skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some excellent replies here, thank you all!

General replies:

1. I will not donate this computer as it's the only spare one I have. I do promise though to donate the next spare one I get.

2. It's a laptop, so turning it into an aquarium is not going to work. Poor fish.

3. The reaon that it's spare and not donatable is that the screen connection is very very loose and so the Force of Duct Tape is what's keeping it alive.

What I've decided to do based on the replies:

1. Install Linux (of course) and set up a central backup server, attach the house's printer to it, and attach the current external backup drive.

2. Turn it into a media server. I'll be trying both MythTV and XBMC and will report later.

3. I will donate the spare CPU cycles to Folding@Home, at least initially. BOINC and other distributed computing projects will get time. Maybe I'll cycle once a month.

Thank you again :)
What's strange is that I mentally inserted the word the first ~10 times I read that sentence...
Does anybody older than me remember if there was this much hoopla around the 2000 inauguration?
I was more than happy to download the Silverlight plugin (I didn't have it installed). After an apparent successful install (latest OSX) and restarting Firefox, I'm told the plugin's not installed. I don't know how typical this is but perhaps Silverlight's not ready for the prime time yet?
Hacker Leaves Message for Microsoft in Trojan Code
News and music are different. Chances are I'll hear a song somewhere, then buy it and listen to it again and again.

A news article is usually read once then never re-read. How do I know if the article is worth paying for without reading it? And why would I pay for it after I've read it or heard the information?
Now, more companies will be aware of their environmental impact.
If I were in his shoes, I'd do another startup. Why would you become a corporate bitch again, after you tasted the freedom of doing your own thing?
Boxee rocks. As a user, I am excited with the product. As a fellow entrepreneur, I am gratified to see someone else also pursuing a dream and turning it into a game changer. Like many of us who had experienced economic downturns in the past, we are convinced that recovery will come. But when it does, it would have a lot more to do with genesis of the new than reborn of the old. This one is worth watching.
E OKUL
Many people paid hundreds of dollars for their iPod.
That requires the self-discipline of a monk.
Ramit Sethi: Your idea isn’t good enough to keep secret
R.I.P. Enterprise RSS
An alternative question might be: what are you doing in Excel today for which Excel was not intended?

I remember Wil Shipley (of Omni, Delicious Monster) talking about how they originally developed OmniOutliner after noticing that most people were using Excel to make simple lists rather than complex spreadsheets, so there was a market for something less expensive than Excel and more tailored to the things people were actually doing with it. With a product as broadly installed as Excel I'm sure there's still under-served niches.
Maybe he does not have any big ideas right about now and wants to collect some massive paychecks from Google? Nothing wrong with that.
OWL Web Ontology Language Guide
Determine the index of the first parameter in the Array …
Ah, it returns the index. But that’s OK … JavaScript supports the notion of “truthiness”,

Except if it returns "0", of course.

It's a very C-like way of doing things:

if ($.inArray(blah blah) < 0)
// not found!
That's silly. Will musicians run out of melodies? Or screen writers run out of stories? People have been cooking for thousands of years and somehow keep learning more. Food tastes are always changing, if you go back and watch old black and white Julia Child cooking shows she talks about a exotic herb called basil that you should definitely check out if you can find locally. Dried basil, the stuff that's hardly worth buying these days because fresh is so much better. Who knows what foods will seem commonplace in 50 years?
I used Novell iFolder for a while (running on Ubuntu, though it was a pain to install). I think it worked pretty well on SuSE out of the box. Anyway, it uses a client on individual machines with a server hosting the files. Pretty much like Dropbox, though I think Dropbox is a little prettier and easier to use.

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/overview.html

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iFolderClient
I am a recent cook-for-relaxation person. Going through their web site, the main differentiation factor is the tried-and-true recipe factor. Apparently they try each recipe 30-40 times to perfect it.

That is worth paying for. And the convenience of the Internet and the videos.

I could easily go to the library and pick up a book but it is a time consuming process.

So, yeah. If they want to take the time to perfect each recipe. Heck, I will pay for it.
Many were upset over the whole "Supreme Court Election" thing, but once that debacle was over, it was business as usual.
"This is the same with the environment only in this case I suspect that mostly the people on the other side of the equation are future generation who get a damaged planet but none of the instant pay-off from our wastage."

The people on the other side are indeed the future geenrations. Just that right now, it seems that they will be getting a dysfunctional economy instead.
makes you wonder how much they're paying him. He made a mint from delicious - I can't imagine he wants or needs the money...
Reminds me of the quote by Francis Bacon which goes something like:
Science is about being a blind man with a stick, and he who most persistently pokes blindly ahead of him, contributes the most to our understanding of the Universe, though only if he is willing to accept what the poking tells him that he does not want to be true.
I think in many minds this will be summarized as:

* CO2stats said google uses X
* Google said they use Y, which is far less than X
I know it's a bit west of Union Sq., but how about "The Manhole" on Christopher St in Chelsea? It's got a real nice and relaxing atmosphere, but it's also exciting and aggressive.
Completely agree. This book <br>
http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Windows-Fumbled-Future-Micros...
although dated gives some good historical context on Microsoft Management culture (although it is focused more on Gates).
If only that were the case. If there is anything that the modern environmental movement has taught us, it is that religeon is a powerful force regerdless of whether it includes gods or targets academics. For a more nuanced (and defensible) discussion of the topic, refer to "Environtemanetalism as Religeon" by Michael Crichton: http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismasel...
Full disclosure: pg(through ycombinator) is an investor in CO2Stats.
Just because you're working for a big company doesn't mean you don't have considerable freedom. Researchers at Google are given quite a lot of free reign, for example -- I doubt Shacter will be a "corporate bitch".
Hmm, I disagree with the idea of slowing the tills when they get past 80%. That will reduce the possible throughput.

If the till stops then staff will use a backup method - pencil and paper and a cash drawer (same as for when communication lines are cut completely). If the tills slow then the staff will continue but be waiting for the till to respond. Less transactions can be completed under your fix.

Of course you then need staff to stay on and "complete" the transactions at the end of the day, but that's probably going to be largely free to a large employer (eg if it's 15 mins per person then the company can squeeze that out without paying extra hours).

Pencil and paper backup may not be pretty but if it gives a better overall transaction throughput (which I think it would) then it would be the better solution.
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A WITTEH
I HAS A KARMA

IZ WITTEH BIGGER THAN "O RLY"?
YARLY
UP KARMA!!1
NOWAI
DOWN KARMA!!1
KTHX
KTHXBYE

BTW "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."
BTW http://lolcode.com/
Not very repeatable getting the Times to troll Google unless you get a PR company to feed them the flamebait nonsense and then give a quote to go with it. I suspect CO2stats has just been lucky. I'm sure this will be good publicity for them if they keep handling it as well as they have.
Congrats to Joshua. One of the more amazing things early on at digg was how open and willing he was to share advice and knowledge with what must have looked like a competitor.
Freedom would be much easier to gain if you go in with a reputation. In comparison, a startup probably offers a lot more freedom to someone smart, but lacking the credentialing of a previous start-up success.
And anyways, freedom for its own sake is not really useful. Some ideas are complex enough to require a team of talented individuals and perhaps more resources than what a startup can muster in its initial stages.
Google probably has a few great and interesting projects that he interested in, and the lost opportunity of making millions through a sale or an IPO might matter less to someone who has already trekked that trail.
Ask HN: entry point
There are a lot of interesting things around.
Some of them can be very useful.
You are smart enough to understand main ideas. I'm.

So, it's nice to know a good entry point for something new. Like SICP for "CS", or The Feynman Lectures on Physics for physics.

For example, one nice source (a book, an article) about corporate law can be very interesting and useful if you are going to start your own Microsoft. Like "Law for Dummies" but for smart people.

If you can name an entry point(-s) for something (music, Lisp, money, etc) for smart newbies, what will it be?

Links (on the foot) on http://worrydream.com is a good example of what I'm trying to ask you.
Many agencies are represented, not just bigspaceship.
That's nothing. At my last job we used to have weekly 'status' meetings that always turned into 3-4 hour fantasy brainstorming sessions about all the fantastic features we could someday add to our product. Since I have pretty low tolerance for unpleasant activities that are a complete waste of time I would usually lose my fucking mind near hour 2 and then storm out of the meeting to go back to work.

At least at your job people really accomplished things worth bragging about rather than just sitting around and talking endlessly about all the great things they could imagine themselves accomplishing.
IE is still 70% of traffic. So, if you write something in Silverlight, and IE maintains that, you're going to work in 70% + however many non-IE clients have Silverlight or are willing to get it.

That will be most everyone. People will do just about anything you ask them to. The prevalence of phishing has proven that. They'll put their online banking creds into any site that has bankofamerica somewhere in the domain name. They'll buy Viagra from an anonymous email through a Costa Rican pharmacy. They'll most certainly click the button that says "Install Silverlight from Microsoft to watch the video".
It would be nice if the topic had some real subject to talk about.
Yeah, there's something about watching a progress bar get to 100% that is very satisfying.
What I have in mind would be a direct message to the author, not a public message. That should further discourage spammers -- I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time.

You might want to have some feedback that informs a person who is about to report a typo that 4 or 5 other people have already reported a typo on a given post. That might help discourage the phenomenon where a single typo generates a flood of 10,000 helpful reports.
I believe that there is a phrase that CEO's and Most Paid People in the company that is used to everyone else to keep the little guys smouthered in the position they sit: "the bottom line." They use this when they realize that if they don't do something unethical or completely brilliant, there will be a bottom line that little guy will have to deal with. He will be fired or they'll cut his hours, or they will give less health insurance and higher premiums and deductables, etc. Somehow the little guy is going to get cut so the irreplaceable CEO can go on a $600,000 necessary cruise that the little guy wasn't even invited to.
Look at working in retail. It is a nightmare! There you are so replaceable, they can't keep positions filled for very long because people either "get themselves out of that situation" or they remain humiliated and keep collecting a smaller check.
The only way to be truly irreplaceable is to CREATE something. Because once your one-of-a-kind creation exists, you have added something to the world that wasn't there before. So for it to be authentic, it must remain irreplaceable.
"make sure they're passed via feedburner."

Isn't it now make sure they're NOT passed via feedburner?
Human Hunters Genetically Shrink Their Prey
I just wish there was a technical solution. It feels like the only real solution is boiling down the industry until the best players survive and have room to grow again.

I think another hope to look to is a growing public understanding of the problem. As the news situation sinks in with the most people, I hope it will become a point of honor to pay for quality reporting, and I hope there will be easy avenues to channel this money.
Download Flash games and play on your desktop
If the effects are anything like those encountered by William Hurt in Altered States then I'll be keeping well away from all beats, binaural or not, from now on.
Man, it's this kind of stuff among others (e.g. http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to.html) that make me envy the spirit of CSAIL in the 80s.
Interesting to note that they buy credits at $5/ton then sell them at $200/ton.

That means that your $10/month account is really only 50 cents worth of offsets, plus $9.50 worth of guilt.

The medieval popes are envious...
I have a corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Law, which is that:

Lisp programmers see everything in terms of as an ad hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Lisp,
and don't see other benefits it might have.
That is, Greenspun's Tenth Law is true - for Lisp programmers.

I came to this conclusion because of a tragic pair of research papers, which had a fantastic usability idea. The second half of the first paper took the focus off the usability, and developed it into a very simple functional language. In their next paper, they dropped the fantastic usability idea completely, and made it into a lisp. :-(

Some XML standards fell into a similar trap, by wanting languages that process XML to be themselves written in XML - such as XSLT. It's a nice abstract concept to be able to process yourself... but at the price of abominations like "i &lt; 10".

Adam Bosworth pointed out that XML's XPath resisted this - by making XPath itself an embedded non-XML mini-language. Imagine an XML representation of path components - now that would be verbose!

In a politically expedient move, I'd like to point out that pg didn't fall into this trap: he made the DSL for users of Viaweb to customize their store to not be lisp (though an easily mapped subset, if I understand correctly.) It's a non-lisp mini-language.

Great link from the article, about "principle of least power", for mini-languages: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP Constraints are very empowering, because you know what to expect.

Regarding XML: I'd always thought it was just one of many possible syntaxes for representing hierarchical data; and it really didn't matter which syntax you used. As in a lingua franca (or any standard), provided that it is barely adequate, the key thing is that everyone agrees on it. XML became the Chosen, de facto standard, because everyone was already familiar with HTML, propelled by the mass adoption of the web. So the question becomes: why did we get HTML (based on SGML), instead of S-expressions? The article gives reasons, but I guess the short of it is that if a group of people work towards a specific purpose for years, and are successful at it (as SGML was), it is probably a good base to start from if you want to do something similar, i.e. describe documents.

Also, more directly, if I imagine a large webpage described with S-expressions, I think HTML is a bit clearer.

Nitpick: The article omits that quotes (or apostrophes) must be escaped in XML attributes.

Very telling points about LaTeX - that like XML/HTML, it also uses named end-tags; and that Lisp documentation itself is used LaTeX instead of S-expressions - drinking their kool-aid; but not eating their dog-food.
A company like Google still has plenty of interesting projects he could work on (without having to worry about business operations tasks and funding). I'd also imagine del.icio.us took care of the "make bunch of money to never have to worry about financial security" side of things too.
Prototype alters stuff but jQuery doesn't. So there is very little conflict. The use of Prototype however will prevent use of other altering js frameworks like MooTools.

Fundamentally I think Prototype/MooTools are horribly designed javascript library because they introduce incompatibilities. However I use them when I need a free component or 2. I would never drop jQuery though so I always use $j instead of $, even when using jquery by itself
Yes, as in woot.com. They currently run contests through their message board. The format of their contests fit perfectly into our platform. But how to convince a large company like that to use a startup project like this? Chicken Egg problem.
Yep, lots of people already do this -- it's called A/B testing.
Death by blort.
Damn- sent you the wrong link. Here's the one for the neck:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0958269246/ref=s9subs_c2_14...
oh i will like i care what you say dumbo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
True. But you're not really "buying" either. You pay this MBA $80K, and he adds a certain amount of value (presumably more than $80K). It's all dividends. There's very little fixed cost (training, a couple weeks to get up to speed) that could be considered as "buying".
The death of the internet would hardly result in the collapse of global civilization. We'd just revert to more primal past times, like looting and arson.
Generalized rules such as these tend to be meaningless within the context of specific situations. Do what feels right.
There are some claims here I'd still like links to backup.

Show me a "small" paper with 60 reporters.

Show me a "small" paper with 25 reporters covering national news.

Your local paper has 40% of its reporters covering national news?
Republic is quite loud and crowded most of the time. Other good in the area: Grey Dog Coffee (University Place), City Bakery (18th Street betw 5 and 6), Tarallucci E Vino (18th street, big table in back good for meeting).
Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Made-Simple-Third/dp...
Cool as that would be (and hello there, we corresponded a year ago on an alumni list), that's besides the point. Pandora for news wouldn't help out the newspapers as long as the stories themselves are still free and surrounded by add-blocked ads.
New Stack Overflow Server Glamour Shots
You did invent XMLHttpRequest, for which I must give you credit, even though you didn't actually use it for anything interesting until it was rediscovered years later

XMLHttpRequest was first deployed in Outlook Web access in the ancient year of 2000. Years before gmail made it popular. So I would certainly say that Microsoft used it for something...
Argument order:

jQuery

$.each(collection,function(){
this.bla();
});

The reason index is first param is because wheb you need it it is the only param. The reason for the item param is incase you need to attach a scope object to be this!
[SF] Want to work on a massive live video site? Justin.tv is hiring talented software engineers
Yes, I meant a direct message too - like a flag - because it would discourage spammers. I didn't unpack it, so it was ambiguous.

I'm not sure if the "10,000" reports would happen; have to try it and see. It's probably more like bug-reports, or 37signal's "feature requests" (that they read and throw out). And, if you fix the typo, the reports stop. :-) It's hard to judge, but I think you'd have to be massively popular to get even one or two typo reports. But I don't know: need to do the experiment.

Maybe a lower-cost solution would be just to add "prompting" text next to the comment box, something like: "typo corrections are welcome", to encourage people.

Typo reports (bug reports?) aren't that common: for example, I made a comment on a typo to Tim O'Reilly's recent blog - but no one else had.
[SF] Justin.tv is hiring talented network engineers to take us from 100 gbps to 1 tbps...
One option is charity. Keep in mind that the government pulls in $1.2 trillion from personal income taxes per year (ironically enough, that's the size of Obama's proposed stimulus package).

Anyway, in a libertarian USA, most if not all of that $1.2 trillion would stay in the hands of the people; that fact, along with a few other libertarian ideals, would mean a more prosperous people.

A more prosperous people, with the knowledge that the government no longer provides inefficient health care to others with their hard-earned money means... you guessed it. Also, a libertarian USA would mean cheaper /everything/ (including health care) because of the Austrian economic, free-market principles.

I truly believe it. I've got some excellent ideas based around for-profit charities. Imagine famous, fancy restaraunts situated in the big cities. The bottom floor sells wonderful food to the celebrities and rich folks. The rest of the building houses and feeds homeless people. Of course, it doesn't even have to be a fancy restaraunt, and it doesn't have to house homeless people.
[SF] Justin.tv is hiring sys admins
I don't use RSS either, except maybe for the originalsignal tech & world sections. http://tech.originalsignal.com/

I just took google reader for a 5 minute spin & it didn't seem nearly as polished. What else is out there?
Welcome to http://zombo.com. This is zombo-com. You can do anything at zombo-com--anything at all. The only limit is your self.
For what it's worth, I am looking for a place to stay and Youth Ball tickets... have parade tickets to trade.
Ron Paul, IMO, has shown there doesn't need to be a separate party. Ron Paul is a libertarian in many ways and yet he's been a Republican congressman since 1976, save for the few years in between that he went back to practicing OBGYN.

He actually ran for President as a Republican in 2008.
Meetings are not only about hearing what data other pople present and presenting your own. The reason you have meetings is that you can look someone in the eye and ask them if they will really be able to ship on monday. The answer will often be different than if you send an e-mail.

Running a good meeting is about people and psychology.
XML definitely adds features over sexps, and is good for adding markup to primarily text-based documents, where the concept of bare text has an intuitive meaning, and elements denote a formally defined machine-readable layer on top.

However, the fight occurs when XML is used as a generic serialization format, or even as syntax for a programming language. There, the features only add redundant complexity (what does unquoted text mean in an ant build file? why am I putting quotes around identifiers, and why am I including the redundant end tags when my editor indents for structure?). When your format already has specific semantics, the wiggle room between element/attribute/text only adds inflexible accidental complexity.
Does the time depend on the category you are posting to?

I got a productivity webapp approved in one week last July.

I will be posting another finance app to the app store but I don't expect huge delays because its not in the hugely popular game section.

Am I wrong?