skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I seem to know if I am still here, but not where I am going. When I think I know where I'm going I could not tell you if I was still here.
Spotify is really well done : the client is lightweight, launches fast, is responsive, when you double click a track to play it starts playing instantly (it really feels like the file stored locally), and the catalog is impressive (although about 1/3 of the stuff I listen to isn't in there yet).

Here in France they have a competitor that is already very entrenched : deezer.com. If you go a party at someones' place, you will ALWAYS see a laptop in a corner with Deezer playing stuff. People walk up, search for what they want to hear, and it plays. Simple. Of course, Spotify is miles ahead of Deezer in terms of technology and user experience. So I hope they don't get squashed by the virality of Deezer.
Aaron Swartz had a great blog post about how this is just not true at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia. The core of people who incessantly edits do make a lot of edits, but they're cleaning up vandalism or bringing articles into the proper Wikipedia style, not actually writing articles and contributing new facts. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. The combined knowledge of 1,400 people just don't isn't enough to write all the articles about Magical Trevor AND Godel's Incompletenesss Theorem. A mathematician might come once to put in the bulk of the theorem, and then leave because he has better things to do, while obsessive Wikipedia janitors will edit it over and over again.
In the comments to the article, the outright lack of respect for property rights and the constant childlike reference to the "MAFIAA" is absolutely appalling.

Though spotify does sound like a neat service.
It's actually very common for both drives to fail at once. Examples:

- case fans fail, everything overheats

- room AC fails, everything overheats

- power supply goes haywire, toasts drive electronics

- box falls off the shelf, drives crash

- fire or smoke damages drives

- roof leaks, drips onto drives

- one drive fails but nobody notices for a month until the next drive fails

- burglars steal box

No, not all these have happened to me.
There's mention of a staff, but I can't imagine how they survived based on the traffic estimates I've seen for their site (14,000 visitors a month per Slashdot). Does anyone know more about their business model?
"After I wrote my book, I lost a good chunk of my retirement savings to Mr. Madoff, so I know of what I write on the most personal level."

Now there's a backhanded endorsement of a book by its author.
> Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams

I don't.
How does this study do by Peter Norvig's checklist?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Anecdotally: at university I observed that my fellow students tended to prefer philosophy lecturers who told interesting little stories, jokes and asides. But whilst entertaining at the time, I always preferred the lecturers who just got down to the arguments etc., because they provided a constant stream of substantive points and arguments for me to write in my notes. And getting relevant material written down is actually useful for learning and getting good grades, whereas thinking 'what a caution that lecturer is', and expanding one's repertoire of philosophy jokes and anecdotes isn't.

On the other hand, I did have a couple of maths lecturers who managed to combine getting down to the nitty-gritty with some effective crowd-pleasing moments, which afforded one a break from concentrating for a moment.

So, for my part, I would tend to agree that if helping people learn is the goal, tangential 'interesting details' should be minimised.
Show him the numbers. Build a spreadsheet the makes the case for Mac.

You say, "I dislike working in Windows as I feel...."

Feelings are not persuasive to good businessmen. Numbers are persuasive.
I don't own an iPhone, and I don't own an Android phone.

Android kicking the iPhones ass was a hyperbole, but I do believe that the business model of the Android is better in the long term. In a few years there are, with a little luck, 10-15 different Android models, and just a few variations on the iPhone.

Variation, options and non-vendor-lockin are good selling points.
Wow, this article is so wildly ignorant of the basic economics.

Let's start at the beginning. Depressions are caused by a slight increase in people's preference to hold onto cash, which causes a downward spiral where the economy slows and then people want to hold onto cash more.

The first thing you try to do in this instance is increase the money supply, but we've gone as far as we can go on that -- the Fed has sent the interest rate to zero and it can't go any lower.

So, as Keynes said, the second thing you try to do in that scenario is let government spending pick up the slack and take advantage of the productive capacity that isn't being used on anything to get the economy moving again.

Greenspun claims this won't work because "a lot more globalized today and there is much more competition among countries." First, we've only recently caught up to the levels of international integration we had during the first wave of globalization, starting in 1870. Second, countries don't compete with each other. The fundamental well-being of a country is determined by simply its domestic productivity. What would we be competing for?

He seems to suggest that we're competing for international investment dollars. But then why do you think government investment won't work? Why is international investment this magical thing we must attract to start businesses?

He claims that Japan's huge fiscal stimulus proves stimulus doesn't work. But in Japan, stimulus did work -- when it was tried. As the leading scholar wrote: "the 1995 stimulus package ... did result in solid growth in 1996, demonstrating that fiscal policy does work when it is tried. As on earlier occasions in the 1990s, however, the positive response to fiscal stimulus was undercut by fiscal contraction in 1996 and 1997."

See http://mediamatters.org/items/200812220005 for more.
No politics. No anti-semitism. Go away. Flagged.
Seems pretty clear that it's RAID 1 (mirroring). And isn't that exactly what RAID guarantees in a mirroring setup? That the two drives will have the same bits?
> AFAIK there are no hard Android sales figures yet.

No, and that wasn't my point, although I did hide that pretty well. See my answer to pxlpshr.

> Meanwhile, if the "monopolistic distribution channel" of iPhone software ever becomes a serious handicap to Apple's sales, Apple will just end it, overnight.

Yeah, and if they do, they're out of the vertically integrated business, and back at "just" being a very good hardware company. That's not necessarily a bad place to be, but I'm arguing that there are indeed synergies between Apple and Yahoo in a vertical integration that can actually be a real competitor to Google.
if you are using MySQL or Postgres

Sphinx Search Engine
http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

it searches the database where you stored your documents.
It doesn't crawl your website.

The quality of the search results is superior.
this one is really suseptible to someone adding all his/her friends just to see who they match - once you delete someone, the other person is no longer notified of the crush. plus, multiple people can match (downside) and there's only one type of relationship (the crush). and there aren't many fb connect sites out there: this is a good example of one.
Who Owns Your Great Idea?
The obsessive-compulsive editors at Wikipedia wield disproportionate political power there. Political power at Wikipedia is based upon display of obsessive-compulsiveness.
The iPhone 3G Finally Unlocked Perhaps
> If Apple don't integrate vertically

What do you mean by this? I'd say Apple is one of the most vertically integrated tech company I know.

They don't just do their software, they do their hardware as well.
Fatal flaws that are killing local Internet plays
23 Student Innovations (scroll down - individual hyperlinks on left margin)
There are interesting relevant comments in the HN thread on conspicuous consumption (linked from the Best of HN'08 post):

"Child enrichment has replaced the yuppie trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was important to own a BMW and Rolex watch. Today, the children of this same generation have become the vital signs of success... Messages that speak to mothers about bettering the lives of their children, enriching their experiences, and creating more intelligent students can be seen in print and electronic ads."

"Children became their status symbol. Discretionary dollars switched from diamond bracelets to private violin instructors and university sports camps located seven states away."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219936
Transform your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the Web.
Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization
"Although selection would plausibly have favored neurocomputational machinery that automatically encodes an individual's sex and age, 'race' is a very implausible candidate for a conceptual primitive to have been built into our evolved cognitive machinery. During our evolutionary history, our ancestors would have inhabited a social world in which registering the sex and life-history stage of an individual would have enabled a large variety of useful probabilistic inferences about that individual. In contrast, ancestral hunter-gatherers traveled primarily by foot and, consequently, residential moves of greater than 40 miles would have been rare (16). Given the breeding structure inherent in such a world, the typical individual would almost never have encountered people sampled from populations genetically distant enough to qualify as belonging to a different 'race' (even assuming that such a term is applicable to a nonpolytypic species such as humans, in which the overwhelming preponderance of genetic variation is within population and not between population, and at most geographically graded rather than sharply bounded) (17, 18)."
BBC is not anti semite (though it is anti Israeli, according to its own report: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balen_Report)

Anyway, I second "no politics" and flagging this. Take it to Reddit.
Neuroscience of meditation and attention
Following the sentence "no politics" with one equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is a bit hypocritical.
It does show why stories that intersect with politics are dangerous though; the topic seems to bring out the most irrational in people.
It's the variation and options that really drove Linux to the desktop during the 2000's. Everywhere I go, people ask me, disappointedly, why there are only half a dozen filesystems to choose from and expressing their sadness that a mere week of experimenting will do to pick between KDE/Gnome/fvwm/blackbox/etc.

(You did note the recent news that Apple passed RIM (Blackberry) and Motorola to become the second most popular smartphone make, with just two the two very similar iPhone models?)
The Other Jason Fried - myopenbar.com
I think it's important that he knows reasonable people consider that article anti-semitic. If you saw a post you considered anti-semitic, would you want to quietly omit that?

I did not "equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism". That is not my reasoning. That is a political interpretation that you have made.
Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?
how come any time anyone criticizes Israel, people instantly label them Nazis who want to throw jews into ovens?

And wtf really...the source is BBC, not some Hitler loving blog
Sorry. To clarify, there are statewide standardized tests, which in turn end up resulting in department-wide (within a public school) standardized tests (a regular "chapter test", but the same one is given by all teachers in a given department).

When there's a state-mandated standardized test in, say, science, administration immediately jumps on it and says, "Ok! Now we know what our science tests should look like!" and in turn, science teachers must all toe the line, give tests that look just like the state standardized test, and teach to those tests. If Mr. A's students score lower than Mrs. B's students (and administration looks very closely at these test results), [sarcasm] then Mrs. B must be the better teacher! [/sarcasm]

Students "pass" their own class's chapter tests, partly due to teachers just passing them for the reasons previously explained, but also partly because they've been prepped and groomed specifically to pass the test.

Students "pass" the state-wide standardized tests partly because that's what they've been prepped for, and partly because of the nature of standardized testing. Think about it: if everyone does poorly on a state-wide standardized test, the state administrators making the test assume they've made it too difficult, and so water it down. Makes sense also because they want their state to compare favorably with other states. But regardless, what they want is that bell curve. They want it bad. They want to point to the districts on the low side of the bell curve, tell them to improve, and believe they've done something useful.

In turn, local districts want their own bell curves. They want to point to teachers with students on the low side of that bell curve, eliminate them (or otherwise reprimand them), and believe that they've done something useful.

Then net result of all this for the students is that they become pretty good at passing standardized tests but not terribly good at critical thinking. In class, teachers will hear over and over again from students, "will this be on the test?". The students crave bytes of information that sound like a multiple choice question with the answer attached, because that's the sort of thing that leads to success on tests.
Are we all disqualified because we waste too much time on HN?

Reading looks like a good wheat from chaff question because someone who reads is continually educating him/herself. What gets points for a candidate? Language/framework books, algorithms, professional practices, essays, science fiction?
I gave my two weeks notice and am staying on one last week before I resign. I hope to start posting incredibly arrogant startup advice based on my successful venture a few months from now.
To answer your first question, the app is either paid ($9.99/mo sub) or comes with ads.

As for the second, well... I've heard that they make iPods now that can connect directly to the internets. Syncing music across a wire is _so_ 2001.

More seriously, I imagine that the whole "copy to iPod" thing is such a minefield (especially with the music industry involved) that they have no intention of going there and are betting on a disruptive shift towards music players that are connected (almost) everywhere - with the iPod Touch and iPhone being the first examples of that. I would be deeply surprised if they didn't have an Cocoa Touch client (along the lines of Pandora and last.fm) in the works.
I know that both of these are true, but it's not the point.

People would need a lot to start using facebook like Twitter. They'd need to be able to get all of the statuses via SMS, Firefox Extensions, etc, etc.

People overall don't use Facebook statuses like they do Twitter, and that inertia will take a lot more than allowing people to make apps that would show people their friends' statuses.

Inertia is a powerful force, and that larger userbase would somewhat be a disadvantage in that regard. It's more people they have to get to switch over to using statuses like they would Twitter. Getting that process started would be almost impossible.
What makes you think that "criticizing Israel" is what I was commenting on?
Far too many to list, much less read. Find one that you think is good, and subscribe to the ones they link to.

Avoid ones that: never criticize; very frequently post lists, free brushes/templates/vectors/tutorials; use the word "inspiration"; never post anything whose design-relatedness is indirect or not immediately clear or without commentary; or are authored by recent graduates.
Fixing Finance: A Slice of Danish
1000 plus or minus 200 years covers a huge range. 1000 was just about the fulcrum of the medieval period: life in 800 would have been a complete disaster, whereas life in 1200 was in some places a mini-Renaissance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century

If you really got dropped at a random place, it would probably be grazing land or forest, especially in 800.
You'd have to find the nearest tiny village and convince them you weren't dangerous. The stuff you had on you would seem miraculously fine, so could be valuable in trade if it wasn't stolen from you first. But the best way to extract value from your stuff would be to give it as a gift to some powerful protector; money wouldn't be any use unless you could protect yourself against robbers. So it would be all about finding a powerful protector.

In 800 you'd want to find the most enlightened bishop nearby, present yourself as a traveller from some obscure pocket of Nestorian Christians in the far east (drop hints about Prester John), and get work helping to administer his estates. This wouldn't work everywhere, though: a lot of Europe was still pagan in 800. If you landed in the north or the east, you'd have to try to find some enlightened local warlord instead. Hard to say what use you could be to him, though; probably your only hope would be that he'd keep you around as an adornment to his court.

In 1200 you might still want to find a bishop, but if there was a town nearby (especially a great one like Florence or Venice) you could also find work in a bank or for one of the great wool merchants.

Generally: Be compulsively clean, and keep your opinions to yourself.
Top 10 Popular Websites
A USB drive loaded with Ubuntu is actually really handy when trying to recover a busted system.
> "Robust" according to whom? Save the commercials for your webpage. Just the facts, ma'am.

I would argue that a resume is a personal, (hopefully) factual commercial. The interview is there to put any claims you've made into perspective.
Apple right now is the only viable, visible shot search has at innovating

What?! That's a huge statement to make with no backup at all.
Back in the last century, I was the CTO at small company and I had to hire marketing and sales vice presidents. I learned pretty quickly to avoid people from large companies like IBM. They never got their hands dirty and wanted a large support staff. I never really interview programmers from large companies, but I suspect the same may be true for them, e.g. they have never configured a server.
I was assigned to read this book in AP Psychology in high school. Discovering Carl Sagen alone made that class worth it. I now own quite a few of his works and would highly recomend all of them to anyone. The Demon-Haunted World should be required reading, regardless of whether you agree with his viewpoints. Each chapter is a starting point for a powerful, exciting intellectual discussion.
Well what else is there? Or is there some subliminal message in the article to kill jews?
Even RAID1 doesn't guarantee this'll work. There are many ways simply disconnecting the secondary drive while cause problems:

1) The app may be in the middle of a series of DB commands that all need to complete with success before the DB is consistent at the app layer.

2) The DB is in the process of writing out some table rows and hasn't finished.

3) The DB has written some temporary locks to portions of the database that need to be released.

4) The OS hasn't committed writes from the DB to disk

5) The disk hasn't committed writes from the os to platter yet.

Your best bet of this working is to cleanly shut down your app, then cleanly shut down your DB and run an fs sync. After all that it might be ok to yank the drive.

Just yanking a RAID1 drive may work sometimes, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially when every DB system I know of has some sort of backup/dump mechanism. As someone else mentioned, RAID is great for providing high availability, but it does not provide disaster recovery.
Advantages of concatenative and stack-based languages
Prediction is impossible, we all know that. What
we don't know is that retrodiction is also impossible.
History is a form of science fiction. The future is
history that hasn't happened yet. History is the
sensibility of one time, assessing another time, that it
cannot possibly know.

-- Bruce Sterling, http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000001.txt
The place where I work actually own extensive google search appliance but to get through inter-departmental red tape will be harrowing- not to mention I won't be able to admin it.

Looking for something free- ^^ Solr looks promising.
Hard to tell if there is anything meaningful in the study. Like most psychological studies it used students as subjects. I am not surprised that the only thing they could remember was the remark about sex. Quite likely the "meat" wasn't anything of particular interest. Contrast that with a lecture to professional programmers on Hadoop. An OT story or remark would be just an ice breaker and not the main take-away.

Take-away here: psychological studies on students tell you something about students, not necessarily about the rest of us.
Agreed, they are an anomaly there in my mind.
Wow, this piece is actually just a quote from my article, which goes on to disprove the statement.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Why are people voting this up?
disagreement = irrationality?
You use a hash table when you just need lookup. You use a tree when you need sorted order. The only tree worth using is a red-black tree. There, now you don't need to look it up. ;)
BeepBeep Is Another New Erlang Framework
I Love Typography is the only other design "blog" I read, although I have a bunch of clip blogs like Monoscope and Aisle One.
Give me your top 3, will you?
I get that "money spent" does not equal "results achieved". But: in many of the worst cases where money hasn't equalled results, the cause has been money misspent on administration: bloated staff, unreasonable compensation, new buildings. So while the Charity Navigator definition may not be perfect, it's a very solid heuristic. For instance, it detects the DC school system.
Well, keep in mind that I'm just one guy. I'm not some sort of high powered executive; I'm a hacker that just happens to do hiring.

There is a world of difference between the people of the world who are interested in making themselves better developers and computer scientists and the people who just want to do the minimum necessary for a job.

Other than the obvious requirement of some modicum of honesty on a resume (like... if you're going to say you know Haskell on your resume, you'd better be prepared to tell me what a monad is), reading has been the best indicator of a hire for me than anything else. Of course, just because someone says they read a ton of books doesn't mean they're going to get a job, but I'll only do face to face interviews with people who give a shit about what they do.

We don't do the caliber of stuff that requires deep discussion about sorting a million integers with only 2MB of memory, but we do like to keep our shop as small as is humanly possible in order to keep the quality level as high as we can.
Apple shouldn't buy anybody.

They should focus on producing the coolest gadgets year after year, forever and ever.

That's what they do best.
The off-the-rails comment is due to the blog's trend away from things like critiquing the Win32 API and talking about software scheduling, and towards Spolsky's theories of company management. It's the Inc. effect.

His writing is also less engaging now than it was 3 years ago; fewer stories about crazy bread machines, more bland prescriptions.
What one invention would you introduce ahead of its time?
Well, since it's a resume, it sounds like you know exactly how to interview her. That's an hour's worth of questions right there.

Your comment reminds me of Steve McConnell's "beware a guy in a room" chapter in "Code Complete", though.