skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stop talking about it.
You could also check out Apptopia http://www.apptopia.com/
I usually want to go the other way...
There sure seems to be a lot of confusion here on HN about what Steam is.

There are a lot of people that say the only reason why they ever run Windows is to play games on Steam

It seems like a lot of people hear that there will be a Steam client for Linux and somehow think that all these games will now run on Linux. Sorry to disappoint you.

It seems that there is a misunderstanding of what Steam actually is. Steam is merely a marketplace, updater, and launcher for over 1500 games. Less than 5% of those games run on Linux. Valve only has 25 games that it produced in-house. Only 6 of these have been released since 2007 (their games alone hardly dictate how the industry will move. They are not a dominant player in this respect).
Most of valve's titles have been mission-packs, or variants of Half-Life, TFS, or Counter Strike.

If gamers can boot into Linux tomorrow and run Steam, will they? Would they really do it for the 100 games that are available (most of them dated and washed up games)? Then new titles come out or they want to play their current favorite (non Valve) game, they have to boot back into Windows to play those? Why would they do that? (besides geeks/hackers with too much time on their hands).

I know that the majority of hackers love the openness of Linux and the smug "hipness" or "superiority" (or being in-vogue) of Apple, but I think that people tend to self dilute themselves with wishful thinking that Microsoft and Windows will somehow go away any time soon.

It is comical to me how people can berate one closed platform - Windows (and list being closed as the reason why) and yet love other, even more closed platforms (Apple products, Steam...)

Steam holds a monopoly on digital sales of Games in the PC market. Suddenly Microsoft wants to compete with them and they start ranting like lunatics (publicly calling windows 8 a catastrophe). Any company who does business with the public should expect competition. And the public should welcome it. It keeps prices lower and forces competitors to produce better software.
Thanks man! Keep us posted on the side-project, awesome space to be in. If you're on Twitter, I'm @alidrennan.
I also found StatSoft's statistics textbook to be useful:

http://www.statsoft.com/textbook
Campfire is made by a company with a massive and rabid following, and is cross-sold to the users of three other popular products, two books, and a massive blog.

Hipchat is an amazing product which is steadily getting better under the steam of great developers. It is also owned by Atlassian, a company with great execution and a strong track record of successful cross-selling.

So under these circumstances, no, I personally wouldn't enter this space.
Actually, this is exactly how transactions in Oracle work. The difference is - one db server (Oracle) vs. distributed system (Google)
Have you ever watched the news? Ignorance is what you get from watching the news. http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

As I wrote before, if you want to learn something pick up a good book.
Postgres and Oracle?
it led to the company making many articles free for public for viewing

That is a nice result indeed, do you have a reference?
> Is there a HN filter to weed out "rich man has opinions" type stories?

Yes. The title says "rich man has opinions". Don't click the link, don't read the comments and don't post comments about how you didn't want to see this.
Campfire is the only 37s service that has been sticky for my team.
Oracle doesn't have to be one DB server. Check out Oracle RAC for instance.
I'd suggest against it personally. Get a $10 linode and setup an ircD there.

If your home network gets DDoS'd, it's going to be quite an inconvenience.
I'm still trying to figure out what I'd be doing with my time instead of working for a living. I think it would be working.

I'm in about that boat. Paycheck aside, I feel like contributing in a meaningful way through work has far more lasting value than indulging in hedonism or art.

Armstrong would have had a heck of a time getting to the moon, if it were not for those who worked to put him there.
Nik, Im sure if you actually talked to me you'd find that Im just a normal bloke who likes inventing things that hopefully someone will use. Ive sold a few inventions over the years and its great to make a living at what I love doing...Id ask you as one fellow technologist to another to not make it personal. Please.
According to a friend, the most recent version of Sparrow is essentially broken (100% CPU and crashes). I haven't upgraded in a while for this reason, and I'm not expecting that issue to be fixed, ever.

That said, I'm still using Sparrow on my laptop and desktop machines as well as my iPhone. But probably not for a whole lot longer.
* Pownce - shut down
* Convore - shut down
* Grove - shut down

I think the guy is really just telling facts. Unfortunately, it means that the next project may have users worrying about when it'll be shut down. (There were actually comments to that affect when grove was announced on HN).

Also, I think the underlying issue here is that none of those services cost anything to run, so they seem to have been shutdown because of other factors - perhaps a lack of ability to see things through.
What other avenues do you suggest?

To me the Largest Sadness is that he did not succeed in releasing the corpus to the public, which I presume was his real goal. Making this information accessible would be one of the largest contributions an individual could make to the world, possibly worth the trade of spending the rest of one's life in prison. The tragedy is doing so without the reward.

The only greater contribution I can immediately come up with that is definitely accessible to some of the readers of this board would be leaking the Google Books archive. Depriving the world of life saving knowledge for purpose of profit is as great a sin as genocide. Sometimes conscience must trump the law.

Sincerely,

A long time member resorting for the first time to an anonymous account.
I remember trying it out when it was free, and then I got a notice about the pricing plans. I emailed and said that the prices were outrageously expensive for just a few users. I never got a reply, but I got an auto-reply a week later telling me to fill out my billing info.

They put the service out there, and didn't really listen to much feedback or improve it. I was rather disappointed and find this ending... expected.
I completely agree with you.

However, he did 'break into' an MIT switch closet to run 'keepgrabbing.py' over a 1Gbit/s connection. He wasn't just downloading 100KiB PDFs, either. He downloaded at least two million documents. The indictment isn't clear exactly how many, and it sounds like he downloaded a lot more than 2 million, to boot. Not all of JSTOR's documents are neat 100KiB PDFs, either: a substantial portion are scanned images (1+ MiB PDFs) from old journals. So, we're looking at the TB range of data.

This is not to say that his intentions were ignoble...
May 1999. Not exactly news. Chances are high that we already read it 13 years ago. I'd be more interested in an interview about the things that he worked on more recently, such as the Go language, or what he's planning to do on this winter vacation.
That is in progress. The voting will be added next week.
The Talk of China
Several years ago our household income was $xx. Along came some opportunities and now it's $xx+y. My wife and I live the same lifestyle and save the rest. Why? It's fun to see the doors that open as your savings grow. Even if you never open those doors, having access to the keys is its own reward. Someday we'll open one of those doors. The anticipation and journey will surely be as joyful as the reveal behind the door.
> I find it very disturbing and revealing that such a high level and respected guy did read no real book, I mean real books that will be read in 50 years, literature or philosophy, or classics like Seneque, Proust, Montaigne, Austeen.

Bill Gates is reading about how much college students learn in college instead of reading Kant and sipping wine by his fireplace and being a pretentious douche-bag.

Oh, the horror. What has the world come to.

EDIT: If it didn't occur to you, the definitions of real, classic and important are different for a random punk on an internet forum and Bill Gates. Also, Bill Gates doesn't seem like a guy who would read classics so that he can make blog posts about it.
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft—a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically.

My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
You could also argue that designing for the average phone may be holding others back.

My Nokia N900 has a screen 800px wide, supports CSS, can display inline images, execute flash, execute javascript. Yet a lot of the time I get redirected to the "m." version of a site, with bland default-font single-color text, perhaps an image or two thrown in if I'm lucky. I would guess the majority of the sites have just copy/pasted a list of mobile user-agents and use that to decide when to redirect to the mobile version. It's a pity that there's no simple way for the phone itself to tell the site what it is capable of rendering.
I don't see why.

The Steam client running on Linux does not mean any more games will run on Linux than do today (hardly any of Steam's over 1500 games will be available in Linux in the foreseeable future). The only people who will load Linux just because the steam client runs on it now are people who like booting into different OS's depending on what game they want to play today.
Your concerns seem well-intentioned but they miss the point of the post. The knuckle-draggers you worry about aren't searching out blog posts looking for reasons to stop participating. The fact of the matter is that it has been shown that people who watch TV news know less (or more false things) than those who do.
Apple iPhone 5 Has 1GB RAM; Apple A6 Chip Was Built In-House
As someone who has served on a federal grand jury this is true (the rarity of a false bill), but is most likely due to two factors I saw over and over again:

1) The government generally doesn't bring borderline or weak cases in front of a grand jury. They have limited time and budget and don't want to pursue a case they don't feel is a sure thing (or, more accurately, a sure deal with the defendant as most cases do not go to trial).

2) Grand jury decisions need not be unanimous, only simple majority. I voted against indictment in a couple of cases I felt were weak, but they were indicted none-the-less. Further the burden of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt but rather a preponderance of evidence[1], which is a lower bar.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Burden_of_Proof#Preponder...
Interesting, just saw another startup with the app version of this, AppTheGame, demo'ed recently. Will be interesting to see if SV & mobile first can do a better job than Europe & web first.
"Forever" being until Google changes their service which is probably about every few months.
Art is one of the areas of human endeavour that has the greatest amount of 'lasting value' - you only need to look at the numerous existing works that are around, and how much pleasure people derive from them, to see that.

Even if you are only an average artist yourself, and your own works will not be appreciated by many in the future, for many people they would like nothing more than being able to spend time creating art. Besides, software is half science, half art...

Perhaps you didn't intend it, but putting art in the same boat as hedonism is giving the latter way, way more credit than is appropriate. :)
Funny - Apple releases an app-store built into OS X and you hear faint applause (Yes, Steam already had a client for OS X at the time), Microsoft follows suit and you hear loud curses and wide spread disapproval. This shows 1. the illegitimacy of Apple and 2. the double standard that Microsoft faces.
PostgreSQL 9.2: Full-throttle Database
Unfortunately, I know from working on my own smarthome project that the "turn lights on or off based on location" is patented and secured already.
I wonder what they will do next. Grove.io started out of Convore(YCW11)[1], announced just 249 days ago[2, 3, 4].

[1] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/10/convore-grove-io/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3449917

[3] http://betakit.com/2012/02/20/convore-shutting-down-april-1

[4] http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-do...
If you had a few of these in your house a an iPhone camera app could be made that controls the lights so that you could compose the shot and the lighting. It could even briefly brighten the lights like a flash setup for just the duration of the exposure. That way the lighting needed for the moment of the shot needn't interfere with the ambience of the room.

Interesting things could be done by having lighting shifts programmed to change during video shots, too.
I always find this to be terrible advice. Most programmers have similar itches, if you scratch your own itch, you are going into a lot of competition with many other developers. Why not solve a problem for an industry that gets much less attention? Maybe success rates would be much higher if we stopped all building the same things.
I think Color Kinetics has locked up almost everything useful with RGB LED arrays.
We were doing this (and still do run our own XMPP servers for other purposes), and opted for grove for the logging, availability and to ease the maintenance burden.

Just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean everyone wants to, even (or especially) when you're a highly tech-centric organisation.
I have a troubling relationship with time
2011 December 19 Survey of Eastern Libya Public Opinion, October 12-25, 2011.pdf

- In light of recent events, the date is relevant
For html/javascript/python, go with CodeAcademy.com!
I'm curious. Can you send me a UNIX?
There is no difference between large and small tech companies shutting down their services. Google has shut down close to 50 services in recent year if I remember correctly: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/google-shutdowns-continue-i...
For those who liked Grove and its combination of IRC and web chat, I personally recommend Flowdock which also has an IRC interface https://flowdock.com/ I know the people behind Flowdock personally and know that they are going to be around for a long time.

As a personal note, it's sad to see Grove go away. It was the first bigger service I got to design and I loved working with Leah.
Nice deck man! Education's ripe for the doing - today, we’re preparing our kids for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technology that hasn’t been invented, to solve problems we can’t yet imagine.
That's because with K-dramas there isn't a huge existing market that would be cannibalized.
Mark Shuttleworth springs to mind here, although with rather more than 1 million.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/22/internet.so...

Shuttleworth continues to fund Canonical (although I think they may be closer to breaking even). Whatever you think of Ubuntu, it has certainly made a difference.
It's an easy solution with negligible end user consequences.

Do you have an evidence that getting rid of infinite scrolling will have very little impact on user engagement? It might have a lot.
The strapline on your web page should be:
Converts your website into photoshop layers
Not:
Converts your website in photoshop layers
Yeah I run my own IRC server but when it came to my clients, I didn't want to be responsible for that. Grove is fantastic but wasn't all that reliable. I wish it had taken off, though! I might be forced to fill the void ;)
Ugh, I don't understand how Grove.io can just drift apart like that. Surely Grove's costs were relatively low, and my impression was that there was a significant level of uptake.

> "..our team has moved on to other projects.."

So, unprofitable, or just not the next Facebook? Is there really no one that is happy to keep the service ticking along?

I feel like there is a pretty significant problem with tech startups, where everyone is so busy trying to be the next big thing, that everything else is dropped and abandoned in that pursuit.
Yes, it is. Sorry, but it really, really is.

No NFC (and some crap about Square letting you use wifi):
NFC is for far more than just mobile payments. The ability to instantly swap and share content between devices is spectacular. The fact that NFC isn't "popular enough" and therefore the #2 mobile OS won't support it should be a sign the device is "boring". And personally, if I could use NFC to touch my phone to a Square terminal like I can with Google Wallet, I'd be a happy camper.

There are bigger screens:
Quoting some guy who hasn't figured out how to hold a phone with a larger screen comfortably (which everyone with a bigger screen has) is just protecting your ego. My thumb can reach my entire screen, one handed, on my Galaxy SIII. We all were told that the 3.5" screen was the "perfect size for the human hand", and now that Apple has a bigger screen, it's also the perfect size? No, it's because iOS developers can't handle variable display sizes, so Apple has to do these things in baby steps.

iOS is stale:
Yes, it really is stale. It looks like a juiced-up palm pilot. You can pretend all you want that "it's the most usable interface out there" - well, maybe because you've been trained to use it. There's nothing that could be better? Multi-tasking is as awesome as it could be? The Notification Center was perfect when they lifted it from Android, and couldn't be improved? Managing notification settings, app settings, having random apps that can't be removed or put into a folder - these things are ideal? (I have a much longer list of annoyances, but I'll spare you those). No, you're just trained. Best for you. Not best. There's a difference.

It’s just longer:
It's also lighter and thinner. So was the iPhone 4S too heavy and fat, or would you have preferred they filled that space with a bit more battery, so "you can make it through the day" isn't a selling point? They quote the same battery life as the previous generation phone, despite new chips and radios. So I can only assume at some point they went "Being the fourth-thinnest smartphone currently for sale...that's way more critical than 8 extra hours of web browsing and apps. Good work team." Is that the choice you would have made? Most users?

Congratulations, the iPhone is boring and you are happy with that. You've decided you'd rather have predictable than amazing. Don't tell the rest of us we're wrong for wanting more.
Books, by and large, are useless in keeping up on current events. The news, despite all it's faults, is current - which is what's meant by "informed" in this context.

That's not to say that you shouldn't read books nor that the news is the best way to stay informed, but saying that reading books is the best way to stay on top of current issues is provably wrong.
"Bill Gates is reading about how much college students learn in college instead of reading Kant and sipping wine by his fireplace and being a pretentious douche-bag."

I understand your point, but, I can't help recognising the irony given the key findings of the book mentioned.
Yes and hopefully it also means that many people take note and speak up against the law and against his harsh treatment.

And this is not just about the law by the way. The fact that governments around the world can be blackmailed or corrupted by a small number of ruthless publishers is a political issue as well. It's also a credibility issue for researchers to some degree, particularly those who have already made a name for themselves and still play along with this.
"there's no connection between spirals and prime numbers"

You just shot yourself in the foot :(
Yes, there is a connection. If you add up the total distance each line makes in a tick, its equivalent to the harmonic series, which is a special case of the zeta function. This is where the spiral comes from. Its a dirct consequence of the fact that each number has period 1/n. The spiral emerges naturally, its not programmed or forced into that shape.
I'm finding that writing reviews, even very surface-level reviews, of books I am reading is helping me to derive a lot more value from them.

Firstly, while reading, I find myself reflecting more on the book. After all -- I will be writing a review, I need to be an active participant.

Secondly, I find that books will often spark some thinking on a topic and the review will essentially morph into an essay. I wrote a 3000-word review of one book[1] that diverged into fuzzy logic, theories of jurisprudence and a few other areas in order to properly explain my reaction. Right now I'm writing a review of Waltzing with Bears that will diverge into financial accounting and a pet theory of mine about how tools create paradigms that shape entire bodies of knowledge.

Third, books can often be connected to one another. I find that my reviews tend to link to each other. Not because I am trying to drive internal link traffic (I'm basically a nobody in internet terms, it's not worth the bother). But book A will have tangentially touched on the topic of book B; or perhaps book C illuminates something only poorly discussed in book D. To the point where I refer to books from before I started reviewing with an "unreviewed" annotation.

Finally, some people find my reviews useful. My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting and I do a lot of reading both on it directly and on allied subjects (eg, anatomy). Fellow strength nerds have found my reviews useful in helping them select books for their own libraries. It's nice when people give you positive feedback on something like that.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
You paid $150 for software which still works, which had no promise of updates forever anyway, and you're upset?

Not that your point is invalid talking about Grove - suddenly everyone who used it has to move in under a month. But I don't get the upset over Sparrow. If it helped you at the time, it should help you now.
My biggest concern is a vindictive prosecution... pushing for 35 years in prison is absurd.
Don't know if this is sarcasm or not... hmmm...
Exactly. Picking on any specific category makes me sad about human kind. For example I like to joke about Italians and their food obsession, but I'm not laughing AT them, I am not viewing myself as superior. Most times cultural differences are awesome to observe, none is better than the other.

It's so easy, in case things go bad and, say, a war starts, to fight against other categories. Think cartoons making fun of jews in the 1930's -> the holocaust.
http://www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm

Groucho Marx sent the following wire to a Hollywood club he had joined: "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

If you can't think of anything you can make that people would want, then you need to either:

1. Learn to make different things

2. Learn more about what people want
Is "how to win friends and influence people" a classic book by your definition?

I think the key thing I takr from his reading list is reading about big current issues. At least he wants to fix things.
In any given dimension. We all figured this out.