skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, this is incredible. I can't wait to see the source for Aquaria.

I guess that the humble indie bundle is over now that the projects are open sourced. Or maybe people will continue contributing just to be nice.
I believe the grown money would (mostly) go to the partner lenders of the program, Kiva makes it sound perfectly lovely, but someone has to go out and interview those people and file paperwork and take photos an collect the money, and of course make profit doing that.
The one thing that concerns me is that people will have to a) pay for the turnkey service or b) know how to set it up and probably have to pay for hosting anyway. People won't pay to leave Facebook. Maybe a competitor will start an ad-based turnkey site.
Coming from a user interface design background, I thought this article posited a couple of false dichotomies which were perplexingly echoed in the comments here. Their suggestions appeared to be targeted at either amateurs, ad professionals, or flash jockeys, because a good designer would likely be taking this advice already. The gist of the article is summed up nicely by a commenter here: "Usability trumps design every time." I find that perplexing, because my goal as a designer was always to find the most usable solution through design.

1. Value -- a good designer will take the time to understand the the target audiences. Many target audiences aren't looking for value, they're looking for status or something just as intangible. Implementing a visual design which communicates something the target audience isn't searching for is closely akin to pricing your product incorrectly. In fact, design approach is almost completely analogous to retail product price stratification.

2. Trust -- this again depends on audience. Sometimes "labor of love" is the most relevant trust mark, but in other cases it's "well-established" or "industry leader."

3. Accessibility -- this is kind of a 'duh' for any experienced web developer. Most design-oriented site you go to are built for modern browsers only, but that's because all their visitors are using Firefox. Any good web designer still knows how to fix an IE6 margin-doubling bug, for example.

4. Flexibility -- um, it really is possible to design sites with good UI and flexible content. Would anyone here make the argument that Craigslist would have failed with proper whitespacing, appropriate font selections, and logical visual hierarchies? Those can all be accomplished with a single stylesheet.

5. Function -- this really is the point of design. Most good designers would tell you that. Design without utility is bad art. I love user interface design because I can build things that look good and work well. The two go hand-in-hand.

I may be reading too much into the comment that "in general, aesthetics simply don't matter." If that's really true, do you have a good explanation for Apple's success? How about Nike?
"public domain" is not a license.
Code contracts and inheritance
"We are four talented young programmers .." cough

Humble also!
Hosting costs will be much less with a VPS. For one CPU core with of processing and 20GB of storage it's $123 per month from Heroku and for $79.95 per month you can get a Linode 1440. However, if you need to scale easily Heroku can handle that for you and you'll have to do it yourself with a VPS.
I'm similarly wary of giving a team money upfront based on a design.

Let public demand and old-fashioned nighttime/weekend hacking kick start the project.
Why is it called diaspora? Seems like a very emotionally charged name for something that should probably have a neutral or fun name.
1) I started with BASIC/QBASIC, assembler, some C, html/css, javascript, php and then some python. Later at school I got C/C++, Java and VB.NET but by then I was already web development for quite some time.
2) At first I only had old books from my local library, hence the BASIC/QBASIC, assembler and C. Later they ordered new books on the 'new HTML 4.0' and soon I started doing js and php as well.
3) no not really, although I did have projects of my own most of it was purely for fun. To be honest, it only struck me after a year or so I was programming, before that I was only trying stuff out. I think that's an important part of the deal, having fun and just trying new things.
4) I was on my own, I didn't have anyone behind me to teach me...
5) To be honest I think should have focused more on C/C++, but I absolutely don't regret being a web developer, I would hate being a C/C++ developer I think. I don't know why, just a feeling...

About helping your nephew, try to make him see it as a game and have some fun. Explain that the computer does whatever he wants, he only has to program it himself. If the application, in whatever language it is written, doesn't run, you have a 99.9% change it's your own fault.
It seems ridiculous to me that the FDA prevents scientists and doctors from getting known, proven anti-venom products back in the market, whereas the rich corporations can get drugs on the market that still aren't proven to be much more effective than a placebo, but with worse side effects.
How much does it cost to print something like a cup?
I see.

Can I assume that 1 Dyno is more or less equivalent to a Linode 360?

Also, how much data can you insert in a 5MB DB?

Thanks.
I'm really, really glad that all of the games were available for Linux, and I'm glad the numbers show that Linux could be a viable gaming platform.

Massive kudos to all the developers!
SwirlyMMS Jailbreak App Pulls Off Native iPad 3G SMS & MMS Support
Would anyone who has experience working with operational transformation care to comment on it? It's mentioned in the OP as the basis for real-time collaborative editing and seems pretty important (and interesting!) for this type of app.
I think the one thing saving us from hyperinflation is the lack of political control and influence over the FED. You see hyperinflation in currencies where the ordinary government has control and influence over the central bank, because they just use the central bank's inflationary power to boost spending. The FED is independent from Congress for a reason, and an ongoing power to audit threatens that independence and, by extension, our currency.

A one-time audit for the bailout will accomplish the main objective people have been asking for--accounting for all the bailout--without threatening the operational independence of the FED.
"You skipped over the word "marginal,"

Most pieces of software cost millions to develop, so I don't think it even applies.
Non-Sensational Analysis of Recent Facebook Privacy Issues
My take on this is that they want to take 3 to 4 months of complete focus on coding and design. If you involve too many people by open sourcing it now - you could easily have a "too many cooks" syndrome and the whole project gets bogged down by too many opinions and too much time spent on moderation.
That would be an interesting item to deregulate. I've always been fascinated that the U.S. government doesn't mandate an official language [1] and just incidentally uses English for most purposes (with Spanish becoming increasingly relevant). As far as I can tell, it hasn't caused any major problems for the country and may be a better way to handle the issue. Could currency be the same way?

[1] Language being another item that governments tend to regulate.
TomDoc - Reasonable Ruby Documentation
It seems like this would be an instance where the government should provide the funding. It's in the public's best interest to have at least one anti-venom product available. It makes no sense to tell people "tough luck" when they get bitten just because it's too expensive to pay for the studies to get government approval.
I thought something similar myself. The notion of diaspora doesn't exactly conjure up warming thoughts, but instead someone displaced (of their own volition or not) from their native homes. It is a very emotionally charged concept.
Well, until it has been tested, it is neither tried nor proven. And here is but a single reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide for such testing requirements.

Edit: to be clear, I was attempting to respond to the parent's parent post. I apparently suck at internet.
I just finished a 3month kiva fellowship :) so I can assure you that your kiva loans do not generate interest for you. You will (in most cases, if the loan is repaid in full) at best get all of your loan back, which you can then reloan, donate to kiva, or withdraw. It's still a great nonprofit, but I should've made it more clear that we've already promised publisher profits to Room to Read, we just need to decide where in the world to build.
It's entirely dependent on the exact process and material. Cups are also a bad example, due to their geometry.

You'd probably be looking at roughly $50-75ish+, if I had to guess.
Heroku says one dyno is 1/4 of a CPU core so I'd guess it's much less processing power than a Linode 360. How many columns you can insert into a 5MB DB depends on the size of the columns, but definitely not enough for a site with many users.
It lost me at "Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, DEC, Compaq, HP, Lotus, Sun, Netscape, Google, Twitter. Over the years they come and go, and they never solve problems."

I can think of quite a few problems that Google solved. Same for HP, Lotus, Sun, Apple, Oracle, IBM, DEC, and Netscape.

Take the example of Apple -- it revived itself from near-death after the original Mac desktop platform proved unprofitable.

Take the example of IBM -- kids these days might not remember it, but IBM used to make hardware. Now it makes practically none, but still has a massive and useful business.

Take Google -- it didn't always dominate advertising.

Etc.

I think Twitter is probably the only company on that list that hasn't undergone at least one fundamental transformation, and that's simply a matter of time.
'Linux is Not User Friendly' - No Way
If you really want to play with something in the meantime, you can check out the 6D: http://www.get6d.com/code-on-github

That is the most self-contained codebase I had seen so far out of the few I studied (OneSocialWeb.com and DiSo-project.org do look more technologically advanced, but they have more dependencies).
> The sort of artist who survives at the long tail is the sort who would be happy doing nothing else, who willingly sacrifices security and comfort for the chance to communicate something meaningful, hoping to catch the attention of those few in the world who seek what they also find meaningful. It’s a somewhat solitary existence, a bit like a lighthouse keeper throwing a beam out into the darkness, in faith that this action might help someone unseen.

Wow. Best essay on honesty in passion vs life I've read in a long time. Thank you for posting this!
Binary Analysis: automatically check your gadgets for GPL violations
India's Viswanathan Anand retains world chess crown
Whew, this article was a real eye-opener. I didn't know we had anti-venom shortages, my assumption being that you can go to a hospital after a bite in time you'll be easily cured.
You're right. The federal reserve is a quasi private/public entity. It's a private organization with the chairman appointed by the federal government.
Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas
I'm not sure that is correct - look at the web applications that use the AGPL license:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AGPL_web_applications

It seems to me this would allow the service provider approach and the ability to also have a commercial part (like the Funambol dual licensing approach...i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funambol). This doesn't seem like an overtly nefarious scheme to reach for your $5 :-)
The best way to present your company in 2010 (flash)
Yeah I don't quite get that either.

Apparently Marvell thinks that there's a market that's being overlooked for systems with lots of low-power, highly-efficient cores.

I guess I can see how that might work; it would be competing less with big Xeon or Opteron boxes than with blade systems. I've seen companies that for whatever reason are not comfortable with the idea of virtualizing multiple logical servers on one big physical server, but instead have lots of high-density blades. Different way of thinking. Except that many of them are running flavors of Windows on the blades, I could see some sort of ARM SoC based solution having some appeal.
Sure, but they could always roll it out and say "The code is available, but fair warning - we want to focus on getting this up and running before we start reviewing suggestions."
WSJ isn't doing it. It's evidence that Google is 'stealing' from Rupert. Google is allowing people to read WSJ articles that are supposed to be behind a pay wall... </sarcasm>
This version of Docs uses operational transformations, the idea for which almost certainly came from Wave. However, the actual code in Wave is written using GWT (Java compiled to JS), whereas Docs is written in JS straight.
Ok. So I guess is obvious which one to pick except if you really hate sysadmin stuff, otherwise I don't think the price is worth it.

Thanks.
All Cloud in the Background All the Time
Someone wrote it on twitter http://twitter.com/paddydonnelly/status/13810325308
The use case for an antivenom based on known working precedents, where the untreated alternative is death, is somewhat different to sedatives used generally to treat colds, coughs, morning sickness, etc.
I loved this typo: keeping your site flexible [...] may not be ascetically appealing"

Those darned designers and their ascetic ways...
Unemployment is the Mother of All Invention
Scroogle Dissapears or Google search page becoming too complex
Exactly. I find this far more interesting and hacker-news-worthy than most TechCrunch submissions. Holistic vs. narrow scope commentary.
Many retail investors stupidly placed stop loss orders which hurt them on the way down.

Very few people placed "don't miss out on a gain" order.
If you want to create a Facebook replacement you at least need a name you can't spell wrong easily. Diaspora is not such a name, and there are several ways of spelling it and it still sounds right, for example:

dieaspora
dyaspora
dyasporah

You won't say that to your parents and guarantee they get it right first time when typing it in (although I guess that's what Google is for. Did you mean...).

It's a hurdle, and one they need to fix if there's any chance of this being a "distributed Facebook replacement"
From the article:

Note, the games will be "free as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'": see each license for the full, finalized details as they come out very hopefully this week -- stay tuned. It is the underlying code that will be made available to everyone

Maybe the Humble Indie Bundle will finish and they will switch to another form of sales, but they are not stopping selling the games.
Just-in-time compilation is not a new idea. According to the book "The Practice of Programming" (by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, Ch9, pg. 242):

"Generalizing the idea for the full set of operations, we can write an on-the-fly compiler that translates the current regular expression into special code optimized for that expression.

Ken Thompson did exactly this for an implementation of regular expressions on the IBM 7094 in 1967. His version generated little blocks of binary 7094 instructions for the various operations in the expressions, threaded them together, and then ran the resulting program by calling it, just like a regular function."
Mark McGranaghan's Ring library might be a good place to start. The Ring spec is the de facto base library for web applications in Clojure, much as Servlets are in Java, and Rack is in Ruby.
MongoDB: 8m ops/s on 25 servers (320k per server)
I'm a little skeptical about the magnitude of the increase in time from concept to realization.

Four hours is the printing stage, but laying out something like that in cad is fairly time consuming, on top of that every piece surely went through numerous iterations. Additionally, the medium seems hard to fiddle with, so if the part didn't turn out, you have to scrap it completely.

Plus given that it is some sort of plastic, your only finishing options are probably powder coat, some sort of vapor deposition (which that photo looks like), or possibly some sort of plating if people have figured out how to do it.

While I'm sure that the tech will make some people's lives easier, this is one of those things that seems like it could easily be over hyped.
whereas in reality, "The cost of ... antivenom is $2000 – $3000 per bottle" [1] and you should hope that your health insurance covers it. I've heard of anti-venom which is more like $10k per bottle, but can't find a link.

oh, and you'll hope that there's a location in-state, otherwise you're going to rely on the fastest courier to get one to you, once you've been approved.

[1] http://www.biochem.arizona.edu/CatalystWebsite/Fall04/Featur...
Anything is better than anything else, at least for very specific values of "better". There is no objective measure of the quality of a smartphone. I guess "I prefer the N900 to the iPhone" doesn't get nearly as many clicks.

Also, the link is to an article about a linked article - http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2010/05/10/why-the-nokia-n9...
Until there is a "Hacker Canon" site to collect these links, people will keep posting them here.
I guess that depends on how much is sacrificed on the altar of x86 compatibility. I was under the impression that it was a lot.
http://www.mrgreen.am/affiliate-marketing/the-ugly-truth/

I found this article to have better examples. In particular, the ChristianMingle ad -- same wording, different treatment, different results.
My view is that people should be allowed to opt out of FDA regulation if they wish to do so. It's my body; I should be allowed to put anything I want into it.

It took 10 years for the first beta blockers to be approved in the US after they were in use in Europe. In that amount of time, thousands of Americans died for lack of the drugs. It's hard to distinguish this from mass murder, or at least mass manslaughter.
"That's why you have TVs that come with remotes with a million buttons on them, it makes the buyer feel like he's got something powerful"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ
I don't think User Experience is HN's top priority.
I don't think these work very well, in general. What colleges tend to do is look at their student body, observe "Hey! A lot of them are getting big scholarships, so if we raise tuition, they can afford it", and then raise tuition.
Eight Websites You Need to Stop Building
And sell more books - that's the real reason breadpig puts profits into nonprofits related to the product. Higher literacy rates means more potential book buyers. It's quite sinister, really.

We did the same thing with LOLmagnetz (for the SF SPCA) so that more dogs & cats get adopted, creating more dog & cat owners and thus more potential LOLmagnetz buyers.
This article proved to me that Hacker News is truly invaluable.
I'll start a so-easy-your-ten-year-old-can-use-it if nobody else does. Free of ads and everything.
BP plans on plugging the oil leak with golf balls and tires
Taking the subway isn't socialist - the subway is just run by a vaguely socialist institution. The question is what sort of institutions create better results (e.g. better subways): is it competitive, accountable ones, or monolithic, monopolistic, unaccountable ones?

For example, you imply that a subway is better-managed by a government agency, but in NY at least the subway system was built in rapid order by a few competing private concerns between 1905-1940. In 1940 those competing entities were unified into a government monopoly, and the system has since stagnated for 80 straight years. See this visualization for evidence that expansion essentially halted in 1940: http://www.diametunim.com/shashi/nyc_subways/. The current big expansion being undertaken is the 2nd Avenue line, which was literally on the planning maps in 1929: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway.
I keep telling people: we're open-source :) please consider that an open invitation to fix our search.
Should they have said, "We are 4 idiots" instead?
The cost of providing power to datacenters is going up both in absolute and percentage. You pay once to heat the server in waste energy then again for air conditioning to cool them back down. The ARM chips provide better perf per watt but the upper limit per ARM chip is way lower. To use them, it requires distributed software which is hard but we're getting there.
X-Plane comes with the SR-71 by default.
Apple Questions Data Showing Android's #2 Status
Aye, most of the MFIs (microfinance institutes = banks to the poor, essentially) are for-profit. Some are non-profit, though, but they all charge interest rates for these loans - kiva lenders essentially are loaning them interest-free loans ($25 at a time) to encourage them to take more risks, that is, lend to poorer clients for lower interest rates.
It uses PHP to serve the images from a database - e.g. http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/3/display.php?file=3-8.... Going to the image manually shows this:

The Database Must Be Down.
> laying out something like that in cad is fairly time consuming, on top of that every piece surely went through numerous iterations.

"Regular" design would still go through iterations.

> Plus given that it is some sort of plastic, your only finishing options are probably powder coat, some sort of vapor deposition (which that photo looks like), or possibly some sort of plating if people have figured out how to do it.

In this case, they're using plastic, but you can also print in metal, wax, rubber, nylon, paper, and resin. (And yes, you can plate the plastic. This is how Aston Martin makes headlamps for their vehicles.)

> While I'm sure that the tech will make some people's lives easier, this is one of those things that seems like it could easily be over hyped.

It's true. People get really, really excited about all of this, and start talking about "When everyone owns a 3D printer..." It's such a sexy technology that people get irrationally excited. It certainly has downsides as well as upsides.
No. Read the article -- in the example used, the alternative is weeks on a ventilator. Which we know works. Until these drugs are known to be efficacious with tolerable side effects, they are still a second best treatment.
Where have I seen that logo before? ... http://www.wallpaper.com/
And Thalidomide wasn't approved in the US whereas it was approved in Europe and Canada. So... your point is stupid.
Ron Paul is known gold bugs' favorite, so undermining the Fed by any means is definitely going to score some points for him.
Monica Lam at Stanford has been talking about similar ideas in an academic setting. E.g., http://suif.stanford.edu/~lam/ibm.pdf (10MB), http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/
You can never be too safe. All xkcd-book-built-buildings will have raptor emergency escape plans installed in conspicuous parts of each room, of course.
I'll definitely have mine next time I have a garage sale. I think semi-licensed SF street cart vendors should be overjoyed. Et cetera. I think there's a long tail of uses for debit/credit for which an easy solution has not existed.