skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm that friend! I had the same feelings about RSS as the OP, so I created http://feedingo.com.

Most RSS readers try to be something they're not: "it's like reading email", "it's like reading a magazine" etc. Feedingo is a web app with an interface that makes reading RSS as easy as possible.

It's true that the current pricing that I launched with needs to be changed, but sign up for the free version and try it out while im working on that.
"Chrome doesnt crash"

Despite the fact that I have all but abandoned Firefox for Chrome, I beg to differ. I've crashed Chrome a number of times doing nothing at all unusual, just basic browsing. But beyond crashing the whole program, I have had pages without plugins lock up and refuse to accept clicks, a phenomenon that I have never seen in Firefox.
But that's exactly the problem in Greece; at base, promises have been made that can't be kept.

Income sources are running out: tax receipts due to the recession, new taxes due to voters, people willing to lend the state money at rates it can afford (if Illinois can't officially borrow money, no doubt it's like Massachusetts or New Jersey who create off book liabilities like a zillion "independent" "authorities").

But the promises can't be cut back because those directly benefiting from them are too powerful and are willing to use extreme means (e.g. "If You Don't Give Us 150 Percent Pensions, We'll Kill This Child" http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/25/if-you-dont-give-us-150-pe...).

Unlike Greece it's not a sovereign nation, it has no theoretical option to drop out of the US dollar and issue a devalued Illinois currency. Although if it's like California and New York soon enough it'll be issuing IOUs and demanding that taxes be paid in cash on payments made to companies.

And there's no provision for bankruptcy of a state (there is for municipalities and the like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_9,_Title_11,_United_Sta...). States are in theory sovereign entities with governmental rights and responsibilities split between them, municipalities and the Federal government.

It's going to get messy.
Ask HN: I want to raise money for the Gulf cleanup, how do I spread the word?
I put up a quick page to help raise some money for the Gulf cleanup and figured I'd use my product (MailFinch) to have some fun with BP in the process.

Any tips/recommendations on what I could be doing to spread the word about this?

URL: https://www.mailfinch.com/thanksbp
Ask HN: Anybody interesting in a Sunday afternoon puzzle?
So I've implemented the retinex algorithm from GIMP in java. (Lots of reasons but mainly flexibility, threading and memory usage).

Here's an example of the current differences:

http://imgur.com/GPsy9.png

GIMP is the top, mine is the bottom. Given that in large part this is a Gaussian filter at first, I've got to assert that mine is probably the correct one. However, the sad part is I am really interesting in implementing this bugged behavior as well.

My implementation is here:

http://github.com/rortian/Retinex/blob/master/src/org/pseudopattern/retinex/ByteImage.java

which corresponds with this gimp file:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/common/contrast-retinex.c?id=GIMP_2_6_8

I'm about to have to start building gimps that will give me more insight, which I don't honestly want to do. If anybody has any clue how this might be happening I'd love the help. I've got a minimal C background so any comments from someone knowledgeable there would be especially helpful.
but WHO are all these people using Windows Live Mail/Messenger, Azure, Windows 7, Windows server, etc?

Guilty one here. While I use Windows 7, Windows server (multiple licenses) etc at home, I guess just Windows 7 is the norm for most people I know.

At work I can attest to having some hundred Windows Servers and not a single Linux box. As we were a consulting firm, we had lots of different customers but our focus-area was MS-tech. Ofcourse my numbers will be biased, but let me tell you: there are lots of Windows Servers out there. Lots. Sure some Linux-servers here and there as well, but Windows Servers are having pretty good days all in all.

As for Windows Live Mail... I dunno, I like gmail better.

As for Windows Live Messenger though... At first that seems like a really odd question to me, but really, it's not that special.

In my experience IM software is one of the categories of software with the highest geographically variation of any I've come across. In the US I hear people actually use AIM, which is entirely unheard of in the rest of the world. In Europe, you will find MSN is the status quo. In Australia Yahoo Messenger seems to be pretty big (or so it seems), but I've never seen anyone use it elsewhere.

The interesting thing about this kind of software is how it's not the software itself which is drawing users. It's who you can reach (ie, userbase). So if everyone in your area is using product X, it doesn't matter if product Y does everything ten times better, it will still be useless to you unless you can reach the userbase of product X.

Whoever gets users first wins (because who seriously bothers to run several IM applications?). And then it just seems to stay that way.

If I were to take my (severely) biased impression and generalize, I would say everyone is using every product from Microsoft, with the noteworthy exception of BizTalk. Linux can only be seen on netbooks or as a means of bypassing the corporate web-filter. Oracle does exist, but only in very few companies which rakes in billions. MySQL doesn't exist at all, except for in the bottom-tier web-hosting basket.

But I'm not going to do that, and I suggest you don't take (what I assume is) your Linux-hacker biased experiences and overgeneralise them either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Hey dean, give my reader http://feedingo.com a look. As an example of an RSS reader created by a designer.
I really didn't know dating sites were this successful...hmm time to jump in..off to make a profile :)
Are Cell Phones the New Cigarettes?
I married the girl I found on Facebook.

We met when I searched Facebook for 'Cryptonomicon', and she was the only result. (This was April 2004, so there were maybe a couple thousand people on all of Facebook.)

We moved in together a few weeks later, and got married in 2006.
Your analysis excludes the fact that the sampling of people you meet is not uniform but biased according to what you do.
The chances of meeting women who do outdoor sports is extremely high if you do them yourselves, you are more likely to meet a girl like you want in a bar than in a church, etc. My point is that bumping into a girl like that randomly is actually very high, as long as you don't spend your life only at home or at work.
Links linkified:

http://imgur.com/GPsy9.png

http://github.com/rortian/Retinex/blob/master/src/org/pseudo...

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/common/contra...
I use HighCharts(http://www.highcharts.com/) at press9. Javascript, very nice charts.
"Actually speaking "social netorking" sites generate more traction in the dating world"

I am not so sure about that. I don't really see people hooking up with friends of friends
does he address Tragedy of the Commons? monopoly? uneven distribution of information and power? aristocracy (feudal or modern)? just curious, because those are also economic forces in the real world, but they tend to push back against the notion that a totally free unregulated market w/o govt intervention is best.

Regardless, I'll definitely check it out. Looking at the 1st few pages on Amazon and he seems to have good writing skills. Do not like the Hoover Institution connection though.
Awesome reader, first one I've actually liked.

Only major problem so far is that I can't delete a feed (the link isn't working) or edit details.

Other than that, awesome job.
Wait, so now I can't wear functional coats and glasses anymore while making discoveries? I have to care about fashion now? Well damn it.
I think there's an issue with people's expectations of their Feed Readers. If you add 100+ feeds then expect the reader to make it easy to read every single post, that will never happen.

Feed Readers work best, and are much more realistic when you treat them like Twitter. You can follow 100+ people, but you don't expect to read every single tweet that they send out. If you miss a post, oh well, it's yesterday's news.

Just log into your reader of choice when you have free time, read the latest news, then go about your day guilt free.

plug: http://feedingo.com
Clickable: https://www.mailfinch.com/thanksbp
I can't find this one presentation of theirs on scribd. But it had some inkling of their projected path. Technically speaking, I believe they were using Ruby on Rails and MongoDB at the time and of course a lot of encryption details.

Edit: Here's a relevant yet detailed look at what they proposed they'd build: http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-vill...
And if you are on a mac, you can do something like this instead of the xdotool line:

silent !osascript ~/.vim/refresh.scpt

Where refresh.scpt looks like this:

tell application "Safari"
activate
set rURL to URL of current tab of front window
set URL of current tab of front window to rURL
end tell

Or like this (this form preserves the location on the page)

tell application "Safari"
activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
tell process "Safari"
keystroke "r" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
A lot of people think that the Cash for Clunkers program was actually the single most effective element of the recent US stimulation bill. It really did contribute to a burst in actual buying of products, thus, economic activity. Whereas despite all the money made available to financial institutions there did not seem to be a follow-on rise in new or extended credit for businesses and individuals; if anything, it got worse afterward.

What is the argument for why the CfC program was bad or ineffective?
I wrote myself an RSS reader that does exactly what I want...which is aggregate links for me.

It's here: http://newsyndicated.com if anybody is interested.

The only real "feature" of it is the ability to make a sort of "meta rss" feed so that you can share links that you have "liked" with your friends.
Ask HN: Project Management Suggestions (Gaming Principles preferred)
I'm looking for a new webapp to help manage my todos and enhance my planning and collaboration. There are startups for todos/PM posted all the time on HN. Unfortunately I did not keep a list and searchyc isn't all that great for generating the results I'm looking for.

I'm looking for an app that incorporates gaming principles, at the least, the ability to assign points to tasks and get instant emotional rewards when completing them.

This way I can also see the total value of tasks completed on the team.

I know somebody has built this app, and I'm pretty sure somebody has already posted it on HN. I'm looking forward to your recommendations!
s/stay fit/be slightly less sedentary

These are nice and all, but a much more effective approach to staying fit is to do active things, go to the gym, eat well, etc.
Your device is slow because apps are constantly triggering low-memory conditions. Memory was very tight on the 3G, even before iOS 4. This is precisely why multi-tasking isn't enabled.

Safari alone is consuming most of your device's memory, by a very large margin. It stays resident in memory when you return to the home screen, and it's one of the last apps to be killed in low-memory conditions. The problem is that much worse if you do a lot of browsing on your iPhone or iPod; Safari just grows and grows. This is why the problem appears to be fixed when you reboot your device.

Here's the tip: You can quit Safari by closing all of its tabs and then returning to the home screen. You should do this periodically; I did this whenever I was finished with a browsing session. With Safari out of the way the rest of the software on your device should run at normal speed without triggering any low-memory conditions.

My primary devices now have 256 MB of RAM instead of 128 MB, and I no longer have to worry about Safari's memory consumption.
My only issue with the video, which I think is great, is that he doesn't seem to look at what is actually causing the problem he's trying to solve.

To my eyes the problem this video seems to want to solve is that of unpleasant work places. That’s the point he’s making in that there are a lot of unhappy people out there and a big reason they’re unhappy is because we’ve been incentivizing them in the wrong way (through monetary means as opposed to mastery and autonomy).

But we all know that. It’s in our very human nature. You can’t tell me the problem with Corporate America is that people don’t know their employees want to be self directed. So illuminating that fact doesn't fix the problem.

Fixing the problem requires asking "Why aren't people given autonomy and the opportunity to further master their skills?"

In my opinion the answer to that is another part of our human nature which is the need for power. Since the beginning of time there have been people who have wanted to have power over other people. That tendency has been dominant in human evolution from the Kings of Old to the Senior VPs of today.

But that component of human nature is opposed to the values of personal mastery and autonomy. Someone who loves power wants to control those under them and doesn’t want to risk being replaced so they take away autonomy and inhibit mastery for those underneath them.

Fixing that is the actual problem (and I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a solution short of abolishing management completely)
There are 10+ HN submissions of this by now, here are ones with comments to check out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939
I think Facebook is very strong and unlikely to die anytime soon.

One thing that can happen is HUGE breach in upcoming Facebook Credits platform. If they manage to loose a lot of money of their users and partners, it can be big. But I do not think it is likely.
That's a great book, even better than the first one. They made us read it at founder institute.

Those logistical efficiencies must work in the convenience store biz as well. Honolulu has all of these ABC stores. I even saw 2 almost across the street from each other.
My experience was that it handled having low storage space (Less than 400MB free out of 16GB) less well than 3.1.3.

Once i freed some space the odd app crashes seemed to stop.
This REALLY makes me wonder which I'd want to be:
http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/dans.html

I love the effort, mystery and imagination that went into the first one. Would I want to be a guy that inspires that, or would I want to be the guy that inspires the normal "scientist" in the next drawing?

The first one brings about a sense of awe for these brilliant people that come up with fantastic answers to really difficult questions, while the second one reminds us that even the scientists are humans, and have a social life and enjoy themselves.

Both have their pros and cons.
I have no idea, but judging from comments, it seems to be <10% female. That might be an underestimate, though, since many women who post on predominantly male forums often don't reveal their gender.
Article from 2006, and submitted previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185187

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345938
I think very local control is much state or federal control of marijuana sales, medical or otherwise.

http://www.theanswerisliberty.com/2010/06/can-democracy-and-recreational-drug-use.html
I'm really interested in learning more about this. I've been making sales calls lately (for the first time in my life), and one of the biggest sticking points I have come across is when someone tells me they have a problem (that my business solves), but that they are happy with spending time and resources to solve it in house.

I've been playing with a lot of numbers, and I'm almost certain that I can solve their problems a lot cheaper than they can. I've tried to convey this in a couple of different ways.

1. Telling them straight forward "I can solve this for cheaper than you can right now."
2. Asking them if they would consider using an outside tool to solve the problem and explaining more about how my product works.

Neither approach is really working for me. Does anyone have some solid advice on how to guide the customer along so that they come to the conclusion that they have a condition that needs to be fixed?
This is very tricky to do. Let's say that it's the iPhone4 launch day and every story is about that phone. Some users might want all those duplicate posts, to get different perspectives on the story. Others might just be annoyed and want all those duplicates skipped.

I think filtering is probably the way to go in this case. Instead of detecting duplicates the reader should allow you to filter out all stories tagged "iPhone4".
Decentralisation of social networks: A protocol built on top of email.

All your info would be held by your email provider (gmail, say), and when your friends log onto their email (yahoo, say) your new updates are download for them to view.

If problems with getting email providers to abide by protocols specs aren't too large, I really could see this working.
Simple VM JIT with LLVM
Plug: Give my startup Pretty Graph a try (http://prettygraph.com). We are trying to build the best web-based graphing tool. Still in very early stages, and looking for early users. I was going to make a review post here soon, but since you asked now I thought I should mention it anyway.
It is completely unbearable on my 3G. I did install a jailbroken rom which has multitasking enabled, however it seems odd that "Backgrounder" ran apps just fine yet iOS4 cannot.

Oh well back to 3.1.2 for me.
I love how the after is regularly "normal people with exciting jobs". I hope these kids become scientists :D
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you? We don't think twice about Google docs being a good idea, or a thousand other things that were once thought to be purely desktop applications, why should coding be any different? I think it's very striking how few good editors there are on the web, and no real IDEs (that I know of).
Thanks po and bd for sharing this site, I finally feel I understand voltage, el. current, el. devices. It is awesome!
Agreed on both your points. (His college textbook is probably the thickest in my economics collection.) I lost a lot of respect for him over the Soviet era. It undermines his credibility on many other issues. Economics is already a soft science (compared to physics, etc.) so having trust in the authority of it's pole bearers is pretty critical.
An interesting observation I read about a week or two ago when this first popped up was that not a single boy changed the sex of their prototypical scientist - every one was male - but some of the girls who drew males first did.
I know it sounds like an ad - because it really is - but http://earlyedd.com wants to be the solution for the RSS problem (http://blog.earlyedd.com/post/739958248/the-problem).

EarlyEdd is the RSS reader that shapes on your interests. It discovers people reading pretty much the same stuff as you do (the fellows), and it compiles a relevant news edition especially for you. Give it a try ;)
He is not.If you think he is the misinformed person is you.

You can inform yourself.Search for DRDOS.Search for windows trademark issues,lindows, you know what? they were an entire line of windows branded products before MS, MS destroyed them all, you can search what happened to them.

Windows is a generic word, it can't never be trademarked(unless you are rich to get over the law), that applies to "word", "powerpoint", "project", "excel", "exchange". A word in the English dictionary just can't be trademarked, by law.

Maybe you were a kid then, but there was a time when "word" was not the most used word processor, it was "WordPerfect", and people used Lotus123 instead of "excel". What did MS did? They made windows but didn't let WordPerfect and Lotus123 people(and everybody else, like compiler builders) use the windows API, so MS had a 4 year period of advantage. Once they did, the high level exposed API was slower than what MS used.

I'm tired too. When people don't know they don't know what they don't know.
Study mashable. They use a bunch of patterns that are simple, direct, enticing, appeal to ego/self-improvement (for men) or create an emotional response (for women). Apparently this works superbly w/ their ADD social media targets.

1. "Top X ways to [blah]"

2. "HOW TO: Find the greatest [blah]"

3. "[blah] will save you time/money"

4. "[apple product] [blah]"

5. "X finally becomes cool"

6. "X + Y = [blah]"

7. "World's cutest kittehs: [blah]"

8. "[Big company/other trusted/loved/hated party] [blah]"

etc
What hardware did you have issues with?

Not that I necessarily recommend the hackintosh route, but if you had 10.5 running, 10.6 should run as well. I had my system moved to 10.6 within a week of it's release.
I have indeed misread your comment. Sorry.
I don't see any way of killing Facebook "at this point." Think about what Facebook does: It connects people, in a constant stream sort of way. And you can count on being connected to almost everyone you know through Facebook just by signing in (over 1/4 of everyone on the internet is on Facebook, and I imagine this fraction is much higher in The US and other English-speaking countries). How would one overcome this barrier?

Another problem is that Facebook is responsive to market pressures. Despite the recent "Exodus" of privacy-aware folks being little more than a trickle, they made changes to the way their privacy works. They adapt, and any significant improvement offered by a competitor will be added to Facebook's arsenal (Tagging in statuses, for example).

Finally, knowing all of this, it is much easier to simply include Facebook Connect in a social service than to leave it out. By including it, you get over that first critical-mass hurdle. The problem is that by including it, you are also putting no pressure on Facebook or increasing the drive to migrate to your service.
Another thing to consider is that kids enjoy rebelling, but they also want to have things.

Every kid wants a cell phone no matter if their parents have them or not.
Definitely, AT&T's problem in SF has a large congestion-related dimension. I know, because for the first ~2 years of AT&T service, it was annoying but not totally useless in my home neighborhood. But in the last 6 months, it's collapsed. Long periods where call attempts and SMS-sends fail, and where the signal meter oscillates between "no service" and 4 bars -- but even 4 bars may not allow calls and SMSes to succeed.

Congestion means they have lots of paying customers in the area -- so even without congestion pricing, they ought to be able to plan and maintain capacity here. That they have not is evidence of the lack of proper competition, aggravated by Apple's exclusive deal.
I am not sure for a blog or article, but since you are asking on HN, I for one would like to see less sensationalism and more straightfoward, objective summaries. Less "linkbait".