skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tried to signup for dropbox but it is just an invite-only beta.

looks very good though, exactly what i want. fast simple and free(?).
Collision detection for www..com and .com in the dupe checker.
Allow duplicate stories after 365 days.
codespaces.com subversion account, and it is free for the basic one.
"OTP should re-branded as "OTP on rails" it's really just a framework for building fault tolerant systems." nice !

edit: using that as the title, would have gotten this much more upvotes.
It makes him sound like some kind of hero, though. Maybe he is, but in general, I think ruining one's health through working too much is not a good idea.
I know how the system works, yeah.
I thought there are robot harvesters guided by GPS already?
A poor title selection detracts from what is otherwise very good advice.

The formula is simple and elegant and the result quite useful: an elevator pitch. I can't count the number of times over the years that I've tripped over myself trying to explain what I'm working on.
In case you weren't convinced that "rockstar" has jumped the shark
Friendfeed Is Going To Kill Google Reader, Not Twitter
It renders all weird in links. :(
Ironically, my experience was that everybody seemed to only understand the factory pattern. Wherever I worked, people loved using factory, whether it made sense or not.
I do DRM for a day job, including cracking systems to find their vulnerabilities (and then patch those vulnerabilities, before the pirtes exploit them - fun!). TPM is not the same as the other solutions, it really is a bitch to crack. You're pretty much reduced to reverse enginering the entire CPU, removing the TPM module, and then fabbing your own unprotected copy of the CPU. As you can probably imagine, this is not within the reach of a couple of bored uni students.
I agree that solving 'new' problems is a lot of fun. This can cause problem if you try to turn more mundane problems into interesting ones by making your code cover substantiatlly more general cases than is necessary. This is what has happened to me sometimes.

I guess you could consider the optimisation problem of how to finish your 'less than new' problem most effectively as a potentially interesting meta-problem.
wrong. have you bothered trying what you're claiming to be true?

% ./blah.rb; ./hah.rb
blah
blah
% cat blah.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby

if __FILE__ == $0
puts "blah"
end
% ls -F hah.rb
hah.rb@
not true anymore... disregard
with one clarification... (last I checked) 1.9.1 will be the stable, it won't be incremented to 2.0. Matz decided against the even/odd = stable/dev versioning scheme.
"podcasts that chronicles the news of the web" s/b "chronicle"

"Devorak" s/b "Dvorak"

This blog is pure filler, yet every entry makes the front page here. The bad poems written by the random 17 year old goth girl I added on livejournal three years ago have more insights than these posts. Is the maintainer a HN member? Someone almost-famous? I don't get it.
The Only Eight Books I’ve Kept (After Hundreds of Reviews)
Shattering the Conventional Wisdom on Growing Inequality
I think we'll eventually see the convergence of web apps and desktop apps. Sort of a hybrid of the two. AIR and Google Gears are steps in that direction.
There are no stupid design patterns, only stupid programmers who don't understand why they are using the design patterns.
Re: Nobody uses Silverlight: some tv channels (Italian RAI, Dutch NOS) do for streaming TV over the web. Don't know why, though.
Never Confuse Corporations With Law Enforcement
Play Processing.js Tower Defense
Guy Kawasaki on Innovations
Interesting work makes boring data sets appear interesting. Start by seeking interpretations.
I think 'rural' is going a bit far, but it would be fair to characterize the valley as "All the drawbacks of a big city with non of the benefits".
>Adam Leibsohn, a 27-year-old communications strategist who makes roughly $60,000 a year and pays $1,650 a month for his own apartment in the East Village...“It’s kind of a spartan lifestyle,” he says.

We admire your frugality.
Email me for an invite.
I'll release a solution to this problem (among others) in a month or so. If you are interested, drop me a line on my username at gmail.
It's not just the oceans, for example, how much of Himalayas is actually discovered? Or African Sahara?
It is not a start from scratch, but it is incompatible with previous versions of Ruby in significant ways.
Lies We Tell Kids, Now in a Pill Bottle: Introducing Obecalp
If what the article says its true they're releasing the actual code, no need to clone yourself.

In theory, it means increased distribution for app developers since their code would be easily ported to any site that implements the platform clone.

I have no idea how much how this will play out but the code should be an interesting read.
I'm solving a newish problem, posed (but not yet solved) by MS Photosynth: build an immersive, 3D-like experience from photos. But then again, I'm not a startup, but a one man nonprofit/research thing, releasing my code under the GPL. http://openphotovr.org

My next project is definitely gonna be a for-profit in some other area. Still deciding where exactly.
nods

My impression is that this is a fairly common model for communes - farm work during the some seasons, spend the rest of the year working for cash or on some big project.

If you strip out the cultural differences, communes and start-ups have a lot in common. I don't see why a start-up/farm couldn't work in this way, just so long as you don't try to launch a product in September.
How is the title of this submission related to the content? The article is about research on counterproductive motivations of software designers. There's nothing like the phrase "don't know how" in the article at all.
The new font for "permalink parent report reply" under each comment distracts attention from the comment text. Otherwise fine design. Long time reddit user.
Professions you might want a rockstar for:

Programmer, salesman, designer, ice road trucker.

Ones you don't:

Drawbridge operator, actuary, forklift driver, mortician.
Since when do people resist taking medicine prescribed by a doctor? Why see a doctor if you aren't going to do what he says.
I can't decide what this means. Is it that we give kids pills for anything so now we have a pill for nothing? Or just that, indeed, parents lie to kids so thoroughly that it has taken on a physical manifestation?

In any case, I have a free suggestion for the makers of Obecalp: run a TV ad on Saturday mornings. Tagline: "Ask your mommy about Obecalp."
Data Portability's Future
I've been saying this for years. OpenID is not catchy. It will fail.
Whether or not the suggested courses of action have any merit is not going to be a constructive debate, but the problem is real. People who really know what they're doing come up with the simplest solutions. Almost every time I've had someone suggest a really complicated solution to a problem (or been tempted to build one myself), I've found that after further thought there is a better way. In the few instances I've plowed forward, I've regretted it later.

The simplest solution is almost always the best one.
I only looked at the first few slides. Don't understand the problem with the block variables? The current version seems clearer to me than the new proposal. Variables are visible in the block they have been defined in, what could be easier to understand? Probably I am missing something, though...
For fun about a month ago I actually bought the domain letsmakepuppies.com to make a social network for dog breeders with a subtle dating aspect for humans. I thought it was a cute idea, but then I saw a sticker that read, "Please don't breed or buy when pets in the shelters die."
Cost of converting entire U.S. to electric cars? Zero.
I can't stand it when people use Factory in Python. In Python, classes are objects -- you can just pass a class into a function as a parameter!
You are right. But I have a question: what are network desktop applications like iTunes good for?
asterisk support

starstar maybe?
Yep, horrible downtime. Stay away from Dreamhost. We use Beanstalkapp.com, no complaints so far.
It's all my fault :)

I've been working with the Reddits for the past couple weeks on this realign and it's certainly been quite a challenge given how well the previous design fit the audience.

You can also check out the latest design prototypes @ http://reddit.rrwhite.com (we're going to keep doing incremental improvements) and leave feedback @ http://reddit.uservoice.com.
Yes you can convert everything from oil-based to renewables, but what about cost per kWh? At the moment, renewable energy sources just can't compete with oil even with the current high prices.

That's not to say that entrepreneurs aren't making headway and closing the gap... Soon. Can't wait!
Is github really the only one that sells hosted git accounts? How come no one is competing with them?
only stupid programmers

the thing is, you can't just read a book about design patterns (any book, no matter how well written) and know when to apply them. You'll have to try it, make mistakes, learn from them, make mistakes in the opposite direction and so forth.

People should build some personal throwaway projects and cram in every design pattern they know. That should at least get them started on the learn/mistake cycle. At least it did so for me. Though in my last project I was totally abusing the factory pattern while all the while chanting "I shall not use patterns when they are not necessary" :blush:
wow, the author is picky.
Creating your own cipher is basically always the wrong answer. There's a reason why we're still using AES, even though it's 10 years old.
you cant in java!?
The largest cause of disease progression in HIV is adherence between 70 and 90 percent. Hypertension, Diabetes, etc. All these long term problems have adherence rates less then 70%. Resistance is low on the list for reasons for nonadherence. More common reasons include forgetting (because human brains are lousy alarm clocks), not getting refills, not renewing the rx, and not being able to afford it. One problem that happens is people fail to take meds as prescribed, get sicker, go back to the doctor, get a higher dose, take it right, and take too much since the doctor was operating under the assumption that the previous dose was taken.

This is responsible for about 10% of hospital and 24% of nursing home admittances, at a cost of 100 billion. There are many 2007 and 2008 medical journal articles about how this is a huge problem desperate for a solution. Its not that people don't want to take the med, in most cases. Its that it takes more then wanting to adhere to make it happen, and the medical industry has no good solution.
Cost to produce the energy? Cost to upgrade the existing stations?
Cute idea, but a a lot of the details don't even stand up to a basic reality test.

For example: "value of a used car, if exported to Latin America or China: $5,000"

Does he seriously think the US can sell the entire set of automobiles currently on the road to Latin America or China at that price?
http://www.maxniederhofer.com/2008/05/27/financial-times-web...
It's time to rethink copyright law
The major problem with block variables in ruby is that if you do something like

x = 4
1.upto(5) do |x|
puts x
end
puts "after the block x is #{x}"

It will print:

1
2
3
4
5
after the block x is 5

That is probably not what you would expect!
Problem toughness is not only defined by technical difficulty. Most programmers (myself included) tend to focus on that, but the toughness has many other components, such as the number of users, their fickleness, the strength of the competition, etc.

I wrote an article about this some time ago on my blog:
http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/02/11/how-tough-is-your-p...
Nice discussion. I personally use http://tipit.to because I can actually get money out of that service, making it much more interesting as an alternative to an advertisement revenue stream. Tipjoy is not free and doesn't allow you to get any money out of the service, which make it a harder sell for me.

Secondly I personally think a tip service should definitely be a very social enterprise, and I have the feel that Tipit is that a bit more, with their "pledging of tips", etc. I think you'd just have to go and see for yourself.
yeah, because the markets often do things where no profit is involved right?
there's no evil conspiracy. people want gasoline, companies supply it and make money.
Have a look at http://flex.org/showcase . Flex is used for a whole lot more than video/music/ads/games. Yahoo Maps is built in Flex, fyi.

Daniel
Actually some of the most seminal work in machine learning and statistics for example was done on the most boring datasets, for example read Fishers work on classifying Iris sub-species.
Yahoo Buzz Could Be a Digg Killer, But...
Of course you can.

I don't see how passing around classes could replace the factory pattern?

In Java these days usually Spring is the factory...
One by one:

Problem #1: (Price/Barrel: $130)
Does he seriously think that there is no chance that the price of oil will ever reduce from this plateau?

Problem #2: (5% interest)
The interest payment for a long term loan of $8 trillion are going to be a lot more than just 5%.

Problem #3: (cost of a new electric car, if mass-produced: $20,000)
So... an electric lexus can be mass produced and sold for $20,000. How about a Ferrari?

Problem #4:
Administrative costs: Who does the book keeping.

Problem #5:
Who pays for the massive amounts of electricity used by these electric cars?

Problem #6:
Who pays for the infrastructure required to keep these cars charged?

Problem #7:
Who pays for the massive infrastructure to maintain these awesome cars after they are manufactured and bought?

Problem #8:
If it really was so cheap and efficient to convert straight to electric cars? why isn't anybody doing this in scale?

In total: A very haphazard analysis of the cost of converting to electric cars.
You know, you could just rewrite this article and the replace the words "New York" with
"London", and "Oklahoma" with "Scotland"!
Nice article.

So take a little time and hypothesize about your market and marketing plan.

I believe what is unsaid is that you iterate, and both the product "code first" and the plan "marketing" continue to iterate and evolve.

Over time your idea of who your market is becomes one with your solution and your sales.

Seems like a non-controversial and practical piece of advice. I liked it.
I'm looking forward to seeing the new virtualmin support xen.

I have been trying to make more interesting out of the apparently mundane; reimplementing the google charting api internally cause we needed to make charts, and even some good ol' csv exports (interestingly, csv export formats that are useful for biz people are not the formats i would prefer as a programmer.. the more you know..) further, I'm focusing on trying to learn the best tools for the job -- picking up vim finally, trying to grok sed/awk, bash scripting where appropriate.. even perl is sneaking into my head.

make stuff that people want is a great mantra.

i suppose i got into programming because it was a process of discovery and a process of invention. keeping it that way seems to require intention.
It's a nice idea: How is it better than using Geni.com?
OK, so reading this article is enough to thoroughly convince one to rethink the usage of Singletons. But what other design patterns would you guys recommend? Most of the common design patterns are some form of Singleton implementation or the other and suffer many of the same drawbacks Steve points out in the article - what are the alternatives?

(I've been making do with custom interactor classes that perform object sharing by using linked-list of class instances with a custom "mapper" and though it works great it's really hard to explain to anyone).

Also - any books you guys would recommend as an alternative to Design Patterns?
I can't disagree with him on some points however. I do wonder if he filed bugs for each of his criticisms back when FF3 was still in early beta. That would've been somewhat more helpful.
You assume that new technology is necessarily more complex. This is counter to the recent trend emphasising simplicity and developer ease-of-use in development tools.
Yeah, we're doing it. We make humanoid robots.

http://www.anybots.com
true, but for this it would be fine(?):

x = 4
1.upto(5) do |y|
x = y
puts x
end
puts "after the block x is #{x}

So the problem is only the parameter to the block?
A new definition of ignorance - no Twitter!
Brijit - The Story of a Dead Startup
Drugs to make you cleverer are in the test-tube. Good.
Nothing you can't get from Pandora (or Seeqpod).

I was going to add "unless you're not in a hotspot", but browsers are going to cache more and more, so that's not going to be as true.
Mars Lander Phoenix descending (picture taken during flight)
Scoble is fast on his way to becoming the Dvorak of his generation.
I'll do it for 250k a year
China Set To Overtake US In Online Advertising 
"2008 marks the year that China overtakes the US as the largest internet market in the world in terms of sheer number of users."
+ venture capitalists and SF
1: certainly I would bet on the price of oil increasing over time

2: The US government bonds aren't very high interest rate.

3: $100,000 for something Ferrari class in speed, see the Tesla Roadster

4: The government

5: The consumers and electricity companies. The coal lobby would be in favor of a plan like this, they are itching to start burning all the extra coal we have in the USA.

6:The consumers

7: The consumers and the mechanics repairing the cars in the free market.

8: Because this type of thing requires strong government authoritarianism.
he's not talking about renewables, this plan would involve building many more coal plants. Browntech. We're going to burn through the coal, even once we convert the southwest to a solar farm we are still going to need mor energy. And we have a lot of coal.
Exactly, this is a clear example of the imperfections of capitalism. Do you think it would be good for a powerful globalized government to fund free electrical cars for the people?
Curiously, somehow only in OOP there is a real need for teaching/learning "patterns", whereas outside of the everything-is-object world anything you do is a "pattern".
Problem #1: We'll see probably $200 this year and even higher in the next years. This can only be slowed down and nothing else...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
That is a huge problem. It also addresses the desire to do good while you're trying to do well for yourself. I wish you the best.
I never liked the patterns books because I always thought they gave you solutions without knowing what the problem was.

Ever learn MVC? Might be a good place to start.
Scene reconstruction is an interesting problem domain. Your manual stitching of photos is a great example of crowd-sourcing.

Kick it up a notch and get the machine to do that for you =D
And the cost of the ensuing clean up? It's more than zero.
"Hint: sitting on a couch and drinking beer isn’t going to help me get to my goal."

That's ignorant: saying that someone who doesn't have this guy's whizzy high-tech lifestyle is just a couch-potato with zero motivation.

Technology used to be about productivity, but most of what happens now has nothing to do with work -- it's about fun. It would have been better if this guy had just admitted that rather than writing 2000 words of nothing much at all.
When you write your own MVC you'll come right back to the original patterns question. MVC is just the thing programmers interact with so they don't have to deal with inter-class interactions directly. But the MVC framework itself needs to manage those interactions somehow, using one pattern or the other.
Setting Up PHPlist (Open-Source Newsletter Manager)
It's better to burn coal in an industrial energy production facility that has cleaning technologies than for there to be millions of internal combustion engines. The economies of scale reduce externalities. I would hope a government good enough to give its people free electric cars would invest another trillion dollars in clean coal.
You'd want to do this transition over time and give the cars away in a lottery, in a way calculated to upset the financial markets as little as possible. Saudi Arabia would NOT be happy with this arrangement. They would be very, very angry in fact; we have been such close allies. I would not like to see them angry.
News.YC users - how about coming together to create a mentor group?
As several of us here are, I'm working on my startup. Sometimes I sit back and I think - am I going the right path? Have I got lost in the fog of business? Does this even make sense?

The people I know will say yes because they believe in me. But I need analysts, people who are also involved in technology.

Hence my idea - the various startup founders on this site create a group where we can discuss and mentor each others startups. Give advice on marketing, on design, on usability, on funding etc.

Anyone interested or do you all just want to stick it out with the solo thing?
I thought News.YC was a group?
Now all they need to do is get users to stop being such asshats.
I stopped using PayPal a long time ago due to their appalling customer service and the fact they think nothing of screwing sellers even when the seller is clearly in the right.

For example, in several (unrelated) cases I had items which were sent to buyers and had proof of delivery/receipt (sometimes I even received written confirmation from buyers to state items had been received and they were happy).

However whenever these people made a dispute (usually 1day after they expected to receive the goods), PayPal ALWAYS refunded them.

These disputes arose due to issues caused by shipping delays on international sales (and yes, I tell buyers several times during the order process on my sites that international shipping may be subject to minor delay at times especially during peak holiday seasons, so they should be aware of this).

The only thing PayPal is afraid of is your Credit Card company. they frankly do not care about sellers as they know an unhappy seller will stay with them, due to market dominance, whereas an unhappy buyer will kickup a fuss (in worst case using thier card company to claim a chargeback) which will cost them time and money. Also, as they want to increase usage of thier service, they will usually find in favour of the buyer in a dispute as it is the sellers money they give away, not theirs, and hence for them it is a win-win situation (happy buyer, less headache for them) at the seller’s expense.

Before worrying about the availability of their service, I would encourage seller to beware of the drawbacks of the service.
http://www.paypalsucks.com

A MUST read for anyone using PayPal, even if you have never had a problem.
Things move through here very quickly. Real discussion has to revolve around the same startups through all stages of the project. News.YC is a very short attention span project, I'm thinking something more detailed.
The sooner OpenID dies the better IMHO.
Delicious Library 2 released
Satchmo 0.7 available
I think that Mr. Bob has very valid points, but the question is whether Scoble is the right person to address them to - for him it's a job to play with new tech and review it.

Anyway, it's interesting that Bob has a 3-letter .com domain registered (bly.com), so he isn't that much behindhand as it might look.
In what version of HTML was an <img> nestable in <a> introduced? I have a feeling it might have been really really early on, in which case prior art should hopefully stop this dead in its tracks before they've scared too many people into paying up. Unfortunately someone will have to stand up to them in court...

I couldn't find any record of the actual patent they're attempting to base their claims on here.