skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried out the Windows version. All you have to do is extract the 2 system archives into a folder somewhere on your disk and run the executable. It looks like you get the whole environment, with the ability to create multiple document windows. I haven't played with it further though, so I'm not sure how it would differ from running it right on the hardware.
CNET: Wolfram Alpha
I submitted this because I wanted to honestly see what people's views on the Mac were. Well, I guess I got my answer. :-)

What's interesting is that the Mac/Windows debate is intense enough that this still got comments and votes long after it was flagged off the front page...
I'm not sure, but this, or some evolution of this feature, could turn out to be a real revolution when it comes to group collaboration and sharing.

Or it might just be another feature, or that I'm trying to see something that isn't there.

I've been searching for a merge between this, Chatterous and possibly etherpad for small-group collab. Alas, it eludes me still.
This is why I don't use Linux for desktop: atrocious font-rendering especially w.r.t to correct kerning: http://imgur.com/2bpz8.png (pay attention to the words: source, coined, success, recognition etc.) Only the Leopard gets it complete right.

I've been using Linux in servers for more than 10 years. I had a cheap generic laptop running Gentoo for 2.5 years, which was much more stable than my current Macbook Pro (which I didn't pay for), which has been in the shop twice due to hardware problems in the past year.

But I cannot tolerate low quality font-rendering in Linux any more, as I've been spoiled by the fluid font-rendering in OS X.

Apparently, I'm not the only one, who has this issue: http://www.kilobitspersecond.com/2009/04/17/ubuntu-font-hint...

These are not insurmountable problems, I'm eagerly waiting for desktop Linux to polish up, as I look forward to dumping the crappy Macbook Pro.
Workplace Accident Compensation
Expecting an accident at work is very unlikely. Accident and injuries is the last thing on your mind when carrying out your duties in your workplace. Everybody knows that what we want is security and safety when at work.However, we can never tell, accidents do happen at the least places you expect it to occur. Your employers should make it there responsibility to make your workplace a safe and risk free environment.
If it freezes you are doing something wrong.

I had no crash or freeze of the OS (any OS, really, XP, Vista, OS X) for years now. Well, it’s down to maybe one or two per year, but that’s certainly tolerable.
Firefox 3.0.10. Opera 9. Safari whatever. All work just fine on Tiger.
nvm I answered my own question with some checking

this is interesting:
http://www.clickpass.com/docs/privacy-policy

and this

http://blog.teampatent.com/2009/03/30/clickpass-harvests-add...
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594525
Firefox 3 and Safari 4 work with Tiger (4+ years old). You can easily skip one OS release without any problems.
Can you articulate why this is "completely disingenuous", why it is "link-bait" and why it is a "bit of shallow drivel" in addition to describing it as such?

The title is absolute, but the text qualifies it: "1) conventional approaches and planning don’t work when you’re trying to get into new spaces"

They also say Stop presuming you can be right in a world of massive uncertainty. I doubt you disagree with that.

I can see how you could interpret the title as implying that "planning is a waste of time"; but that's not what the text says. 37Signals have said they deliberately choose provocative positions for their titles. I can understand you not liking it, but why judge the whole by the title? Personally, I automatically qualify it with "plans are useless but planning is indispensable" (because it makes you look at the issues.)

Incidentally, the link is to a book by MacMillan and McGrath that's being launched this year (not an article): Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity. Maybe you're thinking of their 1995 paper of similar name "discovery driven planning". When I read that paper a few years ago (via "The Innovator's Dilemma") I found the details in the paper not very helpful; but the basic idea of an experimental approach was brilliant: (1) work out what you don't know, and (2) make a plan for finding out (instead of a plan for achieving something, that presumes you already know.)

Such a plan is "a plan to improve". And this gives a different interpretation to the title (quoted from Macmillan and McGrath BTW): "the only plan is to learn as you go."

Anyway, your flag has succeeded, so someone agrees with you. I'm disappointed, as it's throwing the text out with the title.
Shoulda Roundup: Elegant, Maintainable Ruby Testing
Every EC2 instance has about 150GB of transient disk space. It works like a regular disk but once you shutdown the instance (or in the rare event the instance fails) the disk is gone forever. To solve this problem, Amazon provides EBS volumes ("elastic block storage"). These are like raw disks that you can create on the fly. You create one, attach it to your instances, give it a filesystem, and then mount it.

You can run MySQL off of the transient disk ("/mnt") but you should consider running it off of an EBS volume. One reason is because you won't lose the disk if something happens to the instance. Another is that you can use the snapshots feature to create instant backups of your database. Later on you can create new EBS volumes from a snapshot (which is really cool for building a stage environment with production data).

This may sound a bit complicated when you're just starting out. It was for me anyway so after working with AWS for a couple years I started working on a development and deployment tool for EC2. The configuration is entirely via a Ruby DSL.

You define the properties of your environments and roles with the machines DSL (including EBS volumes) and you script your repeatable processes (like deployments) with the routines DSL:

http://github.com/solutious/rudy/blob/0.7/Rudyfile

If Python is more your style, there's boto:
http://code.google.com/p/boto/
Ronald Reagan - Appreciated the Power of Ideas
I found this 60 minute mp3 interview on the "New Books in History" website giving a very different view of Ronald Reagan than you usually hear. The author, James Mann, makes a good case that Reagan appreciated the power of ideas and so thought the Cold War could be won. He also argued that Reagan was motivated by his hate for nuclear weapons.
This site is a good arguement for the importance of history. - Greg
Each EC2 instance comes with a certain amount of transient storage. It is transient because it does not persist beyond instance termination. Amazon also has persistent storage for your EC2 instances called Elastic Block Store. EBS volumes will persist beyond instance termination and can be attached to any running instance (but only one at once) within the same availability zone.

If you're running MySQL on EC2, it's pretty straightforward. You get an EBS volume for your database and back that volume up to Amazon's S3 service. S3 will then provide multi-site redundancy for your data in the event of AWS availability zone failure.
Our (Leah and Dylan Higginbotham) company is called HugaMonkey. We make and sell baby slings!
When we decided to start the company we knew that it would start out online and have a strong ninternet presence.
We brought my buddy (Clint Eagar) along because he had created and sold an internet business before.
Clint and I spent several days coming up with different names that might convey a baby sling in use.
As we came up with the names, we'd check to see if the domain was available. One after another, our clever names (wraparoo, cuddlebug, etc...) were shot down.
We got on a "huga" kick with hugakid, hugabug until we came to hugamonkey. It was funny and memorable. Luckily the domain was available, so we snagged it.
It's a great name because people laugh when they hear it and rarely forget it!
This post (and the blog overall) shows how the forgotten art of tracing/debugging executables can seriously affect web 2.0 community - when the last person who knew assembly will retire we are all doomed :)
But it is efficient. It's like the system in Starbucks (there's a company that knows efficient) rather than the coffee shop where you have 6 people fighting over a single coffee machine and then the same six fighting over the till.
Woah! I can see how this is different from an e-mail list that gets published on the web. ;-)

Interesting to see how a new layer of paint can bring old concepts to the masses.
Posterous is great. I'm interested to know - was this something that you've had planned for a while, or did it come as a natural evolution of the product / feedback from users?
Busted Arrington Caught Riding Segway Indoors
True, but that's a process rather than a normal retail model. I mean, compared to pick something off the shelf and take it to the register.
It does help if you not only know most of your workers personally - but your father knows their father and so on for 200 generations!
There are a few software companies like that in Utah - everybody in the dept goes to the same church on sunday, not my cup of tea but they seem happy.
Can you include url links in the diagrams?
Presumably that's not policy or at least not a formal one since they'd be in violation of the Equal Opportunity Act. While I knew nothing of the place before this, I'd suspect they have at least a token non-Hasidic employee or three just to keep them from getting sued.
RIP RFP - Why Startups Should Never Complete A Request For Proposal
Today is my day for touching raw nerves ... Since the other comment is giving me unmerited points, go ahead, take some away here if it makes you feel better.

But, you know, it's a bit sad that you refuse taking a creative approach to the issue: what is 'good design' if you take away the control available in print - exact page size/layout and precise font choice.

It's not like the issue is going away. Heroic measures like sIFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacemen... ) are too contorted. And Mark Pilgrim already wrote on the wall about downloadable fonts (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundri... ).

It's a fluid. The tighter you grab, the less you hold. Let go.
Good points.

For me though, the chance meetup at an airport is much more likely to happen on facebook, where I think more 'real life' friends live. Since facebook changed to put the emphasis on the 'steam', I think that use case is pretty much taken care of there.

I definitely see a range of usecases for twitter, but I don't think it works well for 2 way communication.
This is ridiculously awesome and the exact feature we needed few months ago.

We started a blog for our larger extended family(50+ people) so there is a simple place for all our family communication. Yet a lot of the people in our family know only rudimentary use of the computer--and that means email. So the blog idea didn't quite work out and we're back to emailing--which is disorganized but works.

With this we can get the best of both worlds! Communicate via email, archive on a blog!
Google Puts the Brakes on Saving the World
If you haven't done so already, check out RightScale (www.rightscale.com). They offer a dashboard that helps users access AWS.
It does raise the question of what it means to call something a 'Rails app', especially if AR is considered the heart of Rails.

Also, given the restrictions imposed by GAE, Rails may not even be a good choice. Sinatra or Innate/Ramaze (once jruby-rack pulls in Rack 1.0 code) seem much better options, being cleaner and lighter.
So instead of Highly Optimized Smalltalk (with VM implementor help) = Horrible C, we have Highly Optimized Smalltalk (with VM implementor help) = Average C.

I can live with that.
There is some advantage to having a text-based markup language. That way you can emit it from tools.
His abuse of the language certainly doesn't help to take him serious. Is it so hard to spell out "you" and "because", if only to sound less like a spoiled 16 year old who's whining about his latest toy?

Once again I have to ask: Why has this been voted up? I want my last 5 minutes back...
Yes, lol, yes. by all means.. if you are a linux guy, just buy a linux laptop (pick your flavor). You can get 2 or 3 for the price of one mac, and it will probably last longer (physical hardware)
actually it would be "because", not "cause" lmao

edit: no fair, you edited your comment :)
The Psychological Aversion to Extremes
this sounds quite logical but I'm curious if anyone here has done some A/B tests on it and would want to share
What does that greedy algorithm work on, given that Facebook doesn't allow you to store a copy of the friend graph? At the point of notification, all you know is a list of user IDs that have your application, and possibly how many friends each one has.
You're just jealous she made it work, whereas if a developer tried something like that it would be a disaster.
Pixel City, a procedurally generated city
Or -ahem- http://www.dabbleboard.com

*am affiliated
Hmm. I don't much like that. I guess it's probably too late for me, though.
Sure, it sucks, but I wouldn't say it's as bad. Being required to work X hours per day with the option to start when you want is still an improvement over a completely regimented schedule.
A new reason for businesses to promote women: it's more profitable
We're definitely excited about the potential for this feature to grow into its own product!

You can expect improvements to this coming fast and furious.
For online uml sequence diagrams : http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ .
Too bad that's not open source and no vector export format.
It's something we talked about even back during last summer when we first launched Posterous. It's great to finally be able to put it out there.

Once we launched group blogs though -- we did start hearing a lot of requests for this feature too. There's absolutely a validation piece to it. When users ask for it, you know there's something there.
Who is Louise Hendy?
Beyond the Stars, Effective Local Rating Made Simple
Actual article: http://www.thebuzz.at/blog/2009/05/beyond-the-stars/
A very similar story is that of college football coach Mike Leach and his extremely unorthodox, extremely successful program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694...
"If you're a happy T-Mobile user, for instance, and you want to upgrade without switching to AT&T, iPhone isn't an option."

How does it compare to the G1? I'd guess the Curve has a stronger business focus.
I've no idea why this was downvoted, but ok. Perhaps pg can review logs to check whether it's someone targeting you (sounds unlikely) or a bug then.

Edit: above comment was -1 before I upvoted.
New male contraceptive injection appears effective
this should be required reading for anyone wanting to build a big django app right now
Each EC2 instance is a virtual, private server which looks just like any other linux box. However, files on disk are part of shared drives and are not guaranteed to persist. You have three choices : attach and pay for an elastic block store that IS persistent, make periodic backups to S3 or forgo the use of the disk altogether and use SimpleDB instead of mySQL. I'd recommend using an elastic block store.
"Fortunately, I found them (maybe) on google images:
http://cache.consumerist.com/assets/resources/2006/10/laptop... "

According to the context ( http://consumerist.com/210708/all-laptops-break-period ), this is apparently a graph from 2006 ranking "how quickly different laptops need repair," which doesn't really make a lot of sense given the way the graph is displayed. These definitely aren't the reliability scores from the 2006 rankings, which you can see discussed here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/10/5614.ars

FWIW, the upcoming consumer reports rankings were announced yesterday, and all apple laptops topped the overall rankings:

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/05/05/consumer-rep...

It's unclear where they are in the specific reliability rankings.
Repeatedly lying in court, during a nationally televised trial was unsound. If he authorized presenting a fake video as evidence, that was "unsound", too.
If you are modeling in text (which is a good thing) why not use something like alloy (http://alloy.mit.edu/) which is far more expressive and can be analyzed and checked automatically.
Interesting. I was about to impulse-comment on a previous comment, but then say yours.

Makes me wonder about the ways of being wrong, and who do people here think tend to be wrong in a good or valuable way?

E.g., making conjectures that at least posit novel interaction of events and ideas, or are wrong due to lack of current knowledge and over-optimistic conjecture, not because of willful ignorance or bias.

(I suppose that describes any good sci-fi writer; I'm thinking more of bloggers or essayists.)
What Happens to a Startup Layoff
I'm more interested in how you got Mashable to cover this (so quickly). Anything you could share there? (yes, PR-related question).

Awesome feature, I'd imagine you will be using this mechanism to allow developers against your API to track API changes? :)
At least here in Taipei, most manhole covers I see are rectangular.

What kind of interview question is that?
Well, first, you can bend the rules. How does Facebook know whether you're storing the graph or not? They won't unless you violate the TOS in some other, more overt way.

Second, Facebook's rules say you can't store it for more than 24 hours. The current copy of the graph is available via API calls -- just call getFriends for each user with a valid session.

Third, if your app is big enough you can approximating it by seeing who sends notifications to whom, who clicks on newsfeed items, etc.

Fourth, although I used Facebook as an example, this applies to any social network with a notification mechanism. I just used Facebook because it's easier to understand -- they limit the number of notifications at the API level.
You mean, letting the new feature go viral naturally rather than just blasting it to every person out there?
Here is a link to the actual article for someone who finds this page in the future and the post is no longer at the top of the blog: http://www.thebuzz.at/blog/2009/05/beyond-the-stars/
For some people, Netbooks are a boon. I've loved sub-notebooks ever since my first Toshiba Libretto. If you think typing on an EEE is tough, you should try a 50CT. Netbooks provide a similar experience to what would've been traditionally a £2000 sub-notebook for less than a quarter of the price. You can't knock it... unless you compare it to an equivalently specced sub-notebook. If you look at the top-end sub-notebooks (non-Apple, mind) the resale price is very comparable and you get a heck of a lot for your buck.
Perhaps M4DBI http://purepistos.net/m4dbi

I'm also a fan of Sequel (though I wish it had a different name).
Perhaps it's this: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E...
I used Engine Yard Solo for working with AWS. It's great service and really easy to get started with Rails app on EC2. You've got to wrap your head around how EC2 works but I really love the ability to start up a brand new server on the fly and do whatever I need to do, and then shut it down.
Have You Seen This Video On How To Start A Membership Site By Yaro Starak
You know how you always see Internet marketers selling products about how to make money online and it seems all they do is make money by teaching how to make money?
Thanks for your reply. I now understand how it all works.
Others mostly answered your question, but if you like to run MySQL on Elastic Block Store (EBS), you should read the following article:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

If you take the approach described in the above article, you should think about creating a symbolic link to your EBS volume instead of changing MySQL configuration file.
Startup Request - Where is my Dashboard Aggregator?
a. Unless you like throwing money out the window, there is no need to host your stuff on AWS. It's the most expensive of the cloud offerings. Go with Linode or Slicehost.

b. You'll have to use EBS if you want persistent disk storage with an AWS instance. Otherwise when you reboot, goodbye to everything on your harddisk.

But, seriously, reconsider your aims of putting up a 24/7 web hosted up on EC2. You're wasting money.
I've found it easier to think of an EC2 image's 150GB of 'disk' as RAM, and Elastic Block as an actual hard drive. EC2's disk is there when it's powered on, but when you turn it off, all data disappears. Elastic block is really EC2's hard drive.

Two issues that burned me a couple of months ago with EC2 and Elastic Block:

I built my server and got it running just right. I then wanted to back it up, so I bundled it (save your instance to S3) but forgot to register it(list your S3 bundle as a privately available AMI). When I terminated my instance I wasn't able to restart it, because it wasn't available in my list of registered AMI's. I had to rebuild my server from scratch.

The second problem that I had was in rebuilding my database after my instance terminated. Postgres keeps the log files (transactions the database has completed) in the install folder and the data file(what the database has stored) in the storage folder. When I terminated my instance, I lost all the log files that were stored on the EC2 'disk'. I had the data file on elastic block, but the log files were gone. The standard recovery process for postgres needs log files.

It took me a day to figure out how to rebuild the database from just the data files. I now have both the database and the log files on my elastic block image. Hopefully that will help the next time I kill my server. :) I also now have automated backups of everything.
The Open Share Icon - 100% open, community-driven goodness
Possible way to catch dupes on user entry:

When a user begins submitting a URI we recognize as similar to one already entered, automatically ask "This might be a dupe. Sure to commit?" and list the similar entries we already know of.

Similar to the "this username is already taken" autocomplete box on many sign-up forms.
This is why I've started adapting my desk to allow standing most of the time. I feel fresh even at 6 or 7pm. I tried standing all of the time for a day or two but I find that sometimes I want to sit too.
It is one of the cheapest ways to get a Windows 2003 server slice, if that's your cup of tea, however.
Windows 7 RC review
Microsoft has been pouring their heart and soul into creating Windows 7, which could be their best operating system up until now, according to analysts. There has been much controversy over the release of Windows 7 in the last month or so, as you may have observed. Initially, Windows 7 RC was to be announced publicly on May 5th, but earlier for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. However, a couple of days later, it turned out that it had been leaked on P2P file-sharing sites , just what everyone needed after the Pirate Bay trial. Well, now that it has been released, TechCombo would like to review Windows 7 RC for you readers, let’s see what all this hype is really about!
I have a EEE too - I plug it into a full keyboard and HD display, and it feels like a desktop. That is, docking it, as many people used to dock their laptops. The shrinking size of the box (not display/kb) is inevitable I think (Moore's Law).

BTW: Asus is switching to the 1000 series exclusively - 10 inch screen, and a larger keyboard than the 701.
The idea is that you can do things like this:

<img src="http://yuml.me/diagram/class/[User|+Forename+;Surname;+HashedPassword;-Salt|+Login();+Logout()]"/>
UK consumers lead way in mobile commerce