skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to use MPD on Linux and really liked it, and just recently realized that it's possible to use on OSX as well. I somewhat prefer the ncmpcpp client to ncmpc, but ncmpc is fine too.

On that note, I also like that I can switch interfaces (even CLI to GUI) without having to switch to a completely different piece of music-library-management software, thanks to the client/server design. I even use different clients for different things; for example, the simple CLI client 'mpc' is good for using in scripts.
It's especially bizarre given that the majority of college students are 18+. What obligation do you have to the parents of a 20 year old? Your obligations are solely to your students.
Except there are no other prominent streaming services in Europe afaik, who would pick up that idea.
Interesting Nuggets from Yelp's S-1
This might be an interesting subject worthy of a proper treatment. I was somewhat put off by the fact that there were giant tangentially-related pictures between every paragraph, though.

The answer is: "Depends". Though if your business model is immoral when applied to poor folks, it's still immoral when applied to rich folks.
Or maybe the answer is not "yes" or "no" but "this isn't really a well-stated question". Without trying to be a Real Philosopher[tm], here's some questions I'll throw back:
* how big is your businesses cost to the society? Could it be lower, at expense of your profits?
* how expensive is your product for your clients? Could it be cheaper at expense of your profits?

The idea of removing profits, or even "attractive" profits feels a bit like a straw man. But there's another idea, that profits can be much lower while still being attractive enough to attract talented, capable people.
doing these courses next to full time work is tough, but its just so tempting.
Chinese hackers took control of NASA satellite for 11 minutes
"I have never pirated anything that was available on Rdio/Netflix/Hulu."

Now that is exactly how it should work.

I wish I could say the same, but sadly not any of those services are available overseas. I really wish they could finally open up for everyone, my money's just waiting to be spent on Netflix!
Actually I've never seen one of these. Maybe my friends are less annoying than this woman's?
Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)
I would quote from Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex Speech, but it should really be read in its entirety:

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html
In your opinion, is that better than viewing the ads?
Very very very very very very very flagged.

Seriously, this got 76 upvotes? What do you think this is?
I find it kind of scary that when I go to the AppFog page and click on support I see only one item on the site. ( http://appfog.zendesk.com/home ) Surely there must be more documentation that can go up there?
The Europas 2011 winners announced – but how credible are the awards?
ncmpcpp is an awesome player, though sometimes I do wish that I could have a full featured GUI brower like amarok plug into the mpd backend. Are there any good Qt based interfaces?
Angry Birds get Scientific - LAG
If you're looking at a die, and see a 1, the opposite side will be a 6. If you're looking at a 2, the opposite side is a 5, and so on with 3 and 4.

So the back side of that portrait would have sixes in place of ones, and so on - generating a negative, with black taking the place of white, and white taking the place of black.
Water utility hackers destroy pump
> you can actually script Photoshop using Javascript.

Could you write up a tutorial post?
Presumption of innocence doesn't apply to criminals now, does it ?
Indeed it is. That's a tech story, of direct relevance to the core topic here, since it's an important milestone in the internet and entertainment industry. Netflix has never before exclusively acquired a show, particularly not a popular one, for streaming purposes. The story generated an interesting discussion about the future of these two industries.

This story, on the other hand, is not just a political story but political activism, and needs to be nuked off the face of HN with extreme prejudice, because they're like weeds and have a tendency to take over.

The distinction is that people submit and upvote stories like these not because they think they're intellectually interesting, but because they're trying to make something happen politically.
Interesting example:

In the UK, we're seeing a huge increase in the number of payday lenders, offering small loans for less than a month, for a fee of about 10% of the loan amount. Our financial regulations require all credit products to prominently state the effective APR, so most of these lenders are forced to advertise a rate of circa 3000%. This is obviously a shockingly high figure, so there has been some amount of campaigning to set a cap or outlaw payday lending altogether.

What has been fascinating is that many poverty campaign groups have opposed a ban, on the basis that it would be bad for the poor. A loan at 3000% APR may well be cheaper than going overdrawn for a day and incurring a £30 fee, or having their electricity disconnected for non-payment and having to pay for reconnection. Most payday lending customers have no other access to legitimate credit; Such high rates are the only way to lend to them and still make any sort of profit. A ban would probably be good news for illegal loan sharks, who would become the lender of last resort.

Idealism is all well and good, but the solutions that offer practical change here and now often feel deeply uncomfortable. Needle exchange and supervised injection services spring to mind - providing addicts with clean injecting equipment seems like a really shabby band-aid, but the only alternatives are unimaginably horrible.
The simple argument made here: if helping the poor cannot be made profitable, it will never be done on a large scale. Therefore, the best (only?) way to help the poor on a large scale is to find a way to do it profitably.

(Of course, you also need to make sure that your profitable poverty-helping business cannot be co-opted by an even more profitable poverty-exploiting business.)
Firstly, this post will not significantly change my search engine rankings, if at all.

Secondly, I have nothing against SEO, just what it has come to be in recent times. I think it makes perfectly good sense to say, post your own camera review in the comments of a post on the same camera. Doing this on several websites/blogs will better your ranking while also helping people who're looking for camera reviews.

I just hate people spamming useless content with links attached for the purpose of SEO. I hate it even more that people buying websites have come to expect the sort of gains that you would get from such activities.
I used Ario for a bit, which was fine, but I find I prefer ncmpcpp somehow. Ario's GTK, though: http://ario-player.sourceforge.net/

There seem to be about a dozen each of GTK and Qt frontends, but I'm not sure what proportion are really actively maintained / full-featured.
I'm not so sure. People tend to have a very easy grasp of moral/immoral when it involves direct action ("It is wrong to stab this guy because he cut in line"), but the more abstract the situation, the more people need metaphor and analogies and conversation to determine what they believe is moral. It's hard to have a gut feeling about how many pieces of cheap paper is moral to take in exchange for a durable good.
Agreed. I think the biggest problem with applying free-market ideals to these situations is that one party (the poor) is not in a position to act rationally, i.e. there is an element of coercion in their actions, due to hunger/sickness/etc.
Freakonomics: Unnatural Turkeys
I don't see any comparison possible between an article showing progress on understanding humankind (pg's), and a list of well done funny pics (op).

Strangely, pg's submission had only five votes. Maybe, just maybe it is a sign HN has deviated a bit from its creator's intent.
Any chance that they might do a compilers class too? The compilers class at my school got cancelled for the fall term and I don't think I'll have a chance to take it in a future term.
I discovered that by accident. It's nice once you know about it, but the "cancel" label is very poor --- it reads much more like "forget about even trying to read this article" than "read the article and to hell with the signup page".
Before the housing meltdown, the #1 reason for bankruptcy was medical bills. Yet for some reason, there is no question that doctors profiting (and bankrupting!) their clients is "immoral". The usual defense is something like "they earned it".
The Gmail of Archives: How USC is Turning IT Costs into Online Profits
Getting More Facebook Fan Page Likes
There was a good article a while back about how oversharing is killing staste - http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/09/...

Basically, we're caring more about volume of information rather than curation of good information, and when that happens - taste dies.
Twitter / chroman: \355\240\265\355\263\220\3 ...
Stanford's classes are specially designed for online education (i.e. not a byproduct of on-campus lectures from 2003). In last years 3 major innovation dramatically increased effectiveness of online education:

1. Special format (found by Salman Khan): short videos, blackboard

2. A lot of quizzes inside lectures (inquiry based learning). See http://t.co/eN9g9MAU and http://t.co/YiXUMs9x

3. Group effects (http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...). If your class has definite schedule and you have thousands of people doing this class with you and communicating while doing it, your results will be much higher.
He was Bill Gates' closest friend, according to an interview with Gates.
I disagree, the fact that there exist a particular scenario that does not lead to the optimal situation does not legitimate the fact that it's ok to profit from poor people in general.
http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24404&sta...

Grub makes chainloading difficult, now. It's dirt simple and they are obfuscating. Grub now has an extra level of indirection -- you must make a script to make the config.

LoseThos boots like Windows -- chainloads. A bootloader should not get involved in details of filesystems -- just load the partition boot sector and run it.

They can do whatever complicated extensions they like to support just Linux, but they should keep it dirt simple to chainload.

------------

> InstallMasterBoot('D');

MBR stage 1:

http://www.losethos.com/code/BootMHD.html

MBR stage 2:

http://www.losethos.com/code/BootMHD2.html

Make and install boot records:

http://www.losethos.com/code/InsBoot.html

Hard Drive Partition Boot Loader:

http://www.losethos.com/code/BootHD.html

CD ROM Bootloader:

http://www.losethos.com/code/BootCD.html

OS stage 1: Start-up cope to call some BIOS and switch from 16-bit real mode to 32-bit, then 64-bit modes.

http://www.losethos.com/code/OSStartUp.html
Netflix SUCKS!
Geo Search
We're a math literate audience. It's not snide to suggest your opinions have no statistical weight.
Totally agree. I signed up for the DB course but could not keep up due to responsibilities of my full time job. However, I've kept the assignments and plan to do them later.
Agreed, the number of wow-answers seem to correlate, maybe wow should be counted as downvote?
I know this puts me in the minority of the HN crowd.. but I really don't care. I click the allow button and get on with my life.
This question might be tangent from the intended purpose of these awesome free classes but can anyone share if some certification or acknowledgement of some sort is received upon completion?
So, I guess I am the only one here who actually likes the new apps? Its interesting to see what people are doing, and I have found interesting articles that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

The talk about recommendation is missing the point, making this information available to your friends in this way is not recommendation. And people don't see it in that way; I certainly don't. Explicit sharing is still treated differently by facebook, and given more emphasis. Its clear that they realise things that aren't explicitly recommended are less valuable; thats why they now show you this aggregated view of articles read.

It seems a bit weird at first. I'll admit, I initially opted out of sharing, but I'm meaning to change it back now. The 'openness' philosophy of Facebook is often a bit daunting, and they make mistakes because of it, which is worrying, but it does have its upsides as well.
I'm not an expert in Photoshop scripting by any means, so I'd have to remember how I did it first… in the meantime you can check out these tutorials:

http://www.kirupa.com/motiongraphics/ps_scripting.htm

http://morris-photographics.com/photoshop/tutorials/scriptin...
If you're in a situation where a police officer is entitled to arrest you, but he physically can't arrest you because you're sitting on the ground with your arms linked with somebody else, then the police officer is entitled to use reasonable force in order to arrest you. Pepper spray is the least dangerous way (to you) to do this -- all other possibilities run the risk of breaking your arms.

I'm really sick of this game, though. The game where protestors deliberately work as hard as they possibly can in order to provoke a police response, and then whine about the police response. This is a game the police can't possibly win, and the protestors know it; that's why they play it. If the police don't respond, then the protestors will just escalate their douchiness until they do.

I know this game, it's the game I used to play with my older brother. Harass him until he hits me, and then go whine to my parents. It was pretty douchey of me, but hey, I was a kid. These kids are supposed to be grown up, what's their excuse?
Everyone should research SEO thoroughly before considering outsourcing it. There is a streak of truth in this short post: many companies promise number one rankings and, more appallingly, many companies believe it.

The author's idea of good SEO, however, is a bit off in their note. The note only seems to mention on-page optimisation and no external link building, a crucial part of any campaign.

Link building can be done without spamming and any SEO campaign without adequate link building will fail to meet expectations.
Far from being immoral, it is REQUIRED for the benefit of the poor. 6 years ago, I left a 6-figure job in the states and spent a year living on $2 a day in India (I was an early employee at http://kiva.org trying to understand the plight of those we served)... It was hard as hell... but a lot of companies served those markets tremendously well and made a lot of money. I ended up writing business school cases about a couple of things I learned in that regard here are some briefs-

1) Mobile phones. Super cliche, but they use mobile phones in every aspect of their lives now, and it has made a tremendous difference. Something that used to require an hour bus ride to the nearest city and then waiting in line for an hour, ruining a days worth of work in the fields can now be accomplished in 5 minutes via SMS.

Airtel (one of the largest mobile providers in the world, one of the biggest companies in India) has made a tremendous amount of money by focusing not on ARPU (Avg. Revenue per user) like every other mobile company, but rather focusing on how much profit they can make per minute sold... they are happy to serve tons of farmers that only use their phone for 100 minutes a month (~$2 a month). If it was not profitable for Airtel, the poor would never have access to cellphones, something that has DRASTICALLY upgraded their lives. Nokia sells amazing phones tailored to that market for $20... they have radios, flashlights, and batteries that last a week (all crucial to rural India), and Nokia is able to maintain fantastic margins on those products. Airtel has an ARPU of $4 (contrast to US carriers ARPU of ~$55)... yet they have a $30Bn market cap

I actually co-wrote a case on this topic with professor CK Prahalad (the founder of base of the pyramid thought - you should read up on him. if this topic interests you at all read his books, particularly "the fortune at the base of the pyramid" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad)
If you're interested in reading my case (http://www.globalens.com/casedetail.aspx?cid=1428834) give me a shout.

2) Clean water. A lot of villages don't have it. There are both for-profit and non-profits trying to tackle this situation, but regardless they've found that the only way to scalably get clean water to the masses is to charge for it... to "profit on the backs of the poor" I co-wrote a case on that topic here: http://www.globalens.com/casedetail.aspx?cid=1428987
I remember hearing a few months (or so) back that Google is catching up to these people anyways, Demand Studios ended up losing a lot of high-up spots on search results, etc. Its only a matter of time as natural language processing technology improves that search engines can better sift out the potentially useful information from the crap. From my small experience working with Natural Language Processing, I think the technology is already there its just a matter of making it cost-effective to use over a huge number of sites, as use of NLP tends to be rather resource intensive to where even a company like Google probably can't yet afford to run intensive NLP algorithms for every website they index.
I'm not sure if you're just trolling or if you have an actual critical comparison to make. Can you elaborate?

There are a number of things you could be referring to when you say the Stanford lectures are "way better". Which Stanford lectures are you talking about? The recent AI, DB and ML classes? The general Stanford open course stuff? Are you talking about the content, presentation, selection of material, structure of classes, file formats, editing, ... ?

I've watched a lot of the Stanford AI and DB lectures, and I've cherry picked from the other stuff. The list of courses here (http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative) includes some things that aren't offered by Stanford, and based on 5 minutes of sampling, the video quality looks passable. Some of the Stanford open course videos are pretty terrible in video quality (check out the web applications one) altho the content seems very good. I can't speak to the content of the Harvard lectures without actually watching them. Have you?

While it would be great if Harvard started to offer structured online classes like the recent Stanford ones, it's pretty cool that these are available at all, given that Harvard is about as old-guard as you can get.
Just put a no-follow on your comment link, and start moderating the comments out which do not add to the value of the discussion. Comes with the territory of running a blog.
You can also decide to turn off comments completely, which Michael Grey, a great SEO, actually proposes here: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/why-everyone-should-turn-off-bl...
HTML5 Scorecard: Amazon Kindle Fire
It's not a question of whether it's interesting, it's a question of whether it's on-topic. Certain things are off-topic, because they have a tendency to invite bad comments which drive out good discussion.

I'm interested in pictures of cute cats and big tits, as well, but they're not suitable subjects for this site either.
Stockholm Bunker Data Center
It's still terrible compared to any Apple product page (ie. the competition).
> the viewpoint I like best defines sin as the failure to reach your potential.

Even if you do think morality is subjective, this is a remarkably poor standard. I know anyone reading this board is at least somewhat entrepreneurial, but elevating the acquisition of wealth and power to a virtue in its own right is completely backward.

Also, those who are the most immoral are often those who have reached a very high potential of wealth and power.
The latest MacBook Air was almost powered by AMD
Startup Weekend - WE NEED HELP Quick survey validating big data for SMBs.
There's good code, which is something that good products build their foundation on, and near perfect code, which can get in the way of building realistic solutions on time.

>Do you really need a full objet-oriented API right now? Do you really need to make a dozen interwoven classes, when it’s possible just a hundred or so lines in one class will do fine? Can you do all the same error checking and unit tests in a much smaller code base?

This is not necessarily "good code". That's code you think is good. Excessive or complex code is not good code, and I think the author should redefine his usage to what programmers sometimes perceive as good code.
This is why, as developers, we need to remember the end user and optimize for their experience. I have often found a good exercise is dedicating time to deleting code. I am always surprised on how much this process ends up improving my overall UX.
> Though if your business model is immoral when applied to poor folks, it's still immoral when applied to rich folks.

The markup on drug store cotton balls is shockingly high, like 1000%. Nobody who buys cotton balls cares though, because the $2 per bag they end up costing is a very small fraction of their income.

But take that to a developing country, and that $2 is completely unaffordable. You would be forcing people in need of sterile cotton swabs to pay a day's or a week's earnings, when their manufacture costs a few pennies.

I don't think the former example is unethical (indeed, the cost of a bag of cotton balls (in America) is probably far below what the market could truly bear). That stupendously high markup is fine because it still keeps the final price easily affordable.

In the latter example, that same markup makes cotton balls all but impossible to buy, when even a "normal" retail mark up of 25% would have kept the price in the cents and therefore at least approachable. I'd call that unethical.
If tons of poor people are willing to cough up cash for your product/service, that's a sign that whatever you're selling is incredibly useful to some extent, probably essential.

Only essentials make it into a 2 dollar daily budget.
Supports the idea that customer's don't care about you.

They don't care what you code in. They don't care about your frameworks. They don't care how you made your life easier to build something for them.

Good code is possible in almost every language. Every language has it's pros and cons.

I would argue developers code less in languages nowadays for the web. They code in frameworks, so it's already one step removed. Coding in frameworks (rails, django, pylon, _______) are meant to do one thing, build great things faster.

Often we get so tangled up in focussing on the frameworks and tools we forget the whole point, the users. Building software is not about building a mausoleum dedicated to ourselves.

It's about making the lives of others easier.

Are you as fanatical about making customers lives easier as your own coding?
I think you're missing the point. He was an intense, emotional visionary. He believed in what he felt, not what others told him. That's why he smelled, why he was rude, why he cried all the time, and why he made people hate him. It's also why he was successful, and why he was able to unite teams.

Most people spend their lives engaged in a kind of Keynesian beauty contest, always trying to do or be what they think they are supposed to do or be. A true visionary has their own internal sense of beauty.
added eric at ericschrijver.nl , curious!
FYI, even if you click cancel it will still advertise you to your friends ("Rob uses this app" in the bottom left corner of the signup popup). Which seems pretty questionable.

I verified with two other friends--I saw both of them in the "so and so uses the app" section and neither of them had ever added the app (only "cancelled").
Intimate Experience with Nook Tablet
I think the recent AI, DB, and ML classes all planned to offer an acknowledgement of completion. This one, linked from the OP, mentioned something similar: http://www.pgm-class.org/