skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
used to work with paul saab (ps) at yahoo. super smart as this post shows. could never get them to use freebsd paul? :)
I'd like to say that you're mistaking HN with Reddit. I'd like to say that the people who are on HN are not so dense as to downmod legitimately intelligent discussion simply because they have a vendetta against religion. I'd like to say that people on HN are modded based on the content, not the subject, of their posts.

I'd like to say that. But this is, after all, the Internet.
I suspect this is a publicity ploy. Maybe I'm cynical.

I believe this is the same guy who got massive attention with his story of someone telling him that when his project gives a computer to a child with Down's syndrome, they are "wasting it on an idiot." Terrible. If it happened. If you're David, why not invent Goliaths and play the persecution angle for attention?

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/09/wasted-on-idiot.html

It's a great way to draw attention to yourself and your project. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but my bs detector is going off--this smells funny.
From the Decimation of Trutap to Flavored Platforms of Modular Innovation
Let me rephrase that. Does anyone have any suggestions for features of this type?
readitlater addon on firefox
As bad as this is, I guess we've been luckier than many sectors. Here's to hoping we are able to pull ourselves out and create a stronger and more resilient economy for all.
After hearing about the outcome of this game you'd think that you'd have to be an idiot to get sucked in, but you'd be mistaken. We once did a dollar auction in an auditorium at Canada/USA Mathcamp -- not exactly a dimwitted group -- and bidding went up to $5.
Perhaps let users bookmark comment threads, and see what changes have been made by highlighting them a little, or putting a red star next to them?
I really think there's something to that. My next thought after typing that comment was whether a helmet view could help, especially if we can simulate subtle G-forces through the visual system. But there are definitely ways of making it more fun - like hanging the operator and coordinating quick shifts in speed with swings in the resonant vector and velocity. Seems like a perfect use for all the VR research.
as have I, except I do capitalize the word "I", because I find that the lowercase "i" as first person pronoun is too twee. now that jerry yang has become the most prominent all-lower-case user, I fear that not wanting to be associated with the stink of failure will drive me out of the practice.
Consider the Philosopher: The early metaphysical investigations of David Foster Wallace.
The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity

This is going to be pretty confusing when we go back to thinking that red symbolizes commies.

The swoosh communicates more densely, I think: it's a single, monochrome visual element, while the Obama logo is busy being a shape and a letter and a picture and a flag. The Nike logo says a lot, laconically; the Obama logo says a lot by being visually chatty.
It's amazing what kind of profit they drive...

I wonder how one could estimate their income...
Wrath, internet style.
I found about this a week ago and it kicks ass. It really helps when you are working with scientific information which is all in PDF's.
Sorry for my improper adjective use, apparently.
Starred conversations seems like an appropriate solution.
the wiki page lists revenue: 20 million Euro in 2008 ($28.3 million USD)
OpenSolaris now on Toshiba laptops
I wonder if there's a correlation between using Swoopo and winning one of these awards:

http://www.darwinawards.com/
There's a friend of a friend of mine who creates some really gorgeous icons for iPhone: http://mantia.me/

He works at iconfactory (http://iconfactory.com), and their icons in general are really delicious, although probably not cheap.
A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis: The Bailout
I don't care about programming being special. I just want to understand what makes it hard so that I can be a better programmer.

Programming isn't nearly as well understood as those other fields you mentioned. I also think it's harder than all of those things.
Feature request: docs.google.com/pdfview?{URL}
(such as hellocreature.com) :)
Fast PDF viewing right in your browser? Like Safari has built in?

I'm tired of "solutions" to this non-problem for people with decent browsers. Can you at least detect that I'm using a browser that handles PDFs well and just give me the original?
Feedback on the site itself: pages like http://www.cloudfireit.com/pricing.html have the details -only- in the image (and no alt text). This is hardly the most accessible way to deliver the information, as screen readers won't pick up any of it. Consider using more semantic markup (headers and divs) and replacing their text with CSS image replacement techniques. The visually impaired (that includes Google!) will thank you.
O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Invests in Amee
it already does that... ;)

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
Just click "download" instead of "view"... problem solved.
gmail gives you both options.

Most of the times I open up pdf attchemtens in Preview, but this come in handy when I just need to take a quick look at an attachments to check something.
Or not. But it's usually better to ask anyway.
A pretty nice idea, and I'm impressed... but damn, it could look a bit prettier.
"Any decision that declared the GPL invalid would have to be so novel, and so far reaching that it would probably break all software licenses."

This is not true at all because regular software licenses are enforced under contract law and open source licenses are based on a legal theory about copyright law and granting permissions under a set of terms and conditions.

One way that this lawsuit could turn out to be a disaster is that the courts could decide to interpret the GPL as a contract rather than a (bare) license. As far as I can tell that would make it rather toothless and impractical to enforce.

When things that are as fundamental and important as that are still up in the air, you don't want to argue against Cisco's legal team about it.
zephyr -i help

at MIT had almost exactly the opposite problem: people were charged up/competing to be the first one to provide the correct answer. It worked shockingly well, as a consumer and it was fun to kill some time as a supplier of answers. (My time at MIT all pre-dates the interwebs, so I can't directly compare/contrast it to a world with Google as an option.)
McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter
Pastebud's iPhone copy-and-paste seems to be giving me other folks' clipboards
I would like the option to get a summery email every 12 to 24 hours that shows which of my comments where responded to. I know you can look through your personal comments, but it's easy to miss someones response and after a few days it seems silly to send a detailed answer which is unlikely to be read.
Gvke - How to Increase Penis Size
Even if it's gambling it still should be legal.
You could tie that to upvoting just like for stories.
What about an option on the threads page to order your comments by how recently they've had a reply (by any descendant comment) + associated RSS feed.

I usually prefer RSS feeds over emails.
IT gurus won't get too old or burnt out on re-learning new stuff every few years

I can't speak directly to the IT guru part, or to getting burnt out on new stuff. I can tell you that my dad is almost 70 and has never enjoyed his work more. I'm 35 and I'm still always itching to learn new things. And given the rapid advance of technology, I'd be surprised if the usual 'grow old and die' scenario remains 'usual' much longer. In the not-too-distant future I expect longer lives and continual renewal to be the norm, and I for one am looking forward to it.
In your words, what is not rational about "mind uploading, cryonics, singularity" ?

It's all extremely unlikely, and it's irrational to believe in it with the faith that a lot of the singularitarian atheists do.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a 150-year or longer lifespan-- in fact, it's probable that the first 150-year-old will be born before I die-- but mind-uploading makes no sense. How are we going to upload something when we don't know what it, physically, is... or even whether or not it's physical? Cryonics has the same issue, because there's no reason to believe the consciousness "sticks around" waiting to reawaken in that corpse.
If a musician has her instrument on hand, she can make music, every single time. Musicians are really quite reliable. Their improvisations and crowd-pleasers won't all be as good as the best works of Mozart, or Monk, or even Billy Joel, but chances are that the crowd will be at least moderately pleased. Cover bands do not routinely run 300% over budget and six months late, and if they do you can be confident that the fault was entirely theirs -- it's not that the gig, which seemed simple on the surface, turned out to be completely intractable.

A skilled carpenter or vacuum-cleaner engineer might not produce a masterpiece every time. But the result will probably be a house that doesn't fall down, or a thing that picks up some dust for at least a little while. Vacuum cleaners are a well-understood technology, and while carpentry projects do occasionally go nonlinear (if you change the specs mid-project, or a freak windstorm blows up, or they discover a natural spring while digging your basement, or... well, just go read Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, one of the greatest engineering books of all time ;) they are nonetheless relatively predictable, and the more experienced the carpenter the fewer surprises you can expect.

Now go read Dreaming in Code, which shows that even if you are Mitch "I Built Lotus" Kapor and you hire Andy "Mac OS 1.0" Hertzfeld your software project may fly straight into a wall: You may blow the schedule by a factor of five, and the budget by a factor of ten, and still not ship anything. [1] It has happened. People who write books about corporate IT throw around numbers like fifty percent when discussing the odds that a given software project will succeed. And the reason why programmers don't stop talking about this is that it is vitally important that our clients understand the risk in advance! Which they often don't. Nothing in their everyday experience with plumbers, dentists, and caterers has prepared them for it.

---

[1] Note: These numbers are not the ones from Dreaming in Code. I made them up. ;) I actually have yet to finish Dreaming in Code. It induces painful flashbacks.
+1 for authsmtp If you're on EC2, outgoing email sux. AuthSMTP is the best option we found.
This is very nice. I wish there was a Firefox plugin that would automatically make all PDFs open in this. I hate the disruption of having to switch to another application to view text that happens to be in a different format. (Even embedding gv inside Firefox would be acceptable, actually.)
How we built Dojo Learning - part 3
This is the third part of a six-part blog post I wrote talking about how we built our startup, Dojo Learning, from my perspective as co-founder/lead developer.

This post talks about how to discover the root of a problem so you can solve that, instead of chasing symptoms of a deeper problem.
Inkscape and GIMP. But I'm not particularly good at it, so take that as you will.
Yes, Mozilla's default Firefox has a pretty lame EULA that you "have" to agree to. (I know Ubuntu got strong-armed to displaying this. I am glad I don't use Ubuntu or Firefox.)

Fortunately, Debian's version of Firefox (Iceweasel) only uses the GPLd (actually tri-licensed) code, which places no restrictions on using the app. So it is really silly that MoFo even tries to force an EULA down your throat, when you can just build the software yourself and not have any restrictions apply.

Chromium is similar -- if you build it yourself from the BSD-licensed code, there are no restrictions on use, and no legal agreements to enter into.

Finally, EULAs are probably not valid, so this is all academic. I would really like to see Google take you to court for using Chrome and not keeping your contact information up to date. WTF.
How is cryogenics any different than paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it?

(You're paying for expensive life saving surgery for yourself).
I was mouthing off in #erlang last night about OOP

There's your first problem. There's a great quote: "Q: Is Erlang Object-Oriented? A: No, of course not!"
http://www.sics.se/~joe/bluetail/vol1/v1_oo.html

Your second problem, embodied in the superficial dismissal you made of the first comment on your post, is that you understand neither OO nor FP. You really need to read Cardelli and Wadler before bloviating further on this topic.

You third problem is that you're submitting your own blog post. Noone is a good judge of their own work -- If it was really worthy of consideration, someone else would submit it independently.
Learning From Failed Seasonal Software Promotion
Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one.

So wait another thousand years. You're undead, you wont notice. If it ever becomes possible, it will one day become cheap.

Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z]

It might be. Why not stick around to find out? Why not help make it be such a place?

The part that really strikes me as idealistic

Oh no, someone being idealistic!

Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Well you'll probably die in the heat death of the universe or the big crunch, so whatever you do life is finite and therefore valuable. I disagree that its finiteness makes it valuable, however. Life isn't a market commodity where scarcity increases value, it's a personal one-off once-in-a-lifetime offer.
He's begging the question, in the original sense.
Me too! I just opened a doc yesterday and didnt know that it was a new feature.

I just opened a PDF doc yesterday. But it took a lot of time to open those images(or whatever). Looks a lot simpler. I love it!
I built a little app for this...

http://ycfeeds.com/feed/comments-on-item?item=396186
Does anybody know the percentage of coders in these numbers? I doubt the job security/demand for a good programmer has changed at all.
Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them?

For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this.

Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit:

In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves.

You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.
I was lucky enough to get Louie Mantia (http://mantia.me/) before he left Tapulous for Icon Factory - I got charged about $900 for 4 icons (He now charges $1000 per icon due to a non-compete).

I can also recommend Emanuel Sa (http://www.emanuelsa.com/) - He's WAY cheaper and just as good.

Also I'd say David Lanham (http://dlanham.com/) & Fernando Lins (http://www.devixdesign.com/) are among the best as well.
We do know what the mind physically is - it's somewhere less than all the components of a person. It may be non-physical in the sense that it's a pattern of information, but patterns can be represented electronically ... are you suggesting it's supernatural?

no reason to believe the consciousness "sticks around" waiting to reawaken in that corpse.

Yes there is - I sleep each night and wake each day. I don't think consciousness exists separately, I think it's an emergent phenomenon. Note to Eliezer, that means I think it is a complex side effect of a multitude of electrobiochemical processes, not that I think it's magical. If my body is kept without decay and said processes can be restarted, then they will process information starting with existing patterns (what's in memory) and new input from senses and there, but for the fact that this is fictional, I am. Cogito, ergo sum.
100,000 is just a number in "tech" firms, which is a board category. 100,000 is a lot, but not really a lot compare to the current situation of the economy. You should look at how many of those layoffs are strategic, and many of them are just "cutting fats". I assume many company are using the time to cut their fats.
I can't speak much for Constant Contact's control panels and what not.

But what I can tell you is that they're on a mailing list that a lot of postmasters are on, and whenever someone has a problem with one of their clients[1], they're very responsive, usually within a matter of hours (sometimes minutes). And that has, without a doubt, kept them in good graces.

So my point here is twofold:
A. Constant Contact is, at least, a healthy player in the field, and you're likely to get good throughput with them.
B. Don't try to pull any fast ones over these companies, if they don't notice themselves, they'll hear about it very quickly. Make sure you keep your lists clean and you're following every single guideline they give you (and they're usually happy to help you).

[1]. Which happens to any service at some point; they can't exactly hand-vet every mailing that goes through their service.
Earl Grey, Hot! Modern Food Replicators
Reasons why cryonics is dumb:

Life is suffering (Buddha, n B.C.)
Death is void.
Nothing > suffering.

But there's a wall of pain/fear/effort/risk with suicide that keeps people inside life. Once you're dead, you're forced past the wall and it's a simple choice:

more suffering or no suffering?

Immortality by not dieing isn't quite the same option - avoiding old age suffering or going to old age suffering? Easy, being alive and rejuvenated wins.
I used a combination of stock icons and icons done by designers.

For my app:

http://www.icons-icons.com/roma-icons.php <-- looks like Fisher-Price with big, bold, colorful icons. A perfect fit for my target users, and I managed to snaggle them on sale for $25.

For my website:

I originally made my own buttons. They worked, and I gradually iterated them upwards, but I'm ultimately not a designer. When I got the site redone I had both my web designer make some concepts and paid for a dedicated designer to make some concepts and, importantly, give me the components (to allow more mix-and-match fun as I tested which converted best).

My web gal: http://www.gursimran.com
My icon/logo designer: http://www.logosamurai.com/

Looks like they're having web site trouble at the moment. Ahh well, this is why I use freelancers -- if your main provider goes dark, you switch. (I would have to look up the numbers but I think I got everything done for less than $300 in total, which is a pittance next to how much I make on the conversion lift.)
Four Reasons Why Parallel Programs Should Have Serial Semantics
This won't last long. Eventually people will realize they'll have more fun buying the iPod and playing craps instead.
I've always thought this would make a great game show.
There's nothing random involved in this, whereas there is with slot machines. Legally that makes a world of difference.
Homaru Cantu at the Moto restaurant in Chicago does some stuff like this. He offers "fresh squeezed, orange soda" at his place in addition to donut soup and dehydrated peanut butter. Check out this video at Pop!Tech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2iuOf76BSg
> the sun doesn't rise and set on Redmond, WA

I think the Anti-Microsoft bit was actually distracting - it appears central to the issue, but I'd say the actual point was ignorance over free software.

I think it should be focused on informing people of their (ever-expanding) options, rather than bash decisions they've made in the past.
I don’t know much about file sharing business, I don’t use any public system myself; we do own an infrastructure for that. But I have to say looking at your application it look great, I can tell you guys spend a lot of time on it and that you know what you are doing.

This is my two cent advice to you guys: don’t get discourage by negative feedback from HN, read between lines. Take all comment with a positive spirit, critique should be a base for your work ahead. You must find ways to convince more people of the usage of your tool. Focus on converting more people into your cause; sell your product. HN is a tough crowd, but a crowd with experience and good judgment. Take all comments as a call to go back to your drawing board and do more magic.

Good luck guys and keep it up.
It'd be nice to be able to easily follow your favorite commenters as well.

Edit: You can do this with Backtype, but a feature built in to HN would be great.
".... Chromium is similar -- if you build it yourself from the BSD-licensed code, there are no restrictions on use, and no legal agreements to enter into. ..."

Windows only at the moment, but good point.

"... Finally, EULAs are probably not valid, so this is all academic. I would really like to see Google take you to court for using Chrome and not keeping your contact information up to date. WTF. ..."

Just extra legal armour that may or may not be used.
you can't put fb and google in the same category. fb is still surviving on investment capital and frankly could end up in a serious cashcrunch. google has a blank check for hardware. both companies have reason to worry about hardware expenditures, but facebook's is more imminent
I bet it has. No one is immune in a recession; quality, talented people get laid off of the time.
"Ah, thank you for clearing that up. Now, in your copy of the state code, look up 'games of skill' which offer a monetary prize."

At which point they say "Don't be ridiculous. Every thrift store is a 'game of skill' with a 'monetary prize' by your standard. Have fun shutting down Aunt Ruth's House of Lamps and Doilies, pal."
I can't believe this company is offering a scenario where you pay an upfront cost to try to get something for less than it usually sells for.

I haven't seen anybody get away with that since basically every retail outlet in America charged an upfront cost -- time and inconvenience -- for the chance to buy stuff at a discount, on Black Friday. Unprecedented.

I have no idea why measuring certain things in dollars rather than hours or oranges or whatever else throws people off so. If this business freaks you out, and regular retail stores don't, you haven't been thinking hard enough about the latter.
"... In the six decades since Oppenheimer’s warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw? ..."

One way is to remove, restrict study in certain areas of Physics ~ http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/nuketech/index.html
The very bottom should show a massive meteor on a crash course with Earth.
Elevator Pitch Friday: Duck Duck GO, The Hybrid Search Engine
Informatics 1 – Functional Programming Homepage
Same here.
Someone wrote a Web ap that would sort of do this for you, and emit an RSS feed (It think), but it would create an entry for each up or down vote, which was not that useful to me.