skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, that should work just fine. Despite the less than reputable words it generates, the back-end is reputable and powered through WhySpam.Me. You can delete you shady email at any time, and we won't send you unsolicited messages or sell your info.

Don't take my word, though...put us to the test!
This seems like a fundamental flaw in the client-server model when hosting social/personal information. The server host must pay the electric bill (3rd party) leading to a natural conflict with the interests of the user.

I'd like to think that there is a market rather than regulatory solution. But the story of Zero Knowledge Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radialpoint#History) shows that retail privacy did not find a market during the DotCom boom. Perhaps highly sensitive social network content will change that.
Or we could just move on...
> It's important to have this awareness because increasing liquidity might not always be the best way to increase the efficiency of allocation.

It doesn't matter whether it's the best way, just that it's effective. You typically get better results by applying many improvements than you do by just applying the "best" improvement.

And, liquidity isn't just about improving allocation.

> Software tools have value equal to (amount of things produced with them) - (value of things produced without them).

Actually not. The value of anything is the benefit of said thing minus its cost. It's otherwise independent of the value of other things.

You may decide between two things based on their relative value, but that's different.
"On Writing Well" is one of my favorite books! I try to read it at least once a year.
Since iBooks is free and comes with (I'm guessing) most of this content for free, and is heavily promoted by Apple, this just goes to show what you can do if you find some extra value. Is it the cover art that people like so much? I can't imagine that the reading interface could be much better than iBooks, and iBooks has search.

Does anyone know what the differentiator for this app is (over iBooks)?
Very well said. Now that you are #27 you can add the extra features needed to keep the app at the top. The important thing was getting it up there and on people's iPads in the first place.

Also for iPad and iPhone apps sometimes interface is more important than functionality. The majority of users want apps that look pretty.
I had a bad experience doing this accidentally. I mistakenly left my laptop in my car overnight in the dead of a Boston winter...and the next morning my HD, which has moving parts, did not like it one bit and made creaking noises. I realized what had happened and let it warm up for a while on my lap, then restarted and it was fine. Perhaps mine was just way to cold and there is a mimimum temperature one could suggest?
Thanks for the interview, Patrick. I am also curious about what led you to switch from the Java Swing app to the web app. If you could do it over again would you start with the desktop app and move to the web or start with the web?
I know this if off-topic, but what is the best resource to learn Cassandra? I can't find anything good searching through Google.
It was an oversimplification, but still valid. With public/private keys you know something that no one else knows (your private key). But instead of needing a shared secret, you are sharing your public information. The big difference (IMO) in public/private crypto and traditional shared secret crypto is the decoupling of encryption and decryption.

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that public key cryptography is very processor intensive. Because of this, instead of using your private key to sign every bit of communication, you use the public/private key crypto to negotiate a shared secret for a different algorithm, such as AES.

So it still comes down to having a shared secret. Public/private keys just change the way that secret is shared.

Going back to the issue at hand, the question is where did you get the original public key from. This has always been the "problem" in public key systems. You have to trust the public key that you get in the first place.
Apple as Politician
Recently, Copyblogger had a good article elaborating on just what you said: http://www.copyblogger.com/tips-for-better-writing/
Which Essays are Best Essays?
Have you ever wonder why you don’t get more than C minus grades while other students get straight A’s? How come some student write the best essays while others are always trying harder and harder for nothing? Is it that they are gifted writers? Or is there such thing as an “essay recipe” that they know of?
Is it "private space with nothing to think about" or running water?

Based on my experience from time spent in private spaces with nothing to think about that don't have running water, I'm inclined to doubt the significance of the effect of running water.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1234460
The best writing advice I ever had as an engineer was, "Sure it can be nine pages, but the journal charges $300 for every page over six."
Stop Breaking These Laws (of Software)
That amounts to little more than intellectual masturbation at this point. Not going there isn't an option, we are there. Even Hillary Clinton and John Edwards voted for it. The decision to go into Iraq was truly bipartisan.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244515

(edited for typo)
Problem is many sites, Facebook for example, do not accept the +SPAM as a valid email address even though it's permitted per RFC.

What we really need is a mechanism that will provide truly disposable email addresses in a secure, transparent manner (kind of a 1Password for emails). This would also go a long way in working around systems like Rapleaf trying to tie emails together.

I posed a question to HN not that long about interest in such a service but it did not seem to garner much interest.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139697

Guess Scheiner is right about privacy not mattering much to people when it's not front and center.
There's a PDF from digg from a NoSQL meetup (NoSQL east I think) and it has a link to a document somewhere there wrote up on understanding the cassandra data model, it's pretty good. You'll have to google around for it though.
this wasn't clear to me from the link provided.

edit: actually, this is an excellent demonstration of bad writing -- or rather 'blogging -- on behalf of whomever runs engineerwriting.jottit.com. The post is a straight copy out of another source, with a link to the source, with no explanation of what is going on, no discussion on the material, no value-add in general.

This is something that I struggle with in my link-sharing emails to my friends. After literally thousands of link-share emails, it starts to get hard to say something original beyond "I thought this was funny/interesting/etc", which eventually becomes practically worn into my keyboard. But then this is a good indicator to me that maybe the link isn't worth sharing. If I can't come up with something more interesting to say than "this is funny", then I don't need to be wasting my friends' time with it, because they have their own lists of pages that they peruse and they don't need me filling up their inbox with 25 new conversation threads in a single day.
I have a blog post titled "Why I Am Done Making Desktop Apps" and it answers this at length:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-a...

Short version: web kicks desktop's booty from perspective of developer in conversion rates, support burden, maintainability, and ability to extract data. My next app will be a web app, no question. (If it were a do-over, would I be knocked back to my programming competences as of mid-2006? Because that was Java desktop apps, only -- I couldn't write Ruby and couldn't even spell SQL at that point.)
Yes, it's solid advice, but it is basic. If we're talking about "engineers", that probably means they have completed a college degree at some point. If an engineer completed a degree and didn't take a technical writing course that drilled these concepts into their heads, then I question the quality of such an engineer's education.
That is pretty cool. I just did a git clone, read the code and ran the example. I have no connection with the Neo4j developers (I don't know any of them), but I must say I like their business model: AGPL license use for free, and if you want a commercial license it is a little expensive but affordable if you really need a commercial license.
Mark Cuban: Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers
Here's a better set of steps:

1. Use ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) to copy a complete image of your hard drive onto another drive with lots of space. Let it work for a long time and it will probably get all the data off. If it doesn't you can try the freezer trick, but don't be too hopeful.

2. Unplug the busted hard drive and set it aside. You can perform all the subsequent recovery steps on the image you just copied, which is better than stressing an already-dying drive.

3. Mount the hard drive image (http://tcdb.grinnell.edu/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Help.Ddrescue).

4. Use testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) to try to recreate the partition table.

4.5 Alternatively, you can use parted with the rescue command, but that works better if you know exactly what your partition table was.

5. If that fails, use photorec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) to pull off all the files it can find. It should be able to get most of your documents, photos, etc, but it might not find everything, and they will be missing file names and folder structure. Remind yourself that this is better than nothing.
Ohhhhhh! thanks...

It actually took this reply to clue me in to what he was talking about, same mistake as parent. (Nice ECC RAM baby?)
I double-checked and it looks like it was actually checked in by the Man...in the mirror.
Why the iPad Will Win.
It seems that the problem is that the certificate file name does not match its contents.

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.or...
I wasn't aware that this was a comment on another piece. Yes, I use less formal grammar in less formal situations. I even experiment in the minimalist form with haiku and other writing. Knowing now that it was a comment makes a little more sense. Without knowing that, it just seemed like lazy writing.
Don't forget, if ranked by order of importants, the body should be:

Point 2
Point 3
Point 1
Curious. The iPhone version indeed appears to cost $1.99, but the iPad version is free: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n7x2p/free-is-free .. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I've downloaded it - thanks!
If it were less deliberately controversial it would be more digestible. As is, some of his points seems inconsistent, but that may be due to presentation.
Done! Hope that helps.
Pullum on Language Log today:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2235
Free tool to check your paid / exchange links 
- Get daily status reports of your backlinks
- Get alerts when your backlinks have been removed
- Get alerts when your backlinks have been converted to nofollow links
- Get backlink anchor-text as seen by Search Engines
Federal Court: FCC 'lacks authority' to enforce net neutrality
In the "removing small frustrations" category: getting a second power cord for my laptop. It makes me happy twice a day when I don't have to fish my cord out to bring it to work/home.
This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K projected for this year is nothing. And that number shows to me more limitations of this particular method of SEO & AdWords than anything else, i.e. it is not a way to build company.

My first crappy product made $8K a year in profit 0 advertisement. My second made $72K a year no advertisement no SEO. My third product is making over $500k a year (not projected) no advertisement no SEO.
New iPhone OS Sneak Peek On Thursday
2 things

1. about 80 red flags of why this is a scam, yet 92,000 affiliates. Just shows how peoples greed will let them ignore the little things.

2. its an amazing combination of crowd-sourcing and network marketing. I can see lots of interesting problems being solved like this in the future.
At first I thought that was the idea, but I honestly can't believe someone so successful at the satire of modern social interaction could so tremendously oversimplify the emotional and biological labyrinth of human sexuality into a mere "button pressing" that instantly makes the recipient "happy."

I think Adams' point is simply that it's not that hard to make someone's day better.
Today's Guide to Linux Virtualization
By that logic, doesn't your lack of success with no advertisement or SEO on the first product prove your second and third products don't exist?
If you haven't read Your Money or Your Life, I highly, highly recommend it. It transformed how I think about time and money and led to some real changes in my decisions about life and work.
WhySpam.Me does provide this type of functionality. It gives you "abcdgoldfish@whyspam.me" which forwards to your real address. You can generate as many as you want. So if someone doesn't allow the + notation then you can generate a new email address.
What I'd like to know is what frame of mind allowed you to slog through that for the last 4 years (losing money early-on). Did you believe in the idea? Were you just constantly tinkering (mental auto-pilot)? Were you doing other startup activities in addition? Did you sometimes take a break from the Bingo Card Creator to try other things?

I find that even ideas that I believe strongly in, I eventually get distracted and wind up doing other ideas... until distracted again. Rinse, repeat.
I don't know what are you talking about... Sorry.
The other important thing needed is:

Make your message concrete and specific.

It is no use reading a first sentence that says something like: "We created a novel abstraction to improve software development.". Yes, it is concise, but it says nothing. "We used wavelet analysis to find and factor-out the most modified aspects of our code." -- that I can see I want to know more about.
Nexus One... Close, But No Calendar
http://internetmindmap.com/datasets (related links I've collected)

http://delicious.com/pskomoroch/redistributable+dataset (some good bookmarks)
This is exactly why I left the site. If a site asks me to leave, I will be less likely to return and enter data.
Rails or PHP Framework
If I want to build a scalable web application, given that I know both Ruby and PHP, is there something better between RoR or a PHP Framework.

For Ruby, Rails is definitely THE one everyone talks about. But is there a "leader" among the similar PHP frameworks. I have seen a lot of buzz about CakePHP but I feel there are many more options.
Scrabble Rule Change: Proper nouns ok
Engineers finally discover the inverted pyramid.
The Problem With Advertising
Not talking about politics but bound by politics (office politics).
Stallman Slams UK Broadband Proposal
The passive voice should be avoided.
When I have gone drinking with my covorkers, everyone has restrained their drinking very strategically. No one has ever gotten drunk.
Heh-- yaw, I'm not certainly I AGREE with the contention. No one ever went broke overestimating the vapidity of consumers. Still, I wonder. IM Facebook, and email are content creation. Will the swoosh-factor of the iPad make up for inconvenience of an onscreen keyboard, no multi-tasking, etc?
For the longest time, when it came to the Iraq war there were several Western European news sources that I think held the 'moral high ground' in how they reported the news. Al Jazeera was good, but definitely coloured. Now I find that Al Jazeera is actually much better than 'our' sources, and this article is the first time I've ever had that feeling.

Normally they're good but not 'great'. In this article, which for their audience must be very inflammable material they actually take the time and point out the caveats much more clearly than some of the 'local' news sources in NL, the UK and in France.

There is plenty of stuff here that needs investigating and Al Jazeera does an amazing job of outlining the potential pitfalls in interpreting the video and the 'untold' side of the American military.

I really think that by doing that they deserve to be taken much more serious by people from 'the west', but for some reason the majority here seems to be stuck on what can be had in a basic cable subscription and preferably locally produced.

There is a world of information available to all of us but sifting through it is a lot of work, especially if a subject is politically sensitive.
I wish it would’ve zoomed in and opened my entry after I submitted. Kinda fun, though.
This is nuts. Maybe the court ruling is correct that the FCC lacks authority to enforce net neutrality, but we have to somehow figure out how to put an end to this madness.

It is a case that has much greater implications than just unfair treatment of traffic.

Unfortunately, still a great deal of the country has no idea what this means and it will go unnoticed.
Interesting ... but how could IBM's promise mean anything if TurboHercules, which is an open-source company, isn't protected against assertion of all 500 of those patents.

The loophole is a contractual issue between IBM, its customers, and perhaps TurboHercules (in that the latter is encouraging the customers to violate the contract).

I don't see it having anything to do with open-source patent assertions and again I can't see how IBM's promise would be worth anything if the latter had its own loophole of a "If we sue you for other reason the 500 patents become fair game."
Interesting-- So assumption no subscriptions, you'd use ejunkie for a new product? I always assumed that it would ultimately carve out a bit more of your revenue than a standard merchant account.

By the by-- good post on subscription commerce options here: http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on...
Not a very good article. It seems to be targetted towards beginners, but it goes into rather obscure stuff that someone learning the language shouldn't have to know right off the bat. It comes off as though the author is trying to impress rather than to teach.
We figured that Apple would throw huge mounds of traffic at the free section of Books via iBooks. And then, if all goes well, by being in the Top 5 we'd be able to snipe off their traffic to iBooks, then make money with in-app unlocking of audiobooks and possibly some publisher sponsorship.

By already having the content ready to go we had a pretty huge opportunity to be up there with Amazon and Apple, and, if we can't convert, we can always toggle over to paid.
In a server you replace the hard drive and let the RAID array rebuild itself. You have RAID in your server, right?

Of course RAID is not a backup strategy. RAID 1 is great for exactly the mentioned event: when a hard drive fails. If some of your data has been corrupted or lost, you use your backups.
:) Good point, but I was really just using those as hyperbole. A better example is that it can't know when I'm in a meeting or not (conference rooms in my building are interspersed with offices), so I've still gotta manually silence it during meetings... that's the most common use case for silencing for me (some aren't in this same situation, but many are), and location-based auto-silencing is useless for that.

So now the user has two things to keep in mind as far as silencing: which times it is programmed to do so automatically (all of which the user must be a bit suspicious of already - as you said, to be extra-sure the user would want to manually override even at those locations during times that it's really important for the ringer to be off) and which times they still have to manually override it. So we've got extra mental burden and anxiety for the user, partially or wholly overriding the savings of not having to worry about silencing in some circumstances. We're only trusting the system for those times where we'd really like it to work but it doesn't have to be guaranteed, so there's some lurking uneasiness during those times.

And the user has to program it. And I'd think it's very likely to be a significant battery drain since it's needing to turn on the GPS quite often to be useful. Etc etc.

Anyway, it's a super-cool sounding feature when just considered as a bullet-point, but it just strikes me as a "techno cool" feature (kind of like speech recognition and "Minority Report" interfaces) that I doubt I'll ever see widely used. I'm sure there are a few specific circumstances where it's really handy and I'm happy for those who enjoy it, but I have nearly no interest in it compared to a trusty manual switch and I think I'm speaking for the vast majority of users there. Could certainly be wrong.
ADHD Isn't Just for Kids. Why Adults Are Now Being Diagnosed, Too.
that is a pain in the ass.

having one just for home, maybe I can attach it to my lapdesk and reduce the wear and tear.
See: ESR
Products We Love: EyeClops Night Vision Goggles
Maybe you are taking too many steps at once. A first step could be getting a job where you actually like your coworkers enough to actually enjoy going for a drink with them occasionally.
Makes me want to go to one of the SV/SF Hackers and Founders meetups.

On drinking with co-workers: point taken, but if you are actually having mood problems, watch the alcohol intake. It's a depressant.
From my experience with MVPs and also developers with many MS certifications, they tend to over engineer. They add complexity ahead of its need (like Factory classes when there is only the requirement for one implementation, Visitor pattern when a simple builder will do, etc). The point seems to be to stroke the programmer ego with execution on fancy technical requirements, with a complete lack of care to the experience of the end user.
FancyHands
FOSS Patents: IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community
Can we revoke their rights to location based monopolies?
Apologies, my review may have come off a little harsh. I'm not in the habit of giving 1 star to apps that are included launch day when I know the developer didn't have a physical iPad to test on.

In fact I haven't rated your app yet. What I usually do is wait a week or two until the first update before reviewing/rating.

Of course, not all customers know or even care how the software development lifecycle works.
This is nuts. Maybe the court ruling is correct that the FCC lacks authority to enforce net neutrality, but we have to somehow figure out how to put an end to this madness.

It is a case that has much greater implications than just unfair treatment of traffic, and no I do not mean interference with the national broadband initiative. I am speaking of the precedent it sets.

Unfortunately, still a great deal of the country has no idea about this issue, what this means and it will go unnoticed. Even if it does come into the lime-light of issues (doubtful), because of the lack of understanding by the majority of constituents in this country it will be such an easy topic to spin.

Depressing.
When you are naming something like the SQLCompiler "SQLCompiler" even if it fits non-relational database's needs than naming it "SQLCompiler" was wrong!
Ask HN: What's with these website surveys?
Why do so many sites ask me to fill out a survey before I have even had a chance to see what the site is like? Where are they getting this idea from?
This is the fifth chapter from my book Speak Human. It's free to read online, and I'm releasing a new chapter on the website every two weeks.

The book is concentrated on small businesses/startups, so I believe it will be helpful to many here. Meanwhile, reviews to date have been quite positive: http://gu.nu/bib

I hope you enjoy it!
No, it just asserts that because there's only one core it has to be an A8 (superscalar, no provision for SMP) not an A9 (out-of-order speculative issue superscalar, single core and 1-4 cores SMP versions).