skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in a small town, and were it not for the library may have gone insane. Upon saving up enough for a computer of mine own and an internet connection I visited less, but still treasured the place.

So I sympathize, but believe that we can make libraries unnecessary.

Subsidized or free municipal internet connectivity, already seen in some communities, coupled with a greater commitment to making worthwhile material available online, has the potential to do more good.

Instead of 215,000 copies of a reference book spread throughout the nations libraries, buyout the rights to it or work out an arrangement to make it available online.

Instead of cutting services like data.gov, expand upon them.

As to community connectedness and educating our children, focus on making our schools better.

Libraries are, and have been a grand institution. But times change, and there are better ways.
More like Carbonite, Backblaze, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.
Do Directory Noobs destroy the Whole Directory Business?
I wonder if this explains why some of my best programming productivity comes when I'm totally pissed off at something -- for example, having to manually do a task for the nth time or not having fixed that bug yet. Eventually it gets to the point where I can't stand it and I pound out wonderful code. Perhaps it's a combination of that and implementing a solution to a "hair on fire" problem.

Maybe people who are rockstar hackers all the time have a little more piss and vinegar in them to fuel their coding.
You can't do that against a company that doesn't build anything (as in the regular patent troll).
and ordered bullet list
I don't know about you, but AIDS is the last thing I use condoms for. Unwanted pregnancies and the occasional STI are far more common than AIDS.
Be a faster/better coder than them.
As I understand it cancer cells can only use sugars for energy. If you fast your body starts metabolising fat, releasing ketones. Normal cells can use ketones for energy, but cancer cells cannot. Hence, fasting could be a way to manage cancer. So at least one of the people mentioned in the post might not be a crackpot.

Here's a bit of academic work on the subject:

"The goal of the current study was to test the hypothesis that ketone bodies can inhibit cell growth in aggressive cancers ... all cancer lines demonstrated proportionally inhibited growth ... The results bear on the hypothesized potential for ketogenic diets as therapeutic strategies."

http://cancerci.com/content/9/1/14
It's not really a business about the nuts and bolts, it's about the big orders that their customers can bring in if they decide to produce the product they're hacking on on a larger scale.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Halo_effect
It almost seems as though Yahoo are determined to make Flickr fail at the moment. I'm a paid pro member and I've been wondering why now for a while...

Photographic content publishing on the internet has moved on a huge amount in the last couple of years, yet I see Flickr have done nearly nothing during that period. They need to start looking at what the competition is doing (instagram, etc.) and seriously picking the game up, especially for paid up members.

I'm still in shock they haven't made a proper iPad application, your stuck with the crappy iPhone app which needs a major overhaul anyway. The Android version is equally awful, the web version on phones/tablets renders equally as badly as on a browser (confusing/boring layout). When I login and look through the top nav, there's over 40 choices from it. Does it really need to be that complicated?
Varnish is good because the size of a web page fits nicely with the size of memory pages... if you have very many small objects, you'll have to get a bit more clever about how you place them.
Except the many Samsungs have no dedicated search button. :-(
Yes, get rid of punishment. In the context of the bigger picture, people commit crimes either out of a need for resources or because of mental illness. The former is easily solved if we pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and pay for the transportation costs associated with getting food to people who need it. The latter tends to become worse when it is punished, it is best treated with that word beginning with 'L' which everyone seems to be so afraid of. To put it another way, crime is a symptom and the current legal system treats the effects and not the cause.
If it's estimated to cost $1.61 billion to achieve emulation by 2024, we should spend $160 billion and get it done by 2016. I'm skeptical, but a technological singularity is not to be underestimated.
Quite right. I was momentarily blinded by the idea of being able to grant specific access rights to specific applications without giving them password access, but clearly if they control they web view you are doing this by, not much has been gained.
Twitter's API does not only service native (smartphone) apps. xAuth is always abysmal security; OAuth provides in some cases some increased security.
But the brain exists in a certain state at any given time, and this state theoretically can be uploaded (from some individual person) to a computer simulating a brain so that we don't always have to "grow" the computer brain.
Why The Filter Bubble Is No Bubble and It's Not Bad Either
I'm not saying libraries are useless. I'm saying that much of their use is better served by the internet. Find a job? Do research? Navigate government documents? Even with respect to education we're seeing innovation from things like the Khan Academy.

The internet won't/can't replace everything a library does. Like providing a physical space, or services for elderly (which are often not connected).

That's my point, that perhaps they should focus on the areas where they truly serve a distinct (and valuable) service. Not only might they be more successful by focusing on a narrow set of services, but they might become more affordable to run.
Proving once again, an idea without execution is worth precisely fuck all. All the non-technical founders out there trying to rip the executors in terms of equity, take note.
Home page Factory Golf
Most DSL lines are ADSL and have limited upload bandwidth. Even for me I have 25Mbps down/800kbps up. I run bittorrent and have it QOSed and limited to 400kbps up. Uploading just one album would take all day (but probably shorter if done at night) so someone wanting to upload a sizable music collection will probably take longer than most people have the patience for.

Now, you could prioritize what albums get uploaded but then you're back to curating your music (picking which songs get priority) and most people don't want to do that. If any of these companies are able to do a music service without needing to upload files then they win.
Alternately, the causality could go the other way: i.e. people who are humble and friendly and who treat everyone they talk to with respect and genuine interest (as opposed to sucking up to those above and ignoring those below) might end up famous because people enjoy working with them.
datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity

I once made the mistake of paying $10 to subscribe to a datasheet web site because they seemed to have the full tech specs (i.e. register layouts) of an IC I was reverse engineering (see http://myhd.sourceforge.net/). It turned out to be the same marketing materials I had downloaded from the chip vendor's web site.

Octopart is like the million-dollar part spec databases that electronics manufacturers buy just to have available in their design software, but for free.
That's funny: exactly what I thought. The general shoddiness of BIOSes are the reason why I always have kept interest in http://www.coreboot.org/ (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), but I have yet to acquire a compatible motherboard.
I'm almost sure half of the people who run my software on a daily basis don't agree with my political views. I don't think they care about that - in the same way I don't care whether a loaf of bread I just bought has been baked by a socialist baker or not.
Their search system is unequaled in any of the electronics parts sites I've used (Mouser, Digikey). That probably qualifies as a technical barrier.
Humans, and other large animals, are prone to infectious diseases. Yet large animals aren't extinct, which means that infectious diseases seldom kill off an entire species. Which leads me to suppose that for any species and any infectious agent, some members of that species will probably be immune to that agent.

It has been hypothesized that the main advantage of sexual reproduction -- which causes every member of a species to be genetically different -- is resistance to microbes and other parasites.
Nope. HIV-1 versus HIV-2, and this treatment would have been less effective against HIV-2.
You can use a library when the grid is down. The grid will go down.
Practically immune to HIV. A blood transfusion from a late stage AIDS patient would still infect a CCR5 delta 32 homozygous person. The mutation also grants less resistance against the rarer HIV-2.
I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.
I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've never thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.
There was a comment here the last time this story was submitted that summarized things well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007265
> Google and Amazon are bigger and could afford a fight.

A fight they have no guarantee they can win still. The jurisprudence is against them, although Amazon definitely seems to think they can be successful.
Fully paid summer internship in Singapore for young entrepreneurs
The latest Culture book from Iain M Banks has a war in virtual heavens over the existence of virtual hells:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail
The server could pick say 5 random offsets in the song, and ask the client to upload the decoded data from one second of music starting at each of those offsets. The server can then compare that to what it has and see if it is close enough.
Building a small home foundry for metal casting
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Exactly, "inventing" is the wrong word, if you invent you build, an idea by itself is useless without execution.
SSL FalseStart Performance Results
He worked on Octopart in Antarctica? That is pretty awesome.
One of Lala's products that I tried involved purchasing songs without the ability to download, but they were stored in my music locker on their servers. Although these songs couldn't be downloaded, they cost only ten cents a song (I think, but can't remember the exact amount). While this was restrictive relative to purchasing DRM-free MP3s, it cost a lot less and was all I needed in some cases. I hope that either Amazon, Google, or Apple offers something similar at a low price, as I'd like to give it another try.
Tried to sign up to get my $2 in credit:

> While in closed beta, we're limiting the number of users we permit to sign up. This is to prevent spammers from creating lots of fake accounts =/

> But if you don't have an account and you really want to use Minno right now, just let us know and we'll see what we can do!

Also, looks like you need to earn $10 before you can withdraw.
There are plenty of ways around it, including getting better lawyers.
> Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music?

1. It's a chore to even do it

2. Consumer landlines are generally very asymetric. I have an ADSL line providing 1.1 MB/s (no typo) down, but 75kB/s up. I have 32GB of music on this machine (in lossy encodings). It would take me 3 weeks and 4 days uninterrupted to push that to "the cloud". Not only would make my internet connection completely unusable in the meantime (I don't have a QoS router), 3 weeks before I can truly use the service is hardly seamless.
The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.
No. The most important page is... [Content only viewable to HackerNews Gold Members].
Amazon.com - The Hidden Empire
There are people out there who are completely unable to feel any pain at all.

Why shouldn't there be people who are immune to HIV?
RailsConf 2011 keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson (video)
Not the entire time. Andres was installing a sensor a mile beneath the water surface (if my memory is right; writing this from a mobile phone without the book on me). That was part of his research, I believe most of his time was spent in his grad student office.
In 1982(-ish)i have first heard of the AIDS virus. My father (a biologist) said "I feel sorry for the young people of your generation, this will make life so much less fun" or something like that (I was 16). And I said something like "You old fellas just do not appreciate how potent science is today, we'll have a cure in 5 years max"...

The fact that 30 years later we cured ONE person has really deflated my hubris. Also, no mission to Mars, no general purpose AI, no flying cars, etc, so many disappointments!

I have a theory why it is so, I'll not bother you all with it, I'll just say that the other symptom of the underlying cause is the GFC.
Backyard swing sets Orange Park
When did fair use go away? I must have missed that.
Ask HN: Would you buy LinkedIn shares?
With the upcoming IPO of LinkedIn today, would you be buying some LNKD stock or not? Any experts here?

What about Groupon/Facebook/Insert other hot startup?
Google Boss: We’ll Fight Anti-Piracy Blocking Laws
Company continues undesirable practice, this and more, tonight at 11.
Can label text be curved along a line or path?
The headline is highly inflammatory, though the content is mostly just the same quotes I saw elsewhere.

The idea that putting a censorship framework in place even if it's "only for IP infringement" is a slippery slope. Once the framework is in place, how long do you think it will be before there are all kinds of 'me too' additions that get attached as riders to other bills floating through Congress? All so that some Congress-critter can get re-elected and/or attempt to impose his (or her) morals on others.
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Interesting comments. I'm definitely going to use this advice to good effect if I ever find myself in a similar situation!
Twitter can store a (bcrypt hopefully) hash of my password.

The third party must story my password in plain text (yes. it could store it encrypted, but it must be able to decrypt it, so an attacker could too).
very similar to twidroyd. cool product would be better if you used a fluid layout and had the actual article take up the most space.
What prevents Google/Amazon to handle the upload like Dropbox does ? I mean if someone else already uploaded a file with the same hash it would be available automagically. I realize that this would not work for self-ripped-encoded albums but it would work for legally/illegally obtained songs.
OWJO: Personalized Online Transaction Space | New Tech Post
Also known as "Rogue planets". (Source: Star Trek Enterprise ep. "Rogue Planet").

Sure enough it's fiction, but I can't think of a better nickname.
Indeed, there are a variety of safety questions as well.

If we were simply emulating a human brain, we would not know how intelligent a system we'd create was or whether that system was sane.
That's a great statement simply because it plays on the latent paranoia about communism from the cold war. Well played!
Trading as a "Massive Multiplayer Experience"
Why do we believe the Big Fat Lies about Internet Marketing?
It is risky indeed, if twitter.com implements your killer feature, you will lose everything.

But you can play with that, or go some direction Twitter doe not want to take.

You will have to improve much much more the way tweets are displaid before I pay for that kind of service every month.
The headline is misleading. Apparently, Apple does not sell apps with adult rating in the United Arabic Emirates. This is far from a blank "app censorship by Apple". Especially considering that the censor is more likely the UAE themselves.

More appropriate headline: "Apple filtering App Store based on local law". But that wouldn't be news...
Absolutely. Compare and contrast with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2560879
Youth Is The Power Of Tomorrow: Phone Generations
You could put the "new" mode of operation directly against the "traditional" one only if you were proposing an actually new paradigm (like the point-and-click interface). And even then you would still want to allow a way to fall back to what's tried and true.

As TK is essentially an _improved terminal_, I don't see a reason to totally break off from the current power of the traditional CLI, especially if alienating current power users in the process.

The biggest limitation are the existing applications. Initially the new features could be opt-in, and as the new idea picks up, you would then have more and more console applications support the new type of terminal.
A VC Boom Heading for Gaming?
Re: "reverse global state changes upon backtracking": this sounds similar to the (manual) "undo actions" supported by the Kelbt parser [1], perhaps unsurprisingly as it was developed by the same author :-)

[1] http://www.complang.org/kelbt/
> Is there any reason why they'll end up with a human
> brain instead of a lizard's?

Don't accuse people of cargo-cult science without a basic understanding of brain anatomy. There are vast differences in physiology and anatomy between mammalian and primate brains, let alone the CNS of a lizard. Also, nobody's growing a brain here -- they're building a mature forebrain.
Find a job? Do research? Navigate government documents? Even with respect to education we're seeing innovation from things like the Khan Academy.

If you expect the average citizen to do all those things online it may be reasonable, maybe for a generation, to replace at least some of the gone libraries by Internet literacy centers.
You said you want to go to 2, so go to 2.
Visual Trails: Do the Doors of Perception Open Periodically?
A critical view of SICP and rationale for HtDP
I wouldn't say invented so much as 'foresaw the large opportunity'.

It popped up on Techcrunch a lot before GroupOn, ie. how is it that the $170B local ad market has been left untouched by the web?
6 Things to Consider When Building Your Lead Scoring Matrix
Go beyond the foundation you began with your sales department in determining ideal B2B lead details – consider 6 things when building your lead-scoring matrix.
The biggest issue with Twitter oAuth sign-in that we have faced as developers is that the Twitter sign-in page does not work at all or is not optimized for feature phones with smaller screens and not running Webkit based browser. Always wished that Twitter provided a URL - twitter.com/appname that users could go to and assign all permissions and got a simple key + PIN that they could enter in our app to access their tweets.
GFC? I've looked over this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFC, and still don't have a clue which you might mean.
I have been totally in love with GAE for almost two years now. Working on four different projects at the moment, all of them on GAE.

I have convinced all my clients this year to do their new projects on GAE.

The first thing I worked on was a simple abstraction library to sit on top of GAE so you could port away from it easily if you need to later on. I plan on releasing the code at some point in the next few months (the db part is the hardest, going to support running on Riak for now)

Also, I recently integrated the Google Prediction API into a product. Damn that thing is hot - coolest new thing I have played with in a long time. Those additional service API's make GAE a dream.
Letters of Note: I am only 6 but I think I can do this job
A survey of how Apple UDIDs are used by apps
Ask HN: got a proposal to relocate from Europe to SF
I'm currently living in Strasbourg, east of France, near the german border. I've started Novelys, a small Ruby/Rails shop, nearly 6 years ago.

I've just got a proposal to get hired and relocated to SF. The proposal is valid for me and my team (we're 5).

Difficult choice : be an entrepreneur in Strasbourg or a software engineer in SF.

Have you ever encounter a similar choice ? What did you choose ? Any advices ?
24in60.com looks good !
He probably refers to the financial crisis -- there have been theories flying around that our society is rotten to the core because of money.

Taking money out of the equation would be an interesting experiment - what if you'd had access to wealth based on your achievements that benefit human kind and not based on whether you're playing stock market games?

So in other words, we are doomed :)

On the other hand, as a cynical contrarian that I am, I'm thinking that medicine may have gone too far. Natural selection doesn't work anymore.
Instead of writing a blog post about it, he could have just done a google result to confirm his guess: http://www.saudimac.com/2011/04/17-apps-removed-from-saudi-a...
Ask HN: which mattress for best sleep?
Since we spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping, and sleeping is so important for learning and health, I think this is an important topic.

I'm moving and looking for a new bed to sleep in, but can't find much information on the benefits of different types of mattresses. For example Ikea offers sprung, latex, foam mattresses, and there are also air and water beds. Which mattress offers better sleep?

Another consideration is price, obviously there maybe more spring or better material for the more expensive ones, but is it worth the extra cost?
Good looks – More than just eye candy in UI/UX
tl;dr summaries often address the 'what', but they neglect the 'how', which is often as useful to decide whether or not to read something.
Referring to comments below the original article:

So when epoll doesn't cope with regular files as author expected, why not use better interface: kqueue?
Why don't you discuss this with them? If you're still single/no kids, I think you should go even if to get to know another culture.
Stay in France. Novely is one of the rare awesome agencies here and SF already has a lot of brains.
Don't put everybody in the same place.
Pretty sure governments will muscle in on bitcoin. The way governments work is by ensuring that they exist to mediate, ostensibly to streamline and maintain a higher authority in case things go wrong. I wonder how long it will be until these middle-men want-in on this as well. Governments hate it when independent, optimal and thinking networks with free nodes emerge. On the other hand the potential to abuse the system exists as well.
That's why intelligent people deceive by their actions. See Operation Fortitude for an example.