skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been around the block using these! Springpad, remember the milk, wunderlust, evernote, onenote, outlook tasks, I could go on and on.

i. I carry around a real notepad for quick notes. I fill up about 1 every 6 months, sometimes I take quick notes on iOS Notes app.
ii. Short term TODO's I email to myself and flag important.
iii. Daily stuff goes in Notepad or Sticky notes on my desktop, open all day, synced in dropbox.
iv. Long term stuff goes in Google Tasks under different categories, and relevant web links to those goes in it's corresponding folder in chrome, synced across browsers.
I assure you that there are lots of wealthy people who reinvest their money into more businesses, so I'm not sure of the value of your thought experiment. There seem to be fewer wealthy people giving half their fortune to charity. Not a fan of real-world experiments?
Actually there is a reasonable alternative: Don't live in cities that fail to provide a reasonable alternative. A car is only a reasonable alternative in rural areas and as a mode of inter-city transport.
I'll add to your question with another question, I don't mean to hijack your thread, but I think it is relevant.

Is there such thing as a "great mobile programmer" vs. a "great web programmer"? My thinking is that a great programmer is a great programmer. It isn't the way they approach a language, toolset or technology as much as it is how they approach and manage what they are developing.

But that is just my perspective, I could be wrong.

On the mobile first, web second, I think Fred Wilson may be correct in the target device, but I don't think that mobile should mean native in the early stages, as native development (from my understanding) does not have the ability to run a/b tests, quick iterations, fixes (due to app store approvals), etc.
Everything you said in your comment supports what I said. If there is any non-zero effect attributable to the beliefs of the person administering the drug, then it is 100% correct to say that how well a drug works depends on how much the person administering it believes it will work, regardless of whether the difference in outcomes is enormous or tiny.
What's the speed like? Tor on my laptop ranges from slow to unusable; I assume the same is true of the iOS app?
FAT32 might need a license. I have an alternative and will just remove it.

I'm in jail and nothing goes in or out--so fuck-it.

The LZW compression was patented. I think it expired.

I was confused on patents and copyrights. I got info from Linux on IDE drives, but those are copyrighted, not patented. I got port numbers and my initial interface info. I used to argue Linux did not invent the IO port register spec. That's not even necessary -- it's a copyright not a patent.

God says...
C:\Text\YANKEE.TXT

s always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly.
The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so
I must just simply paralyze them--nothing short of that would
answer. You see, I was "bluffing" that last time in the field;
it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion,
if I gave them a chance. So I must not give them time; and I didn't.

I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where
any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standi
I'd never considered that this "old style" of keyboard could be more pleasant to type on that new slim ones - shame about the price tag though
The Age of Excellence
Not sure if you're still monitoring this thread [no HN notifications, eh?], but here's my question:

My get_username() function, say I have this code:

var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
username = get_username();
res.writeHead(200);
res.write("<html>");
res.write("You are " + username);
res.end("bye");

This obviously won't work, res.end() gets fired long before my DB query in get_username() finishes. How else would I accomplish what I'm trying to do here other than putting my response stuff in the DB query's callback function?

<Sorry for the newb question, buy what I'm doing: having the response generated inside of the query's callback, seems to be the way most of these node tutorials suggest.>
Neul's product literature says that they do download the available frequency database, though they imply it's their own copy.

The product literature also mentions the FCC often, so I think they're targeting the US.
>I am just saying, in terms of societal net benefit, we are probably much better off if our most successful investors continue investing in more businesses rather than charities. Not a fan of thought experiments?

Exactly, WE. Thing is, there are millions of people that aren't included in that "we" and the benefits they get (i.e. saving lives) FAR outweights the benefits we'd get.
This is partly because the most popular distro (ubuntu) has some pretty stupid defaults.

For example:

Default install will not give you flash support or support for codecs like WMV.

Default fonts are enormous

If you have an Nvidia/ATI graphics card you will not get a proper driver unless you know how to specifically install it.
That's my point: if you want them to charge less, the billing for this case is not automated (and is thus much more expensive).
nah they're just saying that they think social is an important aspect of search, and messaging out to the world in preparation for integrating social everywhere.

then when regulators come calling about unfair search + social integration (assuming they make some inroads over time), they have a story already cooking, and a defense that social IS part of search, that goog's mission DOES involve social aspects.
Interesting take on it - I think he sums up my own views far more elegantly than I have been able to so far.

I think the notion of the bouquet is quite apt; the huge number of disparate google products are not something that can be made social with a simple update. In order to be so, they have to be completely re-imagined. Google+ as a social network was a good start (with circles and hangouts) but still was trying to shoehorn the social experience into the same google experience context.
I would have liked to have seen mention of this while loop instead of the index-based one.

while my_list:
v = my_list.pop(0)
print v

Although it doesn't fit the theme of the others because it consumes the list, it is certainly a more natural use of "while" to loop over a list.
Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to iOS
This line of thinking can be good motivation sometimes (like when you're wasting time commenting on HN and should be working instead, oops), but other times it can be a burden on your psyche.

If you always think in terms of "how much is this activity costing me per hour?" then you will never let yourself do anything fun or relaxing because the guilt will be too much to let yourself enjoy it.

Having fun and relaxing to prevent burnout is equally important to making your startup work, otherwise you will drive yourself (and the business) into the ground, in which case everything is worth $0 anyway.
My .02 on VC seed money by David Lee
The idea behind this exploit:

The area on the SAN occupied by your disk contained a simple disk image. When your image is deleted and another is created overlapping the same spot on the host storage, they can look at their free space to see the contents of your disk.

If your disk happened to be encrypted, their free space would appear to contain garbage data.

Encrypting your disk would do you little good versus your provider if your VM can boot without your intervention... someone could just boot your VM to look inside.
Interesting article, but the title does not match the content at all. The article actually endorses "promote from within" but gives some caveats and advice for doing so.
... this is the untold story of the quietly wealthy; the millions of smart, capable people with vast reserves of capital who do their darndest to make sure they don't have to do anything at all.
I agree. Listing 11 won't even compile as was_empty is declared const.
I generally agree with the whole "wait till you get rich then donate to charity" sentiment. But it's hard to tell when you're rich enough. It would be a risky bet either way. You can't be sure how much more you'll be able to make your earnings grow in the future, just as you can't be sure if your charities will pay out.

And the longer you wait, the longer those charities you could have been investing on, are not seeing any benefits.

So you have two balance these two: Wait too long and charities of today don't see much benefit. Wait too little and you might be unable to grow your money and do less overall charity in the future. How do you know what's the right point in your career? Ideally, you wanna start donation when you're at the top of your career. And don't wanna risk falling from where you are.

After the recent investments maybe Andreessen Horowitz think they got to that point. They've got more money than ever and it's getting riskier to wait longer. So they considered that balance and judged it was the right time to donate to charity. You might disagree with their timing. But hey, remember they're pretty good at this stuff, so maybe they're right :)
Oh and this is similar to the approach that the Gates foundation is taking. As far as I can tell Gates approached this as an optimisation problem: given that he has X billion dollars to give to charity, how can he maximise the effect that his donations have? How many lives can he save* with that money?

* lives saved is of course the wrong metric: no-one has ever saved a live, just prolonged it, but it's a convenient shorthand for maximising the number of quality adjusted life years (QALYs)[1] that a donation could buy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
I think the psychology of "group think" is very interesting. I'm sure there could be plenty of material for PhDs if MS would let folks in to study them.

I can just hear the discussion now at the top levels of MS. You know - synergy, that's the ticket. Here we have an interesting phone OS with cool titles. No more icons, that's so 20th century. So PC OS guys - lets create some synergy and leverage our discovery of tiles onto the desktop.

Because, you know, millions and millions of folks will get Windows 8 whether they want it or not and they'll remember tiles when they go shopping for their next phone.

You know Mildred, this phone has tiles exactly like our new Windows 8 PC at home. It must be good. Let not upgrade to the iPhone 5 because it still has those nasty old icons.

You know Wilbur, you're so right. I could never figure out that icon thing where you have a picture representing your program. It's so much easier and faster to have a blank square with a name in it.

Now on my PC, my word processor has ribbons and my OS has tiles. How did I get by before when my OS had icons and menus and my programs had icons and menus.
Well, strictly speaking, you have answered my objection. But I guess I was thinking in Haskell. If Python's map takes multiple iterables, then, yes, zip is a special case. But writing zip by mapping a function without side effects, using a "map" that works only on a single iterable (as in Haskell) strikes me as a rather different thing.

So I suppose that the truth of "this loop can be written using map" depends on exactly what one means by "map".
Microsoft to Consolidate Entertainment Offerings
Quantity AND quality.

Market design is wicked hard. That's the role of governments. Business (court) law, a fair and impartial judiciary, enforcement, currency, etc.

I don't mind so much that any particular system is broken.

What troubles me is how hard it is to fix.

We're all staring at the elephant in the room. But the incumbent vested parties making a buck from a broken system, to the detriment of everyone else, are super effective at blocking reform.
Fair enough, thanks John.

For what it's worth -
I don't have a voting ring of 40/50 people (that I'm aware of :-) )

I don't think the post would have been flagged.

I can't control people voting by direct link, as another commenter alluded to, there are twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers that tweet direct links. Maybe they're accidentally triggering this, which would be unfortunate.

Re: me submitting my own posts, it's just a matter of ritual really. I write a post, then publish, tweet, HN, Facebook it all at the same time. I also dislike when others submit my posts with terrible titles like "Marketers, this is a good article" or "Read this post about emails".

Thanks for your time John.
No, there is a difference between belief and actions. The action of saying "this one should really work" of course has an effect.

There is absolutely no scientific evidence anywhere to support that the "belief" on the part of an administrator in a drug trial has anything to do with any outcomes.
Google Doesn't Want Me to Buy New Shoes
Study - The Creativity Gap
Is that irony or ignorance? There are plenty of things worth doing that do not have a viable business model. How would you achieve the goals of the two nonprofits mentioned in the article? There are really no short term benefits from protecting the environment or helping families become self-sufficient. It takes years for trees and families to grow and measuring the economic value of these investments is not straightforward.

http://www.shelternetwork.org/
http://canopy.org/
Of course if you want to do away with any kind of built in redundancy and take over the sysadmin duties involved you can get the raw space and transfer cheaper.
I'd be flabbergasted to find out their billing system isn't at least as simple as their AWS console. 5 minutes of CSR work tops.

Would probably even be easier to completely drop a bill as opposed to modifying it to charge a lesser amount.
Career Lessons from Battlestar Galactica
No doubt about it, but the people on the receiving end probably don't care.

The intentions of Andreessen And Horowitz are good, so lets be positive about this.
If you go here it has some recent scans: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ and you can check your own site.
...on SmartOS.
I'm curious, is there a way I can set HN to display hellbanned comments?
What is that thing in the upper right corner?
Here's a pile more to blow your mind with:
http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/ [2009]
Offtopic: "Dustin Curtis is a villain."

whatever happened to The "Superhero"?
I'll take another stab at explaining this:

Originally everything was done on dumb terminal connecting to mainframes. Then we got PCs and workstations that could run client-server applications where there UI lived on the workstation but the data still lived on a server. So let's say you have an inventory app with a desktop client. When you search for an item, the application does a query and returns a list of results from the database. You then select the one you want, it does another query and downloads some more data from the database. Then you makes some changes to the item and commit them to the database. The client uploads the change to the database by performing another query. This all works pretty well over a LAN because the server.

If something goes wrong with the server, or if your network switch or network card stops working, then the app stops working. But if you have good gear and a good IT team, that's relatively rare. You can get your work done.

Then along came Web applications. These made IT's life easier because instead of deploying a desktop client to everyone's machine, they can just install the software on the server and everyone can connect to it. It still works mostly the same way your desktop client did, except now the UI elements are downloaded to your browser when you visit the site rather than being permanently stored on your desktop.

Where things get hairy is when you're trying to access these types of systems over the Internet. There's more latency, everything seems slower. Then suddenly everyone wants access from a smart phone, where their connection speed is slower and it can drop in and out. So you start using AJAX to put more UI elements on the client side, but you're still making database calls for each action you perform.

So one thing that's new in these tools is that more data is cached locally. So your inventory app would actually download a whole bunch of data all at once so that you can query it locally, without having to hit the server each time. That creates a bunch of new problem, like handling conflicts, authentication, etc.

Another thing that's new is that there's a thinner, or perhaps non-existent, layer between the client application and database server (in the desktop client-server model, you might also have been able to connect directly to the database, depending on the architecture, so that's not necessarily all that new. I don't know enough yet about how Lotus Notes databases work, but I know that they're the direct ancestor to CouchDB).
Could be helped by adding a secondary task, asking Turkers whether the description matches the photograph.
As for where jhuckaby is and what he's up to, I don't know. But I respect his work and his code.

EffectGames is something I'm really familar with. I worked on the open sourced version, fixing bugs and adding features over the last 8 months as part of a school project. I've added libraries, fixed up the online text editor, and learned a lot. Now that the project is over I'm debating whether I should keep up the work and get a webgl rendering pipeline working or if my time is better spent on other things.
I think you've misread his post. He's talking about donating what they have now VS donating more money after they get richer in the future. He's not talking about donating to charities VS donating to kids from top universities. The second would just be a consequence of the first.
I don't understand why they don't offer a second class of "virtual tickets" where you get the same access to prerelease software and live streaming of sessions. As far as I can tell there are 3 "decoupled" reasons to attend wwdc: 1. Sessions and info, 2. Asking real apple employees questions, and 3. Meeting other devs/socializing.

I know lots of people that currently just do #3 without a ticket. Similarly #1 becomes possible for everyone after they release the videos. So really the only genuine reason to attend is #2 -- real deal access to apple devs. Under this perspective it seems less likely there would be such frenzied demand if everyone had a shot of viewing the sessions and getting the redacted info at the same time. It would also save a lot of people the need to buy a plane ticket and hotel on top of this already expensive endeavor, if all they want is to see sessions.

So basically, imagine something like a $500 virtual wwdc pass where you get a live stream, and a $1600 "Pro" pass where you get the perks of being there in person.
shoutout to Loku!
I'm the tech writer Basho just hired to work on this. Let me just say that I feel your pain like Bill Clinton. Setting up my own system using the Riak wiki has been less than pleasant. There's lots of good content, but also lots of examples like the one you point out. We're overhauling the Fast Track soon.
Silicon Valley’s war for the mobile web
Very interesting article, and besides all the good and proper reasons for this, I also believe it was a way for facebook to "show off" how much they have and can spend. And yes good teams are worth a whole lot.
Ask HN: What kind of challenges do hardware startups (like Nest) face?
I was reading the article posted today about how supposedly it's near impossible to have one's hardware solution accepted into a hospital. Folks mentioned that the challenge is indeed great for most hardware devices, not just the medical ones.

A few friends and I have been discussing a device + cloud hybrid solution, vaguely inspired by Nest. We were wondering how big of a hurdle a company has to overcome in order to get a physical device into someone's home.

We'd love to know what we're getting ourselves into before we spend too much time on that path.

Thank you!
Has Instagram Changed Photography? (VIDEO)
Getting results from charities is hard. Bill Gates quit his job to solely focus on this. Warren Buffet pledged all his money to Gates because he doesn't think he would be particularly good at it.

My point is, why pledge earnings rather than wealth? I think pledging earnings is risky, and the world is better off because Warren Buffet did not do it.
Hello,

Nice meeting you here. I also came to the US as a Freedom Support Act exchange student in high school. I never went back to my home country, got accepted to a University, graduated and was out of status for a while. I married a US citizen and now I am dealing with a 2-year requirement. I applied for a waiver based on "no objection" from the home government. I received a favorable recommendation, but the exchange program wrote a letter to the Waiver Review Division stating that I violated the program and therefore go home. I can reapply basing my case on hardship or political asylum.. but my chances of winning are very slim. You mentioned in one of your posts about repaying the sponsor the amount that was spent? Could you please elaborate? I am in dire need of advice. Please e-mail me at madina_a@hotmail.com

Sincerely,
M
"What I find fascinating in this setting is that Google becomes such a powerful weapon due to a series of perfectly legitimate design decisions."

I call in to question that these are "perfectly legitimate design decisions", basically, if google thinks that the data is private or too sensitive to cache, then it shouldn't be this easy to have it automatically keep hitting a site like this. Google should have realized the potential for abuse here. I'm guessing it truly is an oversight on their part as I can't imagine they would want to waste all this bandwidth either, however its something they should figure out a solution for.
The amazing thing about this quarter's performance is the 47.4% gross marging.

How often does a company as widely followed as Apple post a number so amazing that it beats even the most rabid fanboy analyst's predictions? (At least among the 52 guesses that Philip Elmer-DeWitt rounded up[0])

[0] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/21/can-tuesdays-earnings...
Maybe this post has something to do with it: http://dcurt.is/villainy
How do I "install" Clojure on windows
Trying to install clojure here, but the website's example just brings up a REPL, what if I want to write a program and compile/interpret it later?
Hi there, I won't speak for Joe nor Mark (the color cycling demo was their baby, but I'll pass along the sentiments), but thanks for the kind comments about Effect Games.

As far as Gold Cart is concerned, we're working mainly on some short "experiments". By way of a preview, http://itsmin.com/portfolio/goldcart/gbasp/ Again, thanks for remembering us.
Setting Up Your User Nurturing Email Program [How To]
Every language you listed (except Go, which tries very hard for the fast compilation times) just compiles to bytecode and runs on a virtual machine later. This can be considered a much simpler task than compiling to machine language directly.

When you use a virtual machine, much of the machine code required to execute the resulting program has already been compiled. Some languages/runtimes also use a JIT to compile code at runtime instead of build-time.
Yes, there is a lot of marketing involved in this acquisition, besides the importance of Instagram in the industry.
Come on, you are too harsh, this is one of the most polished iPhone app + website combos. Top 2% or better in terms of UI / UX I would say.
I think he became a villain after the obtvse thing.
When do you stop, though? If you take the "first I'll get rich, then work on charitable causes" route, and Andreessen Horowitz aren't yet rich enough to qualify, what level is rich enough? Does it have to be $100 billion or something before you're allowed to decide it's time to start diverting some money to charity?