skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I recall Dune 2 has no connection to the slightly earlier Dune other than both were produced by studios owned by the same parent, and neither realized that the other team was working on the license. The Dune team finished first, and to 'simplify' things, they just named the RTS version of the game Dune 2.
Show HN: Visualize Fitbit steps with Notch
Hi folks, wanted to get feedback on a project before making it 'public'. It's called Notch and the idea is to create a more fun UX for personal health tracking (using data from Fitbit, Fuelband, Withings, etc).

The demo project is a first experiment with this. The 'private' signup page is at http://notch.me/start.html. Users go in, add their Fitbit, and it creates a personalized infographic based on their Fitbit steps, like this: http://notch.me/p/7Isumkw5k2P1WhyeUVwFmj

Feedback is appreciated! Feel free to email me at eli@notch.me.

Thanks!
Eli
While those men did great things, who actually implemented their discoveries? Drug and biotech companies. Businesses have their place too.
"X has too much time on their hands" is just a smug way of saying "I don't know what it's like to be creative."
Some people LOVE riding horses, but you don't see them riding horses to the movies do you?
Unless the job is in law enforcement.
A lot of protocols and standards containing the word 'simple; aren't. Most of them, in fact! I have a suspicion that this is because these designs start as antitheses to existing complex designs. 'Aha!' say the designers. 'We won't repeat those mistakes!' But because they proceed from the same basic assumptions as the complex designs they try to replace, they always produce something complex in the end, because they never really understood simplicity.
KloucheBag.com, a new "alternative" to Klout
This is terrible. Music should stimulate the mind, not dull it. Creepy little men "singing" is not going to make me more focused, but a nice piece of Baroque will certainly do the trick.
Davy -

I regularly use psql as part of my job, but I gave pgXplorer a whirl. It seems less responsive than psql, but that's a big reason why I use the command line client anyway. One thing I noticed is that you're asking for "Port" twice in the connection properties dialog - I think you mean "Password" in the second instance. I'm probably not your target audience, but I'd like to know - what's the proposition? Why use pgXplorer instead of pgAdmin, for example?
I hate horses! I don't ride them.
I wonder what's the point in writing a book about Dart, where the language, environment, toolchain, compiler(s), and community are still very, very unstable.

At best, it could be an intro saying "this is what they're trying to do"; but you can also cover that in a blog post, right?
http://musicforprogramming.net/ is much more useful.
Not ordinarily a fan of podcasts, but this has quickly turned into a superb production. Really looking forward to more, especially on language-related topics. I’ve even applied to be a guest—just in case.
Great show, hard to believe this is only the 2nd podcast. Everything is really well done - very professional.
"Change" has a large semantic field. For example, there's the word "change," and then there's the rallying cry: change. When regular folk talk about changing the world, they're talking about something fundamentally different from what you're talking about.

(Why do so many HN-type entrepreneurs want to make "change the world" apply to toy apps that really do nothing of the kind? There's no reason to feel insecure about building toy apps, so no reason to reframe them as being world-changing, either.)
Busted In 60 Seconds: Malware Reveals Itself In First Minute
The main reason we aren't driving cars powered by fuel cells is that the platinum makes them too expensive. So there's one use for a high volume of platinum.

With a little googling, it looks like platinum can also be used for producing hydrogen and absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere to produce hydrocarbon fuels.

With lots of cheap platinum, we could make the whole transportation sector carbon-neutral, even if we never manage to make those 600-mile batteries.
For those not reading the title, link is http://qotr.net
Lua scripting is really exciting.

I wrote a library to simplify using Redis' lua scripting facility from inside a rails app: http://shopify.github.com/wolverine/. We've been using it at Shopify for inventory management, and it's let us do a lot of cool stuff, faster than ever.

Disclaimer: I built it before I understood what the KEYS arguments were supposed to be used for, so it won't play nice with clustering, yet.
Fitt's law is useful for two insights: The obvious one is that things you want to be easy to click should be large/close, but the less obvious one is that things you don't want to be easy to click should be small/far.

The "..." dots is probably an example of the latter - I'd guess that Google wants people to view entire conversations by expanding the conversation view, not by clicking "...", so they make one way much easier than the other.
Does it have to be Xen? I've had a lot of good luck using KVM and so far it seems to be more stable... and it can run OS's unmodified.
I understood that, maybe my terminology was wrong, but you effectively pledge to pay $5 every time your schedule slips.

I'm not sure $5 is enough motivation, and if it were significantly more I'd start to question why I was giving this money to the developers of this app, rather than someone more deserving, like the users who are missing out on using the product, or a charity.
FTC hires legal big guns for possible antitrust lawsuit against Google
If they don't hire you because you don't know the most recent buzz words you probably don't want to work for them. A good job especially in your cases is one where you will learn and feel challenged. If you really knew everything they wanted the job would get boring.
Every fraud prevention scheme is going to have false positives, so there's no excuse for not providing the user with an appeal process.
Facebook's naming policy hasn't stopped me from making up comical fake names for testing. It's pretty absurd to think that any developer is going to make test posts from their app/project/whatever to their real Facebook account (not that I have one anyway).
New 3D printer company launching with 40-micrometer resolution printers
trinitylabs.com - Saw @ezmobius at RailsConf earlier this week (of Rails deployment fame) talk about his brand new company, Trinity Labs, which is manufacturing and taking pre-orders for affordable ($2k and less) 3D printers with 40 micrometer resolution.

He has plans to condense the current 3D tool chains (necessary to create and print models) from multiple apps down to a single, simple tool. Said his long-term vision is to make 3D printing "as simple as 1-hour photo."
"In 2006 a 320 GB hard drive cost $120. Today (Thailand floods aside) that much money will snag you a 3 TB drive."

Floods or not, the current price isn't $120 dollars. It's 50% higher than that.

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-Desk...

Shows one of the cheapest 3tb non enterprise drives. It looks like 3tb was $120 for ~2 weeks. Looking at enterprise drives, 3tb is closer to $300.

This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.

*edit: From the pictures, article is advocating RAID 10. Nonetheless, RAID5 would be just as feasible for additional storage.
anyway, who's using bash nowadays? there's zsh...
"The sun never sets on CERN"

Engineers at Fermilab in Batavia, IL performs CERN operations by day, in evening hours for the Swiss.
Excellent. Love the interface. Very well-thought out.
Piniata Cookies
This is a fabulous idea, cookies with mini M&M's inside. Someone should make this a startup!
I've had the joy of working with a SOAP endpoint that doesn't recognise <element /> syntax, which left me having to create attributes assigned to '' in my Python code, so SUDS would generate the <element></element> syntax for me.

They also massively over-engineered the endpoint, constantly wrapping elements within elements, for no real reason.
That's very cute. I like it a lot, good work. Is the info randomized, or do you get the same info every month (i.e. is it always the panama canal or are there other things? Like walk on the moon, or around NYC, etc.)
MSM,
I know it can be hard to see for many people but sometimes diving deeper into your box is the wrong approach. Your example is perfect. Someone went and took classes that were a "waste of time" and ended up 75% more efficient because they looked at something from a different view...even though they didn't become a chef. This is exactly how people need to be leading their companies.
Did you homebrew your own JSON encoder in PHP? Sounds that way. The standard encoder respects types.
I completely agree. It would be one thing if you had the prevention in there but somehow had the ability to email them and get it worked out but, instead, Facebook completely ruins the UX for this person.
Right, there is no shortage for those willing to pay a premium. Money is not the total equation but there are plenty of great developers that given the right price will jump ship. If one where to put an ad out for a senior developer with a base of $220k I am sure they would have no shortage of great talent at their door. It also has the secondary effect of attracting more people to the industry. I have my reservations about that being a good thing, because passion is so important in this industry but the reality is the market corrects shortages it just takes time and a realization on employers part that they have to raise rates to compete and attract.
Put a blank line at the beginning of your PS1 instead. This has the added benefit of clearly separating every command. My PS1 actually is this:

rpatterson@rpatterson-tba 04/27/2012 01:24 PM ~
$

This gives me a full row to type a command, and lets me see how long ago the last command finished. Each of those components is bold and colored differently.
Something that worries me about perl to no end is tests like:

if ($lastname) { ... }

This fails when $lastname="0". But I am constantly seeing perl code that does it.
Build a Team that Ships
I think the comments here are responding negatively to the title of the post. True, you're probably not going to spend the rest of the day coding to the music you make in incredibox. But this app is still very cool for what it is: a fun, easily accessible experiment in making music with loops.

I put together a couple of little songs that sounded pretty cool, and the experience was simple and enjoyable. I give props to whoever made Incredibox, and think this general direction is promising for casual music making, an activity that could benefit all of us.
I'm really curious how stuff like this gets to the top of HN? In my opinion this is simply a publicity stunt surrounding the interest of HN celebrities, and I wonder who thought this was such a good post?

Personally I feel that way too many of the front page threads some YC company posting some blog post about the HN zeitgeist of the week. That or job postings from YC backed companies.

Maybe I'll get downvotes but it seems like some YC companies are trying to game the system and use their sway here to get unwarranted buzz. I know the site is YC run, but personally I would like to see the focus on YC companies de-emphasized a bit here.
You get an entire /64 for IPv6. Time to make the switch.
Thanks for the comment. I just edited the post to try to make it clearer.

I'm proposing that anyone could start a company, Foo Inc, who would sell redundant storage and compete with S3. Instead of operating your own hard drives, you rent hard drives connected to the Internet from a variety of providers. Of course your customer would know that you were doing this, and advanced customers could even choose their own blend of raw storage providers to optimize for different things.

Towards the end of the post I mention briefly that instead of a startup (Foo Inc), this ecosystem could be set up in a decentralized way (think Bitcoin v.s. central banking), though that is far less realistic.
Well, here's three things you're neglecting:

1) Planetary Resources is talking about getting access to 10's or 100's of times more platinum than have ever been mined in human history, or even could be extracted from the Earth's crust. "Domestic" production simply cannot scale in this way.

2) Mining platinum is not a very profitable business--it comes out of the Earth's curst in very low concentrations. Without a doubt extra-terrestrial sources will always be able to undercut "domestic" suppliers without driving prices so low.

3) No Earth-base operation would compete with a late-stage Planetary Resources, because at any point they could flood the market and drive competitors out of business. Earth-based mining firms will change their business to extract resources for which return from asteroids remains unprofitable.
The S in SOAP is for Simple as the L in LDAP is for lightweight
"side effect of purer motivations. If you're in it to be rich, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. If you're in it create an amazing product and be impactful on a stranger's life, then you're in it for the right reasons"

"Right reasons". The judgmental-nis of that is what I don't like.

Why do people comment on HN? One reason that I do is because of the good feeling that I get from passing along what I know. I've always liked to teach others what I know online and also offline. Wrapped into that though is the acknowledgement from others that they like what I've said that ends up in the "mental" bank and makes me feel good.

I don't think you can have one without the other. And is there really anything wrong with doing for others even if solely for the "wrong" reason which would be the deposit into the mental bank?
People always conveniently forget as well that when you store data at S3 or Rackspace they're doing 3 replica's. If you store 3TB's, its not just the cost of a single 3TB drive..its 3x. To do it at home you'd need to buy 3x3TB Drives @300$ each.
Sorry I prefer old school dj's, they still exists and I don't have to play with an interface ? I'll stay with http://somafm.com/
19k in parking tickets for XXXXXXX license plate - http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2009/10/the_price_of_vanity_plat...

I heard of similar story of a student in Birmingham whose license plate was 'null'.
So yeah, this has me more than a little perturbed. I generally don't have a problem sacrificing some privacy in return for functionality (the terms of service of several popular social networks come to mind), but this... is a bit of a different situation.

Does anybody have a good short-list of Skype alternatives? I don't know that its possible for me to stop using it altogether, but I'd certainly consider cutting back...
Anyone else find it weird that we've not got self-driving trains yet? I mean, they're on rails, that seems to radically reduce the problem space. Yet we're starting with cars? Not even buses that take the same route every day?

I'll note that I do hear about robot driven trains in Japan, but usually as "what are those crazy Japanese up to" type stories, rather than "Why don't we have this obvious tech".
Great thing. Although I don't think it is the best music to code by, especially as it just loops and loops!
I made a similar 'remixer' in about 2003 for my university dissertation, although mine was networked so you could mix with a friend ;)
Love the art style though
Moore's Law Lives Another Day
"I can't help but think that there's a real opportunity for a Coffeescript-like language with a module system, clean class syntax, and some Go-like features such as Go interfaces and type inference, plus manual type annotations when necessary."

haxe meets a lot of these criteria and has been around for a while.
I think this is a lame minority view. I don't know anyone who actually loves driving in traffic, for example, even if it is to take their kids to school or to go to the gas station. WTF?
You don't even need an explicit test. Just ask for their SAT and divide by 10. If post-1995, divide by 10 then multiply by 2/3. I still wouldn't hire purely on IQ though. An intelligent adult with no coding skill isn't that way for no reason. You cannot make someone into something they haven't much interest in being.
This is cute idea. Seems like I would be more motivated to keep up my fitness with this type of breakdown.
> This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.

That is correct. And to be more precise, I'm advocating RAID 5 across storage providers as a service, so people who just want to store data don't have to manage anything.
I agree that using zsh has to be justified. My suggestions for bash users who want to get more out of their (interactive) shell are:

1. Learn bash better. Lots of low-hanging fruit there to increase your productivity with minimal effort.

2. Learn how to customize your environment in bash. Know what every line in your dotfiles does. Add to your dotfiles gradually as you learn.

3. If you learn about some cool features in zsh, see if bash has the feature already. If it doesn't, see if you can mimic it easily with your own functions or scripts.

4. If you still want more features, make the switch to zsh and repeat steps 1 and 2 with zsh.

I think the worst is when people see a novel trick and switch to zsh and slam in oh-my-zsh* without knowing any shell basics. Now you have another shell and a big pile of code and you don't understand any of it. This usually won't cause problems, but you almost certainly won't be getting the most out of your shell. You'd be better off in most cases just digging into bash a little deeper.

I use zsh now, but I only switched after learning what bash could do and what its limitations are. I'll reevaluate zsh vs. bash 4.0 at some point, but for now I see zsh installed by default more often than bash 4.0 and it seems to me that most users interested in the best interactive shell experience are still on zsh and I like to learn from them.

* - I think oh-my-zsh is a great project - I'm not knocking it. I've borrowed lots of great stuff from it. But I think you should understand every line of code you are dumping into your environment, whether you are using oh-my-zsh or not.
Hetzner specifically prohibit the use of file sharing services (see the service agreement for root servers: (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/system-policies-rs).

Not sure if it's still the case, but they also used to have a policy of blocking port 6667.
NewsBlur (social feed reader) uses Redis pubsub for real-time as well: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/20371256202/building-real-time.... Now I'll have up to 500 concurrent clients, but I couldn't be happier with how utterly simple it was to get Python to talk to Redis to talk to Node to talk to Socket.IO in JavaScript on the browser.

I use it during feed fetching to notify all of the users subscribed to a feed's updates.
This has a side-effect that I don't like. Python's virtualenv, once activated, places the string '(venv)' (assuming you named it 'venv') immediately before your prompt to let you know that it is active in this terminal. However, this export hides this modification, and it makes it difficult for me tell whether the venv is active or not.
This is really fun. I like the vocals a lot and I like the interface to control each track. The title is incorrect because I don't think the intent of this app is for programmers to make background music to work to.
The Seattle (or Portland? can't remember which) airport has a self-driving train that shuttles people between terminals. Of course, there's no competing "traffic" to deal with in those cases, just a handful of trains all heading around a closed loop in the same direction, moving people from place to place.
Accidentally invented - Dos attack using Google Spreadsheets
It's scary when you think about the context - someone you haven't added to your contact list, meaning anyone at any time, can find your current IP.

It's not exactly shocking, but it certainly shouldn't be able to happen until you've approved a person as a contact.
Are Apple Fans in Denial? No They’re Not
Every once in a while all of them pause in sync. Try using distinct primes for the length of a musical cycle to create a different sound. Not sure how it would for beats, but I know visually this is useful.
This reminds me of Patrick McKenzie's article "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names".

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
That's right. The main point is that these services still benefit from the falling cost of storage.
So "ability to write basic code" and "communication style" are your top two priorities?
This is pretty much what I've always done - describe the sort of problems they're likely to encounter in the role they're being hired for, perhaps mentioning a few challenges we've had (and possibly already solved), and ask them to explain how they would solve the problem. It's pretty difficult to bullshit your way out of answering a real problem.

Other than adding in some rudimentary skills tests (say, FizzBuzz + walkthrough writing the code with them), and checking if they've developed anything out of their own initiative, I can't see why you'd bother asking anything else.
Study shows 85% of people who say “mapquest” mean Google Maps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

The United States planned one with a collision energy almost three times that of CERN.

...By 1993, the cost projection exceeded $12 billion. Congress officially canceled the project October 21, 1993 after $2 billion had been spent.

The SSC cost was due largely to the massive civil engineering project of digging a huge tunnel underground. The LHC in contrast took over the pre-existing engineering infrastructure and 27 km long underground cavern of the Large Electron-Positron Collider, and used innovative magnet designs to bend the higher energy particles into the available tunnel.

The LHC eventually cost the equivalent of about 5 billion US dollars to build.
I doubt it.. I brought this up on Skype forum and the thread was deleted 5 minutes later...

EDIT: I queried the deletion with a moderater. Was informed it had been moved to the forums admin area to be discussed at their next meeting. He said he agreed it looks like a serious problem so they are aware.
In this case, probably yes. Might want to remove the post, it's a fairly major violation.

Often, names alone wouldn't necessarily constitute a violation as names are generally not sufficient to count as personally identifiable information... but a name like 'Bobby Null' is, I think, quite unique.

When I was being trained on HIPAA compliance I was told that sole first names are generally perfectly fine, and sole last names can often be fine but should be avoided for very common names. But I should also say that I am not an expert on HIPAA compliance.
Your math for comparing SAT scores is off (what is the point of dividing everyone's score by ten?) There have been two main changes in scoring: in 1995 they recentered the scores which in effect increased many peoples' score on the order of 50 points or so (one can convert old scores here: http://2-bit.com/misc/satcalc.html). In 2005, they added a writing section so now your score is out of 2400 instead of 1600. Also, I think you'd want to compare peoples scores based on the current scale which would mean adjusting scores prior to 1995 so that they are recentered and either multiplying by 3/2 for scores before 2005 or discarding the writing portion for everyone.

But many people don't even take the SAT. At least when I was in high school (and likely still today), midwest universities tended to prefer the ACT. Thus, you're essentially looking for people who hit some percentile on national tests, similar to what one would do when applying for MENSA.

Also, as you and others have stated, this isn't really the best way to evaluate people for programming jobs.
Tested and it works brilliantly... it's definitely faster than C-a # RET... Thanks for the tip.