skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more. There's plenty of shops here in the UK that mimic designer goods at a very reasonable price (Burtons is a good example). However designer clothes aren't bought on purely the value of the material, they're bought on the perceived added value of a particular brand (which relies heavily on its exclusivity). Wearing a brand that everyone can afford detracts from that perceived value.
Why Scientists Should Care About Art
my life, and that of many of my peers, is substantially better due to the actions of stallman and torvalds.
The Most Successful College Dropouts In History
Methane has a much lower boiling point (-182 C) than propane (-42 C), so liquefying methane (and keeping it liquid) is substantially harder.
Ah, so we could've had FreeBSD by coughing up the cash for one of those - or was there any special porting needed for it?
Petition: Add Bluetooth Low Energy support to Android
Beautiful, purchased! Thanks for the excellent discount. Can't wait to try it out in my COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE copy of PhotoShop.
Funny you should use those companies as examples of RMS's disconnection from "problem solving in the real world," since Apple's resurgence over the past 10 years is directly attributable to their adoption of BSD Unix as the basis for OSX, and Amazon's (and Pixar's) tech stack has been highly dependent (dependent) on Linux and Perl (Python in Pixar's case) over the years. All of these technologies owe all or most of their existence (existence) to the efforts of RMS, full-stop.
> We're not finished yet

Still, I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon. Enough to encourage me to pick up some projects that I had mothballed since AWS has become the "go to" solution for so many clients these days. With any luck, all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready, but even just seeing this progress from "blessed hack" to "mostly official" is a strong indication that effort in this direction will likely not be wasted.
This absolutely horrible framing of the issue aside, here is an example of what the Times heretofore have written on the subject of "neuroscience":

1. http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2011/10/01/the-new-york-times...

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/kyxgi/the_new_york_t...

Are we going to argue that medical science is under attack, because homeopathy is criticized?
Turning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit.

And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar. Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video.

edit: I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.
You almost can with http://gmvault.org/
Porting was needed, but I've done it for you.
Do mouse clicks active those events too?
Can you not simply roughly double the pressure you store it at? Or is LPG already stored at borderline risky pressures.
FreeBSD on EC2 status
i'd be consistent and consider FNFJW to be actually FNFJU ;)
> Don't believe me

No, and I'm not going to go looking through home cooking cookbooks to try to prove something to you, either. That's not where cooking innovation happens.
Poeple on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4823739 were asking about FreeBSD on non-HPC instance types, so I figured that submitting the main page with information on FreeBSD/EC2 might be useful...
I would argue a large part of the problem with essentially a "donate" button is that the flow is all wrong for a service provider, especially one that basically only has a one-time-setup cost for implementation. Consider a likely sequence for someone who goes through the whole process:

* X visits your site, is mildly intrigued.
* X notices the donate button, passes it up because you have
provided no real motivation for them to do so
* X gets an API key and pokes at it lightly
* X integrates
* ... time passes ...
* X is appreciative of the time saved, and might give you money...
IF they saw the button right then.
ELSE more time passes without paying.

I haven't seen filepicker.io's implementation (which has since been taken down, apparently), but did they include a 'donate' button in the API documentation? Did they email people after X time had passed, or Y API calls? The vast majority I've seen never take these steps, they just slap a 'donate' button on the site and wonder why it doesn't make them rich.

If they didn't repeatedly try to poke people, it's out of sight and out of mind. The hallmark of any good service, really. It's unfortunate, but not surprising, and I wish I knew a more reliable way to get money out of people who are appreciative.
Since there's a bunch of people asking questions about FreeBSD/EC2 here, I submitted my page on the topic separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4823941
There is a large difference between asking someone to name a price and asking someone to donate. In the first case you are forcing them to pay for a product (even if they pay $0). In the second case you are hoping they feel charitable.

The Humble Indie bundles come to mind as a nice way for people to name a price, given their popularity I'd guess they are doing something right.
When I set up new micro instances, I usually launch them as c1.medium to set things up, then stop and restart them as t1.micro -- EC2's ability to change instance types is very useful here!
HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821517
Yes but who will find Odesk? How will you tell it apart from a bunch of competitors and ZenDesk?

You're limiting Odesk's fancy functionality to the small subset of experienced computer users. Even if you only use 3 subsections of craig that's 3 O/Zen/StandingDesks you didn't have to Google for, memorize stupid names of, compare to competitors and learn where they put buttons.

That's assuming some marketing or universal interface magic doesn't fix it.
Double clicking makes little sense on mobile as it is, and the delay should be done away with by default.

Thanks for the reference, and thanks to the OP
Using CSS3 Columns
Its a bit of a useless point then to be honest. Apple is under no obligation to allow anyone to impersonate an iphone as a usb device with their software.

Apple making changes to disallow it were because they were breaking their usb agreement to do it. You are not supposed to identify your devices as anything but what they are. Explain to me how Apple is doing anything bad here because of what Palm started doing? As mentioned elsewhere, the xml file itunes generates is there for interoperability, Palm chose to do something they should not have. There is a difference of "breaking interoperability" (sic), and acting as if you are some other device to an operating system. Palm was doing the latter, not the former.
Outsupporting Your Competitors
marshall brain's "manna: two visions of humanity's future" does a good job of exploring this problem.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I agree that the benefits are not well understood to those outside of the tech world and to them DDG is definitely a me-too site.
I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon.

Yes, I'm certainly glad to have this. Amazon is very secretive, and while I've talked to enough people over the years to know that Amazon definitely wasn't ignoring FreeBSD, it's very nice to have something public I can point to and say "look, they really do care!"

all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready

FWIW, even with the loose ends, I consider FreeBSD/EC2 production ready -- and I'm using it in production, both for Tarsnap and for FreeBSD Portsnap mirrors.
I had no idea that this was possible. Great strategy that I will add to my bag of tricks.
Given that this library is specifically aimed at mobile browsers, why would you have problems with ie8?

Your other complaints seem inconclusive.

By default, you're wasting 300ms of most peoples time every time they click, this kind of default automatically puts any standard HTML you do on mobile behind native controls.

On android for instance, you should almost never expect your user to double tap as that result is now typically proceed with long presses.
“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court
Confessions of an Internet Timekeeper
That site appears broken.
Why is FreeBSD such a big deal? What advantages does it have over Ubuntu?
This article is entirely bullshit. a) RFID has been shown to be trivial to fake and circumvent. b) Nowhere was the issue of a slippery slope addressed once we're all used to having a "harmless" chip put on our persons. c) I am not military so why would the DoD using them have any relevence for civilians?

I'll leave with Rambam's first law: All databases will eventually be used for unintended purposes.
easy for us; not so easy for people aligned with the "lock your customers in as a revenue stream" model.
The quality of Facebook ads is so shady that I fear this will bring nothing good for the users.

Speaking of wish the most common ads I get in Facebook are those where they trick people into agreeing to get expensive and recurrent SMS messages; like a parasite of your wallet. That should be illegal.
Thanks, I didn't realize that info was in LinkedIn. I was trying to be conservative, but looks like I overdid it.

Does LinkedIn know how many employees every company has? Where do they get that information?
Dropbox lacks major features if you try to label it a DVCS, and it's nowhere near as flexible. Most notably, it has ZERO merging support - conflicts result in silently duplicated files (with an added timestamp).
You're right, although I'll note that Minidisc wasn't really a failure. It was utterly huge in Japan, and widely adopted by other companies [no doubt playing big royalties to Sony].

Minidisk eventually proved a technical dead-end because of the development of solid-state storage and the internet, but I can easily see it lasting much longer and becoming more dominant if those things hadn't happened; it had a lot of momentum behind it for a while.
Both GNU Guix and Nix seem like excellent steps forward in bringing sanity to package management. Does anyone know if puppet, chef, salt and similar configuration management tools were inspired by these projects? At a cursory glance, e.g., there are some striking similarities in the DSLs of NixOS and Puppet.
This seems useful in a subset of circumstances but should really be used on a limited basis.

A lot of careful design and thought went into existing behavior. The default delay is there for a reason - to better understand user intent and give access to additional features. Users are also used to the delay and may be frustrated or confused rather than delighted at the change, and some touch-hold functionality may be affected.
getmail, fetchmail, etc.
How is its edibility relevant? Being edible means it's in a certain configuration that the human "engine" can process. I don't think it's obvious that this configuration is inherently inefficient for non-biological engines, even if it is the case.
SFTP/FTP Password Exposure via sftp-config.json
Is Ad blocking the next legal battleground?
I know a significant number of Hacker News readers use ad-blocking options, which is why I thought of making this my first submission to HN.

My confession:
(1) I'm a publisher that relies on advertising as my only viable revenue model
(2) Before that, I ran the digital department of an ad agency that managed millions in online campaigns

So my opinions will be predictable.

But I'm going to (hopefully) sway the conversation into an area few think about -- the "independent web" exists because of advertising. There are thousands of websites that gain either significant viewership (and thus expense) or require significant time investments whereby online advertising makes the effort worth it for those involved. If "ad blocking" and "do not track" increase in popularity, the independent web will be in serious jeopardy. As a publisher of one such site, I know first hand.

And beyond just those important websites that provide thought and opinion which may be contrary to the "mainstream," are a host of other pure information sites on cooking, building, etc. that many of us find useful from time to tim.

And extending further, the massive ecosystem of hosting companies and their employees would also be at risk if their clients are no longer able to pay bills.

The unintended consequences of stifling the only currently viable revenue model for thousands of websites is far reaching.

Yes. Lots of ads do indeed suck (I made good ones!). And there continue to be unscrupulous ad networks that do bad things (though significantly less than 3 years ago). As imperfect as it is, it's the only option.

So -- brains of HN -- if you feel blocking ads is important, and realize that broader use endangers a great deal if important content online -- what's the alternative?
You need to watch out for unexpected performance improvement
Yup, and using dropbox was something I was looking at for vimwiki as well, but the whole "stored in the cloud" thing and the whole "NDA, sensitive data" thing didn't mix (especially in the EU, where you have a whole host of other things to worry about).
Java Contented annotation to help reduce false sharing
Its based on the number of people that say where they work at in their profiles.

This is AirBnB's http://www.linkedin.com/company/309694?trk=tyah it says it has 902 employees.
It sounds interesting, but one of the things I didn't want was something tied to a specific system. This is a notebook that goes across several jobs - and depending on where you work, you could be using JIRA, or Mantis, or bugtac or something homegrown, or someething horribly legacy. So I didn't want it tied to anything specific, but to be a standalone tool.

Mind you, if you were working a lot with JIRA, I could see the appeal...
Certain types of requests by law only require an "administrative subpoena" -- Federal agencies basically are given the discretion by Congress to determine when they are necessary.

Typically, they are used to establish facts needed to support a search warrant. For example, the police may subpoena a utility to obtain electricity usage when investigating a marijuana grower. Using that information, they can obtain phone data and eventually get a search warrant to search the physical location.
This story is sensationalist and false. There is no external advertising network that Facebook wants to sell your data to. Facebook is changing this particular policy so that they can share data among its subsidiaries, like Facebook Ireland and Instagram. The "tracked changes" version of their data use policy [1] makes this clear on the last page (emphasis mine):

> We may share information we receive with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Facebook is part of, or that become part of that group (often these companies are called affiliates). Likewise, our affiliates may share information with us as well. We and our affiliates may use shared information to help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services.

[1]: https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-ash3/676592/128/4... (PDF)
I don't think ad hominem is the phrase you want here. I think what you mean is, the more important question is whether we can continue to consume resources at the rate we do. And my reply to that is that creating more wealth doesn't necessarily imply consuming more resources. For example, new versions of machines often consume less power, not more.
* Trade practices / commercial laws: it could be claimed that the use of third party software to remove paid advertising constitutes interference with contractual relations, eg an advertiser and a website have entered into a contract whereby the site will display an advertisement in return for a fee or commission*

Yeah? And this is my problem as a consumer how? The website upheld their obligation and met the specifications of the contract, I just made the conscious decision to use property I purchased (A 2010 Macbook Pro enabled with Google Chrome and AdBlock) to prevent these ads from going into my eyeball, through the optical nerves and into the part of the brain that causes me to twitch and mutter obscenities under my breath whenever an ad starts playing sound on its own.

If any government sides with content producers and decides to make ad blocking an issue just so some company can save face/revenue I hope people bitch-en masse-about the ridiculous nature of it. That there hasn't been a deeper inquiry into the absurd nature advertisers are going to in order to get our eyeballs on flashing banners and ridiculous audio clips played from unwelcome sources is frustrating.
The way I've looked at it is "everyone who wants one seems to be able to get one in a reasonable timeframe." Apple is a master of this. You might not get one on day one, but you'll get yours on day five. That's enough time to inspire people to line up to get theirs on day one.

The Wii was the same way. It was "hard to get" for two Christmases. How is that at all possible? A company misjudges their demand that badly for two years in a row? But really what happened was they just kept a decent pace of manufacturing that satisfied all demand just in time. I never heard of anyone not getting their Wii when they wanted it for either Christmas.

And you really need exactly that: stories of people "getting theirs". So the delays should be somewhat minimal, enough that people can show off getting theirs and tell the story in time for the next person to do the same thing. The Best Buy on Main Street gets deliveries on Tuesday. Come back then!
vimwiki does support markdown out of the box as of v2.0, though you have to set an option for it...

let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/my_site/',
\ 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]
That does sound like a bad management structure but there is another question to ask:

Are there technical problems that need a highly paid senior engineer to solve efficiently?

Most of the time there isn't and that's a major factor in why the upper levels are people management.

The other factor is that everyone treats this as "just how things work" because of MBA programs and general attempts to apply management pseudoscience from the industrial revolution to modern companies. It's not just your company. Don't know if that should make you feel better or worse.
The author's point is well taken, but misses the greater problem.

Neuroscience has unveiled to us findings which fundamentally contradict what non-scientists hold to be common wisdom. The greater damage that pop-scientists perpetrate is to cherry-pick neuroscientific research to simply reenforce lazy outdated assumptions that the public holds.

Hence, all of the uninformed nature/nurture debates.
Its a cheap comment and may be misleading. If they can't explain why they like it, calling it cool is suspect.
Data protection
We're working to release an online directory service for clubs/organizations. Seeing as how our application is all about managing personal data (photos, names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, etc.), I have two data protection questions for the HN community.

1) How does the security of application hosting services (e.g., Pagoda Box, Heroku) compare to the security of virtual machine hosting services (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Linode)? With virtuals machines, we may be on shared hardware, but we're running an operating system managed by our own team (e.g., minimal account access, restricted firewalls, up to date patches). With application hosting services, I'm not sure how much security, or even between-account application and database separation, to expect.

2) I've read through several of the HN discussions around data protection and compliance. I've also read about data protection requirements for consumer marketing data, financial transaction data, and health services data. Since we're not storing consumer marketing data, financial data, or health services data, which of the other standards out there would apply to an online directory service? Do we just err on the side of "the more secure, the better," and choose PCI or HIPAA compliance?

Thank you!
Exactly, and you're also assuming I could trust the data to dropbox. Sorry, but no, I'll trust photos and nonsensitive personal data to it without too much worry, but NDAs are legal contracts and the whole cloud storage thing and EU law are murky enough to make me just step away from the keyboard.
McGarr's (an Irish solicitor) has a good summary here:
http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2009/09/11/cloud-computing-eu...
I don't understand where you see a contradiction, and I'm not sure what you're confused about.
Khan Academy for iPhone
TechStars puts up their data here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/

Currently the number is 990, which doesn't include employees of TechStars.
Vimwiki, amongst other things (and I'm still learning) supports not just its own wiki syntax, but also markdown and mediawiki (there's an option to be set and it has to be after v2.0); it has a decent diary system with automatic index page generation; it can automatically convert the entire wiki+diary into html if you want that; and it has a few other nifty things like checkboxes for to-do lists and the like. Worth taking a read through the features part of the project website at least.
My pleasure. I just wish someone had shown me the cornell system before year one of college :(
as a developer and a manager, i'd love a guy who could productively answer questions. it means that he can both solve problems and help other developers who might be struggling with the same issues.

this is the kind of developer who will make sure his code is commented from the perspective of letting someone else see how it works, and that your internal dev wiki is well gardened. if you ignore the value this sort of person can add, it is entirely your loss.
Beta.mealku.com: Leftovers Made to Share With Strangers
Linux brings over €10 million savings for Munich
Some of the common answers to that question are clang/llvm, ZFS, DTrace, pf, superpages, geom, journalled softupdates, and capsicum.
Show HN: 60-second slideshows with JSON
Could you expand on this a bit? I'd be interested to see an example of what you mean.
Not a real FreeBSD user myself, but I've heard that it has good/complete documentation[1], a solid foundation that doesn't change too often and a nicer firewall than Linux's iptables[2]. Also, it's not really an advantage per se, just interesting, but Mac OS X's kernel is half-derived from FreeBSD's[3].

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

[2] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU#BSD

Edit: cperciva has more/better examples.
Yes, go look at the Humble bundels.
Well, Facebook already knows tons about you from keyword-scanning your private messages, analysing your FB usage patterns, "looking for friends" in your phone's contacts, remembering your GPS positions in photographs, etc. And they know where you've been on the net thanks to Like buttons and Comments widgets everywhere.

I guess this is the next logical step. I'm even more scared than I was by Phorm this time, though D:
JavaScript the good parts?

How about the Groovy language?
Vapor pressure is exponentially related to temperature; you really need to keep it cold.
Using one tool instead of tons of better tools also has the advantage of just one tool to learn.
I don't think this is the story's main point. If Facebook rolls out an AdSense-like product for publishers they're effectively building an external ad network (external as in outside facebook.com, not outside Facebook), right?
Of course it is, if you use "radioactive" as a binary label without specifying the particular parameters.