skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, awesome. This looks very very slick, and the Google Reader direct import is just...nice!

Bug report, though: A couple of my blogs that I chose to "turn on" only show up as their comments feed. If I go ahead and turn them on, and click on the feed itself in the left pane, I get the site (fair enough), but the list of items in the bottom pane then only shows up the comments feed items. And clicking on them takes me to the comments. weird.

Haven't been able to figure out why. E.g. the XKCD blag (http://blag.xkcd.com) and Cheap Talk (http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com) feeds.

p.s: when this bug is fixed, and archiving support added, I'm totally premium-ing - hold me to it! Great work once again!
The comments are something I avoid about PHP docs. There are lots of bad PHP programmers who feel the need to help everyone else by posting their terrible implementation of X which people then just blindly copy... I like the idea, but in practice, I don't think it works very well.
Wait, do you all actually shut your machine off for flights? I just close the lid.
Does anybody actually turn electronics off? It seems the majority of people simply leave them on sleep/locked/airplane mode.
Watch HN : The last lecture by dying CMU professor  [video]
While I may have written and designed NewsBlur, I am using a ton of other open-source technologies:

* Django: Web framework written in Python, used to serve all pages.

* Celery & RabbitMQ: Asynchronous queueing server, used to fetch and parse RSS feeds.

* MongoDB, Pymongo, & Mongoengine: Non-relational database, used to store stories, read stories, feed/page fetch histories, and proxied sites.

* PostgreSQL: Relational database, used to store feeds, subscriptions, and user accounts.

* jQuery: Cross-browser compliant JavaScript code. IE works without effort.

* Underscore.js: Functional programming for JavaScript. Indispensible.

* And many miscellaneous jQuery Plugins: Everything from resizable layouts, to progress bars, sortables, date handling, colors, corners, JSON, animations. See the complete list on NewsBlur's GitHub Javascript folder: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/js/
For sure. Hence the need for browser vendors to provide hooks - via new HTML5 form attributes, a Javascript API, or ideally both, to enable us to develop our own, usable HTML-based session login and logout forms with HTTP auth.
I have no huge grudge against PHP, but I'd also like really to see an answer to this.
You CAN do this, but it's a monumental effort to fix a tiny problem.
That annotated source is a thing of beauty.
4 very rare things just happened:

1) An application announcement on HN that genuinely appealed to me.

2) A single guy beat Google at UX in one of their best web applications (exposing the original site design for the feed is a fantastic idea!)

3) I paid for an application before it's ready.

4) I felt this was all so important I logged in to post this comment. :)

Kudos, you've done a fantastic job here. I really hope your environs permit you to keep this project going - it's a great idea, and I'm in love with it already!

One of the major problems I have with Reader is that certain low output feeds (making up the majority of my subscriptions) just seem to blend together - I forget why I subscribed to them, and have to go back to the original web page to try and figure out who the person is. Exposing the original page by default solves this beautifully. :)

Great work!

Edit: something I forgot. Visual display of the site allows me to instantly demonstrate RSS to my mother. Google Reader confused the hell out of her. :)
and in a down economy, if your boss doesn't respect you (and s/he isn't completely loony) s/he fires you and finds someone better.
Is a photo of Virgin balloon really copyright infringement, or is it just you taking the safe side? (referring to Photo Guide)
Unless you actually want to, y'know, buy movies or something.

In theory I could buy movies on iTunes, but I frankly don't trust anything I buy on iTunes to still work in ten years, whereas I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get my Blu-Rays to play.
Human life will likely be extendable by gene "hacking"
Thank for your opinion and you are on the right track. It actually is a bit worse than people whom aren't in the restaurant business probably realize. The average restaurant in the U.S. makes between 2.4 and 3.6 on every dollar without alcohol sales. Restaurants that serve any alcohol along with their food sales actually do a bit worse on the average, 3.4% on the higher end. The average is the key and folks who think it is much higher don't do the books. On the average most cannot afford many hits on their controllable costs besides giving 50% away on their food sales (coupons for alcohol are usually illegal). For every dollar spent on advertising or live music I need $4 or $5 back to break even with what was given away, coupons as an example, or spent. I have even put a coupon, as a lesson to a coupon salesman, with no reduction in price, on purpose. I received many,30 the first day, but no one I saw or spoke with ever came back to pay full price. At least the coupon salesman stopped bugging me. Groupons are OK if you are a new business. In my experience they fill your business with folks who rarely return. Thank you.
Anyone with an account could tell me if there's anything in their system about me? I sure don't want to register and log in just to opt-out...
Welzl's algorithm for minimum enclosing disk does it for me. Pick a point, recursively see if it is in the disk without the point - if not, it is part of the definition the minimum enclosing disk (forced to be on the boundary). Randomized, simple, clean and expected O(n).

Not enough people know about it! http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.46....
On the Photo-Guide it might be a good idea to provide 'What to send' examples to contrast your 'what not to send'.
You've done a really good job here. A news reader that lets me both rate news, theoretically learns my preferences over time, and lets me read the entire article without clicking more than once, is a serious package. (Why can't other readers get those things right?) My only problem is I'd prefer a native reader app to a web-based one, just because the major upside of using a reader is that it's constantly fetching and storing my feeds so there's no wait when I want to go read some news. I may check out your iPhone app though.
Rands in Repose: How to Be a Douche
Principals at NEA, Lightspeed & Trinity giving 1-hour meetings for $500
Months is not the metric, miles is. There is a maximum amount of time you want to leave the oil in but most people should be changing it sooner than that for mileage reasons.

Follow the manual on your car. In my case that is about every 3 months based on how much I drive. My brother drives a lot more, almost 2,000 miles a month, so he does it every other month.
Tour of a real toy Haskell program
Thanks! When I first used atchange (detailed in another comment) I saw mention of things like inotify, but didn't have the kernel support on the system I was using.

Fast-forwarding to now, having just installed inotify-tools (Debian/Ubuntu package):

while true; do inotifywait . &> /dev/null ; ls ; done

is a much more responsive version of:

atchange . ls

I should probably make a wrapper that uses inotify when available and degrades to atchange's brute force approach when necessary.
How are you handling sites with frameuster scripts ?
There is something called "general culture". Not knowing that Einstein is a physicist, that Jupiter and the Earth are planets, that Christopher Columbus landed the Americas in 1492, is lacking general culture, i. e. being dumb. When you're so specialized you can't be bothered to know the bare "common sense" stuff, you can't even be a responsible citizen.
If you're worried about misplaced time investment, I'd recommend Abiword and Gnumeric for your Word and Excel replacements; they're blazing fast and Gnumeric supports a lot more than either Excel or OO's offering.
If you want constant fetching, you want a premium account. Premium accounts get updated 10x as often, and allow an unlimited number of subscriptions.

The iPhone app is not submitted yet. Feel free to play with it: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/ipho.... I still have a few screens to make, and a ton of bugs to sort through. Maybe January?
Copy promises scalable vectors, then lists 4 raster formats as what you get.
Take a look at : Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop
Who is this MG Siegler? Is he like Gruber but with a not-so-polished writing?
A nitpicky thing, but kudos to the post author for including the word "may" in the title.

I'm not sure if my ego is being stoked or bruised, but it irks me every time I see a post like "10 Commands You've Never Heard Of"... and it's either a list of esoteric commands used by low level coders or commands that have fallen out of favor over the years.

And I'm familiar with every one of them. I've seen this round of knowledge cycle full circle a couple times now. I can't imagine the eye rolling of neckbeards who've been around professionally since the 80s.
Apple will buy Sony and Facebook. Right after Apple acquires Fermilab and the LHC. Which would make about as much sense.

Most of these merger rumors have supposed benefits that would be more easily and cheaply obtained through a licensing deal or other limited cooperation agreement.
>Its only problem is that the UI is not as polished as on iPhone or Android

Agreed. The phone itself is solid, but the UI made me think of early versions of Android, and not in a good way (as in, "this is even worse than early versions of Android"). It often seems like a layer of shiny paint on top of a ton of older cruft - inconsistent or nonsensical menu structures, "back"/"exit" are all over the place and hard to predict, etc. It feels like a feature phone trying to be a smartphone. This might not be an issue for people used to Nokia phones, but coming from iPhone/Android it's quite jarring.

>but it's good enough.

That remains to be seen. It IS a solid phone, and Nokia keeps crowing about how they'll sell 50 million of this phone over the next year. I can see it doing well in markets where Nokia is traditionally strong (maybe? I don't know much about smartphone usage trends in those markets). But in North America, where Nokia is already behind iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry on the smartphone front, they are not going to catch up by releasing something LESS polished.
This Isn't Another Quick Dismissal of Visual Programming
This UI looks very similar to MS outlook and I really it.However unlike outlook you cannot have all 3 panes vertically.On large screen ability display data into 3 vertical panes makes it more usable.
are you planning to add this feature sometime in future?
Handling iFrame busters? By using iFrame buster busters, of course!

When I detect an iframe buster, I prevent it from doing its job, but instead of continuing to show the original site, I switch over to the feed view. It complies with the wishes of the parent site, and I don't look like a bozo with such a glaring and awful bug. The feed view is still a great view. (It's the Google Reader view.)
World's Simplest Cell Phone
John’s Phone is the world’s simplest cell phone: you call, you hang up, and that’s it. John’s Phone is easy to use wherever you go.
> That's bad news...

Of course it is.

> HTML5 allows us to build rich application

Yes, I know. I love HTML5.

> Don't bash tech you don't understand the benefits of.

I wasn't bashing HTML5. I think you completely misunderstood my comment. I'm all for open standards. I never suggested otherwise.
Ask HN: Python, C and Arc
I was wondering if someone could add the same code http://www.python.org/doc/essays/ppt/acm-ws/sld043.htm for Arc for comparison purposes. I think something like this gives a better idea of the language than a simple "Hello World".
Why your desk job is slowly killing you
http://www.python.org/doc/essays/ppt/acm-ws/sld043.htm
Agree. Users really aren't that bothered as long as it works.

There are certainly faults with my aging Powerbook both with the hardware and software.
Here's the source: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/examples/todos/todo...

Edit, no, it's here: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/todos.html
Jonty's Idiocy - Twitter hijacking
Why should local papers use your service when they can ask their readers to send them the photos directly? At least here in Switzerland there are already newspapers doing this.
It's pretty simple. The owner of this site is a small time blogger and she doesn't want to pay someone to implement a paywall. And she doesn't know any internet tech herself beyond editing stories in Wordpress. She thinks that just screaming "get the hell off my lawn" works on the internet.

It's not clear to me if this is motivated by hosting costs or by this person's sense of IP property ownership. I'd say the latter - hosting is pretty cheap these days.

I say, good luck with all that... pulling subpoenas over THIS? Yeah right.

PS: I just tried to visit one story there and got "Error establishing a database connection". She's got the entire geek universe flooding into her one room shop on the net. Lol.
Ah. I really should write that up. Far too long to explain in a comment here, far to interesting (to me!) to forget or ignore.

I'll write it up and submit it. Anyone who cares to email me can get an early version to read, and your feedback would be useful.

Please.

Thanks.
jashkenas has single-handedly redefined literate programming for me. I've always considered it somewhat useful, but never very practical until seeing his annotated sources.

More examples:

Underscore: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...

Backbone: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html

CoffeeScript: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...

I believe they're all generated with Docco: http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/
Probably not. See http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html for an explanation of why intelligence probably does not exist.
It's made with Docco http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/
1. Even if Facebook used HTTP digest auth for people logging into facebook.com, I don't see how I could use HTTP digest auth for people logging into my website using their Facebook ID. (Also for OpenID, signing in with Twitter, etc.)

2. As a pragmatic matter, it seems more likely that Microsoft would update the various versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP to support SNI, than that all web browsers (including Internet Explorer on Windows XP) would be updated to support HTTP digest auth with a customisable UI.

Having said that, I'm in favour of web browsers supporting both technologies.
That company was iStockPhoto.com, if anyone is curious.
Anyone up for some testing?

(found the video after reading this article. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1323758/Can-cuttin...)

Will be cool to live longer for most I assume but also I would guess that many would have an issue with messing with "mother nature"...
An interesting side note here is that the coming Unity will be based upon compiz, instead of relying on mutter. Canonical apparently hired the lead developer of compiz:

http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/a-bright-new-futur...
Unity is the default in the 10.10 Netbook version of Ubuntu. It runs terribly slow and I found it unusable because of this. I was thinking it seemed like they made something that expected you to be on a desktop but marketed it wrong, I guess I was right..
That's fantastic, good job!
Thanks. That's pretty much my interest. I'm not really concerned about the politics of it. :)
At least that sheep has a vote. I dislike eminent domain abuse as much as anyone but there is a big difference between what property right abuse looks like now and what it would look like without a discernible and relatively incorrupt government.
I have a 4 week break in December; I'll have ample time then to work on this. Please shoot me an email at admin@thefireflyproject.us, so we can talk this over some more.
A bright new future for Compiz
"We have no money to support developers so we are going to make you all use one toolkit"

Yes, we all know that what we need is another platform to target. Get a clue Nokia. Its all about apps now, and this is the priority for app developers:

* iOS

* Android

* WP7

* The fluff in my navel

* Nokia Qt

Pretend all you want, but this is the order my clients budget for.
This is a neat concept - if you have indexed, up to date content, then people will pay for it - particularly the news outlets. They buy images all the time.

Can you tag images as they arrive in near real time?

A twitter for real-time photos, perhaps?
I love how the wording in the title implies a "Fools!".
American law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights. For example, even lawyer confidentiality has exceptions, as for example when a client tells you he is going to commit a future crime (that is not regarded as privileged and can be disclosed by the attorney to the authorities).

In the context of lawsuits and court orders, the key to protecting privacy is to abide by due process concerns. In other words, sometimes otherwise private information can become subject to discovery through legal processes such as third-party subpoenas. A holder of that information, such as Google, has no direct stake in the fight between the parties and will not disclose such information voluntarily. Nonetheless, court processes permit litigants to use lawful means to compel disclosure. Notice typically must be given to the adverse party, who in turn has a right to contest the litigant's right to obtain the information. A neutral judge will then consider whether the information ought to be protected when weighing the importance of disclosure in such a case against any rights of privacy that might be implicated (it is this process of notice, opportunity to contest, and neutral judicial evaluation that affords the due process protections). In most such cases, privacy rights do ultimately trump disclosure but not in all. Thus, when a court orders that disclosure be made, a litigant is forced to make it and, if a third party such as Google holds that information, it too is ordered to make it, though it has no stake in the fight.

Since American law is not absolutist on the privacy issues, and since Google must comply with lawful court orders, I don't think it can be faulted for doing so. Also, given the likely huge number of times it finds itself in this position, I don't think there is anything untoward about a number such as "9,000 times a year." This is perhaps why Mr. Schmidt made his comment in such an off-handed way. This is just a routine part of doing business.

I will grant there are policy arguments that could be made to the contrary but, legally, Google is on sound footing in its handling of privacy issues as described in the article.
Whilst I like you logic I don't think this is the case, at least in the UK market. Trying to find a PHP developer is actually very difficult here, especially if the work is at a somewhat boring company, I guess they want to be at start-ups. No lack of unemployed .NET devs (or employed and looking for a change), although a real lack of quality ones, but I would imagine that is the case with most dev jobs.
Yep, It was nice talking to Aibek. They are a passionate lot. And the quality as he said, keeps me stick around to MakeUseOf.com
Am I the only one who was surprised at how low that number was?
Theoretically, B-trees/ISAM. That's pretty much all you need to know.
Most algorithms aren't optimized for their storage layer(s), they exist primarily in big-O notation that ignores latencies, and especially non-uniform latencies.

On most systems RAM is the 5th level of storage (registers,l1 cache,l2 cache,l3 cache, ram). Just because L1-3 cache isn't addressable doesn't mean it won't have a serious effect on the performance of your code.
Small businesses losing out to red tape
You seem to be pretty close to this guy's analysis of the top 1k sites in google: http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/06/google-top-1000-sites-interes...

He figures that 15.3% of websites are written in PHP. However, the WP numbers are super low (since these are all huge sites), so I bet that the PHP percentage is somewhere north of 20% overall.

It's tough to estimate that stuff, though, because of all the parked pages that are out there.
> I've really come to dislike dualisms in politics, because the abstraction is always leaky. Anarchism is still a collectivist political philosophy, though it does focus a lot on the individual.

Agreed - I have no trouble with "here are some ideas from anarchism which might be part of a solution." But "anarchism is the solution" seems like simple extremism to me.

With reference to esr's essay, if the diagnosis is demagoguery, I think education and basic social welfare are a better prescription than anarchism.

Good discussion and interesting points - thanks!
No, I mean random programs installing their long-running daemons for no reason at all...
Are people using VirtualBox on servers these days, a la VMWare ESX?

I thought it was a desktop-only tool -- this seems to make it a viable replacement for ESX and puts it ahead of KVM in the tools department, no?
Because it moves the problem away from the local Wifi network to the VPN's exit point.

If you use a VPN service, don't be surprised if the local equivalent of the NSA has a sniffer on the termination point. Lots of them do this with Tor, because lots of them use Tor.

Your best hope as far as VPNs are concerned is to run your own, or an SSH-based SOCKS proxy. The best thing to do is for sites to use SSL for anything sensitive.
Assuming the government doesn't quietly get a court order forcing them to log and keep silent about it, of course.
Looks interesting although I like a more minimalistic design. Great logos!
And then you see things like the absolute robbery of the American people via the bank bailout

Minor fact check: the government has gotten back almost all the money spent on TARP. The current outstanding bill is fifty billion; even that much may drop to nothing by the time the car companies and AIG finish paying off. (Source: last night's All Things Considered.)
Remember, there was a huge strain of aggressive pacifism in the US in the 1930s, which is how the US stayed out of World War 2 until 1941. Come to think of it, there was a pretty huge strain of aggressive pacifism in England as well, which is how Hitler got as far as he did.

The 1930s was pretty much peak hour for pacifism. We'd just had World War 1 to remind us that war was a terrible thing, and hadn't yet had World War 2 to remind us that war wasn't the worst possible thing.

One could argue that the more popular pacifism gets the more likely war becomes, but it would be overly trite and based on an insufficient sample. It's a good line though.
Is there any reason to think that LibreOffice, now without any support from Sun/Oracle, is going to cross the threshold of "professional usability" that OpenOffice is just too buggy to reach?
very cool! love the interface. just signed up and trying to import from google reader. fetching feed is happening but very slowly. hopefully its just because the server is overloaded temporarily.
...or even a good Engineer. This lady may have helped design that MRI machine your spouse trusted their life to.
Since all of the browsers on Windows XP use the Windows SChannel API none of them support SNI. That includes the beloved Google Chrome, FireFox, and Safari. (Not sure about Opera on Windows XP)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Support

That is unfortunately an issue that only Microsoft can rectify unless developers on the Windows platform want to take the time and effort to re-implement parts of the SChannel API.