skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent some time learning from a respected survival expert who claimed the 'solar still' was not an efficient use of one's energy. I tried it out a couple of times anyway and proved to myself that he was right.

What did work fairly well was a transpiration bag [1]. It took a few bags to get a meaningful supply of water and one needs to be careful about the foliage used.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2EBiA0Csts
We had Rails Core team members spend lots of time trying to fix our Rails 3.x slowdowns. As you probably know, Thomas is a Rails Core Alumnus and we have lots of personal connections in the Rails community.

Nobody could identify it.

Our sysadmin was a sysadmin for one of the first, biggest, and most reliable Rails app ecosystems. He couldn't trace the Ubuntu issue.

It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience running a business. When you do, you will realize that just throwing money at problems doesn't solve anything.

PS - We have servers at Rackspace. 3 of them. Where do you think a lot of that money went? They're $3k a month. And guess what — they won't manage servers with the configuration we required. Fab.
Wise words on life from 89 year old Israeli President Shimon Peres
I happen to agree that solitary confinement is a form of torture regardless of whether or not he was stripped and left naked for 7 hours. My point was that the 'average Joe' pictures medieval torture devices (or someone tied to a chair and being beaten), when they hear talk of torture. So trying to claim that he was tortured because he was left naked for a few hours (or is in permanent solitary confinement) isn't going to win over anyone in that respect.

I'd venture that the internal monologue goes something like:

" Tortured? He's just left in a birthday suit for a bit,
and doesn't get to socialize. How bad could that be?
Jack Bauer resists being beaten while tied to a chair
every other episode, and still has the strength to
save that day! This Bradley Manning guy is just a
pussy. "
I love statistics, but it seems to me that studies on self-reported states of emotion are fatally flawed no matter how you do the math. In this case, that is to say that just because the majority of people in a society reported neutrally on your study, does not mean that you can imply the negative.

In fact, however, what it does mean is that you can imply nothing, not even that your sample study is "confronting" an "emotion deficit".

This study, and others like it, are generally interesting, however, as they raise questions like: how do you quantify happiness? how do you quantify satisfaction? how do you quantify love? how do you quantify things that simply aren't currently quantifiable? Which brings up the reality, that if you cannot quantify such things for the individual, you surely cannot quantify them for an entire society of individuals? Or can you?
If you read the email I wrote, it's clear that we're not "giving up because of software failure." Look at it again and you'll see it's a different reason altogether.
This.

The ebook career.fork() that came out recently had more on this. Basically, you can learn to spot "clients from hell". There are certain traits that are the equivalent of pointy horns and a whiff of brimstone:

- excessive cheapness in initial negotiations

- "but we can just find a guy on odesk for $5/hour" (reply: OK, you do that, and come find me when it falls apart).

- no effort to understand technical issues. Of course, lots of good clients don't understand technical issues (that's why they hired you), but at least show some interest in what you're doing.

- unrealistic expectations (I want the next Facebook!)

- very vague ideas about what they want. "I need a website made!" Lots of good clients also have vague ideas, but its your job to help them figure out exactly what they need. Try sitting down with them with a pen and paper and listing what pages they need and an outline of the content for each one.

Now, some clients will happily sketch out Balsamiq type mockups, wheras others will just give you a brief list of the pages they need and let you work out the details. Both are fine. But if the client refuses this exercise, stay away.

My big surprise when freelancing was that most clients are not from hell. If you just avoid the jokers, there are plenty of good clients that value your work and pay on time.

Other tips:

- taking a deposit at the start is always good. It's like the client has "broken the seal" and will be more willing to pay in future.

- it's hard asking for payment. It's the social norm against asking for strangers for money. One advantage of paycheck employment is the only time you need to discuss money is in the interview. After the first few invoices, it gets easier.

- avoid getting desperate. When you only have one week's rent in your account, you might be tempted to take on a bad client. Easier said than done, but maintain a buffer of savings and start looking for gigs before your current one finishes.

- be a bit cynical. Even if the clients are the nicest, coolest people in the world, if your code is on their server and your money is in their account, it's quite easy for them not to pay you. If you control the code, and some of the money (ie, a deposit), you're in a much stronger position.
"Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist" - Shimon Peres
Corporate directories aren't something I'm familiar with, so forgive me if this question seems naive:

Does Google Apps for Business (i.e. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/ ) have a viable solution for the corporate directory, or do they just expect you to use a third-party solution like Microsoft Active Directory?
Yes, the other gentlemen are correct. This was all our own money. Which we earned from scratch from our other products (all doing very well, thank you). And, perhaps more galling, VCs approach us every month to try to invest (but we're against it).

I'm sure shutting down a perfectly good and potentially very profitable product will make lots of wannabes and aspiring entrepreneurs jealous. Luckily I don't make my life decisions based on what other people would do in my situation.

When you run a real business, with real customers, you quickly discover that what sounds good, isn't, and what looks bad, is often the absolutely right thing to do. Luckily, our early access customers for Charm heard & understood & appreciated my email.
It's now on an interesting fork right now. ActiveDirectly is possible via DCOM and MMCs, but Microsoft is thinking of replacing it with .NET Remoting and Web based UIs.
I don't believe it was anything crazy and that I believe that there is probably a common answer for what this was, but I am amazed at the HN comments so far that take this post for certification of an idea.
For a bit I was thinking this was a game played via getting the python library and calling functions in the interpreter.
@weisser. Yes we imagine Umano being used in many more cases than just commuting including the gym, cooking in the kitchen, walking your dog, etc. Basically anytime you could be listening to music.

In terms of preloading content, it will be in our next release ;). Already implemented. Just waiting on Apple.

Please let us know at support@sothree.com any pain points you have in the app or anything else you would like to see.
I've actually envied people with cochlear implants for having this ability. The idea of being able to turn on and off senses at will is kind of an amazing thought. I personally have a hypersensitive sense of touch, and it is an almost constant distraction. I can't count the number of times I've wished I could toggle or perhaps just filter my senses.

It's still undoubtedly far off in the wings. I'm not sure if anything has been done on the purely organic side, but I know that at least on the ECE side of things our ability to effectively interact with organic systems is still quite ineffective and brutish. The professor I had for digital signal processing last year does some work with cochlear implants. He spent a lecture talking about the current technologies, and the implantation and interfacing he described was very destructive. There would undoubtedly be severe ability loss if they were used on an otherwise capable person to try to enable this ability. It would be nice if we evolutionary developed some high-pass preprocessing. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that will take a good bit longer to develop than man-made alternatives.

I'd be interested to read what you've written if you'd like another set of eyes on it.
Parody of social media experts
I've asked Gabriel specifically and he said that they use their own crawler/indexer.
The only thing that caught my eye was Google redirecting duck.com to google.com when DDG expressed interest in purchasing the domain. That seems a little underhanded, but not illegal....
Thanks! Let me know if there are any other features you would like to see in the app.
I agree with your main point, but it's ahistorical to say that if something was wrong then it must not have been scientific. That's a popular and seductive view that manages to commit both the hindsight and no-true-scotsman fallacies. The truth is that science (by which I mean the community of scientific opinion) is often wrong. It's just hard to see this in any given case until enough time has passed.

For example, in the 1960s scientists told women not to breast-feed their babies because Science had proven that "formula" was better. That could hardly seem stupider or more absurd now, but an entire generation was affected by it. To me, that's a reasonable baseline against which to guard ourselves. It seems arrogant to suppose that we're smarter or less error-prone than the experts of 40 years ago.

The conclusion I draw from this is that public policy should be skeptical of scientific opinion — not dismissive of it, of course; that would be silly — but inclined to err on the side of pluralism and non-intervention. That would also be an appropriate use of the word "skepticism" as opposed to the dogmatism that calls itself by that name these days. I'm uncomfortable (as your comment suggests you are) with the zealotry of the more aggressive pro-science movements that have arisen in recent years. They speak in the name of science, but emotionally they are proto-religious. Science, the abstraction, does not exist. What exists are communities of fallible and corruptible humans. We need to take that into account, everywhere and deeply.
I was really looking forward to the 64-bit version but it never looked as if Mozilla was ever serious about it.
Yes, Daniel helped us backport to Rails 2.x and make a lot of improvements while we were at it, after everybody had given up on finding our Rails 3.x performance problems.
Google Maps Giving Out Profile Badges To Most Helpful Community Members
I like the strapped-on-whale powered submarine. Any ambitious valley billionaires ready to fund trips through the ocean on whale powered submarines? Just make sure to collect the money before they get on the submarine.
Funny enough, there's thousands of useless Show HN projects which receive better reception than a heroic effort to save human lives.
You should probably try it again. It does indeed set DuckDuckGo as a search engine for the address bar when installed. The pop up button can be removed.
Seems like it would be better to focus on the single problem of not crossing the 32-bit address boundary rather than the multitude of x64 problems.
Has anyone ever seen DuckDuckBot hit their site? I don't have any web property large to appear via DuckDuckBot, but maybe someone else does? Im fairly certain it crawls Quora, as via this tweet https://twitter.com/yegg/status/33693491838066688
"Until you sign the contract, you have to be the mum of your clients, reassuring him, explaining things, understanding him. Once signed, you are his father : you are here to reminds him the terms of the contract. It means that you have to be thorough on revisions, delivery dates for contents, and of course, payments."

Funny analogy. I like it, however...

I've recently been skimming the book "Million Dollar Consulting". In there, the author says you should avoid the temptation to treat the client like a parent ("I'd better hide this problem, or the client will get mad!") or like a child ("I'd better hide this problem - the client is too helpless to deal with it themselves").

Instead, treat them like a partner ("we have a problem. What should we do?").
Well, the base was man-made, who says that the ice wasn't?

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

;-)
If you ask me, it's bad to advertise that you publicly speculate, with resounding authority, on things you know absolutely nothing about.

Haha, won't get funded ever? I have VCs knocking on my inbox doors on a monthly basis. We don't take funding. We have, however, brought in >$1 million in revenue on products since we started doing products, including http://letsfreckle.com.

The sysadmin I mentioned is one of the most respected experts in the community. He wasn't cheap. He had a fantastic legacy of very good, very public work. And yet, here we are.

When you run a real business, you will be faced with tough decisions. Hopefully you will be able to make wise choices as well.
Facebook proposes killing off user voting on policy changes
Their results are nearly identical to Bing in every case I've tried.

Let me know if you find a search result that is different.
What did you need that only x64 could provide?
But I just don't see the problem exactly...I mean, what you are describing is the exact niche that radio has filled...the reading of information aurally...something that is unique from TV and print. And of course radio, never mind podcasts and audiobooks, will be their competition. You can only consume one stream at a time and it's hard to imagine people juggling around several different audio-information apps each day.

I'll download the app for my trip tomorrow, and I appreciate the idea that some things have to be experienced rather than explained...but I almost can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, as your situation describes the kind of person who is satiated by radio and podcasts. The This American Life app, for example, completes my commute.

* OK I just downloaded the app and used it while brushing my teeth. I don't think it compares to radio...as I said, radio production is very involved and the use of ambient sound and scene transitions is integral to the audio story telling format.
I don't know what he is talking about. I have my search engine settings page open and there are more than 20 different search engines listed that I can make default with one click, including Duck Duck Go!

I like the idea and philosophy behind Duck Duck Go, but maybe improving the search results, which are no where near as good as Google's results, would help bring more traffic than whining about non-issues.
While I've certainly seen firsthand the importance of AD in enterprise, and I agree that it will continue to sell a lot of Server and SharePoint licenses for MS - I think Office is probably a stronger most valuable asset for a variety of reasons. Among them, Office actually is MSFT's most profitable product and it actually currently doesn't face any noteworthy competition (not that AD does, mind you).

Also, I had to check to see if 'blogosphere' was coined prior to 2001, and found that indeed it was.
Pretty awesome to see croquet being played on the ocean floor. Why not?
Look at the twitter token fiasco for an example of what happens when you build your business model on someone else's API.
This guy is spot on. I've done quite a bit of time in the corporate environment running middleware systems such as LDAP and AD.

Google Apps does not have a viable solution because it is not in house. There is no easy way to extend the schema and integrating with Google Apps is actually quite difficult. There are tools to help you integrate from Active Directory to Google Apps but not the other way around.

Also Active Directory is actually pretty awesome from a management standpoint. Suppose today you wanted to have 50k linux boxes with all the same logins. You would probably use LDAP (which is essentially AD under the hood). But how about automatic package management per user? How do you configure that? AD has all this built in and more.
What really blows my mind is that they did a regressive rewrite to Rails 2 rather than learn to use profiling tools.

The whole situation just makes my brain stare blankly and wonder what on earth was happening over there.
I wonder if these color schemes are chosen primarily because it's what's traditional and expected; we don't like to surprise our users/customers as it may induce negative feelings, including a lack of trust. For example, we expect a fashion website to look different to a web app, and when something is discordant with our preconceived notions we trust it less. I think that typically designers intuitively go for a less-surprising aesthetic rather than an atypical one whose aesthetic induces a degree of trust-eroding cognitive dissonance.

The one utilitarian site I can think of that breaks the author's pattern is Wufoo; bold colors, utilitarian purpose. They seem to be quite successful too. Having said that, a single counterexample doesn't diminish the validity of the author's central thesis, but it might just be one notch in the larger key.
It's called Cinnamon.
What was the advantage you saw in it?

From the brief discussion, it sounds like it had inferior performance to the 32 bit builds, and was buggier to boot.
Looks cool. Suggestion: dont use alert's, they look clunky compared to a modal/inline popup.
As mentioned in the bug and other locations, Firefox's x64 builds are pre-release nightlies only and not anywhere near ready for primetime. They still get a lot of bug reports that are x64 only and don't have resources dedicated to it because Firefox OS and Metro mode have higher priorities.

For folks in the bug saying that this will make them somehow abandon Firefox, if 64-bit is really that important to them, they'll have to use Internet Explorer only and deal with many popular plugins not working (Adobe Reader, Quicktime, etc).

Opera has an experimental Win64 build from February that is now out of date with known security issues. No further progress has been made or release schedule announced.

Chrome, Chromium and Iron are 32-bit only and have no 64-bit builds, not even pre-alpha experimental ones.

Apple has abandoned Safari for Windows entirely.

So, as far as 64-bit browsers on Windows... you've got IE and that's it.

UPDATE: As correctly pointed out below, there is a snapshot (alpha, incomplete, unstable) build of current Opera for Win x64. Apologies on the incomplete information in this post originally.
It's not just you. Maybe he only crawls the Alexa top 10k or some similar minimal set.
The first iPhone is also bridge #1. An overly-designed gizmo that no one needed at the time.

Hence its massive failure.
They are completely forgetting about the standard cross-browser external.AddSearchProvider API. One-click install initiation works fine in both Chrome and Firefox in a DuckDuckGo + Google Suggest search plugin I put together at http://eligrey.com/blog/post/encrypted-duckduckgo-with-googl...
What I find interesting about the reaction to this email, from you bench spectators, is that you completely missed the point of the email.

The email isn't "Wah we hit a server problem, bye bye."

The point is:

"What this has really shown us is that, if we open Charm to the general public, we won't be able to provide you with the kind of service you deserve. We are a tiny team, and so far, we've had zero luck in our attempts to grow by hiring developers. Problems which are small now will only get bigger."

If you've never run a serious product, or a real business, or tried to hire for technical positions, I can understand why you'd zero in on the "facts" about the technical situation and ignore all the "foofy personal window dressing," and write things like "I call BS! It's a smoke screen!" or "Why didn't they just try BSD?"

And yet I addressed the actual problem in very clear terms in a paragraph you can't possibly miss.

Next time somebody makes a hard business decision and you hear about it on HN and come out, irony guns blazing, may I humbly suggest you read more than the subject line written by the unrelated HN submitter?

As for any poor silent, lurkers who wonder if this is how they will be treated if they -- gasp! -- ever find themselves in over their heads, or in a business they realize they don't actually want to be in… our customer reactions have been uniformly:

"Aw, I'm so sorry... Charm is such a nice piece of software... your email was so touching."

Why? Because we've always shown our customers respect by creating great software, and we're showing them even more respect by ensuring we do not make promises we can't keep.

Our friends and technical acquaintances have been full of nothing but sympathy, understanding, and for those closest to the situation, praise for making the right, hard decision.

Yep, it sucked. Yep, we poured something like $200k into development, redevelopment, and infrastructure all told. Yep, it is a fucking amazing piece of software and the best thing I've ever designed.

But is it worth the constant heartache of the impossible task of finding people equipped to work on it? Of having it stuck in some kind of product half-life because of that? Of feeling responsible for, but incapable of, being "on call" in the middle of the night?

Of feeling guilty because, unless we can somehow suddenly be great at those things, we're taking money for a service which might let our customers down?

Nope. It's not worth it.

And boy do I feel lucky and privileged that because we spent nothing but our own money on it, we are free to decide to do whatever we think is right.

See also my principles 10 and 11: http://unicornfree.com/2011/lessons-learned-from-16-years-of...
I'd like to see 3D Systems be made to pay for the frivolous suit against Kickstarter. Why not sue Formlabs' ISP while they're at it? Surely the ISP's service was used to promote the new printer as well.
The OP is bang on - I started work at Netscape in 1996, went over to Oblix in 1999 (A pure play LDAP management company) and then spent the next 2-3 years in a startup (Loudcloud) in which we tried to run our entire infrastructure off of Netscape Directory Server (Still, one of the finest engineered products I ever worked with - only had issues when you ran out of disk space).

Eventually, after I started managing IT, with all of the Windows Systems, and Exchange Servers, and Users - AD just infected us, and it's really hard to get out of your life. For a while, it was Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), but being able to control whether people can login to their laptop/desktop/VPN/Email/etc... through AD is just so much easier when you have a lot of windows systems. Also - Group Polices, ACLs on things like Printers, File Systems, and other Resources - and now with Lync starting to pop up....

If you can live without Microsoft Exchange, and you don't have a lot of windows laptops, you can probably avoid it - but, AD really is the competitive weapon that Microsoft continues to be able to wield to keep themselves in the heart of a lot of IT environments.

Would love to go run an environment/company that had a pure-play LDAP server like OpenLDAP, Netscape/Fedora/389 Directory server, or, OpenDS.
A number of years ago the project I was working had problems in Ada because the conversion of floating point numbers from character string to internal floating point by the Ada compiler did not always produce the same values as runtime conversion. I had fun reconciling the two.
Ruby Blocks Are Way More Complicated Than You Think