skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember back on my Amiga pretty much anything could be represented as a filesystem.

This lead to lots of weird things being implemented (like a reboot-persistent ram-drive), but one of the things I remember distinctly is the tar-example you mentioned (except it was lzh/lha). You would literally do cd myArchive.lha and that was it. This was a legitimate file-system path where you could do whatever you wanted. Operations may have been slow on bigger archives, but you could treat it as just another directory. It was very neat.

I've always missed having that feature in sub-sequent OSes I've used and I'm very disappointed it's been 10 years and seemingly the best we have these days is Windows Explorer's Zip-support.
Are you sure you've launched it? I can't open the url. If you want to see my project it's here: http://tagsono.me
انسحاب قوات الامن من الحبيلين ردفان
Analytics Part 2 - Data Selection
Yes, I lived in Canada for three years, and had the impression that the electronic transfer capabilities of their banks surpassed what's available in the U.S. Perhaps this is due (in part) to the fragmentation of the banking system in the U.S.? In Canada there are essentially five banks that dominate the banking industry - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_(banks). There is also more regulatory control of banks in Canada, which likely makes it easier to require standard operating procedures, consistent infrastructure, etc.
it's as if the founding product driving force at Twitter have left.
Music with AWK
Ask HN: Where to host your projects?
Looking at things like Snowpocalypse, ThreeWordsMe and the kid who just did the three words "clone" 5factsabout.me; as a noobie who wants to dip their toes in the webapp space, I'm wondering where people host these smaller projects.
I have seen these popup every once and a while on the Platform, all of them have been banned thus far.
Why doesn't conventional medicine recognize your form of treatment?

Because it was invented by some former homemaker with credentials like "I gave up my national merit scholarship and dropped out of college to go do the wife and mom thing for two decades. Now I'm a poverty stricken divorcee who has no clue how I am going to pay my electric bill this month before they cut my power off." Not exactly the kind of credentials that get you written up in JAMA.

What exactly is your form of treatment anyway?

There is a little info here about what I've done (though please note the site is woefully out of date as the last 10 months have been extremely intense):

http://healthgazelle.com/

Just letting the body do its thing?

Are you kidding? That leads to a gruesome death of the sort that motivates people to put up with the horrors of conventional medicine. Getting well has involved a great deal of research and work and other resources, mostly to redress 36 years of not getting appropriate treatment because I was diagnosed late in life.

The most succinct explanation I have come up with is on this page:

http://healthgazelle.com/rootsoftheproblem.shtml

Oh and have an upvote for asking good questions.
HN is not the place for this. Yes, America prisons are horrible cruel places and should be a embarrassment to America as a whole and it's all terrible etc etc. However, this is Hacker News, and this story does not gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity, neither is it start-up related.
I recently heard or read somewhere (can't recall the source...doh) that if you answer 'Yes' to that question, not only will you be switched to plain HTTP for your current session, but for all future sessions as well.

EDIT: here's a reasonable source on F-Secure's blog: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002106.html
My first "patch" to an open source project was libevent, it was a one character change in the kqueue event handling mechanism.

And it is amazing seeing my name all over the web now when searching for it because I got named as a thank you for letting the author know about the patch.

I think it was one of the best feelings in the world when that happened.
This isn't a great comparison. Perl is huge compared to these scraping tools. With how the name "Perl" came to be, it's not likely that two people developing a similar kind of thing would independently come up with a similar name. It's quite common to add a y to a concept to come up with a name (or the last consonant and y, like scrappy, or ly).
While it is strange that he would publish his paper in the Journal of Cosmology, it doesn't change the validity (or non-validity) of the facts. I'm looking forward to seeing some serious analysis of the paper instead of snarky ad hominem attacks like this article.
I've discovered recently that quality sleep is very important to my health.

I was extremely anxious and had trouble focusing until I realized I wasn't able to get good sleep because of the noise from my partner's air cleaner running.

When I started sleeping in another room my mental and physical health both rapidly improved.

Regular sleep is more important for me now as an adult than it was when I was younger.
You shouldn't really have such strong opinions on something with which you don't have a first hand experience.
I love the design. Simple and easy. I hope it doesn't get banned!
> You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games.

What incentive do people have to create content with such a system? Altruism is fine, but content creators need to pay rent.

I worked on something a little while ago that was similar - allowing people to mash arbitrary content together - but abandoned it because of the hassle of trying to prevent it being used for leeching.
It's true..tried it myself.
Credit Card Processing For Business
This must be Google's Facebook clone. It sure looks like it.
Blockbuster's Going Out Of Business Sale Can't Even Compete With Amazon
I'm sorry to be a downer, but is this a problem that really needs to be solved? If somebody unfriends me, it's probably because we hardly talk (if we ever talked) and I won't miss them.
Resources for Kickstarting Viral Growth
How do I... Configure a network to use demand dial routing
Hmmmm... the url seems to be working.

It's a shame. I've yet to see spam on HN, but this looks like spam. Wish I could downvote it.
It's valuable for the network it brings. However once you start charging for it or spamming it with advertisements then some people will stop using it - and then it's a slippery slope.
Note: Mix of facts and speculation, take with grain of salt.

Banks (and credit card companies) make a lot of money on the float, so it's against their natural incentives unless they can win more business as a result. I think they probably could, but it would take a coordinated roll-out of new products or acquisition/integration with an external company... which is difficult to do because of regulation. So you're in a position where you'll either need more or less regulation to do it - either the government mandates it, or the government deregulates and a competitor starts up who currently doesn't have market share, so has nothing to lose by introducing the new features.
Announcing LAJS Hack Nights
We'll be meeting every Tuesday night with the good folks from LARB ( http://rb.la ) at Blank Spaces near Willshire and La Brea in West LA. You can find more information (parking, directions, etc) at http://js.la, and feel free to email me with any questions you have at john.m.bender@gmail.com.

Hope to see you there!
and the results most of the time have been much worse than capitalistic countries like the U.S

Social democracy has as much of a claim to success as anything the U.S. has done. And I'm talking about principles like education, health care access, food and water access, infrastructure investment, and direct democracy.

It seems to me if you're referring to "principles" such as central planning and autocracy, which is not what I'm referring to, then I would agree that those have been obvious failures. But if you read what I've written, nowhere did I praise those principles.

So I would ask what principles you think I'm referring to?

about the prospect of living in Rwanda.

Compared to 15 years ago? This isn't about comparing Rwanda to countries which have been stable. If you follow their trajectory towards community-driven healthcare (which has adopted the Partners in Health approach), and building an information infrastructure, it's a positive trajectory. You can't take that away simply because people still prefer to live in the U.S. or Europe.
As a side note, we have the summer of code coming up...organization/project application deadline is the 11th.
You will have to setup the entire environment. It will take a few hours to set everything up. I'll be happy to give you any help in setting it up. The documentation on github is a little out of date, so if you are interested I can update it for you.

As a start, perhaps you could open a new issue on the project's github page and we'll discuss the changes that you propose. Bugreports are just as valuable as patches at the moment. Good luck!
This journal is going under:

http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-o...

From Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/fy4w5/journal_of_co...

I think it is safe to ignore articles published in this journal.
How can the CEO of Twitter be so clueless, though? It's like reading an Eric Schmidt interview.
Just launched my app for this. http://www.defriendalert.com
I remember payments in NZ being <1 min -- possibly seconds -- 10-15 years ago, as there was a single clearing-house for all EFT, nationally.
Solar Energy Telescopeare are Efficient and Inexpensive as Well
Keyword and Optional Arguments in PLT Scheme
How this problem is not solved or addressed is a tragedy.

You can tell the character of a society by how they treat the defenseless.

Children in prison being rapped--horrific. How ashamed as a society should we be that we can't protect children in prison from being rapped by the staff.

Cameras everywhere sent to a central facility would help no?
Be careful when manipulating your opponent's stats as they don't reset when you get them. I got microsoft.com and owned my future favimon.
I prefer not to reduce complex, intersecting systems to oversimplified hypotheticals.
From the comments after the article.

>Might as well mention that those “useful” applications were ripoffs of popular applications on the store. Hackers downloaded them, modified them, then reuploaded them under similar-sounding names.
Hacking aside, it’s nice to know one could always make a living downloading and reposting other people’s work to the free-for-all otherwise known as the Android Marketplace.
there was this Founder's Day at Babson two days ago which gathered many entrepreneurs / investors around the area, but that's a bit late already. I'd keep you posted since I'm currently studying at Babson, and if there are any open forums and activities around the area, I can give you a heads up
We are looking for our help too! If you are a developer and looking for work, or want to join a start up. Email us, and join us as the 1st employee, and perhaps more. We are pretty open minded.
I cofounded a startup named RentRunner, in Boston, and spent a year trying to get a similar sounding system to be used by real estate brokers. We had an agent on our team, and he was our sales person. We could not find a model that would get us sales without expensive direct sales. And although direct sales seemed to work, the possible price points wouldn't support it.

My experience was that real estate brokerages have very little money, and even less desire to part with it. I'd like to humbly suggest that YouGotListings mentally prepare to consider a pivot rather early if you find the same. There is still so much good that can be done in this space.

I have some ideas for pivot directions--email me if you are interested in hearing more about our experiences.
It was voted up.... a lot. so perhaps a distraction from tech like this is virtuous.

Perhaps HN should allow one "wildcard"/non-tech story to hit the home page every X hours?
I actually once asked the StackOverflow community where the software we make isn't so dear to us as "one's own child" - at least I feel that way so often.

I(){ _just_love_code;} I();
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
Small, niche markets are nice. You won't have the same competition and can essentially own it.

Why seek investment? You've got the knowledge, the connections - boot strap it? Unless I'm missing something that you haven't described.

Do the more sure thing and have it fund your other ideas later. Besides, it sounds like you have tremendous domain experience in the niche market and that would also increase your odds at success.

To me, seems like a no-brainer. But you may have left out some crucial details...like: It would take us 2 years and 10 engineers to build the b2b solution or we can only succeed if we are able to get funding for reasons x, y, z. Or something like that.

I would love to have a product in niche market capable of generating 5M to 10M with 60% profit margin year over year.
public profiles have existed for a long time. this isn't new.
Obviously, mutual exclusion is widely used. I'm not so sure that semaphores as such are used as widely (and certainly not with functions named P() and V()).
What exactly would be the advantages of this for a user? (I can think of lots disadvantages.)

My suspicion is anyone deleting a directory either wants the information within it destroyed or doesn't want to delete the directory after all.

Certainly, more "fuzzy" relations and storage could have their uses - like a downloaded music directory where the least listened songs go away automatically when you need more space. But you would not want to make your entire file system "fuzzy" in the sense that you don't know what's gone and what isn't.

The trashcan/recycle-bin is a great interface for undoing what you thought was the deletion of a file. This, not so much.
In some exceptional cases, they'd serve any time of the day, not just in the evening
The other problem with /tmp is that it isn't "garbage collected" very quickly -- on my Fedora server, unreferenced /tmp files stay around for up to 10 days.

Technically, apps using temp files are supposed to unlink them after opening them, so that they get cleaned up as soon as they are closed. This is sometimes true of things that are shared, like UNIX sockets, too.
Personally, I think it's intriguing to receive an email immediately after it happens and wonder what went through their mind as they clicked the button.
I became an adult in the States - studying than working for a total of six years. I absolutely share the frustration with the visa laws, but I don't think the economic argument holds much water.

Yes, startups create jobs, but just like all other small businesses, they lose a lot of jobs as well because of a high failure rate. You certainly want to give people the opportunity to start companies, but it isn't at all clear that you're actually boosting the economy significantly by making it easier to start a new business.

Additionally, making visas available for foreign entrepreneurs opens up the market for more trade, which would certainly mean downwards pressure for salaries, which would decrease demand. To cancel that out, you'd need to make an argument that you'll make that money up through increased market efficiency - certainly tech products will cost less if the people making them have lower salaries. However, I'm not sure that most households or businesses spend that much on tech. There are certainly less efficient economic sectors (health care topping that list). In fact, most price anomalies in the technology sector are due to copyright and patent laws, so if you really wanted to increase efficiency you'd tackle that instead.

Finally, there's the talent-drain on countries like India and China if such laws were passed. Training an engineer is expensive and you don't want large parts of that investment to just vanish into other markets. I don't claim to have this figured out, but my bet is India, China, and the other growing economies rely heavily on their engineers to sustain their growth. If they begin to stagnate the whole world will suffer economically, and the States in particular given their exposure to these economies.

So, yes, personally I would love the visa laws to change. Would I take advantage? Absolutely. Would it drive the American economy? Probably not.
Do I see a "Buzz" tab?

shakeshead
Every other app that has done this in the past has been slapped down by Facebook for TOS violation.

As a general case, when you're building an app on someone else's platform, you absolutely must know the terms of service of that platform, otherwise you're just wasting your time (unless your goal is to learn the technology and APIs, and there's better ways to do that too!).

And watch out when the TOS changes and leaves you out in the cold. This is why it can be dangerous to build your business on someone else's business.
MongoDB Pre-Splitting for Faster Data Loading and Importing
The ln command just doesn't expose the functionality.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/80875/what-is-the-bash-co...
I highly value "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley in this regard. He proposes a problem and then solves it in naive way followed by the right way/ways. I realized the importance of choosing correct data structure for a particular problem from that book.
Twtspire uses the twitter search api to find tweets with key phrases like "I wish there was a site that..."

Hopefully it'll help give an idea of some of the things that people actually want, and inspire a weekend project or two.

I would love to hear some feedback.
Except in NYC.
Email is for send you notification, anytime data access for publish to stream. You will have full control in the settings.
No, it's the updated Google Profiles as discussed previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282094 (http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/decide-what-worl...)

And as I said in the previous discussion, the reason profile pages tend to use the same layout is because it's an established design pattern now. People already know what to expect when they see a page with that layout.
Dear all,

Thank you for taking an interest in my talk! To give it some context, Ignite is a special format where you talk for exactly 5 minutes - you get 20 slides, each 15 seconds long, that advance automatically behind you. Just quantising what you have to say into exact 15 second lumps to fit the slides actually shapes what you say, and how, quite a lot. The video doesn't show the slide changes, so you don't quite get the feel of that.

I won't debate the "dumbing down" aspect - I'm sure it's equally valid for you to feel about what I did as it is for me to dislike general TV science output as being far too simplistic - we all have our levels.

However, I did just want to point out something that seems to have been missed, and that's that I'm not actually trying to prove Euler's identity in 5 minutes, or make the proof itself the point :) The talk had two main raisons d'etre:

1. To get people who had done A-level maths (that's around age 16-18 at school) many years ago to have their memories jogged, and push that long-forgotten bit of their brains back into service a bit.
2. To be, quite simply, unashamedly enthusiastic about maths, without being at all patronising or speaking down to the audience. There was a recent TV show on the BBC called something like "Beautiful Equations" which turned out to be an artist going round painting the damn things - they couldn't even explain E=mc^2 properly. This was a bit of a reaction against that.

Plus, of course, when you're talking to a room full of interested but not necessarily mathematical people, you have to be entertaining. Hence the pi recital (which also doubled as 15 seconds of getting people used to fast speaking so their ear was in for the rest of the talk), the pic of my daughter, etc. From the many comments I've received in person and online, I reckon the talk did a pretty good job at all that. Can't speak to everyone all the time, of course, but it's found a larger audience than I guessed it would have. That so many people can be interested in Maths With Equations In is a good sign.

I guess the beef some of you have is the Taylor series stuff: the reason I went that route is that a) I had 5 minutes (well, less, considering what else needed to be fitted in) and it's quick and easy to see visually how the equations match (far quicker than explaining about polar co-ordinates), and b) it's frankly the easiest way to explain it to the wider audience, and most likely to be understood/remembered by A-level students.

There's also the "missing the magic" complaint, but what was in there was seriously magical to the audience who were there: you really need a deeper understanding of maths to see the perhaps more beautiful explanations you've offered here. Plus just the result, the fact of itself, is the most magical thing for me, and that's what I wanted to get across most. Even leaving equations aside, the enthusiasm and humour in the talk seems to have inspired many to think about maths differently, and that's what I was after!

Anyway, thanks for your comments (they've made me think, certainly) and sharing all these links and posts, it's all good fun reading.

Cheers,

Oliver.
Although the feature itself is not new, the new design does seem to be highly inspired by Facebook's.
oh ... well doing the whole Facebook thing - finding a mutual connection between me and the employer really helped a lot. Within a few days after using this method I landed interviews and a few different offers. Also, I did have a portfolio of different designs I built for my start-up as well two other sites I built.
If the headline "Decide what the world sees when it searches for you." means that when someone search a name+surname profiles.google.com will always be top I see this as quite powerful!
This happened to me, to a T, when I submitted a patch to cloudfiles-python. The patch was beneficial to my employer (we really wanted to use server-side copying on RackSpace Cloudfiles), but I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't be useful to other people using the Python bindings in question.

I actually ended up not implementing one suggestion (it involved project-contextual knowledge that I didn't have time to look into; I figured the maintainer could make the change if he wanted it), but the patch was pulled in anyway (after many months... apparently the service was not available to all Cloudfiles customers at the time).

So this is more anecdotal evidence. Make contributions! I also made a fix to another project which involved 2 line changes. The fix does not have to be big to be significant in some way. New social coding websites make it easy. In particular, GitHub has very easy-to-use forking and pull-request functionality which I highly recommend using if a project you like is hosted there.
Facebook does not allow this.

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=19404...

However, FB did remove that specific example from their TOS.
Thanks for the comment. Your point is certainly well taken and not alone. Unfortunately, one of the things we do is to help brokers and agents "spam", but it's a supply / demand thing. Landlords are well aware of Craigslist's existence, and if they wanted to be on there themselves, they would, right?

We ultimately are trying to tackle this issue and make it better for the renters and buyers. Yet, going against the market force will not help. Brokers will do what makes them money, that's that. Many startups came before us trying to cut out the brokers have failed utterly.

I believe companies like us in the long run will actually improve this situation. As software like ours become the standard toolset that brokers and landlords use, then we'll be able to improve the actually renting / buying experiences. It's an uphill battle.