skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made these for personal use and have been working on them for about a year. I always feel like my apps are incomplete but I think they are functional in their current form. I appreciate any feedback/criticism.

E2V: I use this to get calls when one of my servers go down and whenever my PayPal account is hit. It's a little difficult to setup for regular users (email filters aren't commonly used) but it is pretty reliable. It uses Twilio and Cloudmailin.net. I just created an HN coupon for 5 additional calls: https://zetabee.com/e2v/?coupon=hackernews

Text: I use this constantly to note down and plan everything. E.g. here's how I note down random ideas: https://zetabee.com/text/share?n=1058338736&h=MU54djV5VF...

CashFlow: This app enabled me to plan my departure from my old job without going into a financial crisis. It has a slight learning curve but once you get used to it, you can plan your finances very easily. I run hypothetical scenarios with my wife all the time - can we afford a house worth X in October? Should she switch to part time and get a 2nd contract? How much can we spend on a vacation and when?
Yeah really. I wonder what Quora's investors are thinking right now?
Sass, at least with its default SCSS syntax, is a strict superset of CSS3 so it's a good place to start. Your existing CSS files can be processed by Sass without changes.

Combined with some of the great mixins provided with Compass: http://beta.compass-style.org/reference/compass/css3/transfo..., you can eliminate many of the vendor specific declarations.
I thought the same - if it weren't for your comment, I would still be laughing. Brilliant!
I believe his point runs along the lines of, ``there are radioactive elements released with coal smoke''. Which may be a big surprise to many people.

NB., a fun experiment: explain a smoker that the cigarette contains proverbial half of the Mendeleyev table.

In any case, the theoretical content of fissible elements in coal may be significant, but it doesn't seem to be economical to extract it at this point. We have heaps of uranium ore, and nuclear fusion seems to be around the corner.
It is a story of pure unadulterated hustle

I see it more as a story about creativity. They could have "hustled" selling something that wasn't novel, completely wasting their time. I don't think that most entrepreneurs lack "hustle" they lack creativity. It's much harder to develop, and some people don't have a talent for it no matter how much they try.
If slow killing by coal pollution is OK, then slow killing by radiation is OK too.

So many facepalm moments reading these threads, maybe I should just quit. What evidence would it take to convince you? Not some hypothetical "people" out there whose rationalizations conveniently say that any flavor of death that's old enough to be considered "commonplace" is okay, but nuclear=hubris. You ought to be smarter. You have seen the numbers. Where's the stickup? Do you think Chernobyl secretly killed 100x more people than they say it did, or what? Or do you admit to having a double standard?
It's so funny to see how the design of the early cars resembled horse carriages so closely. Being an amateur photographer, old photos never fail to amaze me.
Do you happen to know details about the B-tree index self-compaction? I can't seem to find it in their changelog on jira ( http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER?report=com.atlassian.j... )
The opinion would be irrational if it were shown that nuclear power will save lives compared to the other sources or reducing power consumption, and these charts do not show that.
I'm arguing about the original post that I responded to, which makes the argument "this is not from an engineer, but a lobbyist and is therefore bullshit". That is a genetic fallacy.

If he had made the entirely reasonable point that you did-- that this might not be as trustworthy a source compared to another, or engaged the actual evidence used, I wouldn't have taken the time to critique it.

In other words, my disagreement with you has nothing to do with the weighing of credible sources, but the fact that the original post didn't do that.

Note that I haven't even brought up the fact that the post he actually responded to was a revised version of the article by nuclear engineers, thus invalidating much of his claims about it anyway.
Pharmaceutical R&D companies have become just development companies because they stop looking for new drugs and are simply repackaging and reformulating existing drugs (e.g. Claritin/Clarinex).

They're doing this because it costs too much to do research and development gives them quicker return on investment.
Hotlink Detects Malicoius Code in index قروب الساهر
Can't wait until they start implementing filtered indexes ( http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-785 ). Sparse indexes are a step in the right direction, but filtered ones would be just a bit cooler :)

"New map/reduce options for incremental updates" would also be really cool if they had a way to do something like couchDBs incremental views. This would require keeping track of changes or a "trigger" functionality that runs the m/r task after every x inserts
Yeah, but there's trace radioactive elements in literally everything on earth.

Hence, the biggest non point I've ever seen in my life. Unless coal is actually radioactive to a noteworthy significantly-more-than-a-banana extent, which I probably would have heard of by now (not that I haven't been wrong before).
fwiw, it supports Mac as well.
Boy, the commenters there don't seem to agree with him much.
Dropbox spread like wildfire at my small university in Germany. Not so much (or not only) among students but among Professors and TAs.
Something wrong with Twitter
This is exciting:
db.users.mapReduce(map, reduce, {out: { inline : 1}});

This is Not exciting:

"Note that this option is possible only when the result set fits within the 16MB limit of a single document."
Don't give up. Make a free version that only generates 3-5 passwords. No one will buy just based on the screenshots... everyone wants to try something out first. That's what I did for my android app, and now I get a few sales a day.
I've always heard that Facebook ads don't work, but it surely worked in this case.

My own (limited) experience is that Facebook as can be very effective at driving traffic to your Facebook page. To your website? Not so much.
It wasn't sizeable (or on Win7), but that's interesting to know.
First comment in the article is disturbing:

One of my wife's relatives is working with those made homeless in her hometown of Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, which was destroyed by the tsunami. She and many other workers along the coast would not agree with your assessment. The Western media have made the Fukushima nuclear plant the most salient aspect of this tragedy, not least because of the politics and economics of the King Kong vs Godzilla battle being waged by the US coal and nuclear power industries, and other sorts of political battles in Europe. The need for humanitarian aid remains huge. Moreover, this is something most Americans actually can provide -- unlike advice on stopping nuclear meltdowns.
Twitter is down so much lately....what are we to do?

Interesting that a company like Dropbox only has 45 employees and is just so stable. GB's slurped up and down everyday..

Twitter has about 424 employees and cannot stay up for a week straight it seems.
Show HN: please review our MacRuby app, "spotlight for web apps" 
We love the idea of Greplin, but we wanted to search directly from our desktops. Redwood is the result.

Redwood is a "Spotlight for your web apps" -- it searches Basecamp, GMail, and GDocs from one search bar on your desktop. We'll add more sources going forward. Or, you'll be able to write your own plugins in Ruby, to search whatever you want. Download: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip. OSX 10.6 or later required.

## A little technical background on the app:

* It's written primarily in MacRuby 0.10 (trunk). You don't need MacRuby installed -- it's embedded in the application bundle.

* We use two gems: Nokogiri and GData, also embedded in the application bundle. We use macruby_deploy --gem, which makes gem bundling a breeze.

* We use a few Obj-C libraries: Sqlite3 for DB, FMDB for DB wrapper, ASIHTTPRequest for HTTP.

* the UI is rendered primarily in HTML/CSS, and events are passed back and forth between an embedded Webview and Cocoa.

Please give it a whirl, we'd appreciate any feedback. Download link again: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip.
Title looks like a personal opinion. This feels misleading.
Even numbers after the period are good, odd are bad. Large numbers after second period are bad.
I agree with all, but "Build" and "Play" are the crux of the whole thing. All the rest of the list are best utilized by buttressing one's expanding coding skills. I'm about 6 months in to my dedicated, hardcore effort to turn myself into a programmer (with a focus on the web). Nothing happened for me that was worth mentioning until I started making things. THEN I started participating in HN, reading books and researching more vigorously. Because I had context.
"because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes."

Huh? Expected future outcomes are based on assumptions. Japan gives real data that we should use to recheck those assumptions, and we may learn that some of them were wrong.
Hey, this wasn't a criticism, it is just a fact. Do any non-musicians really use these beyond the initial playing stage? GarageBand in iLife on OS X was the same way.
You've got a lot of latitude when choosing a font for headlines. Both serif and sans serif work and you can get away with a fonts that have more "personality" than readability.

Body text, however, should be optimized for readability so your choices are more constrained. I don't think there is a huge difference in readability for serif vs. sans serif fonts for body copy. Ask a couple of designers and you'll get a couple of different opinions. Some will say that serif fonts are better because the serifs "lead the eye along". I'm not sure I buy that, but I do prefer serif fonts for body copy. But if you use a serif font, make sure it is big enough. At small sizes the serifs don't render well and get in the way of readability.

I've heard that Arial works better as a display font instead of a font for extended reading, which I tend to believe since it looks so much like Helvetica. If I choose a sans serif font for body copy, I choose Verdana which was specifically designed for the screen. But really, I don't think Arial is necessarily a bad font for body copy. I don't have any objective reason to say why you shouldn't use Arial.

Also, the header font and the body font should contrast, so if you have a serif header font it's usually good to have a sans serif body font and vice versa.
The fact that producing stuff is difficult is enough to create an opportunity. If you produce better stuff (price,quality,marketing) you get to sell more and earn more. This gives you an opportunity to invest more in to the system. So you get to be ahead of your competitors. And everybody gets to be ahead as side result with time as well, thus you need to keep investing and keep on trying.

The problem is that some industries feel entitled to retire on mohito island while humanity gets to drag them along.

Also most of people using and developing Linux live off it - one way or another. I'm certain that professional/user ratio is in strong favour of Linux.

Idea that companies put money into R&D solely due to intellectual property, or that they only make enough to put something into R&D because of IP is wrong.

Look at some of the most successful businesses in the world. Selling sugared water, selling grilled pieces of meat, selling washing machines and various appliances, selling pieces of wood that fit together,...

Taking whatever IP from them wouldn't change their R&D and other forward looking spending activities much.

And don't come back to me with low tech/high tech argument. High tech production is even harder, that's why those who know how to do it and keep successfully investing into getting beter, get to run the show. Those who don't know how to improve and those who want to collect tax on everybody forever should just roll over and die.
The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health: CRISIS IN JAPAN [Live]
Vandalism is a stupid word to use. I imagine the process went something like this: "I wonder what happens if I add <script>$.fadeOut() as the text of the question" "Oh crap, it worked".

This is called experimentation. If you're in chemistry class and you mess up a lab, you're not accused of vandalizing apparatus... it's simply what happens when you are trying something out. Similarly, when you have a text box on a test website, someone is going to type something in, and if that causes the page to disappear, well... fix the bug and move on.
The Economics of Dissent: How Twitter & Fbook Tipped the Revolutionary Equation
MongoDB is not something I have a good handle on yet. What's its sweet spot? Where should I consider using it instead of Postgres?
Relativity theory isn't patentable as there is no business model which could commercialize it.

Patents were originally intended as a way to encourage innovation because they created a give and take relationship between private interests and the public. The inventor had to disclose the invention's inner workings, and in exchange they were given a relatively short period of exclusivity. The public benefited because the innovation was fully disclosed for others to dissect and re-apply some of those techniques and processes to new inventions.

In the current modern US copyright & patent system, where very few patents actually cover true innovation, there is little public benefit beyond this notion that protecting the inventor from copycats increases their likelihood to innovate. Of course, there is no scientific process that has lead people to this conclusion, so it is honestly an educated guess at best.

The dominant thinking in the business world seems to be that overall execution has become the dominant factor in commercial success and not a particular single innovation. Protecting these interests provides little benefit to anyone besides IP attorneys.
As it turns out, I AM awesome enough to be in the top 10 for my city (Boston).
SpaEmergency is a gift certificate website. A person goes there to purchase a gift for someone else. That person then has to call the spa to book an appointment. We are an online booking hub. Clients typically book for themselves or a significant other thru our site...no need to call the spa. We don't currently do gift certificates, but that's a big game...and something I would eventually like to offer.

SpaFinder is a huge name in the spa industry. There focus isn't (yet) on online booking. They offer it with their POS system (14 spas using in Chicago), which other POS companies do as well. Changing over from one POS to another is a pain, and a long process. They are a lot bigger in the gift certificate world as well.

To answer your question vaguely - (1.) I get a technical co-founder - (2.) I bust my ass
No, there are no menus. "Click here to email customer service." The software handles the rest.
Well, nothing here is groundbreaking. This is the internet after all.

Always make sure you know where you are getting your information from.
The classes are very good. They always have top notch trainers like Dave Thomas, Mike Clark, and Stu Halloway. The class sizes are small, so you have lots of one-on-one time. Of course there's only so much you can learn in two days, so I think it's important that you have some knowledge going in. That way you're in a position to know what to listen for and ask.
x86_64 Linux?
I think the main reason is the general feeling that Quora is being hyped into unexplainable proportions.
Not really a big deal to just output to a new collection and query that.
Reducing power consumption how much? To zero? By half? That's a bit of a moving target.

Regarding the alternate studies you have posted (which, btw, I really do appreciate): If one were to include the upper limits of them, would that make nuclear more dangerous than fossil fuels? Than widespread "alternatives"?

Please note that I'm not trying to be snarky here. I appreciate your posts and would genuinely like to hear your thoughts.
Even more badass is your dad.
Japan earthquake: Anger over Fukushima evacuation plan
I'm curious about whether the creator has had any direct experience with addiction, and if so, whether this type of game has helped him.
I love Dropbox for not using this horrible term.
some of the sweet spots where it _might_ be better in than postgres are:

- horizontal scalability

- flexible datastructures

- map/reduce
You can look in this table (2nd column):

http://erlang.org/download.html
you're failing until other people suddenly start to refer to you as successful
> producing stuff is difficult is enough to create an opportunity

Producing "information stuff" is difficult, but copying it is extremely easy.

You can pay a team of 100 guys to work for a year creating a program, a movie, or whatever, and then have it copied around the internet in a few hours, for free. Leaving you zero income, and a large loss on your sunk costs.

That's why IP exists. There is ample scope for arguing about whether the present rules and regulations are ideal (I don't think so), but the idea behind the system makes sense for many situations.
Twitter Down? HTTPS Launch?
Depending on your take on the situation, I'm thinking Zuckerberg is likely the last person you want as a co-founder.
Yeah, I read about the leaching process (for the previous thread), which sounds good - also enclosed vehicles and such. What I don't get is that wikipedia only included information (the other day when I looked) about open leaching as an optional method of extraction whilst everyone is saying that basically no other methods are used other than in situ (I only readily found information pertaining to experimental use of that in Australia).

The in situ leaching process, as I understood it, requires a quite specific geology and is moderately low in efficiency. The acid goes down pipes and then leaches the uranium out of permeable layers of rock, you suck it up from the bottom and voila (or did I misunderstand). What you can't have is the acid washing away or possibly worse the acid washing the uranium away into the local water supply/environment.

I'm still surprised that basically they never have any accidents at uranium mines/processing plants whilst it seems that everyone who works in the solar industry can't even step on a roof without falling off.
Quora has a lot of passionate users.
How long is it before you can dupe something? A while back, I tried to submit a cool little list of bit hacks, only to find out that the exact same thing had been submitted years ago.

I guess many people probably know about it, but it's a pretty nice list of low level bit hacks:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
Clients are able to wait for the next group commit by adding fsync:true to getLastError calls (some drivers allow you to add this to WriteConcern). We already have some enhancements to this planned for the 1.9 series.
I just left the following comment:

--
It's pretty lame to copy the design and trade dress of another product. It does not bode well for your skill or ability.

Backstory: A long time ago I wrote Delicious. We had hundreds of copycats and competitors. The ones that weren't direct copies were the ones that did better.

I'm sure this doesn't apply to you for whatever reason.
I had an assignment for a security class where I did just this. We each had to write code to print the contents of a file with 600 permissions upon entry of the correct password. The source code, password file, and any logs were all readable by everyone; the next project was to obtain the contents of other students' secret files (using John the Ripper, exploiting race conditions, etc.). So I replaced all my identifiers with the most distracting words I could think of - superman, flashbang, lassie, sparkles, etc. If I recall correctly, only one person in the class even tried looking for vulnerabilities in my code.
Sort of, but there is a grey area between what people think they need and what the NHS thinks is necessary.

My mum is a head nurse and has to fill out a 10+ page assessment of the patient's needs which determines what level of at-home care the NHS will provide.

Often, the family will fight this ardently because it might mean they have to pay for a care home or a private carer. These things aren't always provided by the NHS if certain conditions aren't met, and with the recent cuts, or threat of cuts, the bar for care is being set higher.

In this instance, perhaps someone foolishly took out a Wonga loan to pay for their parent's care, or perhaps it was just a sob story all along.
Well, they have a company together. One could assume that her husband (male/provider/aggressive) wanted to start a company and that she (female/nurturer/passive) joined to make it easier for him (as a real-world example, my girlfriends' mother does most of the administration for my girlfriends' father dentist business, but even if this work is highly appreciated it's clear which one of them is the dentist/owner/boss.)

In short, this thinking is rooted in a rich tradition. Of stupidity, but still.
33,808 deaths in 2009 from traffic fatalities

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
The presumption here is that doing open source work does not open doors to employment - in fact, that's quite far from the truth.

It is in my experience that in large open source projects that anyone is impressed with, the people with commit privileges don't want more contributors.

It is like Wikipedia where if you make an edit to their code or a replacement, they take personal offense to it and will fight you tooth and nail to get it ignored. Or in one case, just ignore me for over a year saying they will merge it and never do it. Or if they merge it, they don't give me credit.
"You can wait for group commit acknowledgement with the getLastError command. When running with --journal, the fsync:true option returns after the data is physically written to the journal (rather than actually fsync'ing all the data files). Note that the group commit interval (see above) is considerable: you may prefer to call getLastError without fsync, or with a w: parameter instead with replication. In releases after 1.8.0 the delay for commit acknowledgement will be shorter."

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Journaling
What happened to the Fail Whale?
A lot of people like it because it makes development faster. It's like the scripting language of databases: you can get stuff out the door really fast (with the obvious power/responsibility caveats).
While I agree that you shouldn't sell yourself short, I think it is also interesting that somone is taking the first step in letting their potential employer validate a potential employee's potential (too much potential there).

Also, it lets the employee validate the quality of the work.

I think it;s okay if done for a couple weeks (short project/assignment). If the employer likes him, he/she can pay him for the work done - out of goodwill.

Everyone wins (only in a perfect world).
It's less usefull if you running a Web or Comet server (were you have one or more processes per client).

It's usefull if you writing a control middleware handling a lot of data buffers, i.e. NoSQL database or MQ server.
Mobile Witch Remote Control: Bluetooth Remote Control Software
Data Center Construction Spending to Hit $78 Billion by 2020
I blogged a bunch of resources recently: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/the_universal_runtime/

And yes, Eloquent JavaScript rocks
Four New York Times Journalists Are Missing in Libya
I don't know how many people have showdead on, so I'll repeat the link from the dead comment for those who use the default setting, because it has a good answer:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fast_inverse_...