skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?
Often, I find great stories and comments I enjoy here and plan to return to see more comments, but when I get back to the site -- I completely forget.

Do any of you have a simple technique (or even a script) for keeping an eye on posts you enjoy?
It's a really well-written and well-researched article.... been a while since I've been this impressed by a Coding Horror article's fleshing out the details and stuff! :)

Very interesting read... and ingenious idea.
Wow, you're a genius. Facebook should hire you.
YouTube has video / flickr has photos
* then again yahoo had search :) good luck
http://www.cloudfireit.com/help/general.html

not sure if this is a design issue but from "Who did you build CloudFire for?" to "Do people that want to access my media need to download anything?" is indented and bolded. While from "Do people need a login to access my media?" to "I have a ton of stuff, will my broadband connection be enough?" is not indented and displaying regular font size.
yeah, i vote them up.
there's a link in your profile that shows your saved stuff.
The issue with DIY is that you can easily get black listed by a major ISP. If enough idiots mark your "Welcome to MyService.com" as spam, you are screwed.

Once done, nobody at that ISP is going to get your mail.

That's the advantage big players like aweber have, they can pick up the phone and work out issues like this with an ISP.

BTW, its worth subscribing to campaignmonitor to actually see which ISPs are nuking you globally.
I make a post in it, then check on my "threads" page (and my post's parent) every now and then. I'm doing it now, for example.
one of those logos had what seemed the default so background in the '0' that was scary to me till I read that the image would cHange depending on his message, seemed kinda cool - but a brand need to be consistent...
http://industrymailout.com is my vote. We use them quite a bit for numerous clients and haven't had any problems. Anything not present in their back end, they've built in. Anywhere from 1000 - 35000 mails without a hitch and an API.
I'm relatively new here, so thanks for the tip! I consider myself very science-oriented and I dislike religion. I didn't even realize my comment might be viewed as going "against the naturalistic worldview", but now I know better. :)
Ask YC: Which custom icon designers do you use for your startup?
Which custom icon design company/freelancer do you use for your startup? Not logo designs but icons.

I personally like clean icons like the Fugue set (www.pinvoke.com) or the Silk icon set (www.famfamfam.com). But neither of these designers is available for freelancing projects!
Tonight, a BigOven, and Me (so poetically)
The Facebook Programming Environment Contest
I use mailchimp since wayback and I like them. The later versions are really robust, but i don't think they have an api. Sounds like you want less of a SaaS?
You make an interesting point, analogous to building an immune system slowly from small diseases, so one big disease can't kill you or an entire population. Similarly, small-time malware over the years has made us stronger against major internet attacks by governments or mafias. However, it's a risky path - from what I've read China's firewall has enough holes for business to get by with annoyances, but it is very effective at keeping most people from learning what they shouldn't.
Sage code:

plot = point2d((0,0))
for k in primes_first_n(500):
r = sqrt(k)
theta = sqrt(k) * 2*pi
plot += point2d((r * cos(theta), r * sin(theta)))
plot
Reasons why cryonics is dumb:

- First off, there's a close to zero chance of a successful revival. Pretty much all of the major problems with thawing (like, let's rebuild your severely damaged brain) are pushed off onto future generations to solve. Not to mention curing whatever killed you in the first place. But let's pretend the future is magic, and this can work...

- Who pays for this? And no, I'm not talking about the freezing. The article presumes we can just use life insurance to pay for cryonics (and not say, to support your presently alive loved ones). But who pays for your future miraculous revival? Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. Not to mention all the medical care you'd need for recovery (and don't forget about all those people who just froze their heads, they'll need whole new bodies!). 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? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?

- The part that really strikes me as idealistic and naive about the article though, is the idea that death is "not part of the plan". And I thought we were being unrealistic about the future when they could rebuild your brain. So now everyone lives forever? That doesn't seem very sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Conclusion: The present is yours to do with what you like, and the future may or may not ever get here. Invest in today.
I must say, Facebook does a lot of interesting work. Things that hardcore engineers would definitely enjoy doing.

But also things I would hate to support.

For instance, I would NEVER want to have to support making a one-off change to MySQL as Facebook has done, to enable them to open a new data center (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=23844338919&id=...). What happens when MySQL is updated? They can no longer just pull the latest version. They have to pull the source, modify it appropriately, test, and then deploy. And if there are bugs, things could get very tricky, very fast.

And this memcached scaling seems like another example. Really cool concept, changing many low-level Linux things. But, really, do they want to be in the business of supporting those things? I wouldn't.

I realize they have massive scale. And I realize that at massive scale, standard solutions may not work. But perhaps they should find ways to do things at a slightly higher level, in a layer they fully control. This may also allow them to focus more on their core competencies and not waste precious developer time.

UPDATE: To make matters worse, from a mail on the memcached mailing list about this post:

<quote>

I think the results speak for themselves, but I don't know that a
merge can actually occur.

The tree the published is entirely unrelated from the trees the rest
of us are working on. There's no common ancestry or even similar
directory layout. As published, it sort of puts us in a position to
either reimplement everyone else's work, or reimplement the facebook
work.

If anyone at facebook is listening, is it possible at all to add
this work onto the codebase where everyone else has been working?
We've got a lot of bug fixes and features we'd really like to not
throw away here:

http://github.com/dustin/memcached/tree/rewritten-bin

</quote>
I also work something similar (three days a week). I recommend it highly. This year has been one of the most productive of my life.

This quote is nice:

"Perhaps I am more than usually jealous of my freedom. I feel that my connections with and obligations to society are at present very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which I am serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful, and only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage."

H. Thoreau
10 January, 1851

More here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2007/12/18/in-which-our-protago...
Uhhh.. neither? Measuring it changes the outcome. Knowing when I'm going to die is as bad as believing I won't.
when you feel like your not.
But did those logos carry meaning right from the start or was that brand recognition built over time? What's interesting about the Obama logo is that it's instantly evocative of a message without needing years of branding, yet it still manages to be super simple.
Blatant is not exactly the right word to describe the situation here.

http://tinyurl.com/5mw2ms
This is...umm...wholly opinion without evidence.

The argument being made is basically: "OOP is easy because it is easy".

I happen to find many aspects of OOP quite unintuitive for almost every class of problem I've ever tackled, beyond the classic academic examples (colors, animals, elevators, etc.). I'm almost always more focused on what my program is "doing" (functions) rather than what my program is "being" (objects).

So, because the author provided no evidence beyond his opinion, I'm going to effectively refute the premise with this devastating blow:

Object Oriented Programming is harder than Functional Programming.
This is online gambling. Isn't that already legally problematic?
I can't be bothered to upload. It's a problem, but personally, I'd be worried about security implications of sharing a folder on my hardrive with a webservice?

I like your presentation. Very clean. on the Features page, I think changing the itunes/iphoto screens to a computer + photos illustration would go futher in saying 'straight from your drive' to the web.

Good luck
Having just written an integration into it, I can assure you MailChimp has an excellent API: http://www.mailchimp.com/api/

It's far superior to Constant Contact's API, which consists of two methods: subscribe and unsubscribe (last time I checked anyway).
Philosopher's assume words have meaning this is the root of all their failings.
The problem of course is that naturalism has it's own limit or else it too becomes dogmaticism. There's stuff we just can't know from empirical observation. Indeed, I'd argue the question "why" has a genesis just beyond rational thought. Empiricism might help to explain away those urges but I don't see how it will ever address their origin.
PowerShell ABC's - A is for Arithmetic Operators
Even simpler. You read a book, you shelve it in your home library. A new shelf/section every year.
Loopt for Android... with background location!
I’m talking about how much the logo alone by itself communicates. Lets see,

1.The ‘O’ symbolizing Obama.
2.The colors of the flag.
3.The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity.
4.The sunrise image aligning with the ‘hope’ and ‘new start’ campaign themes.
5.The horizon, indicating the future.

Just a few that came to mind. Does the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes or the McDonalds arches symbolically convey nearly as much?
I find it interesting that there's a not-small class of atheists who, believing they face the horror of annihilation, are driven to believe in things that are just as irrational as traditional religion-- mind uploading, cryonics, singularity, etc.

I don't know if there's an existence after death, though I think there probably is one, and I consider myself lucky to believe this, for if I'm wrong, I'll never know. What's horrible about annihilation/nonexistence isn't any experience of it-- there is none, by definition-- but the rather hideous shadow the prospect, were it true, would cast over life.
http://sailthru.com (great APIs) and we use http://campaignmonitor.com for our newsletters.
Perhaps but in the marginal case (Ie. for a company which is just on the edge of using a FOSS product), this could screw everybody over.
IPod Nano Auto Mount 
ipod Nano Auto Mount by Speck FITS ANY CAR. This nano auto mount fits both 2 and 4 gb ipod nano's.
" ... here are texts (the Vedas) that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that basically state as fact the very stuff people are discovering today. "

There's a huge difference between a broad claim to there being things smaller than we can see and specifically describing these things ands how they interact.
Only if they're clueless enough to not understanding the licensing. If you're basing your business on something, you should understand how it works, licensing included. It's really not all that difficult, and if you have doubts, there are tons of people you can ask for help. I've done a bit of that kind of work for pay in the past, although I obviously avoid actual 'legal' questions. I wouldn't mind getting more, but I don't think that it's that common, as it's just not that hard to understand, and there are tons of people who will answer questions for free.
Ignorance is fine. It's trying to force your ignorance on others (like that teacher did) that's bad. If you don't understand the issue, don't forcibly confiscate the free software and yell at people.

I don't understand (many aspects of) biology. So, I don't go confiscating biology textbooks, claiming they are full of lies.
i make use of fugue, silk, as well as aesthetica (http://dryicons.com) and function (http://www.wefunction.com) sets. all free, although i don't know if the latter two are available for work.
I usually just wait for the RSS feed to re-announce it later on and remind me, but I like your method better. ;)
I love the demo but my small 4mg PDF which I converted to ipaper runs really slow on my site.
"... To summarize: children, robots and anonymous people are now welcome, you don't have to worry about keeping your mouth shut and there's no longer a method for terminating your relationship with Google described in the document ..."

Don't usually post rww posts but this one is worth reading for the changes in the Chrome EULA ~ http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_text.html Do other browsers have EULA agreements? I'm sure IE has (Is it as restrictive?). What about Mozilla and other free source browsers?
I hate paying someone else to deliver my email. It just seems crappy. So, in that spirit:

Set up a server with postfix. Don't to this on EC2. Many just blacklist those IPs. Implement DKIM. It isn't too difficult and if you just google for a how to there are plenty. That way, the messages are signed and nice. I would avoid SPF. A lot more people have forwarding addresses now and most forwarding servers don't play nice with SPF and that causes mail to get rejected.

Most importantly, make it very obvious how to stop getting the emails with one click. Users hate messages they can't easily stop. Don't hide it thinking that you'll convince some to stay receiving. They'll send you to SPAM and that's the end of your email server. Make it one click, make it all messages, don't ask for passwords, don't ask for email addresses, nothing. One click opt-out. Anything else and, well, you deserve getting dumped in the SPAM folder.

EDIT: almost forgot, make the address go to a real mailbox if someone replies. Most of the time, the reply will be "take me off". Just click the link from their message and be done with it. Don't tell them how, just do it. It takes less time and makes them happier.
Lets see...

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Probability of revival: >0

Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity.

So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics.

Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people.

What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim.

Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.
~0.05% closer.
The PageRank distribution for a simple model of the web
Ah, cool, I didn't know up-voting plopped them in that area.

The downside is that I like to up-vote some posts, but don't necessary want to follow the on-going conversation.
Yes: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Google: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81126...
Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/

I did not double check to make sure that it's exactly what we're talking about, simply trying to help. :)
leave it open in a tab, refresh later.
Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors
And computers only need how much RAM? Come now. Let the future folk figure out how to deal with my head on a platter. I'm just happy that I can finally get the internet on my cell phone.

Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone?

Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember.

Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow.

Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.
Please, sir, what's history?
I guess what you're saying is how much communication was intended for the logo when it was designed, correct?

A logo doesn't communicate anything "by itself" but its empirical nature (text, colors, shape etc.) without branding.

You wouldn't intrinsically know those 5 things having never seen the Obama logo, in the same way you'd simply see the McDonalds arches as a yellow "M".
Tech Layoffs Surge Past 100,000
Aweber.com
We enhance open source software for use on our platform.

We'd love to get our changes into upstream, but it isn't always easy to make the time for that. As you say, all kinds of issues are raised by having our own variant, but fundamentally, if we need to fix (or add) something, we need to do it.

Merging from upstream is just merging. It's a pain and a cost, but we can choose when to do it (largely) and if it's too painful then we can spend the time to merge up.
> Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?
Vertical response or streamsend are both good.
YouTube Grows - But Loses Market Share
yeah, i wasn't trying to dispute your main claim, I just miss CLs argument types when I'm in other languages so it jumped out at me.
Wow, I'm slow or it took me at least a minute to figure out what the heck your service is doing.

I think you may want to play with your slugline:

"Tired of uploading your photos to Flickr to share pics with your friends and family? With Cloudfire, you'll never ever have to do it again. Here's why: the second a photo arrives in iPhoto, it's instantly streamed to web for anyone to see."

Not tight enough, but I get what it does reading that. (I know you do more than iPhoto, but it may click better for some folks.)

BTW, I'm not sure if I'm being a douche by saying this, but I don't prefer women's voices or Indian voices on screencasts. I prefer the British/American male accent. (My good buddy in Toronto is Indian, so I think I get a little latitude on calling out your accent.)
Somewhat related: They made a WarGames sequel. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

I don't know of any hacker-related movies specifically, but I'd note a few sci-fi movies that inspired technological creativity: Flubber (the hovering robot), I Robot, Ironman. Also Futurama, in a somewhat different way.
This is like running a casino. People that play know the odds are against them. They still play. It's about the fun/excitment, the possibility that YOU could beat the odds.

trading the stock market has negative expectancy as well, if you count in trading costs (against just owning the index like the S&P 500 or the MSCI world, with almost no trading costs) Is running the NYSE immoral?
I do. I heard in HS that some colleges asked for a list of what you'd read in the last year, so I started keeping track, and never stopped.

The problem for me is that I rarely read books cover to cover anymore. Novels, yes, but you wouldn't read Gibbon that way.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html

http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/SafariWindows.pdf
Nice use of a confusing title to get me to click. At first I thought some reporter named James Hamilton, was saying that Microsoft was heading for (buying) Amazon. At that point I finally believed that MSFT may not buy Yahoo! and my ulcer went away.

Once I actually saw the article, my ulcer came back. (been employed at y! since MSFT rumors ramped up in spring 2007.
Really, from what anecdotal evidence I've seen, the ability to deal with things abstractly is crucial. Moreover, it has seemed to me that the ability to maintain multiple abstractions and switch between them is also crucial. Note that this isn't "inconsistency" (to borrow the article's terminology), but rather an awareness of context.

This is precisely why I find that the hardest programming language to learn is your second. To learn the first, you just memorize some arbitrary rules. To learn the second, you must develop abstractions for both, and realize how they differ.
I suspected as much. So the headline "Moon closest since 1993" becomes "Moon .05% closer than last year." This example explains a lot of what's wrong with the press. Their problems are deeper than a broken business model.
My co-worker wrote about the genius of the Obama campaign logo earlier this year:

http://www.herecomesthescience.com/2008/02/06/the-genius-of-...

He shows the other campaign logos for comparison and it's pretty amazing how similar the other logos look to each other.
without needing years of branding

Both parties stuffed "years" of branding effort into less time through an incessant and overwhelming campaign effort.

From the Obama camp, the "O" logo was literally unavoidable... TV ads, magnets of all types, shirts, pins, flags, posters, lawn-spam, the list goes on. If any company had that amount of time, money, and insane level of word of mouth, they'd be just as well branded.
I think this is brilliant. We need more competition on the battery front. We are in 2008 using technology that is basically the same as 1808. Intel is all about serious research.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, more power to you, but there's a lot to be said for comparative advantage. Spending a bunch of time on a DIY setup risks being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
I feel that the video is way too long for a "quick tour". After watching bullet points slowly load for the first 30 seconds, I turned it off.

While inquiring HN minds may watch all 4 min, I doubt most users will. I recommend a 30 second teaser which gets the message across, and turn the rest into a how-to video which users can watch if they need help. The UI/UX of the site seems pretty simple, so I don't think people will need a walk through unless they're really dense.

Also the layout on http://www.cloudfireit.com/what_is_cloudfire.html is pretty off balance. Hurts my eyes!

That being said, I like the idea and I'll be signing up for the free trial :)
How is that confusing? I read it the same way you did. The title is straight up misleading.
oh yea? Where?
Ask YC: what do you use for graphic design?
Question for you web startup developers: what tool(s) do you use to do your graphics design (logos, buttons, form elements, etc.) For YC startups in particular a lot of them seem to have a very similar graphical look-and-feel which makes me think that there's one graphical design tool for the web out there that all the cool kids are using nowadays. What is it?