the Amazon rep said it was out of Amazon's hands.

I though I'd have to re-phone UPS and face it's automated machine. I was wrong. The Amazon rep said he'd conference call UPS with me on the line. In less than 15 seconds we were on the phone with a live UPS rep and I was clarifying the address.

The whole process took less than two minutes. This is some of the best customer service I have ever seen. Thank you, Amazon.
Must one give up grids for liquid layouts? Or is there some way to have both?
Technology is definitely a factor in allowing more complexity.

We didn't have the idea of "total war" until the 1850s and the Crimean War - nations in prior eras didn't have the resources to conscript the bulk of their fighting-able population, equip them, transport them, supply them, and command them. Industrialization allowed for en-mass conscription, the railroad made transportation and supply chains efficient, and the telegraph and refined clockwork made it possible to run a war on an intricate schedule.

Today our big change is in information technology, allowing the government to enact more powerful policies with less overhead. If we can do this right, we'll enjoy both the smallest and most efficient governments in history.
How to Recover Formatted Files from HDD
Some computer users may accidentally format their HDDs. The article lists 2 main formatting situations, and explains what happens to the formatted files and how to recover formatted files from hard drive.
> 44. Don’t strain to re-use code; reorganize instead.

that's a good one that is easy to forget when you get into re-use mode
I wonder if the number of great writers who wrote according to a "theory of fiction or narration" is greater than zero.

What percentage of writers in general write according to some such theory? And would their writing improve if they did?
The New York Times iPad app in iTunes (browse all apps)
Bayside Condomínios e Imóveis
I think Olson's full text is here: http://bit.ly/btbF1l
It's going pretty well, but we're cheating: we give the other devs both the CVS and the git checkout commands, and let them use what they want. The early adopters tend to be those who already use it outside of work.

I agree that the tools on Windows aren't stable: I've had to help debug at least 3 or 4 git installs of TortoiseGit-esque tools. I personally just use it from the command line.

Moving forward, we'll train people to use git when they go offsite with other developers, or if they're curious. Part of our job involves spending days away from an Internet connection, so they'll suddenly be sink-or-swim and probably never turn back :)
Ancient and Modern Mexican
And now we wait for someone to jailbreak the iPad
Sort of like cross posting from reddit to digg / news.yc only more time consuming?
Dusk Descends on Cairo and the Nile
Aha - this is from Cairo, it seems: http://72.233.92.162/showthread.php?p=381909
Soon ;-)
And... here you go: http://mantia.me/wallpaper/dont-panic/ :)
Why would you run memcache outside of your VLAN though, doesn't that obviate most of the point (speed) by adding so much network latency?
Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do