skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem is a lot of techies like OS X now, but not the way it's headed.

Lion is enough to make me switch away, and I've been on OS X for a very long time. What's keeping OS X popular now is not its own merits, but that the alternatives are even worse.
Aren't you supposed to keep at least one foot planted when you pivot?

At least when the video comments came out, there was some originality there. Cross-posting is becoming more & more a built-in feature anywhere I'm creating content.
Assuming that 100% unassisted evolution is feasible (an assumption that I personally don't believe in) then the random interactions of basic building blocks within an early primordial soup plus external factors such as temperature, atmosphere, and lightning eventually resulted in random combinations which eventually connected to each other to form proteins and other cell building blocks which eventually formed the first cell.
Ask HN: Do you still listen to mp3?
It feels most people today use services like Grooveshark & Spotify to listen to music. I'm not one of them, because I have accumulated so many mp3 over the years, that I'm very attached and satisfied by my existing library.

So I'm curious, how many of you still use mp3? and how (e.g. phone, CD, online)?
Looking for similar minded individual hackers...
Hello. I have no "special training" in terms of institutional requirements or educational prerequisites. I do not feel like such are necessary in order to define a proper hacker. I believe a hacker is simply defined as an individual who enjoys experimenting with software and hardware for the purposes of exploring new unexplored implementations therein. I do not know of any other individuals that come to mind who embody these concepts but I intend to do everything in my power to search for and communicate with them. I do not have any "formal resume" nor do I feel as if such is important or relevant. I have a significant amount of experience with modifying and hacking operating systems of various devices but I am not going to get into the specific details right now because I do not know if I will encounter anyone of interest here. I am searching for people that are interested in innovative ideas and passionate about creative projects which will change the world. I do not know if these people exist and if so where they are located. I am willing to provide more personal information about myself when and if it becomes necessary. I have limited financial resources but I still direct these toward whatever technological acquisitions I deem relevant to continue advancing my objectives. I strongly believe in piracy, freedom of information, and anti-censorship. I have been with the internet since I was a teenager and I consider it fundamental to my personal identity. I cherish the value of online access and I am vehemently against restriction of data to those who advance the hacker cause. I believe there are very few of us real users left and we must not cease fighting for our rights in the face of authoritarian political opposition. If you are serious about contacting me and discussing these matters please go to my twitter #lvxvria666

Sincerely,
NVM
CityGrid, Google, Yelp Places API Comparison: Request Structure
This gives an idea of the economic activity generated by services like megaupload and what is being removed from the economy by killing the company. Roughly $3.2 million in hosting fees, and could be more if that's just the cost price. Also salaries, over $1 million in hardware, and the various other suppliers. One wonders about the GDP of the recording and movie industries relative to the businesses they're going after.
"They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in."

This is entirely false, and I wish misinformed people would stop parroting it. There's an extremely rigid firewall between the ad side of the company and the search side. People working on search don't even see metrics on how their changes effect ads, let alone make decisions based on them.

When I want change the way ranking works, there's a big stack of statistics I have to collect. None of them involve ads. All of them involve how useful the results are to a user.
How is this different from asking for your Gmail password?
The Iced-Coffee Economy: Why the Cold Stuff Costs More
I was a bit on the fence until the submission to a post (http://blog.untogether.co.uk/post/19740556298/why-are-posts-...) asking about the deletions was also deleted.

Clearly there is no conversation allowed on HN about this bullshit controversy or about HN's removal of these submissions.

The second one bothers me a whole lot more, although both of them are not what I want happening on HN.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commision will beat the rockstar out of them pretty quick.
I think that your clarification and amplification is a very good one overall, but I have a disagreement.

"The fact is that U.S. law enforcement is bound by law (and the Constitution in particular) regardless of whether one is sympathetic to them, and regardless of whether or not legal standards are violated."

However, that's clearly not the only thing that they're bound by: there's an evolving discourse of law, and it's especially evident in the FBI lawyer's statement that many in the law enforcement community have a fundamental conflict - that they want to be Judge Dredd, not Sergeant Joe Friday. Law enforcement officers are bound by multiple and conflicting directives, and that means that they have no choice but to choose, to exercise discretion about which of those is most important. That's normal for most professions, but I argue that we should hold to far higher standards the people who get to legally use force.

My favorite example is micro-scale: speeding isn't actually very dangerous among the things you can get ticketed for while driving, but it makes up the lion's share of the tickets handed out because it's easy to enforce. You can point to a specific number from a mechanical device and say "there: that proves that this person was speeding." Other driving behaviors, often more dangerous, can't be so directly quantified, and so are more of a pain in the ass to enforce - and are enforced less. The conflicting directives result in a sub-optimal outcome.

Law enforcement officers in the US are not bad people: they're normal people, like you'd expect. The problem is that when you give normal people power without accountability, evil results. As the FBI shows in the linked article, they vigorously resist any effort at making them accountable - which is why it's so critical to heap on the accountability. Further, bringing me back to agreeing with you, the standards that they're bound by and accountable to, should be as clear as possible. The fuzz in the directives is part of the expanding power of law enforcement agencies, and we should acknowledge and actively work to counter that tendency towards expanding power without expanding accountability.
Seeking Contrast
I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that Facebook's description of "The Hacker Way" when they filed their IPO helped a bit to give it a positive connotation.
Isn't that just saying that LiberWriter is a more successful product than Hecl? I mean, if Google or whoever wanted to base a service on Hecl, they would have hired you, right? My analogy was to startup funding, not sales, but I think it still holds.

Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source projects.
They do have a way of setting up project pages: http://pages.github.com/

And each project has a download list which can contain official releases, or you can just link to a tag as a zip download. Github also has a pretty decent issue tracker and wiki.
The article also mentions that they need to hold onto the data because it may be used as evidence in the court case.
"...sharing your Facebook password is illegal."

Illegal is the wrong word for it. It's not illegal, it's a violation of the Facebook TOS - a matter for at most a civil (and not criminal) court.
Unleash the power of HTML 5 Canvas for gaming – Part 1
Aside: "per se". It's Latin.
Senate passes CROWDFUND act 73-26
Open sourcing client work. Good idea or bad idea?
I have a consulting company and I've been considering open sourcing all of our work moving forward. Our contracts state that we retain copyrights and license the code out to the client, so I don't think there's any legal reason why this couldn't occur.

I'm wondering if others do the same thing, and what the big negatives that I'm not thinking of could be.
I'd say quite the opposite. It's normal and expected to be a member of multiple social networks.

I'd wonder what kind of IT person doesn't have an account with facebook, twitter, a personal domain, etc.

Nice ludditism, though.
I have to agree because I like Snow Leopard better than Lion and have not made the switch yet because of that. However I don't think this is a sign that OS X is endemic. I still have hope that Lion is just an ill planned stop on the OS X progression.
Wouldn't the MIT/X11 license be a good choice for this situation? It's fairly liberally used, permissive, and has a similar anti-endorsement clause.
I take a guess and predict that many of us mortals would have taken a chance.

This is the worst lead sentence from any article I have seen on HN.
Help me out with the math here:

1 terabyte costs them $128.41 per year, right?

Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the Reduced Redundancy Storage.

The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is $0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB.

If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3 copies of each file), is $162.51 per TB.

So, if I'm doing this right, as long as their HDs last at least 15 months, on average, they have triple-redundancy, and the cheapest price ratio for consumer hardware. And I'm not even counting their power, network, cooling, or puny humans to maintain it all. That means their HDs, if they were made out of the cheapest parts I could find, would have to last significantly longer than 15 months, on average.

They're actually doing really good on price, if you ask me.

Or am I missing something obvious, or doing the math horribly wrong?
And I think you're overestimating that number. As far as I know, about as many programmers use Linux as OS X, and Windows still dominates even among programmers. For example, the recent StackOverflow survey--probably fairly indicative of programmers in general--found that about 20% of the respondents used Linux and OS X with the rest on various versions of Windows[1]. As far as my own experience goes, about as many of my CS friends use Linux as Windows, with a slightly smaller number using OS X. But here, I suspect, there is some serious selection bias.

[1]: https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=2RYrV_2bFw2aZ2RfedWH...
These sites wouldn't be a problem except that Google inadvertently promotes them in search results---otherwise, they would be the tree falling in an empty forest and no one would bother creating them. Google promotes them because their algorithms are no better at reading content than the spam sites are at writing content (worse, actually, because at least the spammers can leverage existing human-produced content whereas Google has a harder time leveraging existing human comprehension). Spam in Google's results will continue to get worse until Google's search engine can actually reason on a par with humans, at which point we'll have reached the goal of strong AI.
Steven Bernstein a crook and a freak of nature
Gambling with the devil: A/B tests done right
Who is surprised by this "revelation"? The only less surprising thing would be Theo or RMS saying no...
To know whether it was the right decision or wrong decision would require knowledge of Torvalds decision making framework.

Clearly, the personal offer from Jobs himself makes it apparent that both sides knew that money was not the motivating factor for Linus otherwise a guy in a suit with a briefcase full of cash would have sufficed and a personal call would have been unnecessary.

I'm not sure what the veneration about working at Apple is all about, it's a company, you give them your time, they give you some money. Big deal. If one wants to work at a company that makes products used by billions of people I'd suggest a ball bearing factory.

The reality of working at a company with 10,000 engineers is that you'll probably spend your time writing the perfect unit test for the checkbox on the reminder app. If you really want to be the next Steve Wozniak you're going to have to start in your garage.
I hope more people take note of the absurdity of the current software patent system because of this fight.
My mother was office staff at a nuclear plant for a number of years in the late 80s/early 90s (and for reasons passing understanding, received training as some sort of emergency/backup operator, despite making very clear that in an emergency, she'd be driving away as quickly as possible). From what she tells me, former US Navy officers and enlisted were absolutely everywhere, as both employees and NRC personnel.
The most important thing to look for is your own willingness to be employee #1 and not a founder.

Your role is different, often radically.
We are looking into other verticals as well, but want to stay focused at first and see what people find useful. Build lean and pivot from there. Thanks for your thoughts!
Comments which are voted down are often misunderstood. More often then not, those comments consist just of a single sentence. A few days ago I made a comment, which had 3 downvotes, however the 3 posts where I explained myself had 15 upvotes in total. I think it's great that HN has this feedback mechanism that sometimes lacks in real life (especially in non face-to-face conversations).
sneaky how he rips off the wired article by saying "apparently...this and that..". We are seeing too much of this kind of journalism lately. You see a catchy article somewhere then rewrite it by saying "so and so reported this. Apparently they found out that...
For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software, I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my early planning here: https://github.com/SirDinosaur/hackercoop, and I'd greatly appreciate any questions, comments, critiques on how to make my / our dream possible.
High Speed Touch Screens - Microsoft Labs
I use pinboard. It's really good.
depends on sector when I used to work in hydrodynamics (in teh nuclear engineering section) it was mostly lab coats jeans and wellies.
That's a pretty smart way to deal with the problem. Yahoo is not a patent troll in the sense that it has no assets of its own to lose. It is far more vulnerable to this sort of counterattack than, say, Intellectual Ventures.
Try hiring a Hadoop or Machine Learning Architect, Ruby dev are easier trust me!
How do you solve taxes?
At one of my past jobs, the threshold for "should I commit this?" was "does it compile?". The rationale was that if there were problems with it, they'd be caught during "acceptance testing" (which was probably 6 months down the road). I didn't stick around for very long...
There's a lot of young talent out there - enrollment basically hockey-sticked while I was studying nuclear engineering from '06-'10. Their best bet is probably finding the right kind of phD student, because the real hot-shots from Westinghouse and GE can make more money striking out as consultants.

I personally decided to get out of nuclear engineering and into physics, but best of luck to these guys and gals.
I see, the answer then is straight forward. You have interpreted the lively discussion as a signal that something is appropriate for HN, this is not the case. There are many things for which readers here would engage in lively discussions that are entirely outside the 'appropriateness' definitions.

A lively discussion only signals that many HN readers hold an opinion on the topic that is strong enough to relate, but that signal is perpendicular to a signal that would indicate appropriateness.
Mind if I ask what you don't like? I upgraded a few months ago, and while I had to turn a few annoying bits off, it's overall much better than Snow Leopard.
This. The same thing happened with the Boston Jam thing, and many other cases.
For the interested reader - Linus' book "Just for fun" has a pretty detailed account of his meeting with Steve Jobs.
Here are some previous submissions of this or related items:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604148 <- Many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639049

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671845

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524122

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878511

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124871

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3561007
Researchers may have discovered how memories are encoded in the brain
Correct, but perhaps after this ends, MegaUpload could return the legitimate files. I don't expect the government to do the same. And I very, very much do not expect the MPAA to do the same.
Immigration Law for Startups in NYC
The seven business slids for startups
There's enormous value in having 60 years of data on the neutron irradiation properties and mechanical failure modes of a material. An "obsolete" design is also a well-understood one, and you can't afford to fail fast and often in the nuclear industry.
Unwitting puppets perhaps, but I doubt the people of the FBI want very much to be dealing with copyright drama. That's like fixing bugs in form code to them. It must feel like a complete waste of their time and talent.
There's nothing like wading through sewage to find the occasional lost gem. Personally, I'm increasingly finding that the ROI in reading comments is close to zero.
Some third party browsers allow you to change the user agent; AFAIK this is the only way to avoid this.
Considering Job's obsession to build closed systems that goes far beyond just "closed source" this should have been a trivial decision for Linus. As described in the book, Job even insisted to use non-standard screws so owners and hackers couldn't open the box using standard tools.
Not stupid at all. Yes, as I remember it, this was pretty much all covered in a single, 14-week semester.
The majority of AECL (the CANDU reactor team) is un- or under employed after the buyout from the Canadian government - that's an entire workforce to tap into.
Path like navigation controller for iOS
What times you are talking about? Professional creators - like composers, poets, etc. - existed long before Berne Convention. Of course, then conditions were different than they are now - J.S. Bach had to write a new cantata every week as the condition of his employment, and also teach Latin and singing to the young. Of course, what was good enough for J.S. Bach is definitely can not be good enough for a person named something like "Jay-Z" or "50 Cent", as the latters' art is much more valuable for the society than Bach's.

As for serving Powers That Be - most of the creative people do it right now, only Powers changed. Some time ago, most disposable income was in the hands of aristocracy and later rich merchants. So they were served. Now due to huge technological advances pretty much everybody has disposable income - so artists cater to everybody. Some of them still cater only to the richest, of course - everybody has his niche. But except for the distribution of the disposable income, not much changed.
It's also a meaningless statement from the sidelines. Just where are all of these outlandish reactor designs coming from, anyways? Oh, right. Academia. This isn't a case of a hidebound academia and a fantastically innovative private sector. Really, the opposite is true.
Let's rephrase the question: how do we solve taxes?
I had to wikipedia Theo (founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt
Ten Protips on Avoiding Hackathon Fail
Building Facebook collages with jQuery and CSS- Framous
It's 99% that I hate (and I don't use that lightly) them screwing up Expose (to me this was the OS X killer feature on laptops) and the changes in scrolling. 1% is the unwelcome increase in skeuomorphism.

Generally I don't get on with iOS either, so iOSification is a trend I'm not into. I accept that may not be a popular opinion, but there we are.
I have to agree with pagekalisedown, onSwipe is a scourge that needs to be destroyed. If you insist on using it to the detriment of your readers, then please please please give us the ability to turn it off easily and have it never come back on.
Also a general note to all web devs: my iPad now has more resolution than any of your monitors, DO NOT force me to view your 'optimized for mobile' site if I dont want to. otherwise I will stop visiting your sites.
Thanks!
For one, the other companies have other redeeming features: Microsoft has MSR, Google also does some research as well as a lot of open source stuff and IBM also does good research. Even Facebook contributes more to the community at large and the state of the art, as far as I know. All that Apple does is mostly produce overrated products in secrecy.

Apple is also very anti-freedom in the GNU sense, and have horrible policies on iOS and their app store. They really treat developers working on their platform poorly, and actively work against letting their customers have alternatives. (Jailbreaking shouldn't even be necessary!)

However, the really worst thing is how popular they are. Their draconian policies on iOS have pushed other companies--like Microsoft--to emulate that on their own problems; as far as I know, Windows Phone is almost as locked down as iOS. So Apple is at a weird confluence of evil and popular support, which is much more dangerous than evil by itself (this is why they are more worrisome than e.g. Oracle or even Microsoft). Their worst effect is cultural--making the nonsense around third-party iOS programs seem reasonable.

If Linux dominated the market, you would be free to use it however you like. If iOS dominated the market, you'd have to play by Apple's rules--getting a developer account, going through their review process... And even OS X is going in this direction--you have to deal with Apple to get your code signed, and there are no alternatives.

In a lot of ways, Apple is worse than Microsoft in its heyday; their only saving grace is their small market share--thankfully, Apple does not enjoy a monopoly anywhere or even a large share of the desktop market. Still, ignoring scale, they really are worse than Microsoft was; the scale is the reason they get away with all the things Microsoft couldn't (like standard web browsers or music players).
Eh, what? I responded to:

> GCC (which is arguably more vulnerable to patent issues)

And that statement certainly implies that A is _more_ vulnerable than B which promted me to ask what would make it _more_ vulnerable as I can't see in what way that would be true.
Sparrow for Calendar on iOS?
I am looking for a calendar application on iOS that approaches Google Calendar the same way Sparrow has approached Gmail, as in better than the default calendar app. Is there something like this?
I did the search from my home computer. The Eames chair ads are showing up not only at home, but on my computer at work as well. Seeing how I've never logged into any Google property at work, I find that interesting.