skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)

There's a time for watching movies as much as for anything else. The problem with TV is that is puts you at one end of a big tube while they're feeding the other, with little choice as to what you get and lots of commercials.

I haven't watched TV for years now, but I do watch lots of anime and right now I'm at episode 3 of Blake's 7. The difference is I choose what I watch and try to make it as diverse and interesting as possible.

There's a lot to say about how I choose what I watch/read/listen. Sometimes I do just waste time on comedies, but sometimes it's a very active and rather difficult process of search and selection. I often go from an anime to a book of from reddit to a movie. Recently a sum of factors, mainly Junni Kokki (anime) but including a discussion here last week led me to some heavy Confucianist reading.
This is a topic which would be perfect for a web 2.0 startup, but I haven't seen any serious contenders and I don't have my ideeas settled yet. But just imagine: what if you could jump from somebody's profile here to his favorite media (books/movies/shows/music/articles)? What if you could make a ... gestalt of what hacker news or reddit or digg reads/watches/listens?
It took me 26 years to find out Ayn Rand existed (just an example). Before the net it could've taken me a lifetime or more. It's time to lower that a bit more, don't you think?
I am using keynote (http://keynote.prv.pl), I keep my file (single file) in a small flash disk and put it in my wallet, so I do not have to worry about sync the file between my home desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Keynote allow you to have tabs and folders within tab.
I'm on OSX and I use VoodooPad + email. Voodoopad is a really good program for creating "wiki-like" notes. It can also embed, links to files, rich text copied directly from safari, etc. For online viewing you can either use the built in web server or export as HTML periodically.

I use email for updates when I'm away from my laptop. It's easy for me to type things up in a rough form for processing later and I can use it almost anywhere (I took 6KB of notes during the startup school on my blackberry)
Coding Around Vista's UAC Security Limitations
Umm... FAIL: "Stock Overflow"
http://99designs.com/contests/6774/designers/245246#entry-44...
Study Suggests Using Real World Examples to Teach Math May Not be a Good Idea
I would really like to rag on them for this, but the only problem that PHP is causing them is probably filtering out the incompetent n00bs that want to work there (and the opposite effect -- what hacker would want a PHP job?)

Back when they leaked their code, it was very well written. The frontend stuff was very nice "Hello, <?php echo $username ?>", not "<?php $query = "SELECT * from ..." ... ?>".

Finally, PHP is only slightly slower than Python and Perl, and slightly faster than Ruby.

So although using PHP is a horrible idea, Facebook seems to be dealing with it. It sure isn't the path of least resistance, though. It's much easier to write good $ANYTHING_ELSE than good PHP.
The Green Shift
No jobs please, we're entrepreneurs
Zooming in Life and Innovation
Same here. notes.txt and ideas.txt. These files travel with me whereever I go :) And Gmail draft mails with some quick thoughts, that I later merge with the text files. It works!
I didn't find GN or similar products useful. I just save the whole URL on del.icio.us, using the tags I can remember later.
Can New Google CIO Fill Douglas Merrill's Shoes?
Google's New Challenge: Keyword Spam
Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages
Spammers Ramp up Siege on Google's Blogger via Bots
Now that's pretty cool and unique! I like that it isn't web-based but you can still access from anyplace.
PG: Please kill "failfailfail" account
In case you haven't already tagged this clown (bot?).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174735

Also, is there a better way to report abuse and/or lame-o's?
I think the point Godin's trying to make is that people who habitually "play nice" with others, even if starting out as pretenders, supposedly end up living a happier life. This might be a contested claim, and I'm not sure whether there's any research on this exact topic (the results that I've seen published by Martin Seligman point in this direction, at least), but personally, I've seen it working: "radiating niceness " seems to create a feedback loop of sorts. The theory would be that a parking inspector of above-average niceness would lead a life of above-average niceness, which would be the reward (for some).

However, the scene Godin describes plays in New York. And I'm not sure that the average New Yorker can be convinced that "playing nice" is compatible with being a true New Yorker...
Why Africa may never produce a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, or Facebook
If more than a few people with print design experience would say that the leading in his PDF is good, I'll eat my hat. Admittedly, the document is good; the leading is poor.
Google Groups Vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting
The current situation has occurred because it makes economic sense. Parking attendants and sports store attendants don't require many skills (since they have computers, automated cash registers or other staff to call upon), so they're cheap.

Workers in grunt-level jobs will, in the majority of cases (though not all!), do as much work as is necessary to keep their job. It makes economic sense.

Some people ARE naturally friendly or gregarious even at minimum wage and we've all bumped into a few friendly McDonald's servers here and there, but people like these are rare in areas where their pay is low and their costs are high. It makes sense, then, that people earning a pittance in New York City - one of the most expensive places on earth - are going to be, on average, surly and not very Mary Poppins-esque in their behavior.

If the city of New York or the sports store wants customers to get a better service from their employees (which they generally don't), they need to pay more money and give them incentives. As it is, companies tend to give the employees incentive to be MORE unfriendly, whether by incentives to issue more tickets or with store policies that prevent staff helping customers to their full extent.
This is a very interesting case, but more so, shows the disgraceful practices of the RIAA.
Seth Godin action figure
I estimate about 2 MW.That's only the same power as two and a half Bugatti Veyrons. Or maybe a dozen mortal cars. Or the power of the sun hitting 2,000 square metres of the Earth's surface on a sunny day.

So, not all _that_ much, really.
We should all be concerned about the world's Food Crisis
Like all of us here I try to keep up with technology news, startup news, and anything that can help me with my startup idea.

However, I also have been keeping an eye on the food crisis going on around the world. This is really something a lot of us probably ignore here in the US, but it is now actually affecting us with increased food prices and according to reports prices will continue to rise.

I typed the word food on google news and all the news are related to the world's first food crisis affecting the whole planet.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=food

are any of you here concerned too about what's going on ?
Django 1.0 feature list
(from another board, this was posted by me about a year or so ago there)

(disclaimer: my company offers colocation, but I also do syadmin work for customers that use a specific web application server that I am expert at setting up)

My experience with RS stems from a customer that felt he needed very high burst bandwidth availability, and proceeded to get a Cisco firewall, 2 Opteron servers and a certain amount of transfer from them.

The time period was from about October or November 2005 thru to now, he is still a customer

Good points:
a) they have a decent trouble-ticketing system
b) they have Cisco guys and Linux guys on-staff
c) they have monitoring in place
d) you can call them up

Bad points
a) bad HW: one of the Opteron servers kept rebooting under load. It would work fine until we unzipped some multi-GB files. It took RS a few days to get in the parts to replace it, and obviously, they did not do heavy-duty testing of the system before it went into production - I feel like 15 minutes with memtest86 would have caught it

b) bad HW: a drive failed, became read-only somehow, they rebooted, fsck'ed it and said it needed to be replaced, of course. problem: they wanted to charge extra to image or transfer all the data from the old drive to the new drive.

My take: they should do it for free, it is part of hardware maintenance - they wanted to leave it mounted as the secondary and then we were to move it over; alternatively, they could have offered to back it all up for us to the network backup, but they didn't.

c) lock-in pricing practices: they want to charge A LOT of money when you want to upgrade some hardware. They figure it is easier for you to spend more, than to change all your IPs and switch to some other provider

d) revenue enhancement: they want to sell you other services and push you to buy them. Any problem other than a basic one, is an excuse for them to suggest either a hardware upgrade or something else they will sell you.

e) if it ain't LAMP (linux/apache/mysql/php), the techs will not have much of a clue. Part of the service I set up involved a different web server running on port 80 (needed for the web app server I mention), not Apache. The tech wasn't paying attention and reset things to use Apache.

These are all just my opinions, your mileage may vary , etc.
A hunter who hunts twice as much doesn't eat twice as much, he starves to death.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence supporting the claim that people who earn more money are therefore more friendly. Particulary not in NY, where being nice in public can mean not being taken seriously.
Does anyone know how hard it is to write a code highlighting mode for vim where it uses normally uses latex highlighting, and then switches to C or Python or whatever programming highlighting inside special delimiters, like "\code{}"? Then I can just write a perl script to mimic tangle and weave, creating code-only and latex-only text files.
Git merging by example
Recession is a time of great opportunity
1) Read intro about how fucking awesome some document is.

2) Find link to the document; click link.

3) Error detected -- surely this loathesome-looking PDF isn't the fucking awesome document in question!

4) Hit back, re-parse intro looking for link to real document.
Yeah, I forgot to mention, we've received about ~4,000 hits through StumbleUpon overall. These have been spread across time, but are very welcome.
There is also TiddlyWiki [http://www.tiddlywiki.com/]. Its a single HTML file that you can carry on your flash drive. You create tiddlers, tag them, search, the whole gambit. I use it for maintaining my work reports, and its pretty cool.

You can even go as far as customizing the tiddlers (think of them as index cards). I created one for work that automatically puts the date, and adds "dailystatus" as a tag, and has two input areas, "Tasks completed" and "Hours worked".

The file can get large, but if you feel the need to host it so its accessible from the web, there is tiddlyspot.com that lets you host these files for free. So you can have a local copy as well as one on the web, and you can synchronize between them easily.
The list provided by the article (C, Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Prolog) is not a bad one, if your goal is to understand different paradigms of programming.

Of course, if your goal is to hack out a quick web app, the list might look slightly different....
Not to mention it's pretty dangerous to give a pissed off person a weapon like a lollipop while being facetious...
I'll second (or third) the vote for OneNote. I find it to be indispensible for dealing with unstructured information, and perfect for imposing structure as you go. It's not a web app, but has good mobility support (easy enough to share a Notebook, or keep one on a USB stick). And, the browser integration is great-- one click saves an article, ready to be filed away.
Recently, I talked about how "Entrepreneurship is a deep desire to create and destroy at the same time." So clearly we have to be in dissonance with some and resonance with others.

http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejecti...

But more importantly, to follow up on your comment. The question really is about "making something people want". We all know that this is a necessary condition but is it also sufficient. In the old days, it would take a lot more than that to succeed (so it was not sufficient). But time has changed. I believe today under certain constraints, it can actually be both. In the following, I talked about "narrowcasting" and "entre-sumers" which are the corner stones for such paradigm shift.

http://foundread.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-qu...
Good, it would be really nice if the AIM app would work properly instead of logging off every time you switch apps.
Depends where you are from. In the UK, it can be up to 5 years before getting permanent resident status.
you could use a 7inch touch screen LCD for way less, and have even greater control
Do people really have that big of problems with svn?

I have used it for quite a few years and never really had too many problems. It isn't the ideal system, git may be getting close to that, but it works.

Maybe I just look at it differently - I have a few friends who work somewhere that still uses Microsoft VSS.
Ask HN: PHP/postgres authentication library/app?
Does anyone know of any php libraries? applications? frameworks designed just for user account authentication... creation... perhaps management? preferably with a license that wouldn't force me to open source the whole app.

if not does anyone think creating something like this would be useful?
Windows only...
If you have mobile phone with full keyboard, it not a bad idea to keep your notes there. You have your phone with you all the time, whenever you come up with something to write about, you don't even need a computer.
VC vs. Corporate Funding
Interesting video here as he talks about VC funding vs. funding from Microsoft.
Developer Incompetence, an analysis
Senior Yahoos To Jerry: Please, Please, Please Get This Over With
Thanks for the links.

1.order_by fixing: I always run into problems with it, this is much needed

2.model inheritance: finally!

3.querysets not loaded into memory: yay! I do some hackery around the old way that I can remove.

4.slicing to the end: nice, again this commonly results in a big of uglyness getting the total size of the queryset

5.reverse? nice feature to have. So if you order by date you can quickly reverse the order.

6.values retrieving through FK? Amazingly useful. If you don't already use values, I strongly suggest looking into it. For large sets of data it is a must-have feature, you can load a minimal amount of data. I do this for things like mapping a number of points, I just grab the id and lat/long. However, now I can simplify that function since I can grab values across FK's.

7.Values list? Actually somewhat handy, depending on the application. Dictionary is nice for my previous example of using values.

8.Restrictive select related? Very cool, you can do some optimization by providing a list of what you actually want to get.

9.None check? Perfect, I much prefer that syntax to the blah__isnull=True.

10. Update for a queryset? Very nice - will consider how to use this to optimize some work. So instead of saving individual objects you could do one big update.

11. Q class improvements? I currently don't use Q's, but with this added functionality I may revisit that.

Overall this looks great. Many positive improvements, and a very logical upgrade to Trunk. I imagine once the newforms admin makes use of this and integrates the model inheritance it will also be merged in.
99designs: Need something designed (logo, ...)? Crowdsource it.
File-swap: STDs for your computer
We use SVN exclusively for our projects at NeoSmart Technologies (private and public); and a huge number of highly-popular open source communities are also built around SVN...

Examples similar to Drupal: WordPress, Gallery2, etc.
Are you looking to store web pages along with your annotations, or just your personal notes? Also, does it necessarily have to be stored online? Firefox's ScrapBook extension and OneNote are two excellent tools I have used.
The Mac in business: it's easier than you think
Certainly a lot of projects use svn, even Django back to this original thread. I think every Python library I use is checked out of svn.

So do people just like to joke how it is so unusable? Or is there some glaringly obvious thing I am missing?
Semi-justified self promotion: http://www.awesomehighlighter.com
You're completely right. To convince myself:

trillion = 10**12
wikipedia = 10**8

surplus = trillion
applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01
print applied_surplus / wikipedia

which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.
Woopra live analytics 1.1.1.0 released and more invites sent
I have to say I'm sold so far, which is why I'm posting this. This really feels like the way things should be for traffic monitoring.

I'm trying this out on http://bug.gd at the moment, as they increased beta allowance at the same time as this release.

It makes me feel like the site is a lot more like a high-traffic BBS. You get to see live what features people are bouncing around and the "Sysop chat" tool is really interesting. I think the biggest risk is that people will think that the site owner isn't really there and it's one of those fake "Speak to a sales rep now!" popups.

But I have to say, woopra is impressive-looking and very fast (in this build at least).
Some of these designs look really good...

Bookmarking now since the price looks to be pretty "right" too!
http://www.no-spec.com/
makes me think of twisted's deferreds for asynchronous network programming: request some data over a network, attach a "worker" callback (and an exception handling callback), and your application can move forward without waiting for the response. very awesome for things like parsing <n> rss feeds at a time.
i've signed up for them since last month and until now, the website is in pending status.
Another site that does something similar is www.worth1000.com. The founders of that site are doing http://a.viary.com/ I believe.
So I just watched all 8 episodes. I think it's interesting, especially the ending where (SPOILER ALERT BEYOND THIS POINT) half if not most of the initial executives leave after 0-7 months.
This article has almost nothing to do with VC vs. Corporate funding. It's mainly about failed startups and entrepreneurs who pick themselves up afterwards and give something new a go.
yeah, Joel Spoelsky and Jeff Atwood thought so too: http://99designs.com/contests/6774

it's what brought me to the site
I guess what you say might be generally true for public facing staff, although I still think friendliness (or fake friendless) can appear when incentivized or required. Examples would be the hotel industry, sales (think prestige car dealerships), and any low-demand hospitality industry generally.

This effect is particularly true amongst the self employed who generally want to keep your business. My dentist, for example, is friendly, otherwise he knows I'll go elsewhere. My doctor, however, is not, but he's state-employed so doesn't care whether I stay or not.
The Inflation Debate Grows Louder
Nice concept. I swapped a PDF on Pi-Calculus against a photoshopped Sumo wrestling match and "The Logic of ARIZ" against a photo of a very wrinkly old man. Personally, my interest would be sustained for longer if it were a bit more specialized, like if you could blind-swap technical/scientific papers, or short-stories. I'm not so much the photo guy, and this site apperars to be somewhat pic-biased.
I think you were trying to post to the article about these "contest" sites being possibly illegal.

You know, this is a case where I think that the laws, if being broken, should be broken.

I think that these sites are more like "submitting a request for comps and receiving them" more than a "contest."

Now if people are running these "contests" and not fulfilling their end of the bargain, then they are bastards and should be caned.

But for people in developing countries with great design skills (or people in developed countries that are looking for experience) these "contests" provide a much greater potential for income that they normally wouldn't get.

I think that a lot of this whining about the legality and "morality" of these sites and contests by the establishment (in this case the design firms and professional designers) is simply a case of them being afraid of lower cost alternatives (that might be better than them!).

This may be another case of p2p and digital music vs. the recording industry and the RIAA. There will be some losers (napster) but the cat is already out of the bag.
Making Money On The Web With Videos
Evernote is pretty good.
Gotta love designers outsourcing their own logo design.

http://99designs.com/contests/6884
For the Brain, Cash Is Good, Status Is Better
The Wealth Report - The $300,000 Watch That Doesn't Tell Time
The article is a bit hit-and-miss, but it's an interesting and difficult problem.

I personally believe that a lot of the really bad developers came onboard during the y2k+dot-com boom, and the population has been self-perpetuating and growing in enterprise environments ever since.

Perhaps the way to resolve this is to create some sort of exclusive society of good developers, which you can only join by personal invitation and after a thorough grilling by some developers who have already joined and who are aware that diluting the society with crap programmers is not in anyone's interest... Something like a Mensa for programmers?

Then good developer could be identified by belonging to this society - much like professionals in other professions are identified by memberships to such societies (doctors, lawyers, architects, hell, even engineers).

Daniel
aka http://www.sitepoint.com/contest/
<shameless blog plug>
"So is it fair that the GPL doesn't give back to the proving ground of new ideas, the commercial world?" http://moviestorm.blogspot.com/2008/01/gpl-vs-startups.html
Habemus Dialogum - We Have a Dialog
I don't think he was trying to post a link to that specific article. The site at large is relevant with its argument: "spec work devalues the potential of design and ultimately does a disservice to the client".
What happens if none of the entries are right for you?
I know, caffeine pill addiction is a sickness.
True, you can setup the polls and question to reduce the problems but they are all still there since you still asking the user rather than measuring the actual behavior.

I.e., polls are a form of proxy for what you really want to learn but can't get directly. Your example of voting polls is a great example of this... Until the actual election, we can't know and so polling is about as good as we can get. (But I won't even bother to mention all of the games that are played with the polling to manipulate the outcomes. :-( )
That's funny cos I did exactly the same thing!

I tried using Google Notebook for a while but I just kept fighting the rich text editor. I used Backpack for a while to keep Writeboards but that quickly got tedious.

A quick 2-day stint produced a RoR application which supports Textile, tags for organisation and some ajax to make it simple. It does what I want but I'm not sure I'm ready to open it up to a bunch of "hackers" :-)
Give it time (4 or 5 days), and it'll be a blind-swap for porn.