skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the desktop is annoying, so that's why I forked out cash for Deskshade, from the makers of Espresso (a Coda competitor). A simple hotkey combo (for me it's command+return) triggers the show/hide.

http://macrabbit.com/deskshade/

I'm a cheap bastard and it's one of the few pieces of software I've paid for, which also feels good because it's an indie developer. Totally worth it, I feel like I can breathe again with the desktop hidden.
I said the wrong thing again? There's a serious commitment to seriousness around here.
I'll be at the Expo, and I'll certainly try to come.

Will any other HN readers be at Web2 this week?
I like monkeys too. Not enough stories about them on HN in my opinion.
Ack - Megazoomer requires SIMBL and I've been burned by that in the past. The Wikipedia page says the problems are in the past but I'd still be hesitant to install it. I had some kind of app that dimmed the menu bar on command and had to install SIMBL in order to get it to work, which ended up being a bit of a nightmare after a few OS X updates.
This doesn't seem like a poor response to me. I read both the 37signals post and the getsatisfaction post and I personally believe that they did a good job at neutralizing the 37signals post. While they didn't address every point 37signals mentioned, they did address the most controversial. They also let prospective users and customers know that they're listening.
Please avoid editorializing in the title.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Good thing this is for OS X, then, and not Windows.
If they could do that, why aren't they already? Certainly not for ethical reasons...
reusing learned behavior is good for usability.
I'm building it as we speak. Working on the demo today to submit to Capital Factory (http://www.capitalfactory.com/)

The code is basically working and I'm tweaking the UI as we speak.

I'll of course post to HN once it's ready.
Algorithm for dealing with unhappiness related to your comment scores:

if not self.curious or not self.spent_at_least_10_minutes_writing_comment( your_comment ):
self.dont_care()
else:
self.wait_until_score_is_less_than( your_comment, -2 )
self.ask_politely_why_comment_is_bad( your_comment )
self.sleep()
Review our startup, Emotiv Control: focused on electronic vehicle stability control.
http://eemotiv.com

It's a startup focused around tuning the electronic stability control systems in production cars, allowing the driver to electronically compensate and correct for any inherent understeer or oversteer that the car has.

I just wanted to run it by you guys and gather your thoughts on it. Any feedback?

Cheers, Pete.
Do nothing, and let Microsoft and their customers sort it out.

When Microsoft makes a (potential) blunder so many Web developers seem feel it's their responsibility to work around it. It's not. Microsoft and the IE team try hard not to "break the Web". If they missed, chances are very good they'll fix it. If not, it's not your responsibility to work around the breakage.

Has this been a problem for you in practice? Have you had user complaints about it? If not, why are you worried about it? If so, tell your users to work it out with Microsoft or try another browser.
http://eemotiv.com
jyothi: are you fucking kidding me? This was probably the most humble, most gracious, most introspective blog post I can imagine them writing under the circumstances. There was absolutely nothing there that could be considered a "rant", nor was it in any way a poor response, other than the fact that it sounds like they have their heads so far up 37signals ass that they're making the whole Republican leaders / Rush Limbaugh situation look tame by comparison.

Flagged.
Sure. But is that Python? You know in Ruby you wouldn't need the parens? It would work nicely for the sleep and dont_care methods since you're not passing any arguments.
I personally like the visual distinction between properties and methods. But it's purely a stylistic choice.

Having an implicit "self" parameter for functions defined within "class Foo:" would be nice though.
It's everything it claims to be, and really does make things easier. I can't recommend it enough.

But be carful: using blueprint as they recommend litters your markup with pseudo "inline style" classes. If you are a stickler for clean html/js, there are tools that compile blueprint into your custom css classes and ids. Compass is a great one for rails. I think blueprint also has built in tools for this now as well.
Oh come on...there's some humor to be found. Don't rain on everybody's parade just because some people can't tell the difference between funny and not. Besides, there's a whole host of funny-to-hackers type stuff that goes on too! For example, one of last year's from the Ruby community:
http://www.coboloncogs.org/
I've had similar experience with the Subaru forum I visit. However, if you spend any amount of time on the site, you'll go crazy with people asking the same damned questions every day. These kinds of sites have no "long term memory". Having a troubleshooting site that learns from previous experience could be pretty powerful.

That's the idea anyways. :-)
"I almost hit PUBLISH on the following rant-style post, but I wanted to drop you guys a line first"

No, that would have been extortion in the form of: "Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it." In case you missed it, coersion is what is being railed against.

There is a world of difference between responding to public criticism and responding on threat of public criticism.
It's too bad people think MySQL is representative of all relational databases. I guess "mad hacks" make for better press / blog buzz than "we used postgres/oracle/etc. and it wasn't a big deal". (Some people love all-nighters, too.)

Then again, the last thing I read about MySQL had somebody complaining how slow it was, but they hadn't ever indexed their tables. MySQL may not be the issue.

I would love to hear about couchbd from someone who also understands relational databases. Under what circumstances would it be useful, besides hypothetical scaling? I don't need a better big RDBMS, but I wouldn't want to miss another incredibly useful "small" database tool like sqlite.
I've worked with people who swear by that archaic crap they are using for hacking SAP now. They should by falling on their knees with joyful tears for this amazing boon.
it would be a good example of quick customer service

37signals were not and are not customers of Get Satisfaction.
Truly Groundbreaking Marketing Research: Understanding Twitter
Yeah, there's no way I'm touching SIMBL.

I crave fullscreen Terminal.app
To be honest, at first I also didn't like the lack of visual distinction between properties and methods but now I just like the fact that I don't have to type the extra characters. The implicit self is nice too.
It is also an April Fool's joke.
That's assuming an even distribution of such events. I'd like to suggest they are much more seasonal.
Redundant in what sense?

The point is to increase density in a sustainable way. Buildings malls is not sustainable because there is wasted space. All that indoor walking space could be outdoor parks.

In urban areas, you try to reduce wasted space by building stuff like underground parking. You put services along the sidewalk and close to residential so that people can just walk to these services.

You build residential and office buildings upwards since there is a shortage of space.

You make the neighbourhood more pleasant by putting in outdoor walking malls, green spaces, and building a sidewalk patio culture.

It doesn't make sense to split your downtown core into two. If half of your core is industrial/commercial and the other half is residential, suddenly you have to jump in your car and drive to the grocery store. This causes congestion.

On the other hand, a grocery store, Staples, a cold beer & wine store, an electronics store, a book store are all 2 blocks away. I just step out and walk there and it only takes 5 minutes to pick up that one thing I need at that exact moment.

You wouldn't believe how much less food I waste now that I buy that one fresh chicken breast for dinner and those two bananas I'm going to have tomorrow for breakfast and as a snack.
Yet Another Successful Model For Local Journalism
Remember getsatisfaction provides a public front for YOUR company. Why shouldn't they discuss it in the public. They are discussing YOUR business in public, without your permission, and trying to come off as legit.
Wolfram Alpha: First-Hand Impressions
I've seen some forums that have a special first post that acts sort of like a wiki, but stuff still gets lost in the deluge of topics.

I have a vehicle which is the first model year of a re-design. In mid-year, Ford apparently decided to change the design on the door lock actuator. So, I blindly found a part that was supposed to be for my model year, and it turned out to be wrong. I'd love to have a "forum topic" in the vein of what you're proposing. I'm imagining a decision tree with places for people to comment, add photos, links, etc. It ought to have Wikipedia-like community categorization. There should be a topic for "My Ford Explorer's door lock doesn't work" which would walk through diagnostic steps along with part identification/repair procedures. People post stuff like this to automotive forums all the time, so it's no stretch to think that they would add their knowledge to the tree as well (with attribution to encourage ownership).

I like the idea a lot. Forums are a sloppy hammer used to attack community problems that are sort of like nails.

From a monetization standpoint, you can't do much better than a "how to fix X" forum since most repairs involve the purchase of parts/tools. And, you'll know exactly which parts people likely need depending on where they are in the decision tree. So, you ought to get really good click-thru rates for advertising.
What's funnier is that the published date on the story is March 31, 2009
Don't understand your title. Seems like a perfect example of a good adult response.
The best April fool's joke of all time happened right here on this site, so remember before you post yours that to be HN worthy people must be debating whether or not it really is an April fool's joke well in to April 2nd.
Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport
It's way too expensive. I think you could build a cheaper one with Xbee instead of ethernet.

I've been tempted to hire someone to build a few of these things. Any arduino hackers around?
In Soviet Russia, seriousness commits to you!
Ask HN: What do I need to do/know to start a profitable blog?
Background: I am based in Australia and want to start a blog focused on reviewing and recommending products and/or services to a global, English-speaking audience in a particular niche.

I hope to secure revenues from both advertising (e.g. Adsense, AdBrite, Chitika, etc.) and affiliate links (e.g. Amazon.com affiliate program).

O learned HN gurus, please provide relevant advice, links, tips and suggestions for a novice blogger.

Essentially, I am looking for tips, tricks and things you wish you had known before you started out.

Thanks in advance - Your help is greatly appreciated.

P.S. Should I register a company name (LLC or Australian Pty. Ltd.)? OR Should I operate the site personally under my own name?
Check out the parent of my comment. You have it the wrong way around, I was affirming the evidence with personal experience.
Sure whatever. Newspapers deliver ads, coupons, sales and various other "inserts"(all that crap stuffed into Sunday edition), classifieds, legal notices, wedding/death announcements, etc.

Businesses and people pay(less often than they use to but they still pay) for that delivery. Not enough people pay for journalism, we're too shortsighted and selfish. But we are willing to pay for vanity and to make money. This is why papers aren't going away anytime soon.
It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable as it is here to meet someone briefly through a friend and then add them the next day on facebook, for instance.

It's an interesting barrier towards global adoption, methinks; it's like how neither Google nor Yahoo can beat Baidu in mainland China, because Baidu just understands what its audience wants better. But, I think that a social networking platform is going to struggle a lot more with adapting to cultural norms than information search is.
Good find. Thanks!
We use it where I work and the designers like it a lot. It works very well to build cross-browser layouts in a very quick and simple manner and has drastically reduced the amount of time it takes them to cut PSDs into raw XHTML/CSS.

One downside you will quickly notice is your markup becomes much less semantic and a lot more cluttered with CSS classes. This is simply by virtue of how all "grid" CSS frameworks like this work - they set up a ton of generic styles that are impossible to be symanticized. With blueprint you start to see a lot of classes that look like "span-XX last" or "push-XX" or "pull-XX".

There are a number of ways to get around this, however. The first is a tool that comes with blueprint that lets you set up a yml configuration which maps semantic ids to these generic CSS classes. For instance you can say "#footer => span-24 last". This will then generate the CSS in a semantic manner so you can continue using id references in your XHTML.

The second way, and this is the approach that I would highly recommend, is to go ahead and use some sort of CSS metalanguage/compilation tool such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets - http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html). Chris Eppstein has done a fantastic job with the Compass CSS Framework (http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass) which builds on top of SASS, which allows you to do really amazing things with CSS.

The compass framework he has built allows you to do things like define CSS constants (colors, font sizes, etc), perform unit arithmetic, as well as define abstract classes or groups of properties called "mixins" which allow you to abstract out a lot of your repetitive CSS properties. It is also a whitespace sensitive DML which makes the highly nested nature of CSS selectors a breeze to work with. It also already comes with modules for blueprint and other grid frameworks!

I would check out his talk about it here if this sounds interesting to you:

http://pivotallabs.com/talks

HTH!
Could My iPhone Really Crash My Airplane? What about an onboard Wi-Fi network?
Is there a link to what you're referring to, or is this some sort of meta April Fool's joke?
They probably wanted East Coast developers to see it while drinking their morning coffee and reading their RSS feeds.
Every F[0-9]+ key is two things on the Mac. It's a function key, with its definition set by a carefully negotiated contract between the OS and the current application, or it's a non-changeable controller with a pretty picture (volume, screen brightness, etc.)

You do one by pressing the key, and the other by pressing it with the Fn modifier key. Which one is default depends on a pref setting in Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Personally, I set it to use the F[0-9]+ keys as function keys, and use the Fn modifier to access the volume etc.
How big a scene is Vancouver for HN-type people? I'm thinking of basing my next startup either there or in Seattle, and presence of HN readers would be a positive factor for either.
Nine Lives: Cats' Central Nervous System Can Repair Itself And Restore Function
It's kind of bizarre sometimes when I think about how I got into facebook in the spring of 2004. I was a sophomore at Cornell at the time, and I don't feel like anyone talks about this that much anymore now that facebook is all-inclusive and so widespread, but we really only got interested in it because it had come out of Harvard and Zuckerberg had started by adding most of the other Ivies and famous top tier universities (Stanford, MIT, etc.) first.

It kind of like getting into an invitation-only country club at the time. It was a bit silly, but that was what facebook's original identity was built around.

I'm 80% sure that facebook would have gone nowhere had Zuckerberg not been at Harvard when he started it.
Now I want to write a program to compute the monthly variance of historical events. I wonder how you'd build a list of historical events... Maybe it's a job for Wolfram Alpha.
You didn't get my April Fool's joke either? c'mon...
While sometimes I overdo the bitching and moaning (especially after a few beers) I think I'm offering solid advice in this case. Though I guess I'm being a little unfair to Tim Ferris - I've only met him in bars, he may have some integrity. He just seems like a tool.
Can anyone point out what's different in CKEditor 3 vs FCK2? I'm not seeing obvious differences
After a funding failure, hi5 “kind of died” today
When I was writing this blog post, what I was trying to get across was the circumstance where a founder CEO sticks to a vision, despite lack of market traction, customer validation. What's critical is to iterate the idea. Rarely does the first iteration win the day, but multiple revs, multiple tweaks, and a host of test-and-learns are required to get the success formula to a point where "kindling temp" is achieved.
Thanks for the help everyone -- I'll be using the local Barnes and noble to browse through your recommended books :)
Agreed. Just because time (arguably) falls evenly between the 365 days of the year, that only suggests a weakly even distribution. See [1].

I also think it's rather unlikely that true time-travelers would use April 1st, unless they were trying to be funny. And if I discovered cold fusion and it was April 1st, I'd take an extra day to iron the bugs out :-P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalisation
Historical events being events that people thought significant enough to write down?

Because I'd posit that the vast majority of the human world we experience today was shaped by chance events that nobody noticed.
i had no idea until about a month ago that these guys are all located down the street from me. cool to see them getting coverage considering we're in the middle of a corn field. </random>
IBM files for patent on offshoring jobs
"Xinha Here! is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any HTML textarea and text input elements."

As a Firefox plugin. Or use it the standard way.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1449
"SQL does not scale out to multiple databases easily, CloudDB does."

I don't believe CouchDB currently does this any better than what people are doing with RDBMS like MySQL. Right now with CouchDB, there's no bult-in partitioning, so if you want to distribute documents across databases on multiple host systems, you use some sort of reverse proxy to distribute requests across hosts or application level database sharding. Both of these approaches are currently used by folks scaling out things like MySQL.
Really, if you're not passing functions more often than you call them, you're missing out. :)
The only HN April Fool's joke I know of: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=152361

PG coordinated with Nickb to insinuate that Nickb was PG.

Nickb is the site's top user by points. His real-life identity is somewhat mysterious.
There's quite a few of us, we have about 10 people show up to each meetup and we just started up a couple months ago. Although I have no idea what Seattle is doing.
My only issue with blueprint and compass was that it seems overly complicated for what I'm trying to do so far. I'm not a CSS guru so maybe I'm missing the point but is there a good reason to use a CSS framework on medium sized projects?

Or, rather, is there something inherently nice about using grids for translating design to markup? It just seems like the framework adds a lot of code and styles that you're never going to need or use on small-to-medium sized projects. Thoughts?
He's a BS artist.
It applies to everyone. You're thinking of transfer out, which begins at $0.17/GB and works its way down to $0.10/GB, as you spend more. For transfer in, the standard price of $0.10/GB applies from the very beginning.
Whomever modded me down: Do you think that seeing @yourname is as intuitive to users about what it does as @replies?
Well, it would be better to be able to brag that you determined, mathematically, that disasters are most likely to occur in February, rather than being able to say "I determined that most events that people may or may not notice occur in August!"
Winner Business Planning Software
how long before my entire OS is just a fullscreen web browser?
Here is a site that more use full than pwnyoutube.com download youtube videos on the fly,in any format http://youtubeddl.com dirict download from youtube server
I recently bought a Mac Mini and since the installed version of Ruby was a year old I opted to just install from source.

I do the same on my Ubuntu boxen. Is there an argument for using pre-packaged, but not current, installations?

I like the convenience of tools like apt for many things, but prefer to go to the source for certain key items.
Man, S3 is 3 years old already? I'm not sure whether to feel old or wonder where those years went. Feels like they launched just last year.
You must be in a different tech industry. At least where I work, a good designer is highly respected by all of the developers - by doing a good job understanding the customer wants, he makes our lives hell of a lot easier.
""letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism."

No, Adam503 chooses to misinterpret "letting the market figure it out" as unregulated capitalism so that (s)he can go off on a more-or-less entirely unrelated rant.

What letting the market figure it out really means here is that instead of a glorious upper authority picking the "winner" by handing out government funds to a proven-loser business model to prop it up ("winner" hardly seems like the right word), that we unleash the creativity of thousands or millions of people in the confident belief that where there is unmet demand, someone will find a way to supply it.

Did you think my example list was just randomly tossed in there or something? It's the core of the point; government action can only look to the past. Your actions will simply guarantee the extinction of journalism, because the system you want to prop up is dying before competition even fully matures, which is the ultimate proof of economic death.

What regulations you may or may not want to lay down on such actions is an entirely separate point, and if you can't see that, you're simply being willfully blind to the point I'm making because you've been so conditioned in your response to the word "capitalism" that you can't see past it anymore. The fact that Amazon.com created a new meeting point for supply and demand is neither here nor there in the question of whether they are regulated (hint: yes).

Again... this sort of thing has happened millions of times. It's not a wacky theory, it's how we got from the dark ages to the economy of today. (The wacky theory is that this creation is impossible and only happens when central authorities help it along; this flatly contradicts the historical facts.) This time is only different because now the town crier is facing disruption, and he's being loud about it. Other than that, it's hardly different than any other industry which has been transformed over the past 50 years, which is most of them.
this would simply lead to me having plausible reasons not to leave the house everyday....except on the day with the greatest proportion of in home deaths.
Ask HN: Do sales figures for Objective C books mean the language is getting more popular?
I was looking at O'Reilly's data:
http://radar.oreilly.com/assets_c/2009/02/TM_qtr_py_Prog_Lang.html

Made me wonder what kinds of commercial applications Objective C is being used for? Is this the language you use to create iphone apps?
I'll add a comment so you can click on the link:

http://radar.oreilly.com/assets_c/2009/02/TM_qtr_py_Prog_Lan...