skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another way to go would be to link our brains to some computer that can simulate experience. Tired of what the physical world has to offer, people of the future may prefer to live in such virtual worlds, ... as long as the experience seems real, who cares.
On average people visit the same 8 sites over and over. We feel this kind of interface is more efficient, because it's meant to be set as a home page. This way going from site to site only involves clicking the Home button and each site. We also think it fits well with the trend toward touch screens on devices like the iPad.
This guy's kidding himself if he thinks that even seemingly happy, intelligent people who appear to have it all together are not suffering from many of the things he describes, and others. I imagine depression, alcoholism and unintended pregnancy occur highly within higher socio-economic groups.
I don’t think Marco is really making a point here. He’s just sharing what he’s been thinking about. But I don’t think he is saying that a “hot” interface is neccessarily good or bad.
It's not an aberration, it's part of the Jobsian Bauhaus design sense. He got to force the main font choice on the phone, where he probably wasn't able to on Mac OS X.
I prefer bookmarks, and google is more useful as my homepage.
Derek makes the same mistake many make when dealing with deities -- he personalizes them.

My guess is that the ancients viewed deities as categories of things we don't know -- hence the 6 zillion gods. Over time, organization set into religion and people began anthropomorphizing the gods.

Judaism moved "categories of things we don't know" from a multiple choice to a single entity. Then organization set in again with the anthropomorphizing.

It's a mistake to take this to zero -- the assumption that we know everything and things we cannot prove are not worthy of consideration. Having a deep understanding of the huge amount of unknown in the universe is a critical part of a balanced life. To say you don't believe in one person's personification is to miss the point entirely.
Facebook Privacy Guide
Replication of content would be important - you need to be able to see your friend's data when they are offline. Doing that securely would be interesting - but I suspect not impossible with current cryto.

Would need to supporting work both as as server application and a thick client.

Sounds a bit like an open Lotus Notes...
You are doing a great job of telling me what the site is about, but you should also show how it actually looks/works.

I see that it is a website to save/share stuff and I am not sure whether to sign up or not because I don't know what the actual inner pages are going to look like. Is it as simple as the home page etc or will it get more complicated and difficult to use? There are a lot of sites that does this same thing and why should someone sign up for this site? Some screenshots or video demo would be helpful in this case.

But again, my biggest problem with the site is that I still don't understand what problem it solves.
I would suggest you download the Nokia6212 NFC SDK, and start playing around. There are lots of code examples included.
http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/5bcaee40-d2b...
I think we need Clojure in there.
Interesting...

Bookmarklets can help a lot in saving videos, pics, read-later links, etc
What benefit does your site have over Safari's top sites or Firefox's fast-dial?
Hm, when living in Canada I had one exactly like that, it really bugs me how fragile that thing is. I always figured my biggest risk was a roll-over, now I'm thinking the biggest risk might have been hitting a tree.

Incredible the deformation.
Got in touch with Shane, his response:

"server hard drive crashed and I lost all the data :(. I was stupid and did not have backups. I plan on bringing it back sometime this year."

So good news. I wonder if archive.org will give him a copy of it, since they still have the entire site backed up.
I am going to work on a new implementation of a facebook style website. Built on these core values:
1) User privacy
2) Data transferability
3) Open source software
4) Open API (for only that data that users allow, of course.)

I plan to do it in a Python web framework, most likely Django.

I know people have been discussing a distributed social network, but I don't see a market for that among the non-techies of the world. Just like they see XMPP as gMail chat (most of them), open standards mean nothing. Just look at openID, it simply can't gain much traction -- unless a flag carrier picks it up. Distributed social networking will simply splinter the arena till it's impossible for them to know "which one?"

For a new social network, the users want:
1) Simplicity.
2) Privacy.
3) Interaction.
4) Rich but intuitive interfaces.

I am making a call for any interested devs, shoot me an email. lukeseelenbinder <at> the only webmail provider to use. :)

(If I should post this as a new post. Let me know. I'm a little new to HN)
My gut reaction was: why would I bother going here rather than the Top Sites (or equivalent) pane in Safari or Chrome or FF, which shows the sites I visit most and doesn't require me to have another account elsewhere?

Don't get me wrong - I really applaud everyone who gets an idea out there to market, but I just can't see the use-case for this being common enough.

(Thinks more Unless you're going for IE users, perhaps?)
Unfortunately not everyone is carved for the entrepreneurship. The end of the article mentions this very category of people and I agree with the author: something must be done to provide jobs to those people.
Agreed.

As if that weren't bad enough, the charts nor the article contain information about what's been tested. Is it the speed? The memory-usage? Something else?

The results themselves are pretty interesting though. Only thing I feel left out is Opera.
Do you happen to work for UN?

No, serioulsy. It's bad enough if smoking increases your chances of having a lung cancer by 10% or something, but I can't believe 95% percent of the smokers will have a painful death.

So, no need to makes bad things worse than they are.
Smoking leads to enhanced conversation and sociability because all the parties involved are satisfying their cravings and enjoying the rush of brain chemicals. Dopamine causes other types of social bonding too, like office workers who go to the gym together, or have a drink after work.

The sad part about smoking however is the control dopamine begins to take over the smoker, so that smoking becomes the high point of their day.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web1/Ferrell.h...

I can't count how many opportunities were missed while I was smoking at the price of the few opportunities it afforded.
- Viewing/modifying a fasta file containing human chromosome data

- Extremely large log files

Why not use less? Because it's ugly and does not allow me to edit or copy specific sections out. I like having the full power of a good text editor at my back.

I have brought this concern up before, and the excuse I heard was, "Well, you should not have to work with files that large." Seems someone in emacs-land disagrees; now you can play with files up to 512 MB on a 32-bit system! If there is a legitimate use case for, oh, 500 MB, we can imagine a use case for 2 GB. The world is moving on; we aren't playing with 64 KB systems any more, and data keeps growing.

In 2010, our text editors still have hardcoded memory limits? (I understand emacs's architectural reasoning for it -- and that is a choice.) IIRC, DOS 6.2's Edit could handle large files; it accomplished this with a partial-loading/paging trick, rather than actually loading the entire file in memory.

So yes, I would like to and have enjoyed opening files of large size. Admittedly, I have to wait a bit for the I/O to catch up! :) I also have to be conscious of my memory usage, since I am unaware of any paging mode in vim (or emacs). I expect, on average, to have the option to open a file of at least 3 GB size -- and that is without taking advantage of swap. Next year, I expect more.

I know it is not a common desire, so I do not blame anyone for imposing an arbitrary limit other than to say "nyah nyah; I am free".
Speculation about Apple's A4 processor
Of course it doesn't :-) However, I wonder how many people reading this article in the Guardian know about different metric spaces. Hawking's presumed audience here is "laymen".
Thanks for the helpful feedback. Communicating how our site works in a quick way remains a big challenge for us, and we will certainly keep working to improve that. As for the problem it solves, we think it solves a few, but one example would be the ability to hold on to videos that might be watched more than once.
I had been using http://aquamacs.org/, I'm going to have to weigh up whether to switch for these features.
Having once managed to delete a file with hours of edits just before committing to version control, I opened my 60 GB partition in vim, found the text of the file and copied it out. While this is "stupid" — there will be better ways to do it — searching and recovering with vim worked immediately and easily.

Edit: it's possible I used "less", I can't remember.
How to Get a Girl
You're right, in an intuitive sense. In math, especially dealing with weird stuff like extra dimensions, intuition may break down, though. For example, in the 4D Minkowski space you can have a unit sphere with a radius of -1! One has to understand what is meant when we say that "time is a special dimension". otherwise teh analogies we draw may fail. The Wikipedia article I linked explains these in a simple way.
CrackerCast Episode 15 - Social Engineering
I have Flickr, Twitter, email, and blogs. All I need now is a half decent way to schedule events and a super flexible, privacy controlled index of friends and their blogs/twitter/flickr/email.

Exploration and friend discovery were huge draws from Facebook.
That seems too naive. We all know that Wall Street are full of crooks and are colluding with the government. Any of the directors involved in the mortgage bust served any jail time?
If you believe the figures for rape and abuse of women, you could say this to any woman and be right a large percentage of the time.
Here's the article all on one page:

http://www.embedded.com/underthehood/224701207?printable=tru...
Youtube launch beta video rentals
Great title, then the article fails to deliver on its premise. Save yourself a click, the article doesn't know what's inside the A4.
Memristors: the technology that might shape the future of computing
The Numerous Uses of Pack Tapes
If you could trust a central service to be good, we wouldn't be talking about replacing Facebook, IMO.
I think the main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that the former is very clear at all times that all your data is public (by default), while the later is moving from a private to public data, in a not so clear way. But being more focused, Twitter does have an edge: it does not try to contain all data about your life, therefore, even if it sells your data, it doesn't really matter, as it was public already (buyers could just as easily use the API) and you don't have a lot of info about you anyway (unless you choose to do so).

Summing it up: would we even be having this conversation if Facebook, from day 1, started with defaulting all data as public, being clear about it, and making data securing hard to accomplish?
Wave is probably too complicated for the average Netizen. I've personally only found it useful as a sort of real-time chat. Haven't checked my inbox in months at this point.
They've broken our trust
The best answer I can give that is we feel a browser based solution is best, because your favorite content can be accessed from any computer.
I couldn't agree more. XML sounded like such a great idea for this back in '99. Attempted implementation will disabuse you of that feeling very quickly ;-)
yeah I tried various review sites and newegg reviews but they all reeked of spam.

I don't understand why the big G doesn't immediately ban all spam sites. They take about 0.1 seconds to identify by a human viewer.

Obviously not suggesting that G curates the whole web - but jeez purging the worst offenders would make life easier.
I would certainly use favetop for aggregating videos and music. This feature is just awesome. I agree with others - bookmarks are best for launching links and webapps, specially when you are using ONE computer and only ONE browser.

Well, a question to site owners: do you track my clicks on links?? ;)
You're right, that classical special theory of R, but I don't think that's what people have in mind when they think about time travel. If they're so inclined (like me), they think of it as a way to visit a person from the past, e.g. Cleopatra in her imperial boat. Or, going to the year 2500.

As far as I understand, the crucial physical and philosophical problem is: Why is time's direction one way? Why can't we reverse it. Some physicists explain this by saying time moves in the direction of increasing entropy. But WHY does it have to be so? There's no inherent physical law, AFAIK, that says that this must be the case.

In your example the direction is still the same for both people, it's just the difference of inertial frames.
Why I don’t use CSS Frameworks (2007)
I think this is why I found his stint on the Tonight Show so disturbing. It was like seeing a thoroughbred hitched to a plow.

He didn't seem to handle the limitations of that venue well. When he couldn't use his wit full on, he degraded quickly to mostly slapstick. Which was pretty unfunny coming from him.
Émilie du Châtelet - "a great man whose only fault was being a woman"
> I understand emacs's architectural reasoning for it -- and that is a choice.

I think the choice they make is to spend their very limited time on more useful features. I'm sure many of the core Emacs developers would be very happy if someone would fix this limitation. It would be a very invasive change, a fair amount of work.
In the sense that you can show up to their surgery and say, I think X about Y and you should do Z. They don't have to do it, of course, but you've as much right to speak to them regardless of whether you voted for them.
Why?

He's not asserting ownership of a world event. He's asserting ownership of a picture. I dunno if you've ever tried it, but good photos are incredibly difficult to take. When a good photo of a powerful event crops up, it can often define the event in the public's perception.

Why is it stupid to assert the right for compensation?
The big thing in replacing Facebook isn't "distributed" or "central", its "what could make people switch?" Facebook came to prominence because of the elitist factor associated with top schools, the "poke" concept and its lack of "cesspool-edness" compared with MySpace.

At this point, I personally don't see how you could compete with Facebook on functionality, so what is your 10x improvement that would make people switch from Facebook to your new thing? People don't seem to be outraged enough about the privacy debacles as of yet to be making enough noise that a competitor could capture a large share just from that issue alone. (e.g. this is likely why Diaspora will fail, at least initially)

Knocking Facebook out of its top spot is much more of a economics (i.e. incentives, etc) and marketing issue than a technical one, IMO. People won't switch to a me-too; there has to be some compelling reason to move.
Hehe, cool trick, I'll have to try it out someday :)
I think it's important to realize that he is Haitian. Imposing your demands on a Haitian in matters dealing with his own catastrophe is kind of presumptuous, don't you think?
Why not put everything on one page? I'd rather scroll then click tabs.
If you make something, and it works really well, and lots of people love it, and you own it, well, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. The people who complain about this or that about it can shove off.
I theory you are right, but I fear that drivers don't pay so much attention to their driving, since "after all the computer will do it for me".

There has been a fascinating linked posted a couple of times to a story about a guy who worked on the London road system: each time he would clear out congestion issues, more cars would go on the road - which meant that the average speed didn't change. He argued (or the article did, can't seem to recall whom) that people had a specific level of risk they were prepared to accept: make it safer than that, and people drove less safely.
New Rating Site For StartUp Lawyers
There was an old magazine called the C User's Journal a while back. Then it became the C/C++ User's Journal. Finally it either got purchased by Dr. Dobbs or it became Dr. Dobbs. I'd love to get a look at some of those articles in the CUJ. Dobbs doesn't seem to have articles online anymore from this era. I think my only hope is to make it to a well known university library..
>"As you can see, the Mac version was released a year after the Windows version, as customer interest and awareness was reaching an all-time low. I realized that the Mac percentages are so low not because the Mac versions sell poorly, but because the Windows sales are artificially inflated by the marketing campaign."

I think this hits the nail on the head. By the time the game comes out for the Mac, my PC friends have mostly moved on. Throw in that many Mac ports can't play online vs. the PC version, and there's a lot less incentive to buy the game.

>"The NPD survey shows that Mac users make twice as many electronics purchases"

Unfortunately, this also means they're more likely to have a Mac and a game console.
In general, photojournalists don't need consent forms.

In fact, in most places in the western world you don't need consent forms if the photos are taken in public, period. It gets a little trickier when it's a portrait or something. But if you go out on the sidewalk of a busy street where people have no expectation of privacy and start snapping photos, they really don't have any claim to the revenue from those photos.
They aren't going to stop until someone sues the $@%& out of them.
I was thinking along the same lines, actually, in terms of a "distributed Facebook"'s similarity to Lotus Notes. However, one of the big niceties of SaaS services is that you don't bear the cost of storing and transforming all the photos, videos, etc that you upload. Replication of this data would also get quite expensive as you gained followers. And then there's the problem of bandwidth in the US. Seems to me there are some infrastructural problems with a distributed Facebook model that require some more thinking than just "lets run a server on people's home machines" (e.g. Diaspora)
You know, I think they might have been thinking along the lines of a "distributed Facebook"-type thing when this came out. Anyone looking to replace Facebook should probably learn the lessons of Wave's failure before embarking on their own project.
Considering the quality of service they offer, it's no surprise.
For those curious about how to pronounce Scribd (as I was for a long time), it rhymes with "ribbed", as in, "Scribd for her pleasure."
Except for email, that sounds a lot like Friendfeed ;-)
Samsung bada IDE out, here comes a new challenger in mobile
Given Tornado's single threaded design, a production service should run multiple instances of Tornado behind a proxy.

Upstart does not help with the multiple instance problem. Upstart adds the problem of running code with elevated privilege.

I think it might be simpler to write a script to start/stop/restart daemon Tornado instances running in an unprivileged account.
I'm actually working on something like that, with one important difference: no personal data on a server, period. No servers at all. :)
Unplug the internet or install LeechBlock Firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
and block HN among other sites that distract you.
Hacking Vim 7.2
If anyone on the Chrome team is reading, the omnibar is awesome, but please give us the option to also have a multisearch box like FF and IE.
/agree. There's already the 'right group of people' = the minority of Facebook users concerned with privacy. Get them on board, then build the community from there.

It won't be Harvard wanna-be's, but if it turns into another community like HN or Reddit (minus the frontpage and several subreddits), you'd be gtg.
I had forgotten about them, but yes. Both were cool, but I had a subscription to "Call A.P.P.L.E." magazine - a regional Apple ][ mag. Lots of BASIC programs. (I'm amazed to find out just now that it's been revived as a Mac magazine!) I recently was throwing things away and ran across a stack of them.
You often have to wonder if browsers only get better benchmark times because the benchmark times are targeted. I.e., the brain gets faster at doing the same thing over and over again, so the programmers are tuned to getting a faster benchmark time, and optimize accordingly.
That had never occurred to us. However, we consider ourselves an Internet Desktop, so like a PC we want to allow users some customization (possibly including their own design themes). Under the Settings we may include that as an option if there is enough demand for it, but we also believe in fast loading pages, so that would be one drawback.
A willingness to do it right the first time. I find any time I take on "technical debt" it almost always bites me in the rear latter.

A good VCS and the ability to use it.

Spiral development with strict YAGNI. Do it right but don't over engineer.

Automated Tests. Not because I am all that big a fan of tests but because if you write it to where it is easy to test it is often better designed. Code that is written with everything you need to do to unit test is often written with lower coupling and better cohesion because you are thinking about how to take out this one little part to test.
I think minileap has some merit in a slightly different arena so to speak. I'm presuming the winners go on to polish off what they started while the "community at large" follows? I think this would be a fun way for hackers who are already friends to kill a weekend--kind of like Apple's insomnia contests for film students but for coders. My two suggestions would be 1) to think about incorporating some sort of money pot where you require users to submit like $10-20 to make things interesting, and 2) I wouldn't rule out there being two programmers per team.

Best of all, developers get to indulge all those little ideas floating around in their heads, so even if they didn't win the pot they still come away with a feeling of release. Basically, the equivalent of the one-night stand for startuppers :)

HN please review minileap!!!
Foreclosure is not a binary function. Its a slow motion tragedy of deepening desperation that ends when men with guns forcibly evict you.