skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Apps to document my life? 
I'm a data junkie. I like measuring stuff and analyzing it, but I've usually used paper/pen, or the odd text file here and there. I also recently got myself an iPhone 4, and it seems like a good device. I'm looking for suggestions on which app(s) to download so that I can log daily details about my life, and analyze them later (a data dump would be good) I'd soon like to be able to generate reports in the style of Nicholas Felton (http://feltron.com/); I don't even need them to be pretty, I'd just really like to see key areas and see how I can become a less stressed, more productive person. Any suggestions/tips? Do any of you do stuff like this?
great graph overlay/transpose -- i've found posterous to be much faster in my infrequent use of both tumblr and posterous -- also, i'm not a fan of the commenting mechanism (reblogging) from tumblr -- for folks who use it often, they love it, but i find it to be really nonintuitive. makes me think that the early adopter's love it, but to go mainstream they'll need to shift it, which will turn off the early folks. posterous, by comparison, just does things fast/elegant, which seems more broadly appealing. time will tell.
Label your graphs.
clickable link to Nicholas Felton's site - http://feltron.com/
Where Rails Rocks (and where Python doesn't)
No worries - I would have left a comment on your post, but I didn't have an account to sign in with, and wasn't sure if maybe they had raised an additional $50K outside of Kickstarter.

Just wanted to say good on you for fixing bugs and contributing to Diaspora! Unfortunately I don't even know enough Ruby to understand what I'm looking at, but I'm excited about the project - they've definitely got a good resource in you! Is there any indication that they switched to Ruby during this Summer? I swear it was originally going to be in PHP, but I can't find any mention of that now. Could the oversights in the code be due to this being the first piece of Ruby the team has written?
userscripts.org now doesn't work at all

you either get %00 internal server error or please wait message
Why can't the CEO of a site also be a user of HN? Should they have to get someone else to post their article? How would we track that and is it really worth the effort?

Your posts that got downvoted were the short ones without context or value to the conversation. All of your posts that actually provide something to the conversation still have positive points (at the time of posting).
Yet he's built one of the most useful websites I've ever used.

I think the disconnect between these two statements says something.
Good stuff. We're at step #3, and we're trying to strike the right balance between gathering customer feedback (which brings waves of great ideas) and making sure we're delivering only what we need to learn quickly. Step #4 might be the hardest so far.

On that note, anyone interested in helping us with StartMetrics (http://startmetrics.com)?

It's a service that tracks lean startup metrics for SaaS products. We're currently inviting folks to sign-up for the beta test when it's available. We'll also be sending a few customer development surveys.
If one doesn't care about the PR backlash from a thousand people losing their data, why care about the people pointing out the flaws beforehand?
I'm sympathetic to poor people not paying for expensive vaccines, and if that were the only problem, it'd be at least partly the fault of our public policy for not doing something about it (a lot of the benefit of vaccination goes to society as a whole rather than solely to the person being vaccinated, making it a fairly classic case for public subsidy). And that probably is a pretty big part of the story in the developing world.

In the U.S., though, we do actually have quite a lot of free vaccination clinics, and many people have health insurance that covers vaccinations. It's possible there aren't enough free clinics, and if studies show that a large % of people not being vaccinated are skipping it due to the expense, then that's something we should work on. But I don't believe that's currently the case--- a large proportion of the people skipping vaccinations could have had them completely paid for, either by their health-insurance plan, or via free vaccination clinics, but deliberately chose not to get them.

edit: Actually, are there good studies on the primary causes of non-vaccination? It'd be interesting to see estimates of the numbers of people who fall into categories like: 1) fear of autism/etc.; 2) fear of allergic reactions; 3) religious objections; 4) too expensive; 5) too inconvenient / never got around to it.
Farmland isn't actually scarce, though. Right now the world has plenty of farmland for all its people, which is why food is so cheap and why we can afford to consume massively space-wasting crops. People may be starving in Africa, but it's for political reasons which have nothing to do with the amount of arable land there (significantly more than China or India which have similar populations to Africa).

If the world's population ever does increase to the point where farmland is scarce, there's a lot of other things which become economical before skyscraper farms do... even if fusion energy comes along to solve the lighting problem. Switching to land-efficient crops is one thing. Irrigating the world's deserts is another. Even farms on barges out in the ocean make a lot more economic sense than skyscraper farms.
Bring your friends? If they aren't having a good time, you can just leave.
And of course you need to worry about pest management when growing that much of anything in such density. What sort of mechanisms you would need to harvest? Can't see a combine harvester fitting in the freight elevator.

There's a million and one things wrong with this idea. It's depressing how many news outlets haven't done any real journalism and checked with someone who actually grows any kind of plant for a living.
Working as intended.

Of course, the fun part is when you break up after a long relationship where your social circles are very mixed. You run the risk of losing all your friends. Which sucks.
If you do some reading around MVP, you might be surprised at what a low standard exists to constitute a product. Some folk even count an ad + landing page as an MVP. ie. 0 code base. An MVP is a point of departure, not arrival.
3) The world needs a new type of word processor, where editing is done by structure. Users should then be able to render that data in different ways - styled for printing, or for the web. At the moment data is very brittle.

TeX solved this decades ago. In my understanding, there are several word processors that can output LaTeX.

13) For the love of god, please get somebody to take fifteen minutes and update notepad so that it respects unix line-endings.

For the love of god, quit using Notepad! Wordpad is superior in every way. Seriously though, I used to have the same gripe as you until a took a couple minutes to set Wordpad as the default program for opening txt files. Microsoft needs to just make Notepad be a symlink to Wordpad and get rid of Notepad altogether.
Freaking ridiculous. In a rational world, the question would be how many billions of dollars to allocate to anti-aging research. Instead, the government makes it actively illegal to try to mitigate the major cause of medical expenses and a huge contributor to decreased quality of life.
I think it is a wiki for programming questions, and Joel and Jeff repeatedly said so on the SO podcast. The fact that you think it is somehow "unfair" to get reputation that easy illustrates Jabavus point: SO has become less about being information source and more about being a game.
I'll be speaking on Leiningen, my build tool, but I don't want to repeat what's available in the documentation or what _should_ be in the documentation. Open to suggestions for angles to go on this.
According to a post in a thread yesterday, they just worked at Pivotal's office, they weren't consulting for them.
This is a good suggestion - the tweak of not being able to edit once you've received a 'child' comment is a good way to handle this kind of problem. Should be easy to do to; I say yes, this is a good tweak.

Now if only we could get an option (check box in our profile perhaps) to have links open in a new window by default, that would be great (I can't be the only one to always cmd-clicks links to open them in a new tab can I?).
Second the F# sentiments, best language I've used in a long time.

Also can ms put more guys on iron ruby.
Farmland isn't just a place to put some plants while they grow. A farm is a giant solar power facility, one that converts solar energy, carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrate. Monbiot doesn't stress the point enough - it's all about light.

When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function as solar collectors. Going vertical doesn't increase the amount of light you can gather, so it doesn't increase the amount of food you can produce.

Vertical farming is only remotely feasible if we see the cost of energy fall ten-thousand fold. That's only likely if we crack nuclear fusion. Of course, such an abundance of energy would render any worries about food production moot.

Unfortunately, we appear to live in a world where supposedly educated adults are unfamiliar with such advanced scientific concepts as photosynthesis.
What's missing between is "Get an idea about the competition in this market".

Some choose to completely ignore competition; I personally find it important to have a bit of an overview.
what are your favorite domain checker tools?
Blogging your way around the globe -- without a laptop
Some people felt that my last post was lacking substance. This post is an attempt to clarify what specific things led me to become so excited about Ruby on Rails. I hope that it also serves as a bit of a holistic exploration guide for newcomers to Ruby and Rails.

I'm also planning a follow up post covering what I don't really like and where the "magic" has burned me already. Similarly, I'd hope for that future post to act as a guide for Rails developers to get burned less frequently, a well as for Ruby library developers to do less burning.
how about http://ohlife.com/?

I really dig their unique/creative email data submission tweak. Great idea.
Laminated linen, the ancient world’s Kevlar, protected Alexander the Great
Even asking for $10,000 was major hubris that made me skeptical they were up to the task. But they could have been more honest about their capabilities, timeline, roadmap, etc. in order to put things into perspective and bring the hype down a notch. They most definitely over-promised, even if they had only received the original $10k
#newTwitter, Diaspora and the future of the Social Web
There's a menu?

No, seriously. I've been using Vim for years and I've been recently trying to earn Emacs (and finding the tutorial to be atrociously unhelpful to me in that process), and all this time, I thought the menu was an XEmacs thing. (Sorta like how it is in GVim.) I never really notice the menu bar, and I still don't know how to activate it.

Edit: Oh. M-`. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
I have nothing to say to Microsoft or Ballmer because Microsoft is so irrelevant to me now - both as an internet professional and in my personal life.

I remember installing Windows 3.11 from floppy over my MS-DOS install on a 386 and I've used every version of Windows through to XP since.

But you lost me, all my machines run OS X or *nix, I've never run Windows on the server, I don't own any Microsoft software and I don't use any online Microsoft products (Bing, etc).

My love for computers bloomed when the Internet became available to the measses, C1992. That's when you decided that you wanted to own the Internet so you created your own, MSN Home. It didn't work, and you never really got the Internet until it was too late.

You are irrelevant, Microsoft, and due to the way your company is set up to profit mostly from selling Windows + Office to corporations you will never see any reason to stamp out the irrelevancy until it is too late.

In many ways it's very sad.
Ask HN: What are some well-designed domain name checking tools?
Yesterday I read this post from HN: http://semmyfun.blogspot.com/2010/09/get-that-4-letter-domain-youve-always.html

And in the comments somebody mentioned two sites that check the availability of domain names. However, the author has since removed that comment, because he himself owns a site that provides a similar service (but is down for me right now). Does anybody remember what the two linked sites were, or can somebody point me in the direction of some well-designed and comprehensive domain name checking sites?
First impression from a few minutes messing around: this is really beautifully made.

One suggestion: I have no idea who/what this is for. The front page certainly tells me what this is, but I don't have any use case. There's a big difference if this is just for fun, or if this is a serious tool for actually designing things, and you'd better let people know asap which this is.
MercadoLibre Instant 
MercadoInstant is a search engine that delivers instant listing results from MercadoLibre

ps: MercadoLibre is the eBay of Latin America.
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy [2003]
I'd much rather have a SO question as a search result than a blog post.

Blogs are often littered with other information, have weird color schemes, don't always have proper code display, aren't editable by somebody who finds an error, sometimes have spam etc etc
I think you fail to see the irony in OP's comment.
I tried ohlife for a while. It's good as a diary, no doubt. I'm looking more at analyzing miles walked, food eaten, words typed, time slept, etc. I figured a device such as the iPhone would make things easier.
Because high-quality real time 1080p encoding is so easy.
Review: Civilization V
More on that first-mover advantage...

The author suggests that it is not a factor in this arena as Tumblr will inevitably plateau due to a lack of new user signups. I disagree. So long as there are new users signing up for these services they will most likely lean toward Tumblr as the larger community is enough reason for them to go that route. I believe it will be Posterous who plateaus as a result of this.

As it stands, Posterous should be content in stealing Tumblr's users. And boy have they capitalized on this. Posterous allows you to import your old content from over 15 services (including Tumblr).

Facebook has shown us that there are over 500 million potential "new users." I'm not sure it's safe to say that Tumblr new user signups will plateau as a result of a lack of people showing interest in microblogging.
The command line for Windows is now Powershell, which I find superior to Bash in many ways (although I appreciate Bash's relative simplicity, and I am still more familiar with the Bourne shell variants than I am Powershell).

CMD.EXE is still included, but it is the red-headed stepchild.

> the Window doesn't even resize properly.

And the PowerShell window still does not resize horizontally by dragging, which is silly. You can do it by adjusting the window's settings, but this is insufficient. Win32 Console apps need to die.

> Plenty of tools that port easily to OSX or Haiku are difficult to port to Windows. Look at the situation with git.

Of course it is, it was originally written targeting a completely different OS. The same could be said the other way, that's why stuff like WINE and Mono exist.

> but aspects of the user experience is awful.

I concur totally. Getting Windows 7 to what I consider usable (in a power user sense) is a 30-45 minute job with a fresh install (as opposed to ~ 20 minutes on Mac OS X).
Corollary: them falling in love will cost you a close friend, 40% of the time.
Node.js v0.2.2 released
Yeah, I find reblogging and some of the other mechanisms in Tumblr to be kinda jumbled and confusing. On pure merit, I tend to lean towards Posterous... If I were more of an early stage investor, I think I'd want stock in BOTH. :-)
domai.nr
Since the post focused on brevity, was it possibly http://domai.nr/?
Music Lovers, Be Prepared To Fall In Love Instantly – Meet The New Shuffler
I can't believe the fascists on HN that would be fine with shunning, punishing, or even suing the un-vaccinated.

There are risks to being vaccinated, and risks to not being vaccinated.

That (from the article) :
---
"The last result is a bit of an anomaly in that it implies that exposure to TCVs from birth to 1 month and birth to 7 months actually protects against ASD. The authors quite rightly comment on this result thusly:

"In the covariate adjusted models, we found that an increase in ethylmercury exposure in 2 of the 4 exposure time periods evaluated was associated with decreased risk of each of the 3 ASD outcomes. We are not aware of a biological mechanism that would lead to this result."
---

Should tell you that this cannot be said to be a completely conclusive study.
Good question :) I didn't write the article, maybe ask @lucidchart on Twitter? According to the actual article title though, it seems the main interest was testing FF4 and IE9 against existing browsers, which would explain the absence of dev channel versions of Chrome.
I use:

http://instantdomainsearch.com/

http://domai.nr/

http://bustaname.com/

http://wordoid.com/

http://nxdom.com/
I love that a couple of the top suggestions are "Microsoft should reduce its number of products" and "Microsoft should start hundreds of little companies". :)
Immigrants by self-selection are already risk-takers, that fits well as a trait to be an entrepreneur.
How have we changed in the two years since the market crash?
Heads in the Clouds: The Current State of Cloud Computing
"So long as there are new users signing up for these services they will most likely lean toward Tumblr as the larger community is enough reason for them to go that route."

Geocities and LiveJournal are two sites that had pretty meteoric growth at some point. Plenty of social networks (Orkut, MySpace) looked pretty shiny at one point, too. Every company slows down-- otherwise upstart startups wouldn't be able to beat incumbents.
I'd like to think that I have a good imagination, but I still can't imagine the look on Stallman's face if MS decided to fund the development of Hurd. I wish I could upvote you twice, once for good ideas, and once again for that one unimaginable thing.
Childhood immunization uptake exceeds 95% in many countries. So vaccinating "most of the world" is clearly do-able. In the situation where uptake is low, the issues revolve around supply, access and parental ignorance, and not the cost of the vaccine.

Eg.

http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?pid=S0042-968620080006000...
The point of stuff like this isn't to convince Jenny McCarthy, it's to convince fair-minded yet ignorant parents who might have heard Jenny McCarthy talking on Oprah and lack any other information.

(I don't know whether Jenny McCarthy has ever talked on Oprah, but she must be talking somewhere.)
A Loophole Big Enough for a Cookie to Fit Through
BTW, most likely she had a reaction to P in DTP.

P is no longer used, and now it's aP (acellular pertussis, DTaP), which doesn't cause those reactions.
Hmm, that's a good point. That makes it somewhat amusing, though, because that means that the main reason it's hard to exploit this HDCP break (at least currently) is the same reason HDCP is actually somewhat unnecessary to begin with: because recording a raw DVI/HDMI stream with commonly available equipment is hard.
I think it's better to go through your male-programmer-humiliation on someone else's dollar.

I'm pretty sure that's what just happened.
Now imagine your Google TV examining what you're watching, and checking that you're correctly licensed to view it.
No, though it's that sort of thing. I came up with the term because it seemed to describe the key process at work in future software - at least, the kind which I expect/hope to see - and which depends on a sort of weak AI.

It needs an essay-length answer, and I'm not quite ready to do it yet. And at that, it's conceptual, addressing my subjective view of content/interaction problems in different domains, and my equally subjective view that they're isomorphic to some other technical problems for which we have or are converging on solutions. Some might find it aggressively different, others a handwaving restatement of ideas that already exist. I don't want to be a tease, so rather than saying more I'll start making notes this weekend.
WANdisco stars in discovery of new planets
It might be a good idea to open with a 5 minute demo of Leiningen under normal use before you move one to the substance of your talk. Not every Clojurian uses Lien yet, some because they think it's too complicated. Demos that show how easy something is are pretty impressive (It's no accident that Rails and the Screencast became popular simultanously). It also gives you a launching point for further discussion.

Personally, I'd like to see a discussion of Lein plugin development - what's possible, what's not, how to hook into the build process, etc.
They won't have me for long; I have my own projects to work on. Hackety Hack is more important to me, by far.

I also vaguely remember that it was supposed to be in PHP as well, and several other people have mentioned that. I can't find a source...

It could be the reason, but things like "make sure if you're trying to delete a photo, it's yours" is something that transcends implementation languages, you know?
I'm starting to grok interactive mode for the first time with larger programs, and wow! Takes your performance up to a whole new level.

I'm concerned that they're going to kill/assimilate it, though. While they should be reaching out to the linux/FOSS/OCaml community, instead they're building one of their "specials" again -- adopt then modify, tie it tightly into everything else, then use it all as leverage on the little guy. People really hate it when they do that. That trick has gotten very old.
I once left a comment to the effect of

// This code is pretty dense so I recommend you read the documentation first

Some months later I found a follow-up comment left by a fellow dev:

// Or you could just give up now
Very true, but the examples you cited also involved long-time users abandoning those services. The author was careful to note a plateau, not a downward spiral.

Would I argue against Tumblr eventually hitting a downward spiral (negative growth)? Certainly not. I think that is more likely to happen before it sees no growth (positive or negative).

Additional edit: Mind you, I have no statistical evidence to support these claims. These are purely some thoughts that I have, and, quite frankly, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
yup you are right.
the only reason Posterous could gain so much users so fast is because of Tumblr and microblogging becoming popular.
Thanks guys! Wordoid was one of the two mentioned. The other one had a better interface than any of the ones listed so far, and would automatically check queries as you were typing across all domains, and would then remember and list the queries. I don't know if that's a helpful description at all.. Regardless, the ones icey listen should more than suffice as they all do the same thing essentially
Either I’m not getting it or he didn’t change the graph correctly. The light blue line are tumblr’s US visitors (green are tumblr’s global visitors). Why did he shift that line? And why only tumblr’s US numbers, not global?

The two dark blue lines are Posterous’s visitors (again, US and global) and they are always less than tumblr’s, all the time. Shifting doesn’t seem to change anything.

Here is the graph with labels: http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...
"Uploaded by an ordinary user but AMC left it up and instead collected on the ad revenue."

So, the computer program looked at the facts, passed the judgment and collected upon it. Looks like a very efficient RoboCop and no bloodsucking lawyers involved.
Isn't the point that the headline is misleading?