skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available

The backend servers were linked. If your request couldn't be fulfilled on one, your search was forwarded to the next server. The total number of files on Napster at its peek was over half a billion files. Further, that picture must have been from a server that just started because the average server had significantly more users/files on it.

Further, Napster users were ripping everything in sight. There were mp3 encodings of old wax cylinders uploaded for goodness sakes.

- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today.

There was an entire curated music website dedicated to music discovery that loaded into the client.

The chat and instant message system allowed people to talk about music which created a massive music-focused community. It was wildly popular.

And don't underestimate browsing. People would search for the one song they were interested in, notice who they were downloading from, browse the other user and then start pulling down their music if they noticed several songs they liked in it. They then could send a message to that user and add them to a friend's list. That was not just music discovery, but friend discovery as well.

- I am pretty sure it was a substring match

The very first versions were substring match when there were maybe 10,000 users. Later version were not and allowed basic boolean queries like term exclusion.

- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible

There was an algorithm on Napster that did network distance biasing. Basically, if you were an AOL user, you'd first get AOL users back when doing a search. If you were an Internet 2 or even @Home user however, your speeds were epic.

* Note: I built and ran the Napster server.
Mozilla Firefox 14.0a1 Nightly on Downloads App
I'd add one more - take goddamn action. No matter how much imagination and how many resources you have, you'll get nothing done if you don't actually start doing something.
The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation (San Francisco)
It's more like a limitation.
Cannabis University
Where In California is the best cannabis university? One cannabis university called, Oaksterdam University, 420 College and the other cannabis university is called, MCC Directory.
>__getattr__(self, name)

> ... This can be useful for catching and redirecting common misspellings ...

I can think of only one good reason to redirect spelling errors, and that's if you are a widely-used library and you want to support both "color" and "colour" (and similar Britishisms). Other than that, you're just asking for a headache.
How Hacker Democracy Works in India
http://imgur.com/HRuWz
Living in Australia may be a prerequisite for becoming a candidate for office. The source linked describes some but not all of the means by which someone who is already a candidate may be disqualified from the election or from such office.
> You expect to get different results from doing the same measurement in the same quantum mechanical system, that's the basis of it.

As it turns out, AE had a problem with that particular point. Hence his "[God] does not play dice" quote.
How'd you get started doing long-form print journalism? Why'd you stop? What are you doing now?
> No, but seriously, who does that today? (aside from one-man operations) And how is this going to help?

People used to write code in assembly and interface directly with the hardware. Then OSes and compilers came and made everything easier for everyone involved. Only a few highly specialized hackers know how to write device drivers and assembly anymore.

I am convinced that in a few years from now (remember I was talking about the future) the majority of developers will be "frontend developers" who know HTML/CSS/JS (or hopefully JS replaced with something more productive). Right now that thought might suck, but imagine how many tools and libraries will be available by then.

> But there are serious obstacles to succeeding with that and I don't see why that has anything to do with the development-side of it.

I am not sure what you are talking about. I am talking about completely decoupling the user interface from the rest of the OS, a little bit like it is the case on the desktop with Linux / BSD and KDE / Gnome. Only that making user interfaces does not require a lot of technical knowledge.

EDIT: Just to clarify. I am talking about a hypothetical future mobile OS not Android or iOS. The way I am seeing this is a little bit like WordPress plugins. There would be a default GUI, but most people would download a custom one. A large number of UIs would be free, but if you want to be hip you need to pay for the latest one. There will be an entire new class of UI designers, just like since a while ago there is a new class of mobile app developers.

EDIT2: The OS itself would be FOSS and the hardware would dead cheap, because it is just a commodity. Eventually it will replace desktops, for instance with a special javascript API to run a virtual machine, which can run a desktop OS on your phone, if you need one, e.g. for development.
Check this: http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=13431
And today, http://imgur.com/HRuWz

If you didn't know HackerStreet India is HackerNews wannabe for India.

The issue is on HackerStreet India, I have been now and then raising my voice against arbitrary down votes for disagreement, editing of submission titles by editors http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=13218 and communication by some members via backchannels on what I should post or not to post (since I have good Karma)

Today I received a threat email from one of the moderators asking me plainly to keep quiet because they were running it much before I was a member and that they will "hell" ban me if I continue such "violations" and challenging me to start a new community like HackerStreet. This is after I posted an Ask question on How to fight spam which the moderator said was off-topic and I countered him as you will see in the disccusion.

I really wanted to show you guys in America and rest of the World how democracy in India works with this example. When you go to vote, you will be told by Thugs whom to vote. If you raise a voice against the mafia with deep political connections, you will be threatened at your door for your life. And if you don't play along with seniors, powerfuls and others, whatever your business may be, you will be outcast and made to repent!
We're working on a web app version of #4, a version of pgAdmin that doesn't look like it's from 2001. Except with support for more databases besides PostgreSQL and with a lot of cool features you can only get from a web-based database admin and dev tool.
I agree, people under-estimate the resources required to render typical web content, and also tend to forget how even on the high end devices that the web experience isn't particularly good.

Similarly there's also been an underestimation about the cost and nature of systems software, any one remember Oracle's 'Raw Iron' (http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/techs-all-time-top-25-f...).

At the same time, isn't it striking how users embrace mobile apps as opposed to paywalls on the web? I wonder how this OS would address this problem?
Sort of related: rpl[1] is an often overlooked tool for replacing text across multiple files. Terser than "perl pie" and a few nice features like simulation mode.

[1] http://www.laffeycomputer.com/rpl.html
Google's failure to respect the several dozen times I've tried to turn off Instant slows me down more. It's like that Sesame Street skit where they ask for directions, but run off partway through the answer.
In Thunderbird, Account Settings -> Server Settings -> Enable Check for new messages every 3600 minutes, disable "Check new messages at start-up". You might also want to remove the get new messages button from the toolbar.
Comment about what? (I'm reading this in a vanity search, 12 days after you posted it; what can I say, boring Saturday).

I'm not sure I even realized we were on Github's site. If you're asking why we're there, you're right: I obviously can't discuss it here.
I don't think much of the case made, but this was interesting:

"Cognitively, the reading process becomes slightly less automatic and slightly more conscious; leaving less room in the conscious part of the mind for actually understanding the text."

In fact, research[0] shows that we understand and remember text better if it's harder-to-read than if it's easy.

[0] http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/diemand-yauman_...
I have to wonder if people's expectations are just a little to high for something that is free. I think a large amount of people complaining about Linux did not use it when it really really sucked (back when Slackware and RedHat were the only options).

Linux is a hackers operating system. When people try to make it into a desktop operating system it starts to suck (Gnome 3).
Console submissions adhere to pre-established, well-known rules. There is a significant amount of certainty regarding what sort of content will pass muster. With iOS, approval is highly dependent on the individual reviewer, who may or may not make the decision based on the purported guidelines released by Apple.
Things have shifted because they've had to. The CIA is in the business of clandestine operations, strongly preferring to support an existing entity and failing that, small operations with extreme amounts of plausible deniability. For one, JA is just the messenger (as you point out, BM is the one who leaked the cables, and that damage has already been done), and JA is/was not even all of WL (although don't tell that to JA..). but really, since he's made it into the public spotlight, direct action is out of the question and JA can only be taken down through an illusion of law and process.
This seems pretty awesome, will try it out. Was under the impression that Theme.Sherlock gave you 'holo everywhere', but maybe this isnt the case..?
There are only two things that you could do that would help me learn Python: create and curate good learning material. When it comes to education, I think the highest value even today is created by making good new content, not more tools.
That's a really good idea. In the meantime you could use jquip which cuts out a lot of the commonly-unused jQ stuff. https://github.com/mythz/jquip
The author didn't even clearly state how Napster '99 smokes Spotify. The only feature that I thought he stated was that Napster had a form of chat and how it could have potentially evolved into a social network.
Awesome! This will help in my learning ruby from Python, thanks!
It doesn't. I was under that impression as well, but it definitely leaves buttons and text inputs the same. This theme vastly improves ABSherlock.
Yes, the title is misleading. It should have read "an entire phone user interface implemented in a browser" which would have been more descriptive.

I love that the mozilla guys have done the legwork of figuring out what APIs were missing in order to do that. That is a nice piece of work.
Facebook
Google
Foursquare
Yelp
Instagram
Readability
Twitter

And that is just off the top of my head.
1. Set Outlook to send/receive every 1440 minutes :-);

2. WinAutomation inside a VM (?);

3. SnagIt;

6. Adobe Device Central;

7. WinAutomation inside a VM (?);

10. Built in browser is great (seriously, how is Safari better?);
Fantastic , I hope it will work for mysql too.

For DB admin the only nice simple tool I've ever found is SQLYog which is Windows only.

PHPMyadmin doesn't have a very nice user experience.

I don't need a massive feature set, just something that allows me to fiddle with testdata easily, define and edit table structure and do things like copy tables, DBs between hosts with a couple of clicks.
ايميل موقت
This is quite cool. I'd love to see other languages. For example, I haven't written Python in a while - it'd be great to have a refresher for it.
Acrobat allows you to embed a subset of the font in the PDF. For a large enough document, most of the glyphs end up embedded anyway, but at least there's no packaged font file that can be installed from the PDF.
Some nuclear plants are designed to be throttled up and down as needed; others are not and can not. Your experience with naval reactors does not generalize to all civilian reactors.
For syntax comparisons to help you go from Python -> Ruby, you can check out http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting
Tried launching something like that with another HN user here, but it never really took off:

http://letmebeta.com
This is something that RMS advocates:

"Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas." [1]

As other commenters have pointed out it is a feature that is present in a lot of email clients. I suspect that the author uses a web based email solution.

[1] http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
I'm pretty sure you're still violating their license by embedding a subset of the glyphs. You're not allowed to embed them at all. If you're going to share documents with HF&J fonts, make sure they've been converted to dumb outlines.
Yeah via Abilene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_Network

.edu to .edu transfer was unbelievably fast back in those days.
I have relatively little hope that it takes longer than a few days/weeks until a wave of seo-deoptimization services hit the SEO market. The incentives for beating "the system" are just too high.
I agree with this 100%. A lot of the music I still listen to today was discovered because of those chat rooms on Napster.

I miss it.
Within the last six months I used a hex editor to diagnose a problem with a PCM streaming solution and generate a "corrected" form of the output to show how my hypothesis was correct.

So I think today's programmers will do just fine.
http://blog.jgc.org.nyud.net/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-mon...

In case its not up...
I agree. What I wrote here was based on that.

I wanted my post to be more akin to a tutorial than a reference. I don't think the data model reference is useful to people who don't know the basics -- the idea was to bridge that gap so that it could be useful.
How To Mobilize Your Blog For Beginners
Show HN: Brickteria - an alternative to the classic brick breaker games
If I had to read code in all one color text I would go absolutely insane. Syntax highlighting has saved me from so many silly keyboard mistakes.
Defining new control structures using C macros
That's my thoughts too. It's a game nobody can win.
No New Xbox Anytime Soon
Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I think the best strategy for me is option (c).

I agree that slide decks suck as a sharing medium (unless you go to the trouble of adding "notes" under each slide, and share that, but then you're better off sharing a different document). Martin Fowler puts it very well in this post: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Slideument.html

I can see how sharing a slide deck would dilute the value of a talk. At the same time, sharing my slides lets me reach more people. They might learn more by watching the talk, but it's a trade-off.

There's also the question of the legality of sharing these slides on websites such as InfoQ or Parleys, where the slides are synchronized with the video. But I guess option (c) could work for these.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...
http://www.parleys.com/#st=5&id=2103&sl=2
Stop writing classes...
I always thought the Napster client was absolutely beautiful and perfect at it's job. I was gobsmacked when I learned it was the author's first project.

Did they ever release the source code?
It'll be up... it's managed by CloudFlare.
Really cool - I've been doing essentially the same thing for some of my apps, but I never got around to covering all the UI components and packaging it up in a library. I don't have time to test it now, but does it come with the Holo versions of Spinners and DatePickers?
Natural languages have syntax highlighting; note the capitalization of proper nouns in English, or better yet all nouns in German, along with capital letters to start sentences. There are various typographical standards, all of which provide syntax highlighting, and it's arguable punctuation serves a related purpose (note the pairing of certain marks in Spanish).

after all you can still read this without it but it takes more effort i think the author may have glossed over the aspects in language because they have faded to background noise if your syntax coloring is a distraction change it if it works dont

(That was surprisingly hard.)
Cyanogen is trying to be manufacturer friendly after market Android OS. It no longer wants to be a hacked version or rouge side of Android.
Can't imagine how I forgot about that: http://www.nomadness.com
You can find his whole story from the bike days to today here.
I have a real desire for a ~ 8.5x11 (or A4, it doesn't really matter I guess) size whiteboard built into my desk right in front of my keyboard. That could probably replace paper for 95% of my ideas. If they could come out with a finer tipped marker, I would be in heaven.
Cool hack, nicely done!
How strange: "Empire" in the subsection heading "The Decline and Fall of the Paper Empire" links to http://www.forbes.com/companies/empire/ for no apparent reason. Perhaps an autolinker run amok?
Understanding Datomic?
Depends. "Worse is Better" used to be one of the most reliable phenomena in the software industry. That would suggest a more open, network-centric, HTML-based interface should win, despite annoyances or bugginess.

But that rule doesn't seem to be holding true for the mobile market.

I don't really understand it. Maybe simplicity, affordance, and marketing are now the important factors, given the kinds of users we are now reaching.

Or, maybe it's Apple's ability to deliver key hardware innovations, years ahead of the competition. (http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/What-would-be-a-good-use-of...). One would think this trend couldn't last, but they do it over and over again.
>When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go.

A "medium" instance is 3.75 GB of ram and 2 computer units (equivalent to one dual core processor). If you know you're going to use this constantly (24x7, or close to it- 8760 hours) then you can take advantage of the reserved instance pricing. At 8760 hours a year, $390 for the reserved pricing and $0.032 an hour you get a price for this server of $670.32 (or $55.86 a month).

The downside is that this does not cover bandwidth. Most datacenters are willing to give you a decent chunk as part of the package (like 2000GB or something), knowing that most people won't use it. Even if you don't count that though Amazon is still a bit pricier- Softlayer sells bandwidth at 0.10/GB (in packs of 1000), while Amazon is at 0.12/GB for the first 10TB (after which it becomes cheaper at $0.08/GB).

The point being, there are many situations in which Amazing is already cheaper- let alone within 25%. The new levels of reserved instances have really evened things out a bit.
The first time I tried it was down. I got some error, maybe its because it was looking for the mobile theme.

FYI, I just received the following:

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

Sorry, we can't open the web page that you requested because the server hosting the web page might be unavailable.

Possible solutions:

- Try again later.

- Contact the web page administrator.

Error Code: 10005
It should be noted that the UI was completely revamped before MWC. A ton has changed since these screenshots.

(Disclosure: I'm a Boot2Gecko hacker for Mozilla)
It does sound odd, but when Chrome for Android was released there was suddenly a lot of talk about how bad the original browser was. But I assume Chrome would fulfill this one.
"buying links"? I'm completely new to this; would you mind explaining what the benefit is of buying links?
Doesn't appear to yet. The author says its still a work in progress, and its great when people contribute.
Another good article on the subject of caring for your introvert: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for...
> create good new learning material and curate good existing material

Great advice there and I totally agree with you. In fact, we are looking into incorporating great Python tutorials in the public domain to supplement our content.

Actually, we took the interactive approach because to people with little background in programming, the biggest deterrence is fear of breaking things on their PC. On iheartpy.com they can easily try out basic commands without that fear.
Know what your friends buy at the store
Did you ever wonder what your friends are buying in the store and curious what cool stores/products are around you..try peeqshare
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peeqshare/id490466534?ls=1&mt=8
Not sure I agree with this.

Syntax highlighting helps me read code very much.
I notice this every time I end up in an SSH session looking at code in some version of nano without it enabled or when reading code on a webpage that is not highlighted.

Our brains are designed (or evolved) to look for patterns in things, colours help this.

Most of the time when I am in code I am not interested in reading the whole thing anyway, I just want to make a quick change to something like, for example the contents of a particular string.

In that example having the string literal inside the quotation marks light up in a different colour makes it much quicker to distinguish it from the rest of the code, the same the comments.

It also makes it much easier to distinguish where function definitions start if the definition is in bold.

Coupled with the fact that it makes it easier to spot spelling errors in keywords since they will not light up the expected colour.

I think I can also spot common patterns of code (like say foreach statements) more quickly because of the the pattern is reflected by the pattern of colours on a line.
It's more than a user interface though. It's a platform for Web applications that let those apps reach all the way down to the full capabilities of the hardware.
Dang... I'm going to go download the NixOS live image, now.
Hmmm :), it's a long story, but I can tell you the gist of it. My bachelor's degree is in math and computer science, but after 9 years in professional software development, I came to realize that it wasn't fulfilling enough. I went back to university and studied medieval history (which proved to be a tremendous help in my job as a journalist) and started working for a small web magazine. After a year of doing that, I began pestering a lot of people, walking the streets of Tel-Aviv with hard copies of my stories that I gave out to any big-name journalist that I happened to bounce into, and eventually I was lucky to get an interview with a magazine editor who hired me as a fact-checker; things started rolling quickly from there. Alongside that I worked on a big personal software project, my reporting sustaining me just barely, and not taxing the math circuits of my brains too much - I needed those for my software. After four years at the magazine, with my software project nearly finished, I realized it was time to either turn it into a business or let it remain an interesting algorithms research. I chose the former, and since January have been putting the finishing touches. I've applied to YC, I'll be launching my startup later this week with an announcement here on HN, and will be releasing a big, and I think very interesting, open-source product (an important component of the main software) later in April. I hope to go back to writing eventually, if only part-time.

Actually, I've learned a lot of interesting things about the startup culture (specifically that of Silicon Valley) from reading HN comments (seriously, it's fascinating). There's probably a story there, one that hasn't been told yet.