skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Astrid - popular task/TODO list

KeePassDroid - if you KeePass for password management . . .

<shameless-self-promotion>
Song Alarm - bare-bones alarm clock app for playing songs or sound recordings
</shameless-self-promotion>

Andreddit - If you read reddit . . .

HN
How I Organize My Mac
Yeah it goes both ways. The users who barely use their internet connection, such as grandmas that check their email and look up a recipe a few times a week, are subsidizing the users who are streaming Netflix in high def for 3 hours a night.
Anyone looking for awesome operations/systems engineers? :) Is there any particular city where the startup scene is better?
The questions implied by your last question seem to be:

a) do markets always provide better allocation?
b) are there cases where economic efficiency is not the primary determinant of how resources are allocated?

So, 75% of the U.S. budget is made up of mandatory payments (debt interest), medicare (for the elderly), medicaid (for the poor), social security (for the elderly), and defence.

1. Health care services are notoriously subject to market failure due to a variety of problems: moral hazard, unpredictable and highly skewed demand (a small number of people take up the bulk of national costs), adverse selection, insurance free riding, plus geometrically rising costs due to increased innovation, a culture of litiguousness, and the demographics of an aging populace.

Besides all of this, all developed nations share a sense that humans deserve a minimum standard of care, that collectively we are rich enough, and the demand small enough, that we can cover everybody (subject to the caveats above).

EVEN if you decided there is no fundamental human right to health care, then the most efficient allocation (a) is subject to predominantly non-market controls & regulations due to moral hazard & free riding; (b) someone other than the customer makes the buying decisions due to adverse selection.

2.
Defence is often subjected to market forces in the specifics of contracts, but the overall spending levels and results of defence clearly can't be measured by a market, since the mission and goal is about survival, not wealth.

Could the U.S. cut it? Sure. Which elected official would take the risk they'll be blamed for the next [insert tragic event here], though?

3. Social security, again, has to do with a shared sense that the elderly deserve a safety net when they are too infirm to continue working. It's a flawed, imperfect approach, but seems better than just letting people live off the streets in their twilight years, as was done for over a hundred years prior to Otto von Bismark's creation of the welfare state.

I have no doubt the market makes (some) activities more efficient. The challenge is that reality is more complicated than that.
It'll forever be tainted because the other guy launched the product first. The OP will look like a copycat at best or just like he feels his former business partner is in the worst case.

We saw how it worked out with the Winklevi, the other dude actually implemented the idea so he deserves the spoils.
Don't we see one of these posts every year? Just like "Year of Linux on the desktop."
Interviewing programmers
I thought this was great. I just started really digging into these topics (statistics, classification, probability, etc) relatively recently, and it's amazing how young and fragmented the field as a whole still is. So it was great to get some perspective from someone who's been around it for a while anid can provide some color on the field from a broad perspective.
If you want to have a discussion about school funding and tax cuts, submit a blog post or article about it. Please don't take a dump all over someone else's discussion. That's not something the HN community appreciates, which is why it tends to result in downvotes (for you and those arguing against you.)

Don't complain about downvotes; change your behavior.
Any way I can get notified when the Android version comes?
A couple of the best resources I know of are actually on Reddit, in sub-reddits dedicated to cataloging freely available textbooks in various fields:

http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/eebooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/physicsbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/econbooks

And, of course, there is this classic site:

http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...
Wait a minute- DHS? As in, department of homeland security? Why are they involved in this even?
yeah, well, I'm just speaking from my experience.
One of the best ways to cut down on inbound email, is to send less outbound email.
I used to do SEO for a Samsung mobile support site. We rarely use anything monetary in an effort to up our traffic. After a few months, we went from 30 unique per day to a few hundred per day. And by the time I left the company in a year, we are about 3000 unique visitor per day.

It definitely takes some effort to build good content alongside some SEO attributes. Just need patience (& Googling good ways to help things along).

I won't recommend going with a SEO firm, let alone $200/month.
Name, DOB, email & phone of 73,000+ X-Factor audition contestants leaked
The photo itself is not uploaded to the site for checking. Only a few bytes with the serial and camera model/manufacturer are sent in a HTTP GET to stolencamerafinder.com. This makes it very light in traffic.

The site can expand the camera->owner database by searching photos with valid EXIFs on famous sites and correlating it to the user.
The closest analogy to TED talks is:
http://www.edge.org
Edge : Conversations on the edge of human knowledge
in toronto
It sometimes seems it's difficult to make money from making tools, because developers expect them for free, and with source (like Firebug). But of course it is possible, with products like Joel's FogBugz, like Jira and some IDE's.

Even serious money: Microsoft's Developer Tools (Visual Studio) business made over $1B revenue last year:
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billi...
I was hoping for a "Death of a Salesman"-style story of the downfall of a self-deluding developer trying for managerial greatness.
> Good story idea: “My competitor raised $20 million, yet my thing is better.”

That is a good way to get into a writers spam bin. Every writer gets 5-6 stories about related companies when they post something, and it is annoying
I disagree with this statement"it would in any case be unfair to candidates to ask them to undertake a serious piece of work in order to get a job."
Synching of SENT mail over multiple devices (iPhone/MacBook)
I'm just starting my own law firm and looking to be quite mobile. I absolutely need to have all my email (sent mail included) synched on both the Mail app on my iPhone and Thunderbird on my MacBook. I need basic web-hosting as well, preferable in the same package. So far the only provider I have found that offers this multi-device synching is GoDaddy, through Microsoft software. Both Namecheap and Network Solutions told me no such synching was possible with their services.

Cheers, and any input is greatly appreciated.
I don't know how the lesswrong people came to that conclusion about parapsychology a-priori. This is a problem in Science in general. People use parametric-value-based reasoning (e.g. significance values) to get binary conclusions (existence or not of physical processes etc).

http://dilbert.com/fast/1998-01-19/
Apple launches 'Apple Customer Pulse' feedback site
i hate to say it, but the last sentence of this article is hilarious.
Amazing beautiful Burj al arab dubai wallpapers
Why is this interesting versus any of a million other case reviews?
{ I can assure you that for some of us the response is both (a) more akin to amusement than to contempt and (b) hard to translate accurately. Adjusting for the frequent use of the word “human” to metonymically mean “sapience” is trivial. Adjusting for casual conflation near those concepts is easy in most discursive domains. Adjusting for some mysterious «nonlinear» behavior near «poles» is a chore but doable. Adjusting for things like transitively requisite, highly specific background emotions—well, extroversionism and kith are just the tip of the iceberg. “humans.txt” is peanuts. }
I was not around in 2001 so I will take your word on that one. It looks like there may have been a lull and then a resurgence around ~2007:

http://venturebeat.com/2007/01/14/weebly-offers-free-easy-we...
"The company is just three people from State College, PA. Co-founder David Rusenko originally told VentureBeat he would move to Mountain View. He changed his mind, he said, because he found a vibrant Internet start-up ecosystem in hipper San Francisco — the latest sign that San Francisco has become more of a magnet for these kinds of companies."

http://replay.web.archive.org/20070118083006/http://www.bizj...?
There is a bandwidth cap in the terms of service for Charter. They are not enforcing it at this time.

http://www.myaccount.charter.com/CUSTOMERS/SUPPORT.ASPX?SUPP...
Hacking while homeless?
Do you guys know of any successful startup founders or successful hackers or famous people in the tech world who are or were basically homeless?

I've been reading a lot of history books and the stories of various famous mathematicians, artists, and scientists can end up being a pure tragedy in some cases. I'm wondering about modern day stories on creating success out of tragedy. I'm also wondering about why these people succeeded while so many others did the normal thing ("Woe is me").
I have no idea what Joe's option situation is, but supposing that he's cashing them in and dumping them in the secondary market it goes to show that Facebook is squandering the employee lock-in advantage of having pre-IPO stock. It's probably in Facebook's interest to shut down the secondary market, but I imagine zuck and co like being somewhat liquid for personal reasons.
been looking for good writeups on sign-up best practices. thanks for this!
Checkout google apps for your email hosting - it will do exactly what you need
I'm not sure utilities are a good comparison point for two reasons. The first is that the marginal cost of internet data is near zero while the marginal cost of electricity generation is not. Secondly, utilities generally are more highly regulated than ISPs.

The reason it can be distasteful when an ISP raises its rates or limits its services is that ISPs often have a monopoly over many of their customers. At best most people get to choose from a duopoly, so the ISPs don't really have to compete in a free market.
My Youtube connection has been strange for some weeks now. I'm in Brazil accessing Internet from very close to a core network (Terremark NAP). I started to notice the buffering after watching/listening to instant.fm by feross.

It's strange: sometimes a video downloads at 38Mbps - very fast - and some other it keeps buffering resulting in less than 1Mbps. I can see it with NetMeter (I love to always have a graph of my connection speed).

I analysed it a litte bit, all I could see was packet loss and retransmissions. It might be realted to the IP where I'm getting the youtube video, but I still have to dig it more.
... and a good IDE to build the stuff with drag & drop.
What sort of business is it?
Google Codejam - Qualification round is today
That's like asking how many ubuntu users run their account as root. Almost None. The default in both cases is a normal user with sudo access (requesting a password). I'm not even sure where to start if I wanted to log in as root (not just in a terminal).
Depending on the kind of law firm you are running I might think twice about hosting on google apps vs your own equipment as the law is fuzzy around getting access to those types of services vs something that is physically on your property like a small business server. That being said google apps will do this like the other poster said.
Thanks for posting! I found the video interesting!
Maybe I'm being out of line here, but I'd be impressed if HN could go a week without repeating what has been said 50 times previously about a text editor.
Yes.

But that doesn't matter. The only question that I need concern myself with is, "how do I make the most of my life?," not "what does my neighbor need today?" The more people do this simple (but difficult thing), the happier they will be.
Sad, double tragedy for those with playstation consoles.
I know there are some legendary stories about Richard Stallman living in his office. Does that count?
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> [Sorry if this is OT]

Nah. You were on-topic (at least, on-topic for my off-topic bit...). Agreed. The Firebug-driven-tweak cycle ain't lovely, but it's positively gorgeous when compared to the old ways...

And thanks for the pointer to Stylebot. Checking it out now.
I just dropped a Crucial RealSSD into my wife's 2007 white macbook. After using it a bit, I noticed it was as snappy or snappier than my Air 11". I did some benchmarking and lo and behold it matched or beat my air all across the board. The only thing that didn't stack up was the memory benchmarks, which makes sense because the Air is DDR3. Since I no longer lug my Air to school everyday and her old machine is just as quick, I'm actually going to sell the Air and get an iMac.
Read the article. That argument is addressed and dismissed. This is about experience, not specs.
I learned what truly great leadership was at Microsoft in the mid-90s. My father passed away unexpectedly and I was devastated. My director at the time (who is now a VP), called me at my mother's home, and I was a mess. He told me how difficult it was to lose his own father and to take as much time as I needed to grieve. He told me not to worry about work and come back when I was ready. The call was short, maybe 2 minutes. I will never forget that call and its lesson. Empathy is the single greatest "skill" a leader can learn.
I thought I would miss my backlit keyboard, but after 6 months... It only occasionally crosses my mind. Life goes on.
I like the pricing model, but the receive work flow just doesn't seem practical -- people sending incoming faxes have to include a special barcode?? Am I missing something?
Agree with the logic, but unions skew things too much for mere logic to play out in workers minds.
Are you sure junk mail is subsidizing regular mail? This article seems to indicate quite the opposite.

"Of particular concern has been the decline in the lucrative first-class mail, largely consisting of personal letters and cards, bills and payments and similar items. First-class mail volume fell 6.6 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2009, and 4.8 percent in 2008. Traditionally, this mail has produced more than half of total revenue.

Volume for standard mail – advertising and similar business items – improved somewhat, indicating some signs of economic recovery, but generates less income."

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/12/post-office-lost-bi...
It didn't work for me until I noticed that there was a plugin being blocked. (I block all plugins by default.) You forgot to mention Flash in the headline. :P

Awesome idea though!
I just went through a very long (about two months) trouble shooting session with Charter after moving to a new town. After getting the personal cell phone number for a local plant supervisor and keeping in touch with him during the time it took to fix things I got some information out of them. They try to keep their lines at 80% capacity all the time. They do have traffic shaping in place though he wouldn't be specific or didn't know. They don't throttle customers, they do disable power boost and more tightly restrict bandwidth to the plan the customer uses during peak hours. Which tools they are using to manage these restrictions I don't know.

Since they've finished the DOCSIS 3 rollout here last week I've considered upgrading to 60/5 from my 25/3 plan but it's pretty over priced and would be much more worth it at 60/10 or 60/15. During the period of trouble (not enough bandwidth for their inter city link where they actually do their peering) I was down as low as 1Mbit/s during peak hours on a 25Mbit plan.
Concern has been expressed by some Bar associations (including mine in Washington) about using Google for professional legal email communications for privacy reasons/potential seizure of client information - like many governing bodies they are extremely vague about what we can and cannot use though...

The only privacy policy I found for Google Apps is extremely short; I wish that I could just use the service though! We'll see.
How to hack yor company management (brief talk)
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I'll pick on at&t uverse since that's what I've got, and since they're the latest to join the transfer cap party.

Those grandmas are not paying $65/mo for the top service tier. They are paying $35/mo for 3Mbit/s lowest-tier uverse service, and they still get a transfer cap of 250GB.

Streaming netflix users, who are pretty much all going to be in the top tier or two of service (24Mbit/s or 18Mbit/s) get pinched by the same cap. 250GB is 3.2% utilization of an 24Mbit/s download link, over a month, btw.

Even in some alternate universe where caps make sense, the least AT&T could do is grade the caps by line speed. It seems to me like I'm subsidizing grannie's transfer allowance, even if she doesn't fully use it.

Since the primary issue is traffic congestion at peak usage times, the obvious solution is to rate limit heavy users, rather than punishing them with hard caps which indiscriminately targets users who transfer lots of data in off hours.

Given all that, why does AT&T cap all uverse tiers the same? The first explanation that comes to mind is that they know if they drop the caps too much for lower tiers, because despite what they claim 250GB really isn't that much, they'll start cutting into too many grannies' modest internet usage. They want to keep their low-end customers from being hurt by lower caps, but they want to gouge their higher-end customers for going over the same caps.

And why do they cap instead of rate limiting heavy users? Rate limiting doesn't make them money. Caps might (though they will lose some customers over this outrage, and others will cut back usage or service tiers, so AT&T might even lose money overall).
Creator of Facebook iPhone app leaves to build mobile and HTML5 creative tools
The commercial mailings could be given to the post office only on the days they'll be delivered. And this commercial mail is often already sorted

Yes, it doesn't reduce mail volume. That's been collapsing all on its own, as has the effort to sort it.
Wow, that's a great blog (overall)! Thanks for linking to this!
Besides what rick888 said about Richard Stallman, I don't know of anybody. I assume that finding somewhere to live is a more pressing concern for a homeless person than hacking would be.

That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I guess none of them were successful enough for us to hear about.
most people would probably agree. The exceptions can be handled.
Had a co-worker who committed suicide. I still vividly remember the all-hands we had when it was announced. The company behaved well; supported his widow (I am not sure of details, but I know that at least one manager was still in contact with her over a year later). We went to his funeral. I don't remember if counselors were available, but it wouldn't suprise me. About six months later the product shipped and we had put his name in it, in an easter egg. No one objected, at least that I heard of.

It was a depressing time in the middle of some of the hardest work I've ever done. I was single and unattached, and just dove into work as a coping mechanism, as did a number of other co-workers.
They may have already written off the employee lock-in effect and are taking their time going public just to avoid the disclosure and compliance hassles associated with it.
Good to know -- though in that case, it seems inappropriate that web standards advocates were demanding everyone abandon table-based layouts when CSS did not actually support layout yet.
wow... I'm really happy and excited this is here! :)

I'm the guy that built djangocanvas, I'm can't wait to make this open-source soon and find out how this project will evolve. :)
I'd love to work with this guy. Wonder if he's up for a position with a small team of craftsmen... (yeah, we're actually hiring, if anyone is interesting in working out of a small office in Carlsbad, CA!)
I use Google Apps. The archives on Postini are HIPAA compliant and as you say various bar associations have blessed this.

Previous to my career as an owner of all things Apple I used hosted BES (actually awesome and cost-effective if you run your life on Blackberries) and before that I owned a Windows Server and my own BES which was just a giant ball of expense and aggravation.

Small law firm. All Mac. Contact me and I will share what worked and what didn't work for us.

Works: Daylite by marketcircle.com.

Strongly desired: tinfoil-hat level paranoid email. Wish I could find that.
IMHO Friday afternnon is not the most effective time to announce a startup
Amen.

RAII will be in the next great language, as it is a useful tool. This is not an academic concern, it is something that happens all the time due to rushed deadlines, stressed developers, or simple naivete.

People love to slag off C++ but the higher-level devs have done some serious thinking about how to engineer robust programs. Sutter's 'Exceptional C++' is eye-opening the first time around, and the concepts are applicable to any language that has exception handling. Programming in a transactional manner has visibly improved my designs -- mostly through the paranoia that almost any statement could throw an exception.
Have you tried?
https://flippa.com/
http://www.dealasite.com/
http://www.websitebroker.com/
http://sitepointmarket.com/

At least Flippa was mentioned here some times. I don't know how theses sites deal with as 650k/year site, but you are trying many options, I guess...

There is also the old discussion about a site value:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=355627

PS. You could have added "Ask HN:" in your title. That would probably attract more people to answer you.
Thanks a lot for sharing my work here, it was a pleasant surprise to see that people care about it.

It really makes me want to improve it more! :) I will try to publish the new TODO list tomorrow!
The marginal costs of commercial software is even lower, but most vendors charge in a mostly linear manner; it's not like they decrement their prices for each sale they make to keep a steady cost-to-price ratio. Why should they? If enough people want to still voluntarily purchase their product/service, they should continue to try and make as much money as possible. If their are few good options, then the market is ripe for competition to help bring the incumbents back to offering better values.

Isn't this a site revolving around entrepreneurs in IT? Doesn't everyone want to make more money then they spend?
There's a story about Hans Moravec living in the suspended ceiling at the Stanford AI lab when he was in grad school.
django-annoying is a great app, but you are perfectly right links are necessary also because if I eventually add more apps it will be very likely people won't know what they are.
This is great news for us developers and designers. Inspiring too