skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think reddit (or twitter or digg or stumbleupon) users will start liking the "like" and prefer it to replace other buttons? Completely agreeing about the ridiculous aspect of so many buttons though.
Posteorus.com adds a mobile version of your site
Privacy concerns where the reason why I never joined Facebook in the first place.
But still they do know me. As some people typed my email address into it, to request my friendship...

I am part of one social network that is more about professional relationships. As I got many contracts through this network, I am a happy paying customer and the benefits outweight the privacy problems.

Joining a social network that is mostly about private stuff is a no go for me. I just do not see a benefit in putting that kind of information into other peoples hands. I do not want my future customers to know that I am friend with 'Beer-Bong-Bob'. But as I just turned 30, I will listen to PG-13 and keep my mouth shut now. :)
HTML is not complicated at all, that's why it became a success - pretty much anyone could learn to write a basic web page in a few weeks.

Web pages became complex over the years as people wanted do things that HTML was never meant to do. Like page layouts: Early on, people would use invisible images for spacing, humongous nested tables to "hack" a page layout in a language that didn't support page layouts, and pictures of text rather than actual text for example for non-standard fonts or text shadows.

The primary problem is that HTML was never designed for the kinds of things we use the web for today. See the Crockford Javascript presentation for a history of HTML and Javascript, I recommend Episode IV: http://yuiblog.com/crockford/

Designing an "HTML killer" is no simple task, all attempts so far have failed - from Java applets to XML.

But even today you can use applets or Flash to embed more complicated programs. The web protocols turned out to be eminently hackable, and with server-side page generation, forms, CSS, Javascript and now canvas it is "good enough" for more and more tasks, so I expect it is safe to say that HTML will be with us for quite a while longer.
Damnit... it's all filled up. -- "Dropbox is giving the first 500 people to signup early access to the Dropbox Android app." and then later on the page, "Sorry but the Android beta is full."
Thanks, the comments are very helpful.
Exact same thing happened to me. Disappointing, to say the least, especially since I couldn't find any info on the site that said that was the ending time.
The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity.

In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial.

The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.
I would love to see Wuala do similar...
Micromax C350 CDMA Mobile in India
they announced it on twitter http://twitter.com/Dropbox/status/12732959857

I was fortunate enough to get in. it's pretty cool , but still buggy.
It's not a personal site, but he founded an institute which does really awesome work on "fundamental new computing technologies", such as creating powerful new languages and techniques for building a full software stack (from OS to user-level apps) all within 20,000 lines of code!

http://vpri.org/
The other side of it is when interesting stuff gets posted, but it only gets two votes because it gets lost in noise about whatever Apple did lately.

Lambda the Ultimate and citeseer haven't gone anywhere, though.
I wish this topic had a Like button!
It's not so much that your life will get worse, but that at some point in the future everything you have now will be taken from you (ultimately by death). When these things are taken away, will you assign different value to them? Maybe you will wish you just be and experience them one more time. Well you can! Right now... right whereever you are.

It applies to everything; the people around you, the leaves on the trees, the sky, your computer, everything. If you are able to develop a strong attention on the present you can even develop "flow" around everyday things like washing the dishes or walking. Normally people require more intense experience like driving fast or listening to music to achieve this state, but it can be achieved anytime anywhere. That's what will tie it all together and hopefully leave you with no regrets as time passes.
Bootstrapping a Python project
(OT/X-Post Just getting to this now:)
Silly, everybody knows you don't have a Discover card, because you're on Facebook, where all of us friends know this about you....
What do you mean by "less evil"? The whole point of the "Like" button is that it's universal. Something being mildly annoying is not "evil" by any stretch of the imagination.
All the same arguments, but ignoring the most likely explanation of why people choose to disbelieve in evolution: It doesn't matter to the common person.

Disbelief in germ theory could get you killed, whereas disbelief in the evolution theory gets you ridiculed by a bunch of nerds that you don't like very much anyway. Why should one irritate one's parents by openly defying the Bible when there's nothing to gain from it? How could the average schmoe leverage evolution in their daily life to gain wealth, status or comfort? No answer? I didn't think so. I won't be openly supporting evolution until it pays the bills or helps me personally in some realistic way.

Ironically, evolution is the reason why people don't believe in evolution. Belief in evolution makes you a nerd, and nerds don't get laid.
Yes, but I believe there's a "feature" that allows your friends to share your photos and other content without your permission. This is separate from the "feature" that was just helpfully introduced that allows other websites to identify you or whatever the hell it was.

Seriously, I'm finding this Facebook thing more and more of a bother. It's great for connecting with old friends and keeping in touch with family, but if I have to be on edge all the time keeping an eye on the thing to make sure it doesn't breach my privacy then it's just pointless. Everything that affects privacy should be opt-in, not out. But FB can't resist the siren call of those billions of pieces of personally identifiable information they are sitting on.
I would totally use it.
I forget whether picture tagging came along before or after I left, though I know I've seen the feature. It was probably some time in the grey area between when I stopped using it regularly and when I actually deactivated my account. Anyway, I see your point about how you could easily get creeped out about Facebook making it so easy to datamine that stuff. It doesn't bother me personally because I just take the McNealyesque view that any information that I don't make a deliberate effort to control access to is already public. But that's just because I'm a security guy and my brain is correspondingly warped; I make no claim that this mindset is normal or even healthy.
I think I was confused with mixing content with code. Putting style information in tags seems to be bad but not in the header. Even Google seems to use inline script/style code in the head of their website.
I'm not looking for another C syntax language, but I do rather like this bit of style:

"All our code are belong to BSD."

"BSD" is a link to the license.
Is All That Sitting Really Killing Us?
If this interests you, check out the recent HN thread about standing desks (which was sparked by another NYT piece):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1285775
Tk gui toolkit tutorial
Well, that's as close to a trait as genetics can get you. There are only 10 (of the 100+ that 23zndme track) that they consider traits.
A.R. Rahman - iPad exporter, composer
ASK HN:Good web design?
hi everyone.

does anyone have tips for a software engineer on how to do good UI web design?

It's not as simple as it appears, I know, and doing stuff like drop-shadows. matching colors. layouts. having a toolkit of UI tools like different brushes, gradients, etc.

basically, resources on ui design for the software engineer would be very helpful...

where do i about learning about professional front end web ui design?

it appears that having a nice accessible website... from the colors, to the round corners, to the general look & feel... can make or break a web site.
Patrick, it's always a pleasure reading your posts. How I wish companies in the US acted like this...
ZOTAC MAG: a small powerful computer
I want one! :)
World Bank opens up data and developer API
I'll give you an upvote if you can find the source for that story. I can't find it myself.
Yes, the house rental trick was big in the European middle ages: sometimes the lender would just pretend to "buy" the borrowers' house, and charge him "rent" for his own house until he "buys" it back.

Still, the remarkable thing from the Medieval documents we have from the Middle East is that most people actually did follow the rules: they used to do profit-sharing instead of interest; lenders would become partners instead
I haven't noticed this yet. Would someone kindly point me towards an example?
Yes, the house rental trick was big in the European middle ages: sometimes the lender would just pretend to "buy" the borrowers' house, and charge him "rent" for his own house until he "buys" it back.

Still, the remarkable thing from the Medieval documents we have from the Middle East is that most people actually did follow the rules: they used to do profit-sharing instead of interest; lenders would become partners instead.

As for the pruzbul I believe that was introduced by Rabbi Hillel around the time of King Herod, a much later period. The remarkable thing is that jubilees were institutionalized in one form or another in much of the Middle East for many thousand years before that and it didn't cause significant economic disruption.
Structural Tags in HTML5
Slightly half-considering it for the first time ever.
Classic. I have a naming scheme for my personal laptops--female characters from sci fi series. I've had an aluminum PowerBook named Kira, a black MacBook named Dee, and an aluminum MacBook named Kara so far.
I was hoping Lang Lang was a Panda.
Is "Who else" a legitimate question that you can "ask HN" nowadays? I've been gone for a while.
I also joined facebook when it was only universities like 6 years ago, and I was reluctant to join then, but friends convinced me too. I never really got into it, accumulated 200+friends from parties and now login only to post my website. So I hate facebook, I dont store photos or anything, but if I can get about 200 easy clicks to my website when i release a blog, i guess my facebook membership is useful.
Dabblers and Blowhards
Silicon Valley Police Investigating Gizmodo For Stolen iPhone Prototype
Whether you support the guy or not you can't put him in a Catch-22.

'You have done nothing'
'I did XYZ'
'Stop promoting yourself. The work should speak for itself'

...
But aren't they two different companies? I believe anyone can request removal from Spokeo for free. RD seems to remove from more people databases than just Spokeo -- kind of a "premium" removal...
Sorry, but this blog post indicates that Blippy is in no way serious about security. Blippy handled sensitive data (credit card numbers) in a highly insecure fashion, and rather than treating it like a full-scale emergency, which it is, regardless of the number of people affected, we get this "hey, it's no big deal" blog post.

What other massive security mistakes are lying around in their codebase? Why does this sort of reply give me absolutely no faith that they'll deal with those problems seriously when/if they arise?
http://techcrunch.com/

Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.
It never ceases to amaze me the entitlement mentality that some employers have. When they decide to lay off a group of employees, it's just business. But when an employ quits to peruse other opportunities suddenly it's a big betrayal and "how could they be so disloyal".

(obviously this only applies to some employers. I've worked for some employers who were very compassionate and mature for both layoffs and resignations).
we're using apache+modwsgi to serve django, and tornado (by itself) behind nginx. both have been excellent. gunicorn looks to have a bright future, but i haven't played with it.
A nice naming scheme (for server names) I read about somewhere suggested following the periodic table. Element names can be used as the server names and corresponding element numbers as corresponding IP addresses (subnet suffix) of the servers.
Thinking about it. I don't want to have to manage my privacy setting every time FB decides that this small component of the app will be exposed to non friends on these sites. It starts becoming something you worry about and is a huge turn off. 2006 member
interesting, never heard of that one before - thanks for sharing.

And I agree, that a root cause analysis should be done. E.g. asking the 5 why's (as Eric Ries advocates), for behind every technical problem, there's a human problem.
"I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly"

http://www.openlike.org/
I wish I had an identical twin so we could split the costs.
It could also be financial therapy for the serious shopaholic, to have all spendings be public for critique among friends and family... much like calorie counting/blogging for those on diet
I see. Thanks for showing me. It seems largely unobtrusive, but also pretty useless for me.
All my computers are named after Star Wars planets. The recently acquired MacBook Air is "naboo".
Most OS X (and Mac OS in general) apps can be uninstalled by dragging the Application from the Applications folder to the Trash.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/030223

I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot.

The important part:

a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his
arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases
that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was
used to buy fire starters of the same type used in
the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a
happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in
January 2005 because another person stepped forward
saying he or she set the fire and not Lyons.

So I was wrong, and it was arson, not murder, but the point remains that the police were willing to use purchasing habits/items as circumstantial evidence to go after the wrong person.
Interesting.

I was under the impression that def x(a):... was only a pretty way to say x = function(a)...

I have to agree print is a weird thing, but what other statements bother you so much?
My current naming theme is Song Of Ice And Fire characters. The netbook I'm writing this in is named Tyrion, for example.
I am in a similar situation. My school was among the first couple of expansions, if I recall. They pretty much lost me when they stopped requiring a dot edu email address to sign up. I had kept a completely unmaintained presence there since then, but I deactivated my account last night thanks to Open Graph.
I kept running out of names with various schemes, but right now all my machine names are words that end in x.
But, now there are probably over 18,000 apps providing that!
I did.

In fact, I am appalled so few people, apparently, heard of it.
I name our servers after the asset tag numbers. DNS can then be used to provide an inventory of our data centers. It also ensures we have a programatic and automatic way to name machines, and numbers are remarkably memorable after a while.
Clickable link to delete your account. Deleting is different from deactivating; deactivating keeps all your data there. Deletion is supposedly permanent. http://bit.ly/chsPFo
Blippy? Isn't that the incompetents that just lost of customer credit card numbers and then blew it off like it was no big deal?

There's something to be proud of.....
I agree that 'older' people don't use facebook the same way as younger people. If you've been using FB since your were in your teens, it's a part of your life. It's going to take a generation, but our society will adjust to the lack of privacy in trade for the tools it provides.

Unfortunately, no one is going to listen to you when you're insulting your audience.
Any scheme based on a pool of names does not scale. If you have big plans, a sequence is the way to go.
A lot of people seem to share the same opinion about quitting Facebook but are hesitant because there aren't many better alternatives. Does this mean there's a market for a secure, more private social network? Maybe one where everything is completely private, unless you decide to make it public to other members.

If people want/need something like that it sounds like a fun weekend (or two) project.
I have a problem with this attitude, which is why I think most sysadmin types suck. Computers are the most complex devices we interact with on a daily basis. A basic NetBook with Windows running Google Chrome is hundreds of orders of magnitude more complex than the most complex automobile for instance. It is amazing to me that they are reliable at all.

Have some respect for these machines, spend lots of time learning why they are the way they are (read kernel source, learn assembly, take apart a disk drive) and eventually they'll treat you right.
I'm under 30 and just quit.
Ask HN: What skills can a someone develop to become a great hacker?
I'm developing educational materials on teaching people how to become the best hacker that they can be and I'm interested in what you think are the critical qualities of a great hacker.
A big(ish) hosting company I once worked for used Caribbean islands. This rapidly turned out to be a mistake and it quickly turned into any islands, then cities, then god knows what :-)

My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)
Privacy is dead, and I (and most people) have very little to hide. What I do have to hide can be under pseudonyms.

Besides, I think Fb is doing a reasonable job allowing people to control their privacy settings. Most people don't mind being out in the sunlight.
I've got a pretty simple naming convention: interstates.
Can we re-phrase the question in less of a reddit-style way?What's the discussion we want to have behind this?
Previous article and lively conversation on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834817
We use names of beers and liquors. Works well enough.
I quit around one and half years ago. I wasn't really drawing any value out of it.
Being curious.
Only time I remember having interesting computer names out side of college, the companies lawyers put a squash to it. Infectious diseases just has so much creativity to it.

I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.
I tainted my Facebook data and bailed long ago. Facebook just ain't right. (http://www.freeinfidel.com/2007/12/08/taint-the-data-how-to-...)

Trusting Facebook with the ability to track you across the entire Internet is like trusting a Wall Street investment bank with your money.

In both cases, they're the G, you're the mark, no matter how sweet the sales pitch. They wouldn't be selling you if the deal wasn't better for them.
Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.

Oops. My work computer is Spaz, my iPhone is Dirty Sanchez and my laptop is Dingleberry.
My big beef is that it becomes a hassle to have to go in and opt-out every time Zuckerberg decides to opt me in to some new information-sharing service that I don't want to be a part of. So yes, you can disable it, but the trend seems to be to make it a convoluted process to disable these things, followed by new "features" in a few months that force me to jump through a few more hoops. It's just become more of a headache than it's worth.
There are lots of pools you could use that offer a vast amount of names, assuring that you never run out even if you have a very large number of hosts. Good examples in my opinion are names of things existing in real life, e.g. band names, names of famous (CS) people, ..., while fictional names (characters from some book) tend to run out too soon.

You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.
People may end up preferring liking to digging (though who knows at this point), but when it comes to actively looking for interesting content, digg's still got something to hang onto. It begs the question, however, whether facebook will ever make an attempt to organize all of the outside links users promote so that such content becomes discoverable by topic and not just incidental lines on the newsfeed?
Hard to single out one as a favorite, since so much depends on the power/memory/peripheral tradeoff for each project.

I recently used the TI/Luminary LM3S8962 (ARM Cortex-M3 cpu). Loved it. No goofy pin multiplexing, GCC, easy to use serial bootloader, lots of horsepower, great peripheral mix. Interrupt system much more logical than ARM7TDMI.

NXP LPC2106, not a bad chip, but better alternatives exist today. Too many power rails (core and I/O), limited interrupt system. Good tools, serial loader, plenty of memory on chip.

Renasas/Hitachi H8 series. Actually a 16 bit chip. Dirt cheap in some variants (but way too many variants to pick from!). CISC with good code density, decent low power (forgiving power supply requirements, too), good GCC port. Serial bootloader is a bit crufty, a few peripheral bugs, translated documentation.

Freescale MC68332: great chip, but it's technically a microprocessor (no onboard flash, at least in versions available to those of us that don't work for Government Motors...). It also includes the magnificent TPU (time processing unit), a work of art that's a subject all by itself. Long in the tooth but still soldiering on in many industrial applications.
Why do we need all these buttons to do things we already all have our own specific ways of doing?

If you want to bookmark something, bookmark it in the way you know how (in browser, Delicious, etc). If you want to tweet about something, go tweet about it in the client of your choice.
I saw ads for Mahalo on CL in the last few days too and have purposely avoided them because I don't want the tarnishment of either Mahalo (a mass spammer) or Jason on my resume or psyche.
I dare not make the attempt, but I think you could use regular expressions to turn their examples into valid C++ code.
There are a couple of discussions on the Coda Users list about this:

http://groups.google.com/group/coda-users/browse_thread/thre...
http://groups.google.com/group/coda-users/browse_thread/thre...

I have a feeling Panic is working on it. They have already been beaten to the punch somewhat by Gusto, however this app is not as full featured as Coda (e.g., no SFTP) http://horseandtherook.com/gusto/
This is the perfect app to port to the iPad. It's an all-in-one that seems a bit overkill on the Mac, since most of the pieces are available separately, but on the iPad, easy tabbing between functions without leaving the app would be ideal.

I'm convinced that Panic is working on this.