skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Frankly I don't see any indications that the trajectory of electronic book sales will go differently than music and movies. Same insanely anti-customer pathological obsession with turning sales into "licenses," same obsession with DRM, same outcome: the illegal edition is quite likely to become the more consumer-friendly version.

Today people torrent individual albums and movies, or perhaps a trilogy, or a collection of all the albums of a single band. Given the incredible efficiency of text compression, it is entirely conceivable that soon people might be faced with the decision to rent for $10 a non-shareable copy of a single book, or to just download in one shot, "all books released electronically in english, ever [mar 2011 edition]".
Obermann Returns Back on Air Tuesday Night
I see your anecdote and raise you mine, where I saw a old lady get invasively patted down for about 15-20 minutes at SFO.
Maybe you could fit just the punchline on a T-shirt:

A sociologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are given 100 ft of fence and asked to enclose the greatest area.

-The sociologist makes a square.
-The physicist makes a circle and says he can PROVE it's the best answer. Take that, mathematician!
-The mathematician knocks off all but a few fence-links, wraps the fence around himself, and says "Define the outside of the fence to be the ground which contains me..."

(Say the punchline in a smarmy, nasal voice.)
Who am I?

I’m just a simple jack-of-all-trades web designer trying to make sense of this crazy, often unnecessarily confusing world.

What hardware am I using?

My nomadic work rig is a 15" MacBook Pro – late-2007 model with the stock hard drive replaced with a SSD – pox on black bezels and glass screens! When at home it is hooked up to a 24" Samsung monitor that I don’t really take advantage of (I usually keep my windows sized to 1400x900 max), a wired Apple keyboard, an Alienware TactX mouse, Logitech Z-5 Speakers and Sony MDR-XD200 headphones. I also have a PC rig that I built in 2008, but I use that strictly for PC gaming now.

I draw my thumbnails and sketches in a large, grided Moleskine notebook with a Lamy Noto ballpoint pen. As for miscellaneous items, Post-It notes act as my todolist, the Kindle is my reading device of choice and I carry a Canon XSi with me every now and then.

And what software?

I guess Photoshop is a given. I use both TextMate and Emacs for churning markup and code. Firefox is what I develop with first because of Firebug and the fact that I don’t use it for browsing otherwise (keeps the history of my real browser clean). I use Slammer for measuring and laying stuff on my screen in a nice and tight grid.

I use Git for version control. I used to use Emacs + Magit for this but have gone back to a forked version of GitX after simplifying my branching model. Forklift is used for quick SFTP work or when I want to browse my local files with a program that doesn’t suck. I use SizeUp to quickly center windows or to place windows in panes when I’m coding.

I work while listening to music, so iTunes + Last.fm is usually always up playing songs I’ve rated four stars or higher.

What would be my dream setup?

I’d love to get rid of this stupidly-large PC tower I have, but I still need my PC gaming fix. Would be if nice laptop tech. eventually caught up to desktop and kept in line so I could have a MacBook that could run Shattered Horizon as well as it can run Photoshop.
I may not have been clear enough. When I say if you can always afford to walk away it's meant within the context of the post. Meaning that if you can always afford to walk away from clients who are only interested in fixed quotes, not just one job. Which in my experience anyways has been about 90% of the time (of actual contracts, not just leads). I can't afford to turn down 90% of my work... yet.

After reading some of the other comments I've decided to stop even giving them the option of an hourly rate. Works been very steady (too busy ATM) and like I said there's been very little uptake on the hourly option anyways.

I agree that it definitely makes sense to change your model to reflect the type of client.
Another hypothetical:

4. The guy is gay and doesn't want to be inappropriately touched by a woman because he's attracted only to men.

I think that, in general, men getting sexually assaulted by women is something we take less seriously because, yes, as you say, men want sex, they aren't so bothered and because in general men have power (physical and otherwise) over women. But in most cases there are good reasons to challenge those assumptions, which we should do.
Microsoft CEO Selling as Much as $2 Billion in Stock
As you can probably guess, I'm on the Wylio team. Since we're not sure about that aspect of the CC license yet either, we recently changed Wylio's search parameters to exclude the non-commercial CC licensed photos.

We are very concerned with doing things properly and want to make sure we're operating within both the letter and spirit of CC licenses and copyright law.

Thanks for voicing your concerns, I hope this response is helpful!
I was hoping for a dump of the actual database...
Ross Perot made a reasonable fist of it; the only major obstacle is money. Of course, an independent candidate won't have the political network necessary for effective governance, but even that could be spun into an asset; if she had won the governor's spot and performed with reasonable competence that would have sold better than any partisan merit badge.

I don't think that getting heavily defeated at the polls outspending your opponent ~5:1 and changing positions repeatedly is much good for her national credibility either.
Offsite backup services created by HNers:

http://www.tarsnap.com/

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

https://spideroak.com/

(I co-founded SpiderOak in 2006.)
Try crashing a train into the White House, or a nuclear power plant, or hijacking it to Cuba, or any of the other stunts people try with planes.

Trains are intrinsically less interesting to terrorists. Not uninteresting necessarily, but much much less interesting.
A page about the program itself: http://notendur.hi.is/~gas15/FireShepherd/
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Not sure if it'd be useful to people here, but years back I wrote a few chapters for a book: Web Graphics for Non-Designers. Parts of one of my chapters, Using Color, were made available as an excerpt to read here:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/graphics/color/nondesi...

Not sure if any of the screenshots date it embarrassingly, but it might be useful to someone wanting to become more comfortable with their colour use.
Let the Idea Free
Ubuntu 10.10, awesome, gnome do, emacs, eclipse, bash, (i)python, ghc(i), git, trac, chromium (& vimium), openoffice, gmail, gcalendar, evernote, pidgin, xchat, grooveshark.
I can't wait to see what everyone does with this data, there could be lots of interesting insights gleaned from this.

For example, a more comprehensive list of top domains, domains with most upvotes, domains with most unique people submitting, etc.
Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta:

This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right.

The oddest thing is that this browser seems to require that you log in to Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it).

The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However, I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks bar, a setting which is a little buried.

The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now -- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help.

There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much.

I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.
Much better link. As in, it actually has links to the source code. Who wrote the OPs article and didn't both including a link to this page? The genius of some people...
A thought comes to mind: Is it arguably illegal now for a job to require you to fly? It may not be sexual assault in the legal sense when the TSA does it, but that's partially because you can be said to have consented. If someone else is "forcing you to consent" (quoted for oxymoronicity) then that is a different thing altogether, and given the extreme attention the law pays to sexual harassment in the workplace it would not surprise me that while the government and the TSA agents are indemnified, your company may not be.

Actually, let me refine that to merely point out that one could plausibly file a very expensive and uncomfortable-to-your-employer lawsuit over this; I wouldn't guarantee victory, but I wouldn't guarantee defeat, either.
It's possible to make a relational schema without nulls. Most people avoid it though because it adds extra tables and makes queries more complex, in some situations. In others it can make them simpler.
Desktop:

Core i7 930
6GB DDR3 DRAM
2x24" ASUS monitors
Microsoft Natural Keyboard
(On the way) 120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
Fedora 14

Laptop:

~2007 Core2Duo 15" MBP

Phone:

HTC Incredible w/ Android 2.2

VPS:

512 MB prgmr.com instance running Ubuntu server

My favorite software:

zsh
tmux
xmonad
irssi
(mac)vim
git
google chrome
gmail, google docs, google reader

[edit] formatting
There's a torrent link to it in the article, or do you mean something else?
> The problem here isn't misogyny.

Really? I'm seeing plenty of misogyny, along with other problems.
Are there really 25 people working on this?

How? It's social plugins with easy APIs on top of a well written WebKit browser.

At least, I assume that's what the footer there is for: http://www.rockmelt.com/
No amount of "sensitivity training" and related measures will change the behavior of psychopaths. The reason big companies have harassment seminars and rules of conduct is not to prevent this from happening, they need this to cover their asses legally when it does happen, and if at all possible to send a message to their employees that they better not be covering this shit up when the time comes.

Converting the open source community (or any community for that matter) into a paranoid kindergarten isn't gonna do anything besides make people miserable. Almost everyone already knows that this kind of behavior is not within the normal range of human interaction, no training necessary. And I suspect those who do not know this to begin with cannot be trained to reliably behave acceptably and normally, no matter how much effort is put into this.

Psychopaths don't need to be educated, they need to stay at home and take their meds.

If all that holds a guy back from acting like a retarded, violent asshole is a bunch of rigid rules and the threat of public shame, his true self will come out eventually no matter how much you invested in sensitivity training. Personality disorders cannot be treated with awareness campaigns. It's not like these people have somehow just missed the memo on how not to mistreat others and are then magically socialized once that information has been provided.

On a side note, I'm sick of (and kind of surprised by) this notion that all men are supposed to be like this by default and just have to restrain themselves all the time so as not to degenerate into drooling monkeys who rape everything in sight. And it's not just women putting this theory out there, I've seen quite a lot of male creeps on LifeJournal threads "confessing" to this kind of personality over the last few days. PSA: if you're like this, it isn't because you're a man. It's because you're sick and should consult professional help.
I think the interesting bit is this choice between getting groped in public vs. private.

Personally, I'm much more comfortable with an authority figure in public than in private. I mean, photos of some TSA guy with his arm halfway up my ass are going to be a whole lot more embarrassing for him than for me. I mean, he could loose his job, while for me, the worst that would happen is my friends would tease me a bit.

Really, "what you would be willing to do when other people are watching" is often a reasonable ethical shorthand for 'the right thing' - allowing people to (optionally) release the recording of their interaction with law enforcement would go a long ways towards reducing abuses by law-enforcement.

On the other hand, what I'm really afraid of is getting put on some secret list, and video taping doesn't protect me from that.
Well, as I recall, several of the questioners at that session were verging on the point of heckling, so many of the responses were short.

But the answer is that permitting mixed content was probably a mistake in the first place, but it's one that we have to live with. The ease of mixing content means that many sites get it wrong (including Google sites, to our shame) and the lack of ubiquitous SSL (again, including some Google sites) imposes that on others.

So, I suppose that `we don't consider it a problem' is roughly correct regarding warning dialogs: the answer is not to mix content. The problem is that it's clearly too difficult to do that. (The inability of networks to cache public resources over HTTPS is also an issue and possibly one which we'll address.)

Lack of SSL on the Chart's API is a new one, but I'll look into it now that I know that it's a problem.

As for the rest of the problem: fixing stuff is hard. Miraculous answers invariably tend to be so only in the eyes of the conceiver. We'll keep plugging away.
Do it. I'd pay a robot to fix my car.
The tool you mentioned forgetting in your original list is almost surely Terminitor: https://github.com/achiu/terminitor
It uses ordinary files, not a database.
You realize that is from 1994, right? I looked at wikipedia's list of hijackings and did not see any in the last 10 years.
Thanks ronnier!

(via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880428)
tpz - you are correct, it's terminitor. i already had it 'watched' on github
It's for Windows only.
But if the company sold for less than $5m, the founders would get nothing?

Probably ignorance here, but if the company sold for less, say $4m are the founders now in debt for the remainder of the 5x agreement?
In fact the link it's there, at the bottom of the article.
Yes, he meant no NULL anywhere. The relational model as originally formulated by E.F. Codd did not have NULL. It was only much later that some tried to extend it by adding NULL (or even two different kinds of NULL).

In Date's book "Database in Depth" he gives some wonderful examples of how NULL in SQL breaks things. One I recall involved a couple simple tables and a simple question about the data. There were something like half a dozen or so reasonable ways one might write a query to answer the question--and there were many different answers depending on the exact query.

"Database in Depth" has been updated and refocused more on SQL, and is now called "SQL and Relational Theory". He sums up in the latter book the problem with NULL thusly:

To sum up: If you have any nulls in your database, then
you’re getting wrong answers to certain of your queries.
What’s more, you have no way of knowing, in general,
just which queries you’re getting wrong answers to and
which not; all results become suspect. You can never
trust the answers you get from a database with nulls.
In my opinion, this state of affairs is a complete
showstopper.
Agree 100%. I wasted most of a day (in increments over several weeks) worrying about whether I had screwed something up at my end, tweaking my gmail settings, analyzing TCP traffic and so on. A little bit of information from Google's end would have saved me hours of needless security anxiety.

Lack of complaint != contentment. I am pretty annoyed to hear of this indifference to users' peace of mind.
I meant the actual YC/PG Hacker News database, not one reverse engineered from the HTML output.
Text discounts.
Mobile technology is universal for consumers throughout the U.S., but no function on a mobile device is more utilized than text messaging. The best way to reach consumers is through text messages revealing about the discounts available.
Someone downvoted you so I'm voting you back up. I thought the same thing when the concept came to me - the creator would cop a lot of criticism (even be mildly terrorised, funnily enough) from some quarters.
Anyone able to ditch the glasses for an orthokeratology treatment?
I have trouble seeing details at a far distance and wonder if the reports on this style of treatment were accurate. I don't want to do the whole laser in the eye thing so that is out of the question. special contacts that sculpt the eye to do what it should are ok by me though.
I'm going to find out. If people are flying free hardware over my property, then by golly, finders keepers.
Could these be used for last mile transportation? As a way to deliver a letter, or perhaps even a pizza, at least during nice weather?
Direct torrent link: http://api.ihackernews.com/torrents/hn_full_11-07-2010.zip.t...
Hey, email me and maybe we can collaborate on it. Got some ideas on how it could work.
Google Voice and FaceTime – Why the Carriers Are Losing Their Voice
What's the difference? Other than parsing issues?
Radar detectors are sold under the same sort of disclaimer that they're never, ever, ever to be used to circumvent speed limit laws. It's safe to say we can all roll our eyes at this boilerplate.
> Not a big believer in garbage collection.

This makes me seriously wonder whether you're trolling. Out of purest and most innocent curiosity, what sort of programming do you do?
Part of the crawl the Ronnie is sharing in this link is something I shared with him. I've used HN crawls before for my automagically organized HN demo:

http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/

I'm excited to spruce up my database with the most recent posts.
Sorry. I didn't write it and I'll see what I can do about toning down the language. In the defense of the text, while some Key-Value stores provide atomic operations on individual values, I'm not aware of many that offer actual transactions in the traditional sense of the term.

If you want to complain about our marketing, feel free to email Fred Holahan (fholahan at voltdb.com). He didn't write everything on our website, but he's in charge.
Thomas gave me this advice several months ago, and it made my life as a consultant less stressful and more lucrative. It worked particularly well with a menu proposal: here are three different engagement lengths with expected project details for what we can accomplish, which one works best? Instead of them quibbling about my rate, they just said "The difference between B and C doesn't matter too much to us, so we'll drop the last week and pay you the B rate. Cool?". Worked perfectly for both sides, and I got a week with family.
Desktop: Mac Pro with a pair of 23" displays. Apple compact BT keyboard + Magic Trackpad. SSD for boot/apps, 2x1TB RAID mirrors for bulk storage.

Mobile: MacBook Air.

Phone: iPhone 4 + HTC Eris (stock Froyo ROM -- HTC Sense is awful)
Web Application Test Automation just got a whole lot easier with LiquidTest 2.0
Take a look at the example in the page:

<HackerNews>
<row>
<ID>1</ID>
<Url>http://ycombinator.com</Url>
<Title>Y Combinator</Title>
<Text />
<Username>pg</Username>
<Points>39</Points>
<Type>1</Type>
<Timestamp>2006-10-09T20:33:12.700</Timestamp>
<CommentCount>15</CommentCount>
</row>
</HackerNews>

If you really want to understand the HN community (or online communities in general) this data doesn't tell you much.
There are many interesting questions this data cannot answer.

When was each of those 39 points gained?

Who upvoted?

How many points did the submission have when each comment was posted?

How does the number of points affect the number of comments?

Are there cascades of votes (several users voting in quick succession)?

For each of the comments, who voted up and who voted down?
I've been running the two together for a long while with vi-mode anyway.
Social Media 101 says no one will read your posts unless there are completely unrelated pictures next to it.
Timestamps and an accurate karma count (instead of the -4 cap) spring to mind. I'm sure there are other issues as well.
Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become the norm for everything.
Does this help? http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/5941386/Hacker_News_Databas...
Ask HN: Thoughts on startup name - Dashboardly.com
Like it? Hate it? Does it look weird? Does it sound awkward when spoken? Easily misspelled? I'd like to hear what you think.

I've already gone through 3 solid names over the past few months and I'm sick of my URLs getting bought up because I'm too slow to jump on them. This has potential and it was available, so I just bought it. May not end up being the home of my startup, but maybe it will.

I'd prefer to stay away from the generic "ly" discussion because there have already been many HN topics on that. Just wondering what you think of "dashboardly".
If Apple were trying to make OSX the OS with the highest market share they would license it out. They are clearly not pursuing that strategy. If they wanted to sell the most computers in total, they'd lower prices to compete with Dell, HP, etc. They do neither.

I'm sure they'd like to see their market share rise, but their business plan in computers is to own a small but high markup slice of the market, knowing that in doing so they will not be the volume leaders.
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This doesn't seem like a good idea if it works as described in the link (i.e. flooding the network). Not only is it not fixing the real underlying problem, it will probably cause additional problems like network congestion and/or destruction.
As a gun owner and advocate of gun rights, I feel the need to call this out as an example of an inappropriate time to use or display a firearm. Vandalism and misdemeanor battery are not cause to threaten someone with deadly force. To do so is highly irresponsible and usually criminal.
Not the method I was expecting, but I think it could work...
Dave did a nice job on this. I found that it summarizes me pretty well, so I'm going to add a link on my profile that points to it. Might be kind of nice to have it automatically do that a la hackernewsers.
I don't see why not, but there'd be a payload weight limit, and if popularity increased, you'd need some kind of routing system to keep bots from colliding.
> Shade means to add black to a color and deepen it in value

This is really useful bit of information to keep in mind when working with colors - darkening a color requires not only decreasing its L (lightness), but also increasing its saturation (S). Without that the color will loose their intensity and will appear more gray-ish. It took me over a year to arrive at this empirically, so designer wannabes do pay attention here :-)
Oops, right. No I just renamed it: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-the-ruby-for-aw...