skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll find that listening to music in a single key for extended periods of time can become extremely tiring. Most (not all people) need fresh tonality, or they get bored. (Obviously all of this depends on what kind/style of music you are listening to, etc., but I would wager that even if you switched from "classical" music to "pop" music and stayed in the same key, most people would find it aurally tiring).
Plastic SCM to make move detection (version control) mainstream in 4.0
Some free advice, for what it's worth:

Don't lead with "more affordable." Trying to be the cheapest in the market is a losing strategy, generally speaking.

"Simpler to use" is good. "Less annoying to end-users" is good, too.

I assume you've got pilot customers. If you don't, get some. I don't mean users-- I mean customers. Get five people to pay for your product. Get their opinions.

Now: think of a problem your product solves. I mean, one, specific, real life, concrete instance. You're looking for a story. Because that's what you want to pitch to bloggers/journalists. Features don't write stories-- anecdotes do.

Read Patrick's blog. Take his advice seriously.

And, good luck!
> I was possibly thinking of adding the ability to archive items you've seen already so they don't show again.

That would obviously be the best solution. Check for duplicates in the archive.json and the normal .json and hide them or something. This would be great!

> Regarding point 2 - thanks, good thinking. I will definitely need to make this clearer as many are still confused as to how to actually share things. Most try and drag files into the message text field or onto the menu item which is not yet supported.

That was what I tried first as well, so it seems like it would be a smart thing to implement UX-wise :)
Ahh yes. I forgot to mention that. Plug computers seem like the best option right now. Thanks.
Ask HN: $13,000 bill from ATT mobile - What to do?
Hey HN,

Would love some help here. We gave an iphone to my father last christmas and he was fine with it (but not using much).

He then went for a trip to UK last month and now he got a 13k bill from ATT. Way more than what he can afford...

In the bill it sais that he used 900,000 kb (or similar) at around 10am and it cost him almost 13k for just that internet usage.

Is that possible? He tried to call them, but they said that he HAS to pay because the charges came from the UK company....

He said he didn't use it much (but tried to check the email, but was so slow that he gave up).

Any suggestions?
How I'm Hacking Information Consumption
just out of curiosity, why do you want it to be operated in Canada?
I have extra server space - I can host your stuff. Send me an email - bob[at]easyunsubscriber.com
It's nice to see such optimism yet I have to (hopefully respectfully) criticize to your approach.

I used to work in the same office as Bob Jervis who wrote Turbo C back in the day, and he said he never uses parser generators. Clearly something is wrong if the tools that have all the weight of the theory and formalisms are losing to coding parsers by hand.

When a number of really smart people do something, there might just be reason for it. They might be wrong too but if you're going to call them wrong, perhaps you should first take the time to figure why they do what they do first.

One thing that should be a red flag is that lots of people still write parsers manually instead of using tools.

Wait! People write programs manually too instead of automatic program constructors. It might be OK.

The thing about "manually" constructing a parser is that it not a terribly difficult task once one has a strong grasp of the relation between languages specification and recursion. Manually constructing a recursive descent parser also doesn't involve throwing out the formal specification of the language. Rather, you transform your language specification until you shape it into a set of productions which can be captured by a series of recursive function calls (essentially taking the language to Greibach Normal Form but there are a number of short cuts you can take once you're comfortable with this process). It is not a ad-hoc affair but it does allow you make add ad-hoc optimizations for the particular actions that are needed or not-needed in the results of your parsing.

The road block to any reusability in parsers is that a language's grammar exists at a different logical level than a single function, object or piece of data.

Specifically, two programs that parse the same grammar would likely need to do different things at different times in the parsing process. The simplest thing to create the code for each of these programs separately and then let the compiler optimize the code, tossing out the things I don't need.

But any "general purpose" parser library more or less has taken the code and fully compile it - turn it into an AST or the equivalent and then let the programmer deal with the results (the way Python or Ruby do reflection). Such an approach work for some things but it inherently isn't going to be very fast because it doesn't which parts of the code the final user is not concerned with.

Just consider. The simple way of removing a single "i" tag from strings like "<i>help me</i> he said" is never going to be "load XML parser, issue commands, close XML parser". A single loop removing the offending character is going to beat this "algorithm" a thousand times over. Manual parser generation more or less allows you to boil down your parser to this.

Qt creator finds syntax errors as I type and I remember Visual Studio doing the same. I don't think either uses the same parser as their respective compilers because they have to be more forgiving - otherwise they would fail to arrive at the piece of code you're actually editing but I could be wrong. I know most syntax highlighting is custom written but again, isn't that hard to custom write.
BrainSCANr - visualizing word associations in neuroscience
I played with ShareKit for a while and it does include an impressive range of sharing options (and really helped me understand how OAuth works). However I found that the sharing functionality seemed to be tied to a specific visual presentation, which I didn't like. In the end, I decided not to use it because it didn't match the look and feel I wanted for my app.
You can't fault him for not saying we should stop drilling for oil - this discussion is not about oil.

But since you brought it up, we should stop drilling for oil, particularly sea bed drilling, while operating with lax regulatory bodies and marginal penalties for non-compliance.
Right, because Apple are generally in the habit of providing details of their development plans to anonymous developers.

What does 'indicated' mean? Presumably not the same as 'said'.
This is absolutely false. Standard lifetime for nuclear reactors is 40 years. With lifetime extension they can reach 60. Fear mongering is not in sight, the problem is nuclear plants cost a lot of money and time to build.

Especially not true for Japan, the country with the highest number of nuclear plants in the world.

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html
Tell HN: 3 apps for sale
I posted a while back about one of these... now putting all 3 up.

I've committed to joining a new startup and won't be able to give these apps the time they deserve to be super successful.

If you're a great ruby dev, or employ some, these would be great apps for you.

They are:

1. http://floxee.com
2. http://tweetsaver.com
3. http://useqwitter.com

Combined they have over 170k users and are growing nicely (UseQwitter at ~1.5-2k per week)

If you're interested in more details and/or would like to make an offer, please email me at bjoyce [at] velocis.us
The situation in Germany is rather special in that the policy decision being made is to implement the first steps of a decade-old plan for phasing out nuclear reactors, which a previous (social democrat) administration had made and the current (conservative) one had cancelled – a very unpopular decision even before last Friday.

So the measures being taken are in fact neither hasty nor unplanned.
You could have defended your point without the name calling. You're just undermining your otherwise correct point with crap like that.
How to not suck as an Employer!
Kate Moss pulled a similar move back in 2005. She'd pretty much faded into obscurity but was shown in the British press snorting cocaine. She lost a couple of contracts but capitalized on the revival of her "fame" and, as Wikipedia says, "According to Forbes, Moss has earned more money since her cocaine scandal than ever before." Very little publicity is bad publicity. We've even seen this with scandals in the hacker scene too.
A few links that might be useful:

Shopify add-on, using the same engine (with a different face):

http://apps.shopify.com/directed-edge-expressrex

Write-up by one of our customers:

http://www.jonathanbriggs.com/ecommerce/33-of-revenue-expres...

Quora answer by an API user (at that time had already integrated, wasn't live yet):

http://www.quora.com/How-good-is-Directed-Edge
This guy has a point!
Write interesting job posts. You may be able to tap into the small but motivated and smart pool of people with non-traditional backgrounds.

Evaluating them means being clear with yourself about what makes one a suitable candidate. Extracurricular projects of any sort are going to be invaluable, but ask general problem-solving questions and feel out how they do. Do they ask questions when they're stumped, but don't get stumped until they've chewed the problem over for themselves? That's the number one sign of a good junior programmer.
But if you get active, assume that the media will characterize you and your picked group as being radicals and use the one-or-two whackjobs who attach themselves to every group to make everyone look like and idiot. Also, don't expect your "intelligent" friends to not believe the media in this regard.
Your Username Will Now Serve as Your Password and Your Password as Your Username
I don't think the average internet user has information overload. I don't and I use the internet all the time.

Also, it seems like everyone has their own personal way of organizing and handling their email. (labels, categories, archiving, skipping emails, etc). It seems like your system would mess with that.
Fedex has really tainted me to always see an arrow between E and X. There's one on Rolodex's old logo, but it's a little bit different of a form. And I just can't take my eyes off it, damn it.
The more egregious logo change to my mind has to be UPS.

1961 logo = http://i.imgur.com/ZibIo.gif

2003 logo = http://i.imgur.com/fG9KT.jpg

I know, they went into logistics and such, but you can't ignore your heart and soul.
Let us put ourselves in a Twitter executive shoes for a second. Here we are worried about monetization because, well, it is not an issue we can keep deferring. Now while we are wrestling with trials and errors, we see other companies like Adly racking in $50,000 from one tweet. What do you do? You shut down all the opportunities for new comers to milk your cow when all it is doing for you is eat and poop.
As Edison Says:
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
go to settings, enable plugins, on demand

I did it fairly early getting my android, it makes a big difference
But completion / analysis etc. is still triggered on a pause after typing - it's not fast enough to run on every keystroke, not least because of basic reasons like having to page in referenced modules.

Well, not to mention that you wouldn't want to be corrected after each keystroke anyway. "Yes, I know 'whil' is not correct, that's "why" I'm about to type an 'e'".

I actually wish there was more of a delay in Qt Creator's syntax highlighting - of course the stuff I'm working right now isn't correct yet.
It's not awful (Zune is holding its own against non-Apple players), but with a quick back of the envelope calculation I estimate iPods outselling zunes at least 20:1 (http://tinyurl.com/47x4rv3). Nobody wants to be in 9th place :).
That was a pretty bad day, right? However, no armageddon has occurred.
I thought Chrome sandboxes all plugins. How do Flash vulnerabilities - or any plugin vulnerability - affect Chrome, in particular on OS X?
Possibly relevant: http://geniusnow.com/2011/03/15/the-strange-case-of-josef-oe...
OpenBSD rocks, always rocked and will always rock!!! Love it!
in the browser, go to settings, then click 'enable plug-ins' and choose 'on demand'. it will work like clicktoflash and show you a container with an icon wherever flash applets are on a page, which you can just tap on to start playing if you want to.
With a software system, unwanted code can be injected into the system at any time without your knowledge. This isn't true of hardware.
FTA
> In fact this is why Tim Berners-Lee used the word “method” in the HTTP protocol in the first place.

Does he have a source for this? Coincidentally I had just read the HTTP 0.9 the other day and I didn't see "method" being used that way at all. I think method, in HTTP, just means "a means to retrieve / put data", not method in the object oriented sense.
I spoke at length with my Representative about this several weeks back and he was on the fence. He does not want to see Government compete directly with private corps, but in this case I would argue that the internet is a core utility like water/power, especially if you expect growth in high paying tech jobs in an area. This is an example of old world thinking/planning being played by the savvy private interests, and it is alarming.
All query string parameters are used to identify the resource also. RFC 3986 states
"The query component contains non-hierarchical data that, along with data in the path component (Section 3.3), serves to identify a resource within the scope of the URI's scheme and naming authority (if any)."

There is absolutely no difference between path segments and query parameters from the perspective of resource identification.
It's frustrating to see comments being made about the quality of conversation by people who haven't read the article they're commenting on. The points mentioned refer to the program, not hacker news.
I gotta say, that was a really great film! +1 to AT&T for making it available.
I think aside from whether this problem was intentionally created by Apple (I don't think it was), I think it does show that Apple considers these web apps to be second class citizens. Making sure the new JS engine worked for these web apps apparently either was not on the list of things to test before shipping 4.3 or it was something that was allowed to slip. Either way, web app performance was not a release blocker for 4.3.
I don't have a source for this, but I read an article some time back that mentioned Rolodex in a long-ish list of other companies. The topic of the article was something along the lines of, "What do you do when your primary product becomes irrelevant?" Rolodex is a company founded on a product that is made obsolete by new technology. Their re-branding efforts extend beyond their logo. They've re-focused to offer more general office organizational and utility products as a means to survive.

Having said that, I like their old logo much better, even if doesn't represent their entire brand.

Tangent: I'm sure my comment regarding obsolescence will garner replies from people who will proclaim to prefer a Rolodex to a computerized address book or smartphone, but let's be straight about something. A computer address book whereby you key in the addresses and phone numbers of people you know is quickly becoming a thing of the past. With the growth of social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, those who opt-out will be the exception, not the norm. My 10 year-old cousin thinks it's odd that I spend so much time on the phone, and I think it's odd that my business partners spend even more time on the phone (I prefer text-based communication like SMS and Skype chat). What will my kids-kids use? The notion that we rely on explicit exchange of information to remain up-to-date will be foreign to them as well.
I don't mean to sound patronising or rude, if that is what came across sorry.

Whilst mostly you're correct, there are some fundamental problems with what you are saying.

It's definitely stretching the definition of a meltdown to refer to this event as such. It's still pretty much unknown if any melting has occurred, and to what extent it has done. Generally a meltdown is as I described it; where the situation is unrecoverable with the standard cooling and you are facing the situation of simple containment.

I suppose technically this could be seen as a partial meltdown; but the truth is that this situation is at the very edge of the margin for such a problem. A meltdown is not a binary thing, but in this case it is not really a meltdown, and that was my main point.

Right now it is absolutely recoverable, and based on the latest data #1 and #3 reactors will be fine from this point on. Certainly if they survive the next couple of days it will all be fine.

but were also "exposed" which I presume to be through a containment failure

No. If this were the case there would be a much serious issue :) It simply means the coolant level dropped so far that they were exposed to the air inside the container.

If they melt, they can escape much more easily and that means radiation exposure on a much greater level, even if only for workers at the plant.

Potentially... but bear in mind that radiation expulsion so far is relatively unrelated to the core; the radiation released so far is included in the steam that is being vented (and then the explosions push it right out). In a proper meltdown situation the risk is that an explosion releases actual core material into the wild, that would be a magnitude worse than the current situation.

At the moment I don't believe the rods are melting, they are being successfully cooled (and for the most part have been).
What poll numbers are Obama and the others in government waiting for? I believe it was around 77% in favor of a public option for health care, why didn't they put that in?

How are we supposed to "make them do it" besides letting them know through poll numbers, protests, etc. what the public is feeling? They're elected to be representatives who in most cases side with a clear majority except where that would overstep their authority. If FDR wanted to have real democratic voting processes on specific issues, for which he is mandated to carry out whatever the final result is, he should have said so.

(I also don't like the false equivalency of Fox News and CNN/MSNBC/NPR/whatever-alternative-to-Fox, but that's another issue.)
Those two things probably take 30 seconds total.
Stop Rickrolling Your Customers and Prospects
>My point is, why to popularize the approach that you should run away from SQL as much as possible and not tune it to your needs?

It's a business decision. More developers will use their product if it's easier to integrate. ActiveRecord acts_as_blank plugins are fairly simple to write and even easier to use.

Angry VC: Well why aren't more people using Directed Edge?

DE CEO: We could have built this plugin but we want more people to be fluent in raw SQL. It's better for the craft of CS.

I understand where you're coming from, but the benefit of using an ORM should be quite obvious in this case.

Also, I found that the more I understood about SQL, the more pleasant it was to use ActiveRecord. Sometimes its "magic" can be a pain, but when it works, it really works well. I can't help but smile when I think of all the time it's saved me.
Making Twitter more secure: HTTPS
Show HN: Review my startup: Leanpub, a site to self-publish in-progress ebooks
Link: http://leanpub.com

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkjU7EHJw0g

Leanpub is a site focused on helping authors write, publish and sell ebooks (PDF, EPUB & MOBI), while they're writing them and after they're done.

The big idea is that Lean Startup and Open Source principles should apply to how books are written. We feel that many books (almost all non-fiction books, some fiction books) should be self-published as ebooks as the author is writing them, before any publisher is involved. This way, authors get better feedback from their readers, and they can evolve their book with useful feedback.

For book authors, no simple mechanism for publishing in-progress versions of a book has existed, except for the beta book and early access programs offered by the best technical book publishers.

Currently we're focusing on two types of target authors:
1. technical book authors who want to self-publish their next technical book
2. bloggers who want to make books out of a curated and edited subset of their blog content

We support writing in HTML and Markdown: HTML is good for bloggers, Markdown is good for technical book authors. We also support external code samples for Markdown books with a simple syntax.

In both cases, authors edit their books on their own computers, in a folder that we automatically create and share with them via Dropbox. To produce a new preview or published version, authors just click a button on leanpub.com.

We recently pivoted to using Dropbox for all books, instead of our previous two approaches of supporting an in-browser book editor (it sucked) and Git integration (it was elitist).

We finally feel that we have a coherent product. We still have a lot of work to do, but we wanted to get some feedback.

Thanks
My doing list. I found whenever I made todo lists, I would never get around to doing them. More time went into planning the days, weeks and months ahead than actually getting stuff done.

Now I have a doing list. I write down what I am going to do and then I do it. When I finish what I have done, I cross the task off.
Alternatively, it's educating "millions" (hundreds or low thousands is more likely if you're just looking at people who comment) of people about technology, startups, entrepreneurship, while maintaining a community of reasonably high level intelligence.

If people would stop complaining all the time and just teach the newcomers (downvote and a reply explaining why this isn't the kind of behavior expected at HN) would be a lot more valuable than a bunch of "back in my day" complaining.
The same thing happened to my company with AT&T back in 2006. We where sending our sales team to London and Paris to meet with our banking customers and they where running up data usage bills up to 25k per month per phone.

Unfortunately, there was no way out of it other than to pay, up and educate the staff on the costs associated with travel and data usage. The end result was that our teams would turn data features off when traveling abroad and use land lines to call as much as possible.

If your dad is retiring and owns his home then he may just decide to not pay it and let them report it to his credit.

If he is still going to rely on credit then he needs to setup a payment plan and ask them to forgive part of the bill. However, my experience with ATT is that there is no chance of that happening. You will be lucky if you can speak with a rep who even knows what a phone is.
You're right about the ordering, so I guess Django is actually doing it wrong.