skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an excellent piece. I'm afraid it's too long for most folks to read, which is really a shame. The whole time I was reading, I kept wondering how the web has affected our ability to focus and read, for example, long articles. 25000 words? Or a top 10 list?

Hack the planet.

Also, I think Richard Feynman is relevant here. In one of his Messenger Series lectures (I think it was the one about the distinction of past and future), he talks about how he believes the deepest understanding of humanity, and the universe in general comes from examining every aspect, no matter how distant from your own experience. The entire width of human experience tends to yield the most informed results -- breadth is better than depth, so to speak. Jack of all trades, and all that.

We'll see.
I rarely charge my iPad more than about every two or three days. I'd have to use it pretty heavily to charge it every day.
Couldn’t you just turn off 3G data? I know that’s possible with the iPad.
There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any faster way.

One word: Keyboard.

This is one thing that I really love about soundtrackers (e.g. renoise[1]). You just type in your notes while seamlessly tabbing between different tracks/instruments. This makes experimentation faster and more pleasant than any other method I've come across.

It is sad that clumsy point-and-click interfaces are still the norm in most music software. Dragging around little rectangles on a grid is horrible.

[1] http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matri...
IndexedDB, no need to make a Rube Goldberg device out of it
it could be refactored into an LMTP listener easily at that stage.

My mailers only run postfix, and I'm not about to allow custom code to be deployed to them every time the bounce processing needs to be updated. Real-time processing is also difficult to debug, and you need to build in support for caching/storing the input so you can rerun it later in case something screws up. If you're processing log files asynchronously, the same logs can be processed multiple times without having to touch the mailers, independently of how busy the mailers are.

The goal is to eventually get rid of the local bounce message generation all together: the content is relatively large compared to what's in the postfix logs, and we don't use it since we read the logs

This method would avoid some hacky logfile glue or batching or tailing log files.

One man's hack is another man's elegance.

My team already supports massive log file aggregation, storage, and processing, and writing batch processing map-reduce jobs (specifically through the mrjob software developed in house and available on github) is a common task for our developers. There's nothing hacky about this setup, nothing about it is one-off. Installing mail aliases that send to scripts or custom LMTP code would be a hacky solution, we don't do that anywhere else in our production infrastructure.

feed the result to a central database or queue (perhaps via a local database or queue for availability)

This is the hacky solution: that's a lot of things to maintain just to be able to extract from locally generated bounces that you need to not send to an address anymore.

Our setup is literally postfix logs via syslog -> syslog-ng -> scribe -> our batch processing map-reduce infrastructure.

(I haven't looked at what Mailman does; this would be my first port of call and may change my approach).

Mailman is an excellent source for inspiration. Are there many multi-million recipient Mailman installations that run on clusters of SMTP machines?
The power the brokers have over landlords' is very limited, even in hot rental markets like Boston and NYC. The landlords set the price, and the brokers try to rent them (first hand experience). Unlike sales, typically, there is no exclusivity in rentals, it's first come first serve. Whoever rents the apartments get the prize. Which creates tremendous competition among brokers.

It is in the brokers' best interest that the landlords lower their price and pay a finder's fee. This makes the apartment easy to rent. The idea that somehow brokers bound together to control the price is simply untrue (this notion is somewhat true in sales). Landlords control the price based on supply / demand.

Everyone tend to think that brokers themselves represent market inefficiency, which is also debatable. Everyone knows Craigslist, and if they wanted to be on it, they can. Now, why do landlords go through brokers at all, knowing there is Craigslist?

Last but not least. The reason that renting is such a unpleasant experience lies in the nature of the business, and also what I call the Craigslist's dilema. If you are interested, I'd be happy to write another article to further elaborate on this point.
HarperCollins says US libraries can lend its ebooks only 26 times
This is pretty much my routine, except I have an extra step: While I am working on that thing, if I find a really important thing that needs to be taken care of, I write it down as the next task.

That way if anyone interrupts me or if I find a important refactoring or think of something important I get to remember it (and do it) without being distracted at that moment.
The Non-Programmer's Dilemma
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The issue is the Android platform. The Android market is very difficult to sell apps on because the "open" Android platform makes it ridiculously easy to pirate apps.
> Is there any evidence this is true outside of geekdom?

Are you claiming that geeks are the only people that sequester information between groups of friends and/or the general public? Are geeks the only people that may represent themselves one way to one set of people, and another way to another set of people? This seems to me like it's something inherent in the human condition. I'm surprised to hear it referred to as a geek-only attribute...
"I also harass them on Facebook for doing so."

Why?
We watched the 60 Minutes Overtime footage on this piece, and started to realize that maybe the solution is giving voices to the people suffering and letting them tell their stories. Not sure what to do from here.
The FTC has been making noise about actually doing something. [1] There are also proposals to W3C defining a 'Do Not Track' HTTP header rather than cookies. [2]

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/12/privacyreport.shtm

[2] http://www.w3.org/QA/2011/02/do_not_track_at_w3c.html
Yawn.. yet another marketer trying to make a sales page look like a blog.
They have discouraged some trolling. They have also alienated people like me who consciously choose not to have Facebook accounts.
There are two distinct way to look at it. The first, progress for the sake of progress is not the solution. However, when you think of it, we have been walking using our legs since time immemorial. Is that wrong or does it call for rapid evolutionary prototyping of humans? Maybe, maybe not?

I remember using one of such revolutionary interfaces recently "Bump top desktop", where did that lead us? I was honestly irritated with it. I am of course talking about the visual interface and not of things like memory of last actions performed and understanding the series of events. The nearest things that comes to my mind is "Clippy" from MS Office. Remember how if you used to paste something in every slide, it used to tell you of the Master Slide View? That is the direction interfaces need to go.

Also has anyone used Soulver? For a real metaphor of calculator in the UI, it goes out of box to solve the way people want to deal with it on computer. Using keyboards rather than click point 1/+/2/=
Exploring Women's History, To Inspire It
Read the above?
So, I don't know. I haven't had time to delve into their backend, so I'm not sure how they import all that data (lab results, ekgs, xrays). But the interface seems clumsy (coming from a former physician, and current ipad user) from the videos I watched.

Neither of the founders are from medical backgrounds:
https://drchrono.com/team/

They do have a "Senior Medical Director" who is currently a psychiatry resident, which means relatively few years practicing medicine. I don't want to discount his abilities just for that, but for instance, it seems unlikely he has really worked in a private practice which is what this seems whole package seems targeted to.

I know disruption can happen from outside the system, but in the case of physician's medical record systems, I feel like the main hurdle is trying to show/teach doctors that your system can be a more efficient system in day-to-day. And to do that you really need to understand that day-to-day workflow. Especially since they are targetting these small practices it seems.
"I am happy with my current job." - can't go wrong there!
So, how does loading music on an Android device usually work? Do you usually have to drag over files to the mounted SD card? That seems awfully archaic to me, I want my neatly organized music library to sync 1:1 without me having to do anything. Also: Is internal and SD storage treated as one big blob of storage or do I have to micromanage? Do I have to split my 40GB music library in half and copy half of it to the internal memory and the other half to the SD card or will whatever syncing applications are available manage that for me?
Ask HN: Which one to choose Scala/Ruby On Rails/Java/PHP
Let me explain the problem where i am stuck right now. I am not an expert in any of those languages, the best I know is C++ and right now I am trying to develop a web application. I am fairly familiar with Java and PHP.
The application is a kind of summarizer which will take user input as certain keywords they want to know the public opinion about it. Lets say i search for iPad2 and my web application gives users a % positivity/Negativity in public opinion, by analysing various blogs (which the links are fetched from search engines, and parsed) and finding what each one says.This is a brief description.
What my prob is that this particular application would be CPU intensive and I don't want my application to be slow. Another thing is that hosting the web application shouldn't be so costly as i am currently starting off my career(just a college pass-out n working as dev in a MNC).Also the language should not be so hard to learn as i don't have lengthy hours in my hands, which i can devote.
I have things in mind but i am stuck here at the choice of language to move ahead. Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
Thank in advance!
I am not talking about charging money for the core feature. But say features like customizable profiles, more upload bandwidth, Allow Downloads for your content in high res, allow embedding social activity from other sites in profile?

Not looking for a straight off binary reply, but more of a discussion on how, why, why not!
I'm depressed and going to kill myself and my kids
That's it. Nothng more to say.
Nepotism and word of mouth
> The main thing that folks are hiding behind is the fear of being wrong in hindsight.

I'm not so sure that's true.

I can think of many other reasons people might want or even need to participate anonymously (e.g. to protect their job, or their future employability, or their relationships with others in the industry to name just a few off the top of my head.)

Further, some of the most insightful comments seem highly likely to come from people with one or more of these privacy needs.
Our membership site has only been open for a couple years (with a 3 month pause in there) and I personally wrote about 25,000 posts in the forums, answering thousands and thousands of questions. It honestly doesn't get much more personal than that IMHO.

If you haven't experienced it then sure it can seem like marketing for the sake of marketing, but the fact that I was willing to shut down the site (make it bring in $0 revenue for 3 months while it was costing 5 figures a month) shows that I am not trying to maximize revenues without care toward quality...and that I am willing to invest in having a quality service.

And Patio11 has frequently highlighted on Hacker News that the best advice he got from us wasn't even directly SEO advice, but tips to help change his sales copy. That indeed came from doing a direct and personal review of his site.

If we didn't deliver on what we promise do you think I would have risked closing the site to customers for 3 months?
Wow, that satifies intellectual curiosity! :)
Facebook actually handles this pretty well, I have different groups of people and I can cater my status message carefully to each and every one of them.

This problem happens more to me when I'm on twitter however, as I'd like to tweet about how crazy my weekends were, but my entire network is reading along so I really couldn't.
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I checked out a Xoom in person at a Verizon store today - a kiosk in a mall, so Xooms are definitely out there. It feels and looks like quality hardware. They're solid feeling, and not too thick. The back isn't entirely flat, which is odd compared to Apple products. I couldn't get a feel for the weight as it was attached to that cell phone store cording.

I had a hard time figuring out how to get it to come on off of standby - there are no buttons on the sides besides volume, no button on the top (a plastic cover I thought might be a button, though) and unlike Android phones, no visible software buttons. It turns out there is a little round button on the back with a 'power' logo on it.

The home screen is neat looking. It shows an interesting mild 3-d cube effect when you flip between panes. I'm not sure if I like how the buttons (in the lower left) are only in software, and can change.

The browser seemed adequate to me. Pinching to zoom seemed a bit weird; one time I ended up in some other application and I'm not really sure what happened.

The Xoom also had Winamp installed (Winamp?) and the usual photo gallery, applications menu, etc. There is a special 'windows' menu that shows you open applications, which seemed convenient.

I think I would like a tablet a bit smaller than this, actually. I also checked out a Galaxy Tab, and it was pretty snazzy. Of course, there's always the iPad 2 coming out soon... while I like my Android phone, I love my iPod Touch. not sure what it is, something intangible.

I'm not surprised to hear that Ars thinks it seems a bit unfinished. My Motorola phone (a Droid 2) feels a bit unfinished, too. I had to return the first one I had for some problems with the camera, and the slightly newer one I have now is much more polished. Not sure why Motorola is in such a rush - it hurts their reputation.
I thought that post was rather direct. The points of it were...

- anytime you enter a new market you are typically doing so from a competitive disadvantage

- to come from behind you need a unique strategy (rather than relying on a paint-by-number approach to business)

- it is at best close-minded to call any channel or model unequivocally dead across the board, especially if you do not know much about it

- the people that Chris was describing as impossible to beat established stars of today were indeed gray area players a few years back. If they would have "stuck to the rules" back then & used a similar analysis of the market back then as Chris offers today, then they never would have created their websites...which are now market leaders.
As a patient something that I would really appreciate is a realtime queue showing how much behind schedule the doctor is on that given day. Ive had to wait for over an hour on occasion inspite of having a prior appointment.
Also self serve appointments would be nice.
I love ampersands.
Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware
I love Scala, but it's tools at this point in time don't lend itself to be an easily adopted new language (unless you're keen on getting your hands dirty setting up the right dev. environment). I use Java for work, and have dabbled in PHP, but I think for learning a new language for a web project, you should give Ruby On Rails a go.
IBM to build 10 PFlops supercomputer
The filler text complaint is a common complaint against SEOs, but that is a problem far more common with the likes of content mills. That post includes many things that were not publicly known in the prior context (like TripAdvisor's past link buying).

Content which parochially states "x is never worth doing" is of far lower quality stuff than content which is rich in historical context with actual examples used based on real-world data and experience.

The example of TripAdvisor being impossible to beat (along with suggesting that start ups need to avoid risk) is a quite laughable combination since TripAdvisor was buying so many links that Matt Cutts directly contacted them in person at a conference and warned them about it. They levered up on risk until they felt it was about to catch up with them & then backed off.

That sort of approach is far smarter than saying "take no risk." After all, most start ups end up failing anyhow. Success is not about avoiding risks, but taking smart ones.
Yea, I know. If I was posting them, I'd check with the employer as to if it is true and why.
But is it really so much that you're broadcasting, or are others eavesdropping. While it would be weird to say that to a stranger, in facebook your ostensibly informing your friends. That might make difference.
More important than the language is the architecture.

I'd recommend using Amazon's AWS services. They have a free starter offering that lets you build and test your application on a small server and then scale it up effortlessly to larger and more instances as required, only paying for what you actually use.

If you go with AWS then either Java or PHP would make sense, since there are good SDKs for these languages.

Go to the AWS articles page and search for "architecture", there are lots of good resources to get you thinking about options.
Also see: http://ampersandampersand.tumblr.com/
You make a good point about replacing "tap" with "click," but while the two seem similar conceptually (ie. either way you get "input --> reaction"), I think the actual experience is completely different. With clicking, you make an input and see a reaction elsewhere (on the screen). But with tapping, the input and reaction occur in the same place. And I think that direct connection is key. Playing music is by nature a tactile experience, so composing in a tactile manner brings you that much closer to the end product. Granted, I'm a musician myself, so I could be biased. But I think pretty much anyone can enjoy the idea of adding notes to a staff and seeing music come out the other end. The more direct that process is, the better.

In terms of precision, I find the iPad to be plenty accurate, for these purposes anyway. The staff would have to be blown up a bit, but after that I don't see note accuracy being a problem. Plus, this would probably be a more limited program and wouldn't be as applicable to professionals who need that pixel-by-pixel level of accuracy (think finger painting vs. photoshop...).
Tokyo Girls Collection Aired On YouTube Live Streaming
(they have a ruby SDK too, but I'm not familiar with how good it is - I know the java one is fairly mature).
People aren't one dimensional, they behave differently in different contexts. Facebook takes away that context. People who would normally only see you in one context (professional, respectful, whatever), may now see you outside of that context, which forces you to act in a way that is acceptable in any context.
At the beginning of the year I've started to log my work times in a little day planner. Of course, since I dont have any data from before I started doing this, I can't really say it with certainty but I definitely feel like I'm accomplishing more. I find logging work time to be very motivating, but I can't exactly put my finger on as to why.

I did, however, try this sort of thing before, but always with some kind of software or script, and I never kept at it. It only began working when I started to manually make notes with pen and paper. (The day planer I use has preprinted lines for every half hour, so I usually simply draw the time, which makes it possible to quickly skim through the book and instantly get a feeling of how much I worked in a given week and where in the day that work was concentrated.)

I've more and more began to appreciate getting away from the computer and doing things by hand, using different materials, using pens, pencils and paper, sketching on a whiteboard, pacing around the room etc.
However, it makes it difficult to drop a cloister into just the perfect spot...
This seems obvious in retrospect, however I would honestly love somewhere to learn those rules in plain-spoken language.

I don't currently have an eye for design, or even, really, a good understanding of where to start. I would really appreciate a good "Design for (kick-arse) developers" linkset. As a token of good faith, if you can help me I'll stop putting two spaces after a full stop, at least in most cases;)
Yes, but Kiva has very high level control over two factors
1) Who they lend with
2) Whether or not to continue lending with them.

All the partnerships with these MFIs has a clause in the contract where Kiva can pull out at any time if it finds the MFI is engaging in questionable practices.

They also do a surprising amount of research on which MFIs they work with. If the MFI doesn't pass a social impact assessment, then they don't make it past there.

I actually think Kiva does a better job of investigating MFIs than most VCs/angels do when investing in startups. It would make for a great blog post if I was able to divulge all the details :-/
Haskell (or rather GHC) offers a blocking programming model (e.g. spawn a thread per connection and make blocking reads/writes on the socket) but uses asynchronous I/O in its implementation (one thread uses epoll/kqueue/poll to do the I/O and the CPU bound threads are scheduled on a thread pool).
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Here's the link to Network Advertising Initiative's opt out page:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

When you opt out of a network, the participating network will assign you an opt out cookie. When you visit a website that indirectly loads these tracking pages, it will check to see if you have their opt out cookie. If you do, they will avoid assigning you their tracking cookie.

These tools basically help you manage and persist the opt-out cookies so that when you clear your browser's cookies, the browser doesn't remove these opt out cookies.

All the participating networks provide an URL that tell you whether or not you have their opt out cookie. If you do, they will redirect that request to: http://www.networkadvertising.org/verify/cookie_optout.gif

Otherwise, they will redirect you to image that says you have their tracking cookie. You can subsequently use javascript to inspect the dimension of the image to determine whether or not you have opt out of that network.
This can happen with Australian banks. However, the process used by Paypal to clear funds to Australian banks (known as the Direct Entry Payment System) is actually easily blockable at the bank level (ie, you can tell the bank to block all future direct debits from an individual merchant, assuming either they've already done it once, or you know their Direct Entry Code). Blocking it in this way won't even cause fees at your bank, although it might with Paypal...

I should know - I do this for customers at my bank every day. I'm not sure, however, whether this would also stop Paypal paying money into the account. I'm fairly certain not, but I've never had to stop someone paying money into an account before...