skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. You can do a lot of things (version control and encryption come to mind) at the filesystem level. A filesystem is a specialized kind of database, anyway, and databases are surprisingly versatile.

If memory serves, you can automatically mount daily snapshots of FreeBSD's standard filesystem. (I'm using OpenBSD, which is slightly different.)
www.livemeta.net :)

Non-functinonal/alpha at the moment (we are reworking some of the core). :)

Obviously as we get closer to launch I'll ask HN to give it a good critique :D
I don't think it gets a bad rap so much as that it's just not well-known outside a few niches. (FWIW: I'm not in the game industry. I work with high-performance rendered graphics, though, so there are similar concerns.)

(Also, MIT license, not BSD.)
He pretends to have 12 years of experiences with parrots, when the reality is zero.

Yeah, that one would be a little harder to explain away. ;)
Embrace the swarm (1998)
There might be a DRM chip inside the iPod Shuffle earbuds
Actually, if I was concerned about scaling to a 20-core CPU[0], I probably wouldn't use anything mainstream. It depends on the exact problem, of course, but that sort of thing is generally easier in functional languages.

Many of the author's questions can be reduced to "does it have a good C FFI?", but I'm not sure what the overall point is, or if these are just generalized suggestions to think about before starting a project. I'd like to know what the author would use in this situation.

[0] AMD has announced a 12-core Opteron for next year, so this isn't far-fetched at all.
Weekends, in particular, are a whimsical time on HN.
Whoa ... this means I need to change my account as soon as possible! Where else do they have secret accounts ?!
Indeed, I don't see how smaller, more manageable pieces would be more likely to be defective.
His traffic has come up sharply over the last few months (Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/cringely.com) to ~3k/month. Compare with ParrotSecrets.com at ~13k. Cringely is just following his own advice. What he's doing is as interesting as what he's saying.
As a Swede, I'd be as excited as anyone to get rid of mosquitoes. That said, I doubt they would make a significant dent in the mosquito population but it seems like another example of a technological "fix" without considering the wider effects: Which species depend on mosquitoes as food, and what will happen when they can't eat anymore?
Seems like you are not very happy with kevin for some reason. If it's because he didn't give enough credit for your work, well... let's say it's ok but if your comments are outta jealousy... thumbs down. (of course I've hardly heard of an owen related to digg.)
If true, and I don't know enough about this area to comment, but if so, it seems for optimum gene selection, people should procreate (or at least freeze their genetic material in a lab for future use) prior to this age.

I have often thought that perhaps the rise in mental disorders in children such as autism could be related to people waiting until later in life to have children, at which point, their DNA has already begun to break down. Studies showing that the oldest child in a family tends to also have a higher IQ is consistent with this. The younger you are when you reproduce, the more fit your genes are, and therefore the smarter, healthier, etc. your children are likely to be. Economic pressures now make people wait until later to reproduce than they did a generation or two ago, but this could be counteracted by saving genetic material in a lab when one is young, then later, when one is economically ready to reproduce, one can make use of the stored material to do so. It is unlikely in the near future that people will all of a sudden want to go back to having kids right out of high school, so, for optimum gene selection, they should at least save off their genetic material (sperm, eggs) for future use. Otherwise, going forward, the average intelligence of the populace is likely to decline.
This makes sense. Most Paleolithic members of the species Homo sapiens were dead by age forty, so there hasn't been much selection pressure to favor human beings preserving health or their faculties much past that age. I'm living on borrowed time, being almost twice as old as the headlined age. On the other hand, some people decline more or less rapidly, and from a better or worse base, so fifty-year-olds can still outsmart twenty-seven-year-olds in specific cases.

"However, the report published in the academic journal Neurobiology Of Ageing, found that abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until at the age of 60."

Live life to the fullest while you can appreciate it.
Interesting link!

I think part of the issue is that writing a game in Haskell is a novel challenge (it's running head-on into the weak points of the language), so the people who succeed make a big deal out of it. I'm not saying they don't deserve credit, but if they had used more appropriate language(s), the game would be judged on its own merits, you know? Similarly, I find kkrieger (http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger) quite impressive. Not because of great gameplay (I don't even like first-person shooters), but because they fit so much into 96kb.

Half the original post's question is about learning functional programming. That's one of the niches where Scheme trumps almost everything else, and I also think Scheme is worth learning in general.
Thank you. When I want to open on a new tab, I simply right click (I browse with Firefox and use a two-button pointing device) and use the context menu to choose "open in new tab." But other users will appreciate your script, I expect, so thanks for the contribution to the community.
What you say is consistent with what I said in my comment. I would point out, regarding storing genetic material, that I think the studies so far have not shown a large enough effect size from age on sperm to be sure that storing sperm (which has its own damaging effects in some cases) results in a better trade-off. But the general evolutionary picture would favor marrying and reproducing at younger rather than older ages.
Ask YC:  Anyone actually making money selling ebooks/digital goods?
So, this article seems to have gotten traction on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215

It's not a new idea. Tim Ferris has been preaching that since the Four Hour Work Week was published, and affiliate marketing programs are clearing houses for people doing this sort of thing.

Is anyone on HN doing this, or have you done it in the past. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from this community.
Excellent point on the increasing inconspicuousness of industrial-era "motors".

"But at my back from time to time I hear, the sound of horns and motors which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring..."
I really didn't like the concept from the moment I landed on the site. It's like adding to the stinky concept of 'twitter suggestions'. Both make the flow of twitter so unnatural. @barrackobama follower count is way natural than @britneyspears counter.
I have a few apps that still run on 5.0.28. There seems to be some weird memory leaks in this version that require the tomcat process to be cycled about once a week but other than that it's pretty rock solid.
This title is complete linkbait. According to the article, they found an unidentified chip in the new iPod shuffle earbud control, and have no clue what it does.
The scaling situation for the top post would involve large binaries (builds or generated data) being added on a regular basis.

(oops, missed the edit window)
There is a difference between, "This guy doesn't deliver his digital goods" and "This guy is making money left and right selling digital goods".

Both may be true.

Whether this guy has terrible customer service is a different discussion than asking if the business model works. I'm much more interested in hearing if the business model works or not.
Lately we're finding good arguments for the idea that people start declining in abilities earlier than we thought.

At the same time, there's a lot of work being done on life extension.

What happens if we extend life to, say, 150 and what we get is this long, 100-year decline into complete cognitive paralysis?

I'm 43 and I don't feel like I'm losing it. In fact, in some ways I feel more cognitively adept than I was at 27. When I was 27 I was quicker on my feet, but there wasn't a depth there. Now, at least to me, I feel that I have a lot more weight to my decisions and actions. I dunno - tough subject. It could be, like the pot discussion, that I simply feel this way.

I do know that if cognitive decline is going to be defined as starting in the late 20s, we're going to start seeing a lot of middle-aged people getting medicated for age-related cognitive issues in the near future.
> Twenty-seven has long had negative connotations, as it is the age at which many popular musicians died, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain.

Twenty seven is an interesting age. This much I knew for years before reaching it, and turned out to be true. I don't really know why, but it sortof makes sense. It's when you go from being a young man to a real adult. Strangely though, for me it was not filled with responsabilities, on the contrary.
Wow, I've wanted to see this for many years. (I suspect many people who followed the 'Strategic Defense'/'Star Wars' programs, and suffered from flying insects, had the same thought.)
Or we could just use our Google and Delicious utility belts for those of us who don't have your particular superpower. :)
This is abysmal tech reporting.

To paraphrase, "There is a chip and we don't know what it does but things have changed and it'd be way better traffic if we called it DRM."

To directly quote the update, "... Be it an encrypted scheme - unlikely - or a buffered digital stream - more likely - this is a lock-in what no one really expected." (could be encryption, DUN DUN DUNNNN!)

Apple has so consistently caused major turnover in their accessories market with destructive changes that the only news would be if the previous generation of accessories did work. The accessory makers will do what they always do, adapt and continue to sell at the tender mercies of Apple's product calendar.
It's probably a controller for the new press-control surfaces on the cord.

Third parties are already working on iPod shuffle compatible earbuds: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10194769-1.html

PS: Flagged.
Well you can save clicks by control+clicking to open links in a new tab. And use this script to just click on link to open in new a tab :D .
I don't know enough about this area to comment

The study you're thinking of about the oldest child having a higher IQ (3 points higher on average) made a point that it was nurture, not nature.
Die Meme Die!

Count the buttons. Count the contacts on the jack. You HAVE to encode three buttons onto one wire. Unless you enslave a tiny magical fairy and chain her inside to do that operation you are going to need a chip.

Look at an Apple A1018, EMC number 1941 for the original iPod from the days of yore. It was the inline control, it had five buttons to control volume, forward, backward, and play/pause. It encodes the buttons onto a single wire of the headphone jack.

The headphone remotes have been reverse engineered at every turn, for example http://www.maushammer.com/systems/ipod-remote/ipod-remote.ht... . To date they are nothing more than simple "get the job done" protocols.

Has anyone detected encryption in this iPod's remote protocol, or are the people writing these articles just angered that squeezing on the wires of their buttonless headphones doesn't make magic happen?

Edit: Aw, I took too long to document my rant, now there are four of us sharing the rantlight. I wonder how many more just haven't hit the reply button yet?
Er... they've already done this, it's called microwavable pizza. You take the bag of ingredients (AKA frozen pizza) and insert said ingredients into the miniaturized oven and cook for 3-5 minutes.
There is an interesting documentary "Food matters" (http://foodmatters.tv/). The facts presented are astonishing. However, I do not necessarily advocate on taking their point of view, In my opinion it would be reasonable to withhold judgment and look on their facts. It might change your perspective.

"You are what you eat"
Awesome, I usually middle-click so its no hassle, but when I'm without a mouse on my laptop, this will be great to have.
And the heading escaped from moderation. hmmm...
This isn't DRM; I mean, yes they used something which rendered all earphones useless on their own, but I don't think Apple did it with evil intentions. I for one like the new design, I'd rather they stretched out and gave the shuffle market (which I'd imagine is mainly people on the go) an innovative design to enhance the experience than worry about rubbish like this.
1. I actually started work on an uber-twitter feed for all our members (we've almost reached our first 1,000 registered users). It seemed like a fun idea, but what's the use case? What made you suggest it?

2. In all honesty, I have very little prior personal knowledge of Chicago and few, if any personal connections here in the city. I'd certainly do a lot better if I had family here and knew lots of folks, but I'm getting by. In the last month I've started meeting with local media who are seeing what we're up and wanting to get on board with our voting buttons on their sites.

3. Nope. In fact, everyone I pitched this idea to told me it was awful, including Kevin Rose himself. I'm doing it anyway. Like I said, this is far from a success, but it's growing and people who find us are signing up and getting involved.
(I think that might have been the joke...)
Here is one heading successfully escaped from moderation (At least at the moment I post this)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516956
Various Bleeding edge Javascript techniques from creators of jQuery/Prototype/Dojo/YUI
> So the laws should continue to make one a criminal for becoming addicted?

Sorry, where did I say that? I am from Germany, drug use is not illegal here, only possession, trade and production. I am very well aware that this is a good thing.

> The laws only serve to make people like you feel better (ala sticking head in sand) and to line the pockets of drug cartels.

Stop judging me on your misinterpretations of my writings, please.
Tradeoffs. silentbicycle's explanation is pretty good, but I want to call out the fact that you simply can not have an optimal source control system and an optimal binary blob management system. The two share a lot of similarities and there's a core that you could probably extract to use to build both, but when you're talking optimal systems, there are forces that are in conflict.

The problem is that if you aren't hip-deep in both systems, you often can't see the tradeoffs, or if someone explains them to you, you might say "But just do this and this and this and you're done!" Hopefully, you've had some experience of someone coming up to you and saying that about some system you've written, perhaps your boss, so you know how it just doesn't work that way, because it's never that easy. If you haven't had this experience, you probably won't understand this point until you have.

There are always tradeoffs.

Lately at my work, I've run into a series of issues as I get closer to optimal in some parts of the product I'm responsible for where I have to make a decision that will either please one third of my customer base, or two thirds of my customer base. Neither are wrong, doing both isn't feasible, and the losing customers call in and wonder why they can't have it their way, and there isn't an answer I can give that satisfies them... but nevertheless, I have to chose. (I don't want to give specific examples, but broad examples would include "case sensitivity" (either way you lose in some cases) or whether or not you give a particularly moderately important unavoidable error message; half your customers are annoyed it shows up and the other half would call in to complain that it doesn't.) You can't have it all.
> Most heroin addicts, between the time the high dies and before the low begins, hate themselves for doing the drug. They aren't corrupt evil people, they're people who were stupid and didn't necessarily have to be weak willed to get addicted to it. Many people get much more help for being much more stupid and much weaker, so why don't we help the people who really need the help?

And this is why production, possession and trade of hard drugs has to stay illegal and has to be prosecuted. Because most drug victims are stupid at the point of time they try it first.
Many Americans have an oddly collectivist sentiment with regard to employment. They see being an employee as we might see being part of a family or club -- "We're all in this together." When times are good, we'll all share in the blessings. And, when times are bad, we'll all tighten our belts and roll up our sleeves. Variable compensation plans can rationally incent these behaviors, but even those paid a straight-up salary often feel this way.

I, however, see employment much more contractually. If I'm a life insurance salesperson for AIG and I meet my quota for the year, I expect the bonus that was promised to me. And, even if there's no explicit promise of a bonus, I'll consider selling someone else's insurance if I don't think I'll end up earning as much with AIG. So, paying out a bonus to me would be a good business decision, even if the company itself is doing badly. After all, I'm still exceeding expectations.

Is it those who take the "family" view of employment who are most opposed to bonuses being paid by troubled companies?
It's never too late to start anything - developing yourself is a function of time and passion:

http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

-Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology

No matter what age you are, I think this is important.

How often (daily? weekly?) do you think about your self image, attitudes, actions, beliefs, relationships, and recurring thoughts?

I didn't want to get all Mike Litman on you but..
I used "Anyone else believed", not "The article states". Yes, the error is on my side here, but the author was not very clear.
Are You Attending MobileCamp Boston?
There are a lot of "working business models" that consist of tricking older people into paying much more than they should.

There is a lot of money to be made off of unsuspecting people in a perfectly legal way. Are you into that kind of thing?

Don't ask me where I think the line should be drawn. But the line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it shouldn't be right at the boundary between what is technically legal and what is not.
Yes. I threw it in as another example of an unemployed creative.
A lot of people are not that strong, sir. Otherwise, we would not have that many addicts, right?
Invertebrate nervous systems
I can read over 3,000 characters and still struggle with reading authentic texts written for adults. Obviously, the language is learnable but the writing system is a lot more work than most languages.

David Moser's essay Why Chinese is so damn hard goes into more detail as to how it is one natural language can be more difficult for foreign students than another.
Never turn down a sales lead
JWebPain
I don't think Kohana is faster, I think it's about the same. But it's strict PHP5 OOP, and there are a few other differences.

http://pr0digy.com/codeigniter/benchmark-static-cake-codeign...
I can grow my fingernails really quick. Not everyone gets the useful super powers.
I almost read it as "The power of a white beard". Which sounds appropriate in the software industry.

Anyway, a whiteboard is not just great for software development. It's good because it makes it easy to share thoughts among participants. It helps to encourage participation, visualizing of concepts, and the very act of writing down ideas also helps the writer to build his/her own idea more concretely.

When we build up our office in my last workplace, I made sure we had writable glass surfaces for our walls in the conference room. I'd wanted it on our tables too, but thought it would be quite dirty. Everyone who came to our office liked and used it.

When I was shopping around for standalone whiteboards, I was surprised to find a few variations, other than those whiteboards that you can attach a printer, save to flashdrives, auto-erase, there was a kind (not a "board" anymore, but it served as one) where you stick 2-3 attachments onto a normal wall and used a special pen for drawing on the wall. You had to have a projector and a laptop for it to work. You can draw with the pen on the wall, and the software will capture it onto the laptop, projecting it onto the wall, pretty cool.
Start with the good.
1) the site looks really nice and clean
2) your demo clearly demonstrates what can be done

What could be improved
1) demo could/should be edited down to just the key features, and really explaining why I would use it rather than going through all the features step-by-step. It's good to have the step-by-step as an instruction, but you haven't made your case of why I would use it
2) login required? Why? you gotta be kinding me?

That leads directly to (what I think) is the bad

I'm not sure you did enough background on defining the need. What problem are you answering. Not to say you haven't found a nice niche market. Very likely you may have, but the way you have structured your site into these distinct buckets of what I own/owned/want to own just doesn't click with me.
Connecting with photos and photographers (I suspect) is less about brand and product than it is about photos. I don't care that this photo was shot on this type of camera vs. that type (you even went down to model level???).
I would think I would be more interested in knowing how the shot was captured, what makes it special, etc.

Furthermore, you've locked it all up so that I can't read the reviews/comments unless I've signed-up, and then it really seems focused on what I would add to my list, which means that you've locked out the biggest benefit which is the opportunity for discovery.

I'm not a shutterbug, so maybe I don't understand how camera officianados think,but I am a person, and something feels very wrong about your approach.
And about your last point: this is a good thing. :) I can't wait.
Sometimes, I hate reading news from nytimes. For example, in this article, there is no a single link actually pointing to Kosmix website.

Or, we are expected to find out the website ourselves by reading the article?
currently, it doesn't seem to check back if your followers have increased.
There's no standard for in-line remotes, so there's no guarantee that any two will be compatible. Duh.

I blame the EFF for giving this meme legitimacy. They do some good work, but they really jumped the gun. Why not wait until you see IF there's actually a "DRM chip" in the thing and IF Apple actually uses the DMCA to stop 3rd parties from reverse engineering it before you start yelling about unfair competition.