skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a cognitive load -- an amount of brain-work -- that we have today that we didn't have even 30 years ago. Let me explain.

Paul uses the day-spent-emailing example. The crazy thing is, I don't know if spending a day emailing is a good use of a person's time or not -- although I get his point.

Selling life insurance? Maybe 8 hours on email nets you a dozen leads. Could be a great use of time. Swapping smalltalk with 40 people you haven't seen in a year? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Sad fact is, the thing you are doing -- emailing, Facebooking, blogging, writing an essay, etc -- is not a great descriptor anymore of whether it's actually useful to you or not.

You sit on the couch and play video games or watch TV for 10 years, and (in my opinion) you've wasted time. But if you don't email, don't communicate, don't participate electronically -- you've also wasted time.

I've had a lot of questions about time management lately. I find it's a much more complicated subject than money management. With money, there is a number you can look at. Did you make more money? Did you spend a lot? With time, it just keeps flowing along, and it seems like you're always trying to maximize it before it's gone. But I'm not really sure there is such a thing as "maximize"

Covey had a great book on time management a decade or so ago. Need to dig that up and take another look at it.
Is this real? It reads like some parody or prank or something.
"putting them in a lock" is incredibly risky. It requires you to be strong enough to do it - if you misjudge the relative strength of the panicking person compared to yourself, they're going to latch on to you, and you may not be able to free yourself,and now you're both in trouble. The technique I described requires no such guesswork. If you do it properly (something that can be learned), you won't get into trouble, regardless of the relative strength of the two parties. The security of the rescuer is paramount in this situation. Why take the risk of misjudging the strength of the rescuee, when you can avoid having to guess?

You're running into the Dunning-Kruger effect here - you don't know what you don't know. Believe me, as someone that has been extensively trained in lifesaving, there are techniques that are safe and effective, and these techniques never rely on force. How could it be otherwise - we'd be condemning strong people to just die - "Jeez, sorry mate, I see you work out in a gym, and are probably stronger than every lifesaver on the beach, so I guess it's just bad luck for you!".
> lifesavers check rips roughly about once every 15 seconds or so
> (and no, I'm not exagerating - they know where the rips are, and they know that these are a big source of danger)

Where I was at, they didn't even see us drowning for approximately 5 minutes. Where one of our group members had to go tell the lifeguard that people were drowning for them to notice.

It was 5:30 in the evening, so maybe that was part of the problem, I'm not sure.
I'm not Australia's IT minister, says Stephen Conroy
Space Invaders in Flash
A 360 Degree View of Internet Piracy (2009)
One-Line Website
Wakemate are facing the common software "thing", only with hardware :) never quite finished, always redesigning something, "nearly" there, always 90%.

Will they ever make it?
I wrote a jetpack app the allows you to toggle the Search header, Left Column, and Footer elements on/off in iGoogle.

http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/55

I'd say it didn't take off because it requires the user to have firefox, install jetpack, use igoogle, and be annoyed by all that wasted space etc :)

I wouldn't say it failed. I use it at work and home, and I love it :)
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
This happened to me recently. This is what worked for me:

Email the journalist privately (not via the post's comments). Say you've found a small error. Explain it and its fix. Then apologize for not being clear in the first place (which is at least a teeny bit true). Close with an invitation to talk by phone or email or Skype.

The two journalists I got in touch with were super friendly and nice. They genuinely cared about being correct.
Anyone know how to get this functionality in Sass without using Compass?
Top Ten Questions and Answers on Data - Microsoft Answers them
Wow, it's as if I wrote those few sentences :) I totally feel you on the chicken/egg problem. It's definitely a big hurdle for any kind of social web app these days.
And yet, even though I spend more time than I should on the internets, I'd never heard about it. Also, some of the people on this site would have only been 12 or 13 (or younger!) in 2004 so might not have been that likely to have heard, or at least paid attention to, an article like this at the time.

My point is that just because something is 'old' or 'common knowledge' doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually widely known by people. Probably better to move on and look at something else than waste your energy pointing out that something is 'old'.
Thanks for the recc. Just spent some time reading the Tarsnap website. It sounds to be a very competitive solution, both in terms of operational transparency (detailed, no-gimmick website) and the layer of security.

Hope it's not a stupid question, but how do you deal with the "bus factor" (a.k.a. "truck factor")? In other words, if the service relies on encrypted S3 backups and the founder exits for whatever reason, is there a contingency plan?

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor)
Parang? http://hannesp.se/parang/
The guy who wrote it mentored me when I was a programming noob.
Yeah it never actually loaded for me :(
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Totally real, read the actual interview here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2010/07/05/prince-world-...
I've got thousands of saved pages, and I was trying to find one I saved a year or two ago. It's a disaster. Having to page dozens of times, trying to physically spot the text.

Sure would be nice to have a single page with everything saved right there. Then I could just search the one web page for what I'm looking for. I could also put these in a spreadsheet or database for future reference.
Well the "Internet's" is a FAD like MTV, so who know ;)
Perhaps it makes sense. Artists will soon make their money via concerts. Prince has a series of concerts coming up. He has a huge old-school fan base, so does not need to get his songs out there (people already know him).

His new songs then are more 'rare' among his core demographic (not teens) -> driving more people to his concerts, where he makes the money.

Remember that prince, back in 2001 ALREADY jumped on the internet bandwagon. He offered his songs for download then - he is not anti-internet, he has tried it and has changed his model.

Remember, this dude makes 50million USD a year, more that most of you will make if your startup sells for a huge amount of money. He knows what he's doing.
well, yes and no; having them put away into a separate css file would be an extra http request, but it's not fair to say "therefore you might as well use sprites", because the chances are you're going to have a global stylesheet that you can tack the images onto the end of; no extra HTTP requests.
I wrote a couple browser extensions for Amazon Gold Box: http://webslices.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox.html (IE 8) and https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/abgkkmmoanpopajo... (Chrome)

I actually got the web slice accepted into the IE addons gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com) after waiting a couple months for approval. Then I made a small revision to the entry, and for some reason that made it go back into the "pending approval" queue. I sent several emails to the website support contact and got no answers. Months later, Amazon came out with their own extension. I finally got a response from a Microsoft rep after escalating with a friend, and they told me about how my extension can't be posted due to a partnership agreement. Pretty lame.
I fucking hate these videos. Why they don't even provide summary in the web page?
Werkzeug is great if you need more flexibility than Django. http://wasitup.com uses Werkzeug and I've been very impressed with it. My wasitup.web module is a Werkzug application alongside wasitup.http, wasitup.monitor, wasitup.persistence, and wasitup.mail.
I don't know, maybe you're having a deep insight!

Roughly speaking, the idea is that water in our universe is essentially H2O. The intuition is that if we went to another universe where there was watery stuff that duck-typed as water but had underlying composition XYZ, it would not be water.

Doesn't sound too controversial, but has interesting implications (e.g. it's an a posteriori necessity!). And there's also some interesting and powerful explications of "our universe" and "another universe" to do with the nature of counterfactuals.

For an alternative take, see Dupré, John. (1995). The Disorder of Things. Harvard University Press. Introduces the delightful notion of "promiscuous realism"!
First, thanks for higlighting the Balsamiq post and related HN discussion. A lot of good insights: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267639

My 2 cents: before a public launch, try to find discussion forums that suit your target demographic and try to recruit users for an alpha version, ask opinions and feedback. This way you can try to create an early adopter community before launch and at least get very direct feedback - much better way to start than shouting into ether.
Be patient. With the new revolutionary product by Knuth, the summary will be generated automatically.
> ".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the packager."

> -- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2.

Here you have a point. That's a fairly silly requirement. However, the rest of the recommendations in the second link are pretty solid.

> I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here?

No, it's a policy/politics thing. Gems break the FHS, so Debian pretends they don't exist. Not knowing it intimately, I don't know Fedora's approach precisely, but presumably they're either allowing FHS breakage, or patching the gems to bring them into line.

Patching them is a non-small job; the number of badly-written gems out there is astounding. I say this as someone peripherally involved with patching them to make them conform to Debian's standards.

> (Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".)

That's a shame - the limitations of Rails are not an accurate representation of the limitations of the language.
Normal HTTP link:

http://www.frob.nl/tmp/Don-Knuth.mp4
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Afghan Taliban reject Mulla Omar’s arrest reports
Analysis of current Top 50-pop songs
The future of television
The "Donate money to me" button.
I'd love to see an Internet-themed prog rock album from Prince.
erlang also provides a number of 'behavior' modules e.g. gen_fsm/gen_server etc. which takes out the drudgery of writing boilerplate network client/server code. w.r.t your fsm, are there timeouts also happening at some states ? might be required to avoid holding onto precious resources if either end becomes unresponsive for whatever reason...
There is some truth in this however a few things bother me

1. Of all the newspapers he is associating his brand with a cheap tabloid. Under no circumstances would I ever give money to a newspaper like this so he has lost my me already. As there are no other ways of getting this legally - I am only left with the pirating option

2. 'In Rainbows' by Radiohead was profitable for the group (and they have somethings in common with Prince - like an established fan base) using the internet model of 'pay what you want' for the download. This made the band look good and still provided them with a profit.

Prince is doing himself no favours by acting in this way.
how do you deal with the "bus factor"?

I don't. If I get hit by a bus, Tarsnap will almost certainly cease to exist.

That said, the service runs itself quite happily on its own (I've gone for months without touching any "live" code) so the odds are very good that Tarsnap users would have plenty of time to download their data between "email goes out announcing bus hit and account balances get refunded" and "service shuts down".

I intend to solve the bus-factor issue once Tarsnap gets larger, but right now it's not financially feasible to bring someone else in.
Ask HN: List of open/public databases
A year or two ago somebody posted a list of open/free/accessible datasources for hackers to download and play around with. I thought this was a great resource, so I saved it, but heck if I can find it now.

Does anybody have such a list? Things like zip-codes for the US, locations of Starbucks stores, current weather forecasts, list of major newspapers, list of publicly-traded stocks, etc. I know there are tons of open/free databases waiting for us to mashup, just can't seem to find a list of them.

EDIT: The goal is a downloadable chunk of data to mashup, reformat, and use. That means CSV/XML/etc format and a public/anonymous FTP or something.
> Bottle uses one process-wide application object. Flask supports initializing multiple application objects.

The process-wide application object is a sane default for small applications, but not the only option. You can instantiate bottle.Bottle() and work with that, if you need multiple encapsulated application objects. This is fully supported.
One thing to point out: backups in the cloud are useless if you don't have internet access when you want access or to restore data.

If you want to fix my backups, make the data readily accessible when there isn't a net connection between me and the service.

One time this usually bites is if you just (re-)installed a new OS and you need the network driver, which is only available online. I always keep a backup of the drivers on my external hard disk for this situation.

Another service I worry about is Gmail and other Google apps. With email you can easily download the several GB of email onto your hard disk, thus keeping a backup for when you or the service are offline.

Dropbox solves this nicely: it's a local folder that's synched to the cloud. If Dropbox is down or I'm offline, I still have access to my data.
It'd be neat (if feasible) to have a demo of the mobile site ensconced in an iPhone.
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Firefox Sync server on Google App Engine
Ok, thanks for thinking for me. :)

On your further answers, data URLs are far better than sprites in maintainability, not(no rewriting of the map etc)?

At the same time, you download all the data URL images with the CSS, regardless of whether the user ever gets to see them on the current page.

Thats also true for sprites, i think.
Anyone have a quick summary of what this is even about?
I think the 37signals guys had a go at fixing it up some, or am I mistaken?
Function Declarations vs. Function Expressions
"I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists."

Personally I'm very aware of this gap, but I've never yet been convinced by the "serious shortcomings in current technology" part, except in a strictly commercial sense. Can you expand or provide references that might convince me?
yum install [somelanguage]

is always going to be far simpler than downloading the source and trying to bootstrap it.
Hi, can you explain your PoV ? How OAuth diminishes the value ?
Same functionality, but I did it with SafariStand. Given how little I used Stand's other features, this probably could've been better :)
Why Social Recommendations Don't Work
Internet for Peace
Lady Wins Fourth Lottery: What Are the Odds?
Plus "lein swank," which once you've got slime set up is an absolute godsend. The two things I do first on a new machine are install clbuild to get slime and the emacs config, then leiningen to get clojure working. It does make things nice and simple.
Wow, an entire blog post dedicated to a straw man argument.

The opening sentences of the linked article:

There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Now, from the Ars Technica article referred to:

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil.
Where's Amazon's Bibliofind acquisition?
For some insight into the world of Prince, watch Kevin Smith tell his Prince story (from his DVD: An evening with Kevin Smith).

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy_cLJ19HMg

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9O130NYr_4

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCm4Jxo3ltE

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo0LbQzdz1A
Try changing the "Buy at Amazon" to "See it at Amazon", also show who is winning.

These are basically A/B tests.
Best Business Attorney - Best Guide On Legal Issues
Actually there are 11, those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
It's a product announcement by Knuth, for a successor to TeX.

Telling any more would spoil the fun-- and if the sentence above doesn't sound like big fun to you, well, then don't even bother with the link, you're not in the target audience.
On the Mac, Dropbox doesn't do so well with restoring metadata: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-... http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-t...

(Disclaimer -- I write backup software: http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/)
That's rather good. I (long ago in the dark ages of the 90s) built something very similar to twitter and included the ability to see just URLs from posts. I wish they'd do the same thing.
fyi: The new product would speed up such sites, using it's cloud technology built-in, or as a plugin.
I'd be up for trying that if you want testers. I'm lazy and need a decent todo app.
No need to. Once the system becomes available, it'll post itself.
Part of the problem is that HN is extremely time sensitive. You see different stories an hour or two later. Adding a comment behaves differently depending when it's added. Anything that would make participating a day later just like participating immediately would make it much easier not to refresh.
I'm not the OP but I'll add my datapoint here. I have that just because of digital photography. My current 12MP camera fills up a 16GB card easily if I am covering a 2-3 hour event for some friend. That adds up fast.

Right now I do a versioned rsync to a server I host myself that has a (just upgraded from 1TB) 4.5TB RAID5 array. That was ~400$ in disks when I upgraded. Even at the current ~1TB usage that would be 3600$ per year in tarsnap storage alone, without the bandwidth cost.

What I'm still missing is a way to backup that server. I could just collocate a second server for a fraction of the tarsnap cost, and I don't really want to be backing up into physical media (tapes or drives) and shuttling that to a deposit box. What I need is tarsnap only 10x cheaper. I'll accept a lower redundancy than S3 for it and especially a lower turnaround time for restores. S3 seems to be built for on-line transactional stuff not backups so is a poor fit for these services. Even the reduced redundancy version only seems a marginal difference.
I built a multiuser blog for a site with two million plus users (soundpedia.com). I worked hard to make it scalable; making it static, easy sync with new servers in the cluster, etc... Themeable too. It was pretty sweet for the time frame.

Turns out we had an audience whose blogs were composed of copying lyrics and changing colours. You can guess not many really used it.

Oh well. SP went out of business a while after so I never had a chance to do what the audience really wanted (a like button)
5 JavaScript Books Worth Every Cent
There are, in fact, 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those who confuse it with binary.
If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms,

Or we might have tried teaching kids that information is not something to be frightened of, but that would be absurd, I suppose.
agreed about the documentation.
Whether OP's response was emotional or not, it touches the matter.

Note it's very easy to look for fallacies when you are detached from the subject. The question is if the person doing this wants to make the world a better place in his way or is just a policeman for the sake of verbal purity..
Bitrex is a bitter compound, used as (among other things) an additive to industrial alcohol to make it unappealing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium
"Pseudo" is a GUI interface for sudo: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/pseudo.html
Dupe. This was discussed at length (144 comments!) back in March. I remember because a) I mocked the pathetic "It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being." statement and got voted up, and b) a swarm of pro and anti ad blocker posts hit HN over the following 24 hours. It was almost as fun as the iPad launch.

Added: Aha, here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172302
Hrm. Not voting this one up.

His suggestion (don't know if it's facetious or not) of requiring a 'contract' is obviously a non-starter. Any site that tried that would lose visitors to non-contract sites, and since most people don't block ads, the contract site would simply be losing revenue.

> I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

"Find another way". Uh-huh. Like? And, if you think the content is good, wouldn't shutting them down be a loss for the world?

To hijack the thread for something more useful, a concrete example I'm wrestling with is http://langpop.com - people like it a lot, but programmers are also adept at ignoring advertisements, so it doesn't get much revenue. Now, it's mostly a fun project - it wasn't something I ever created to make money on, but I'm getting to a point in my life where it's time to do more things to make money and do fewer "let's see where it'll go" fun projects. (This saddens me, because I love to explore and play and create, but c'est la vie). In any case, people like it, so there must be some value in it, and I've certainly invested some time in creating it, but so far I have not really found a way to capture some of the created value for myself.
Freebase is a big one: http://www.freebase.com/ .

Also, if you’re in the UK the government datasets might interest you: http://data.gov.uk/