skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see there will be a market for edible micro SD cards.

"Sir, we see from your blood sample that you have recently digested some silicon wafer..."
Good Copy Bad Copy (2007 film)
Happiness is Overrated
I'll believe it when I see it. The labels are largely just a copyright exploitation system designed by lawyers; certainly, this is where the money comes from, and until that changes (which I would imagine would happen approximately never), the fundamental behavior will stay the same. Even as their profits are shrinking, the individual incentives to behave monstrously remain in place. I think that the majors are going to end up as 50 person (all lawyer) holding companies suing the bejeezus out of everyone; and promotion and marketing will end up more evenly distributed, albeit much crappier on the high end. I wouldn't touch a music startup with a 1000' pole -- thankfully, I'm not an investor.
Sun co-founder uses capitalism to help poor
Site is updated
Do you think all the people working your cash registers or mopping your floors can seriously be passionate about their work? How about driving cabs, or being a receptionist, or working at a call center? These are universally shitty jobs but very necessary. If we want everyone to have a "career" we should think about how we can get rid of these jobs.
And for even more room, wear a skirt: http://forums.teamestrogen.com/showthread.php?t=24177
that's amusing, considering that every wireless access point is insecure
While reading this, I kept having flashbacks to PHP code written by lazy developers that didn't take the time to learn either PHP or MySQL very well. They would do things like use MySQL to format dates (paraphase: mysql_query("SELECT FORMAT_DATE(" . $date . ")")), because that's just what they remembered, and didn't want to take the time to find the right PHP function. Of course, there's always the opposite side of the same coin, like where they'd use loops of PHP code, executing hundreds or thousands of SELECT statements, instead of just learning how to use a JOIN.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not implying that the author produces this kind of code.
Power Sessions with Screen
Thanks! GAE is definitely a great way to get something up and running fast.

After spending a few months with RoR though I definitely am enjoying writing in Ruby more so than Python. I might try JRuby next time I do something on app engine - http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/
How do you think it could have been better? We struggled a lot trying to decide how much technical detail to include. We decided that including more information (even if a lot of our users didn't understand it) was better than "something broke, it took a long time to fix."

Would love to hear suggestions on this topic.
Cupcakes! :D
ABC chooses Status.net instead of Twitter
Nope this isn't accurate. It's true, but it's not accurate. You have to remember Fried is a web designer. So while he can't design, he has had experience working on things, launching things, talking to developers. And he's willing to put his money where his mouth is - he hired DHH to work on Basecamp, but only after he asked around, looking for help in learning to try to code it himself.
I was a little unclear. My main point is that many of the things that made FreeBSD such a strong leader years ago are no longer weak points in Linux.

I agree with you though otherwise. From a cleanliness, usability, and aesthetics point of view, the state of Linux is pretty sad, especially when compared to FreeBSD. Linux could also learn a little bit about documentation from FreeBSD's excellent handbook.

EDIT: Let me also say that I'd really like to see the OpenSolaris devs jump to the FreeBSD team and help drive FreeBSD further.
The amount consumed is smaller than the amount produced, so there is a net production over the whole cycle.
tom@ubuntu:~$ gpg -c flag.png

tom@ubuntu:~$ gpg -v --list-packets flag.png.gpg

:symkey enc packet: version 4, cipher 3, s2k 3, hash 2

salt eae60ad4255dc4e2, count 65536 (96)

gpg: CAST5 encrypted data

OpenPGP encrypted data is easy to find too. It even tells you the algo used. The example is symmetrically encrypted, but it works the same with asymmetric keys. Even shows who it is encrypted for. Edit: formatting.
Except for the part about the kinetic energy, your overall argument is poorly supported and seems fatally flawed.

"...accidents happen when the variability of speed is greatest.

http://sense.bc.ca/disc/disc-09.htm
"

There is nothing in the collection of short quotes, which you linked to, that supports this assertion. One of the quotes does mention speed variance, but as a possible factor, not as the proven greatest cause of accidents.

Also, your analysis seems to ignore all kinds of accidents except rear-end collisions, which account for a measly 5.4% of fatal crashes in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...). In head-on collisions, run-off-road collisions, collisions with animals, collisions at intersections etc. not only does speed variability play no part, but higher speed is certain to both increase the occurrence probability and aggravate the consequences.
Top 100 Retweeted Hashtags on Twitter
"Oracle Now" 1.1 for iPhone Now Available
I also got sick of feeling like just an ideas person, so I've been trying to follow this advice for the last 2 months. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I started with Python, using a combo of MIT OCW, Learn Python the Hard Way, and How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. I then started going through an online course on dynamic websites that touches on HTML, CSS, PHP, XML, MySQL, Ajax, and Javascript. I've been using w3schools.com and the online manuals to learn more about these.

Does this make any sense? Should I try to learn more Python? If so, which resources should I use? Are these all worth my time? Am I missing anything?
There's a big difference between the HN stereotype and "real" business people. REAL non-technical co-founders:

- Can raise funding and know funders well

- Have a massive network of people to tap into

- Can cold-call like no-one's business

- Know how to negotiate a deal to the point of paranoia

- Have deep domain experience and connections

- Make plans for the future, but can pivot on a dime

- Can talk enough tech to understand well beyond buzzwords

- Know how to keep themselves and the tech side accountable

- Let the tech side concentrate on what they do best
That would be awesome. You could even go the next step and include a HUD projected on a portion of your windshield...
What’s a Cyborg?
Staying power or one night stand?
Kudos for launching - nice one!
I would speculate that it's a poorly-chosen shard key. MongoDB's built-in sharding uses range-based indexing. If you choose user_id as your shard key, and those are autoincrementing integers, then you're screwed if newer users tend to be more active on average than older ones.
That looks potentially useful in some cases. Can you send me the code/docs for that?
All of your downloads. One big button. - GitHub
The rational use for excess money
This will do it on windows: http://www.mediamonkey.com/
(I have no vested interest in this company other than continued development for my personal use)

edit didn't see the comparison below, but this works very well with Iphone/pod/pad
As other's have noted, the landings are very rough when compared to the space shuttle. But let's not forget that these were designed at around the time of the Apollo program. Landing in the ocean at that speed is not much different from landing on the ground. In some ways I think this is much safer than a water landing, especially considering what happened with Liberty Bell 7 in the mercury program.
3D Slides Built with HTML5, CSS3, and SVG
Hmm, I've done similar things based on my own experience (hah!) and what the Easy-2-Read standard[0] says about text color (start with #333 on #fff and work from there).

Really, as long as your luminosity contrast ratio[1] is somewhat decent, you'll be ok.

[0]: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/100e2r/
[1]: http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php
Use two drives and have them switch over every night.
I work in a field where these are bright-line issues. In software security, client relationships are often covered by explicit per-client confidentiality agreements. Disclosing prior relationships can kill long-term contractor arrangements. Anyone who's ever been involved in an M&A project probably has a similar appreciation for the problem.

I think LinkedIn actually may make this easier for employers in some respect, because it datestamps the links and makes it clear who was part of a salesperson's prior rolodex and who's a contact made by/for the company.
UGG Womens Classic Cardy Knit Boot Oatmeal
He's a pretty prolific writer, if you want to know more about him, just go read.

I don't buy into everything he's selling (cf. Rework), but I think there's stuff worth picking out of his brain.

I'm not his interlocutor nor his defender. Go read and decide for yourself.
This advice is best taken for server software where allocating memory and copying data would be considered a very expensive part of the pipeline. In the vast majority of scenarios, any I/O wait or mild to serious computation that has to be done using this data will vastly outweigh the major advantage of memory-mapped files: not having to allocate and copy.

As you might imagine, a caching proxy server is extremely well suited for this, as it's basically just shuttling data directly out of it's store and over the socket.
If there's anyone from Foursquare here, I'm interested in what monitoring you have in place. How long had the shard been poorly performing before you noticed? Do you use anything to monitor MongoDB in particular, or load on servers, anything like that?
I'm in the same boat, a little further down the river. Also started with MIT OCW and How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (in addition to the O'Reilly Python book).

Best thing for me was to escape the textbook-like examples (quadratic equations, rock paper scissors) and actually [attempt to] build real things. Once you have cursory Python knowledge, pick up "Practicel Django Projects" -- you'll build a working CMS by page 28 and feel really good about yourself. By the end of that book I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I was writing other programs, even if I am slow as hell and have a reference book open in my lap.
Compiling OCaml directly to a new cloud operating system
I've jsut started using it. It would be nice if it were easy for my wife could email things to be added to my queue. (Then again, maybe that wouldn't be so nice...)
It seems developers are looking for glorified reviews (Daring Fireball, Macgasm, etc) and concentrating little on the problems. You can take the app, and shove it. It does nothing the web interface doesn't.
A long time ago, Abebooks recruited me as a customer like this.. They were selling on amazon market place and with their follow up to my order convinced me to visit their website.

So, I think it can be done, I'm just surprised that not more company do it...
Google App Engine Prerelease SDK 1.3.8 is out
I'm in sales so I'm customer facing.

I'm just saying that you are basically asking your employee to not work for the duration of the non compete clause.

I don't see how that's acceptable for people unless they are earning so much that it's a reasonable compromise they make in order to get that job.

My company pays me fairly, they've been really good to me. But not enough to where I can not work for six months if I ever choose to leave.
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about letting other people add stuff to your list, but it's a great idea.
So well said upvoting just isn't enough. (And as soon as I added my point, your total dropped a point. Hmm.)
i wasn't going to read this because of the stupid "= fail" title, but then i realized it wasn't the original title of the post. why did the submitter change it?
Derelict Places
I would have pegged a Mainer to make a mean Fluffernutter Pie. :) I'd love the key lime pie (without meringue). Thanks!
Its a really fascinating tell, when programmers think that the solution to a given problem is that everyone become programmers.
Yahoo Nabs Display Ads Startup Dapper
Irony: a post about the fallacy of seeking local maxima urges focus on the extension of life on a planet which cannot support our current population's demands.
Here's what the gpg data looks like when using someone's public key to encrypt a file... now we know who to go hit over the head with a hammer ;)

tom@ubuntu:~$ gpg -v --list-packets file.gpg

:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 16, keyid 63E6E0BBB9FEE3A5

data: [2045 bits]

data: [2047 bits]

gpg: public key is B9FEE3A5

gpg: using subkey B9FEE3A5 instead of primary key 7A997B0A
I think this is an overly cynical view. I don't think anyone actually strives for mediocrity. Maybe someone might rationalize it after the fact -- "I did that on purpose to increase page views." The fat cat PM smoking a cigar and pulling at his suspenders, yelling in a fast-talking Transatlantic accent for "More clutter on the page, or it's your ass!" strikes me as cartoonish ;)

(I don't think Yelp's design is mediocre; it attracted me to the site over CitySearch years ago. I think it's just a little dated, and hasn't integrated what we've all learned about UX in the interim yet.)
You wouldn't re-encrypt the whole drive; usually, the master key is stored in the first few sectors of the disk, encrypted with the login key. That way, you only have to re-encrypt a small amount of data to effectively change the entire disk's key.
Electronic Credit Card As Secure Token
We hippies aren't so into the fluff.
Having more MongoDB-specific technical info might be a call-to-arms for other MongoDBAs who might offer their ideas/thoughts. You could also use that as a hiring/scouting opportunity.

Does 4sq have an engineering blog?
Early Multi-Purpose Electronic Credit Cards Now Available
As a PHP developer, I found learning Ruby and Rails at the same time too much. I went back to PHP, learned MVC in a language I was familiar with, and then when I went back to rails it was clear which bits were Rails features and which bits were Ruby language constructs.

Of course, I then decided that I didn't like Rails enough to put up with its performance issues, and went back to writing MVC in PHP, so I may be a bad case study. (I hear RoR 3.0 is much better performance-wise, but my current solution works well enough that I'm not interested in trying it out again)
We just launched a site today that lets you hire an agent.

Check it out at www.CareerElement.com!
You should make something happen when the Konami code is entered on your website.
It's a common argument - either you work for money or you work because you love the work itself. Besides what should be common sense, there have been plenty of studies denoting that working simply for money does not bring happiness (assuming you are above the poverty line and even then in many cases), especially long term.
> I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Hey, I was doing that. (Though I do actually believe that the recent Chinese success is owed to ordinary Chinese not their government.) Though you can't deny that Deng Xiaoping was infinitely more sane than Mao.
By that standard the British are doing even better.
Well, I'm female, so I wasn't recruited by strippers. But I did get to go to their 'Diversity Weekend' before my interview. They invited out about 30 college kids - women, minorities, and some white males who happened to be in the society of black engineers. They took us to a couple of dinners, saw some sights around Seattle, and we had a full day of mock interviews with real engineers where we got immediate feedback. I had a great time and the interviews were helpful.

Perhaps the event you saw was the sister event for their not-diverse recruits.
it's gonna be so much fun, can't wait.
Every time I try to use yelp.com I am reminded about how much more focused and useful their iphone app is in comparison. The results are always more meaningful and organized in a way that makes it easier to consume.
If you're applying for a job, then I agree.

If you're founding a startup, then a business guy needs to be able to clearly and quickly communicate with the developer(s).
It's not THAT bad, I'd say two or three steps up from that ;)
Really?? It took a simple blog post for someone to go "hmmmm" about over there? Not to sound like a complete ass, but, just like with eBay, I vastly prefer using your iPhone app to using the web interface due to its (relative) simplicity, and even that I only do because I can't write a review directly from the iPhone app and must finalize it on a real computer.

Speaking of that, why on earth can I only write drafts on mobile devices and not submit reviews? I'm just as likely to write a drunk or extremely pissed review regardless of the device I'm typing on. If anything, waiting until I get to a computer makes me instil the reviews with more sarcasm than I would in the spur of the moment on a mobile device.
Google brings Goggles to iPhone
This isn't accurate. Most of this is true, but not for the reasons the thread author gave in his piece.

Why should a business/non-technical founder learn to code? The answer to this is simple: so that you have better ideas. Or, put another way: learning to code gives you the ability to implement your ideas. And implementing your ideas forces you to recognize, after some time, what works and what doesn't.

Hackers who start their own projects tend to have a framework in their heads for figuring out which ideas are good/may work, and which ideas won't. And they know this because they've failed enough times to figure out what isn't good for a project. Whereas most business 'wantrepreneurs' I know don't have that. They don't have that because they've never implemented anything, and so how do they know if their idea's a good one or not?

It's interesting to note that you don't have to learn to program to get this framework in your head. Learning to program is simply the most efficient (and cheapest!) way of doing it. Prominent counter-examples come to mind: Steve Jobs never really learned to code, but he grew up in the valley, and chose to mix around with hackers (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers points out that as a teenager Jobs approached the CEO of HP to ask for parts). So it's probably safe to assume Jobs absorbed such a framework by osmosis - spend enough time around people who make product and you begin to see for yourself what works, and what doesn't.

Jason Fried has also been brought up in this HN thread. And I suspect that it's no different for him: Fried is no programmer (though he's a web designer). But he was willing to pay people to implement his ideas. He paid DHH, after all, to build Basecamp. And that's another hack - you don't need programming ability to learn the framework - in this particular case all you need is implementation (which you can pay for). And if the project fails, you learn from it. Either way you gain things to add to your internal framework. (Derek Sivers also springs to mind - he hired contract programmers to build CDBaby, if I'm not mistaken).

Gaining that framework for sussing out ideas is likely to be the most important reason a non-technical founder should learn to code. Because it's going to help in so many little ways - you learn to detect technical bullshit, you gain a feel for what features to implement when and why, you attract better programming talent - because how else are you able to attract co-founders if you reek of incompetence and/or naivety?
By the way, you should not only look at how the current system is broken, but also at how it does work. The US is not North Korea.
I tend to think that its the concept of work (outside the home) is relatively new in human society. Years ago, people generally just had to survive by doing whatever it was that provided for their families. They grew crops, raised animals or hunted, and some were craftsmen. They were (mostly) able to do these things from home, with their families, on their own terms, and feel a sense of accomplishment. Did they think about enjoying their work? Work was life, and if times were good they were happy.

These days, we have two different lives. We have our family life, and we have our work life. The two are disconnected. We endure our daily commutes and work for big corporations.
We have no voice in the way things are done, and a lot of the time it can be hard to see any meaning in our work even in good times.

Sorry for rambling...
What I really want to see are upgraders or switchers. Who is switching from what to what? New smartphones may be Android simply because it's not available on any other carrier except AT&T and it has the lowest barrier to entry (ie. cheapo Androids are available).

Because I think that the Android growth is simply people upgrading their dumbphones because they'd be silly not to upgrade at the "free phone w/ new 2 year contract". Not that it's a bad thing, but "market share percentage" of smartphones doesn't really show how smartphones are growing over dumbphones.

Good for Android, but as Windows v. Mac has proven: it's not the market share, but what you do with it. ;)
This presents quite a quandary in deciding which is more secure: a 16-character semi-mnemonic memorizable sequence, or a 128-character random sequence that must be stored on a USB stick?

Considering that the record for number of decimal places memorized for Pi appears to be 67,890 I'd argue memorizing a 128-character random sequence would be both possible and most secure. ;)
..except availability on Spotify of their catalogue is not artists' business but their label's, regardless of degree of indie-ness.

My attitude is the complete opposite: "I can listen to Madonna but not to Tallest Man on Earth, who is from Sweden? Kthxbye".
Amarok has some interesting UI features that are really interesting.
Use a pass phrase with correct punctuation:

"I hate the boarder checks that my home country makes me go through each time I return from Europe!"
Not that extra security is bad for your gems, but I was more or less insinuating iPhone support since that's what I really want. ;)
It does need fixing but you guys don't need to go all overboard hiring people and stuff to get it. It's just what the article said. There was a ~perfect~ analysis some graphic designer/something did of newtwitter where they fixed everything with these slight tweaks to font / headers being more easily picked out of sections and everything else. It was just perfect for this, but fucked if I can find it now. Literally just read it from something here or on reddit yesterday but no search is turning it up. You guys could do this yourselves given a good day or so of tweaking shit.

Really tried hard to find that link, it's there somewhere if someone can search better than me. Tell Gabe jesse said so. =)
That's the funny thing about the industrial revolution (or modern capitalism, which is slightly older).

While previous societies had their golden ages, their invariably sunk back into the mediocrity that they came from. The Dutch and English finally hit a sweet spot, and their societies keep thriving in absolute terms. Not to mention that they exported their way of living to the rest of the world.
Truly Ergonomic keyboard available for preorder
Looks really interesting, but it seems it's not Mac-compatible.
Sort of, a plant converts a net positive of CO_2 to O_2.

This is also another one of those cases where some folks can misunderstand the statement to believe that plants somehow take in all this CO_2 and scrub it of Carbon. Not really, that Carbon becomes the plant itself. The amount of C's that a plant pulls out of the CO_2's is nearly equivalent to the plant's dead weight. This is important to understand, because old growth forests don't actually remove net CO_2 from the atmosphere, they just fail to release it. If you cut down the forest, the dead plant matter starts decomposing and/or burning and then CO_2 and/or methane goes back into the atmosphere.

Or at least, that's how I understand it.