skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Needs a better description of "dynos" than the help section gives. Also, what is a backup "bundle"? Finally, no mention of bandwidth, only storage. Are there any guarantees here?
I hate the phrase 'jumping the shark', but Gizmodo is doing it. That week-long listening special was the most naked display of commercial self-abasement I've seen in a while.
QlikView Aims for Oracle with iPhone Business Intelligence Application
QuickOffice is First to Bring Copy/Paste to iPhone
Most shipping products have had line-by-line source code reviews done by at least two different firms (we did some of this work for Vista).

I'm impressed. You probably can't tell me, but just in case... how much do you charge for this?

Considering how many LOC there are in Vista, either you're far cheaper per LOC than I expected, or Microsoft put up a huge amount of money.
That's a classic; his recent work is pretty good too. I really enjoyed both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.
Yeah, well, found them with Google. Here's a link for those interested: http://www.ziddu.com/download/1693606/UII_Icons.zip.html
And the process where developers submit their patches to a mailing list and they are reviewed by people above them is what?

A code review.

You can't measure Microsoft's expenses against the expense of developing Linux. Linux was not cheap to make either - just the time is distributed across a lot of books instead of one set.
But what's the definition of efficient? Will XP use less RAM in a VM than it would on hardware?
You'll probably be correct quite often if you just assume that people have the same username on twitter as they have here. :-)
The Man Who Sold the Moon, by Robert Heinlein

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Sold-Moon/dp/0671578634

(spoilers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon)

Then, for fun, go on to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, wherein a great acronym TANSTAAFL is introduced.
A Sneak Preview of Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine Webcast
I'll be honest - I couldn't finish the Baroque Cycle. (Maybe I'll try again someday.) But when Anathem came out I thought I'd give it a chance, as I so enjoyed Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash that giving up Stephenson altogether didn't seem like the right thing to do. Anathem starts out slowly but it gets much better and I'm definitely glad I read it. If you can get through the first few chapters you will be rewarded. (IMHO, anyway.)
>> "Really, I don't see what you can learn from TV."

Speechless... Really I am. Seek out, and you will find.
> What is really interesting to me because it feature an anarcho-capitalism model of society.

As does Snow Crash.
I hope it isn't as game changing as the Segway was...
>> "popular culture is overrated."

My point is that if you want to have a business, that interacts with people, you better understand popular culture.
I like Ken Norton's thoughts on product managers. http://www.kennethnorton.com/essays/productmanager.html
Cash Is Not King For Startups
SubtleGradient TextMate Code Completion Screencast
New AWS Public Data Sets - Anthrokids, Sparse Matrices, USA Spending
Please date this article in the title (2000).
The adolescence of p-1, Thomas Ryan
The soul of a new machine, by tracy kidder
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
I read The first billion by Christopher Reich(ISBN: 0440234697) about a year ago. It's about tech companies, finance and international crime. Pretty fun read.
Daring Fireball: Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground
This question is 11 hrs old, and nobody has mentioned Postgres' need for periodic "VACUUM" operations? Seriously?

If you are running a system with significant data churn (think: a Reuters news feed expiring at N days), Postgres is at a massive disadvantage if you're concerned with system throughput. Postgres 8.4's rewritten Free Space Map looks promising, but 8.4 was just announced in beta on 4/15/2009. In 8.3 or earlier, you can expect significant latency if "VACUUM" is going to touch any significant percentage of your table size.

Given sufficient data churn with a Postgres system in a processing pipeline, we can be talking about an hour or more for the "VACUUM" operation per evening. Yes, I speak from experience. The MySQL (5.0.45 InnoDB) systems downstream from these Postgres DBs have zero measurable latency due to space-recovery operations.
It is a New Kind of Search until proven otherwise ..
I can't imagine there are many sucessful start-ups that didn't go through at least a couple of iterations before landing on the ultimate model.
In that case I rest mine.
Peter Thiel: The Education of a Libertarian
I've never really understood why people get so worked up about this. I mean, if there were few women in tech because of flagrant discrimination, that's one thing. As near as I can tell, though, there are few women in tech because few women want to be there. Am I wrong about this? Is it in any way a bad thing? I'm not in a great hurry to convince a certain type of person to pursue career X just because the demographics are unbalanced.
They say they do, but their contract said go online to see the limits. I went online and didn't see any limits listed anywhere. My guess is that it's the same 250GB/mo that Comcast uses, seeing as they use Comcast's cable lines to deliver their service (their backend is different - DNS, email hosting, etc...).
IMHO the problem is not that developers don't want to rewrite their programs, it's that they don't want to maintain them, and don't want to learn.

There's no problem with letting old software stop running at some point, provided said period is long enough. The problem with Windows and its back-compat is that it supports more than legacy apps - many developers release brand new applications that still rely on long-deprecated API and technologies. This complicates back-compatibility, since removing API will now kill new apps instead of just the decade-old ones it's meant to target.

Developers need to get a lot less lazy - if the API says "deprecated", do NOT use it. Do not use undocumented calls... If people started programming instead of layering on hacks, this wouldn't be a large problem.
Remind me again what purpose is served by outlawing RealDVD?
Do you get more than the preview?
Linux and OSX have had a number of ways to pull this off for ages. I don't really consider the idea the MS is doing this on their own stack a big surprise.

What still surprises me is that it took the Open Source community to provide full DOS execution on modern systems by means of DOSBox (which basically emulates a DOS era x86 system) instead of the hack-it-up route MS took for Win95 and pretty much abandoned on the road to XP.

Contrast that with other companies (say, IBM and SUN) which have binary compatibility going back to the early 80s and beyond..
I know this is crazy, but I'm going to try to answer that - "If you don't have to work for money, what would you do?". You'll mostly get untrue answers for that, but somebody might look at you straight in the eye and actually say something other than the job you're offering. If it fits your profile, hire them. If it doesn't, see if you can create one. Honest people are rare :)
Absolutely correct. That sneering attitude toward the masses is a ticket straight to the poorhouse. I want to understand them better than the understand themselves.
My Koh-I-Noor was a 0.5mm Rapidomatic 5635, white plastic barrel. Great pencil, until the barrel broke. I replaced it was a Rotring (probably the 600, although I'm not exactly sure), sold by Levenger under their name. (The clip is stamped Rotring, though). It's very nice, solid brass, and easily as good as my (plastic) Koh-I-Noor.

I've had a few other very nice pencils. Less technical is the Pentel Kerry (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/45_356) --everyone should own one. The Ohto Tasche (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/45_131) is almost as nice.

The Pentel Graphgear 1000 (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/340_118) is good drafting pencil, but not quite as 'dense' as the Rotring. It has a decent retractable sleeve, which might give it just a bit more wiggle. I also have a Ohto Promecha 1000 (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/340_154_659) and Super Promecha 1500 (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/340_154_663), but to me they seem to be more about trickery than solid quality. The SP1500 has about four adjustments, so it's got quite the geek factor going for it. Pick one up if you're into mechanical pencils.

I love the very fine line gel pens that are now available from http://www.jetpens.com and http://www.jstationery.com. The Pentel Slicci (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/239_342) is my fave, but check out the Pentel Hybrid Technica (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/239_241), the Uni-ball Signo DX (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/239_286), Uni-ball Signo Bit (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/239_61), and the Pilot Hi-Tech C (http://www.jetpens.com/index.php/cPath/239_284).

As you can tell, I'm a little bit obsessive about writing instruments too.
Just added my twitter accounts to my profile, good idea. I am still wondering if its better to have one account, or a personal + company twitter account.
Thanks for pointing me to UBNT. Looks like their wifi-range products are dirt cheap, but that frequency hinges so much on LOS that I don't think it can go the distance. I've got some 250mW 2.4GHZ test hardware that I set up, and it can do 300+yds with LOS but not 20m through the building.
> going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000 one becomes a justifiable end.

No. Spending substantially more on an AC power cable than your electrician did on the 30¢/ft Romex that connects your breaker panel to your wall outlet is not justifiable. Besides, if you want to completely eliminate any chances of ground loops, AC hum, and so forth, all you have to do is power your system from a battery.
I suspect the lead time is due to manufacturing capacity and probably large transformers are custom or semi-custom. But as you said amazing things happen when there is a civilization threatening crisis.
Oh, but if you don't have cash, then its hard to do much.
I saved a lot of time and improved my marriage by paying someone else to have sex with my wife. He is cheaper and better, and now I have even more time to send working!

Really, I'm not trying to say that giving up TV is a bad idea, just that it's easy to forget what's important in life.
Where are your numbers coming from? The employee's social security tax is 6.2%, and medicare is 1.45%.

You can argue that the employee indirectly pays the employer's portion as well, but you specifically said that 15% comes "from your paycheck," which is wrong.

For the record, I think even my numbers are unconscionably high.
I'm not so sure.

I see git vs. hg as a KDE vs. GNOME type thing -- similar products, yes, but with different underlying philosophies and presenting the same ideas in usefully different ways.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124061372413054653.html
Things I’d Tell My 21 Year Old Entrepreneurial Self
Cool Html Codes
If you’re looking for cool html codes, then you’ve come to the right place! Here, you’ll find useful and interesting html codes , which will help you to improve you site. Enjoy!
* If you've already read Cryptonomicon (see more here: http://jseliger.com/2006/11/29/cryptonomicon ), you're going in the right direction, but you should skip the Baroque cycle and Anathem.

* David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk deals extensively with math (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/the-indian-clerk).

* Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing isn't fiction but is worth reading.

* I'll reiterate Tom Wolf's The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

* Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is nominally aimed at adolescents, but people of any age can enjoy it.

* Michael Tolkin's The Player is partially about the business of film, as is its sequel, The Return of the Player.

If you're curious about more, send me an e-mail; I write a book blog at http://jseliger.com , and a lot of the reviews/commentaries would probably be of interest to hackerish types.
"-it would only take $3,000 to $5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans"

I am a burgeoning audiophile, I'd love to have a guide on how to start building a system in that price range... and slowly get to that point. My 2.0 Bose system needs an improvement.

Side note: the first production site I built was a competitor to this magazine, thats what got me interested. :)
Also submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577990
Bill Gate's father on what it was like to raise him
How To Choose The Right Web Hosting Plan
A start-up business or one that is just beginning to find its feet in the online world needs to begin by selecting the right and most affordable web hosting plan.
Engineering a healthier diet
Another (earlier, apparently) submission, with more comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578263

What's the difference that kept the duplicate detector on HN from picking this up?
No we're not, most kids get out of high school with the ability to read and write. Before public education, you could not say that about most people. Public education is that minimal level of education and it accomplishes that job quite well. Could it be better, sure, but without it things would be much worse.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578269
According to Professor Neal Roese's research, regrets related to education are the most common form of regret:
http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/9/1273

He also wrote a book about regret and counterfactual thinking titled "If Only":
Delivering a reassuring, groundbreaking message, If Only describes two types of "counterfactuals," as these thoughts are known in psychology, and both "if only" thoughts can lead to a better understanding of yourself. One variety allows us to improve performance and learn from experience by comparing what we actually did to what might have been better. A second kind asks how things could have been worse, which makes you feel a whole lot better. Dr. Roese also reveals Americans' top regrets and shows you how to avoid them. And he shows how our brains erase regrets of actions (stuff you did that didn't work out) but let regrets of inaction linger. So his advice? Just do it.
The numbers you cited sounded kind of high, but I hadn't looked at this in a while so I went to verify them. I filled out the 1040ez and the 540ez2 and checked the FICA and SDI rates from the 2008 tables. I found that, for a single person living in CA and earning $30k before taxes, that the total taxes as a fraction of total income (not marginal rates but total rates) are 9.2% fed income, 2.2% state income, 7.65% combined medicare and socsec, and 1.1% ca sdi. The socsec and medicare are matched by the employer, so maybe you want to double that figure assuming that it comes out of effective wages. That gives a total of 27.8%. Sales tax runs around 8.5% but doesn't apply to rent, food, healthcare - arguably all of the non-discretionary items in a poor person's budget, so add another 2% and and the worst case $30k earner with no deductions is going to pay 30% give or take a bit. At the rich end I guess it's harder to say, but in my one an only year of 7 figure income I paid 29% of total income in taxes. It might be worth noting that, of the 30% paid by the 30k earner, 16.5% goes to services that directly benefit that individual and 13.5% go to the common good. In my 7 figure year less than 1% went to services that benefited me directly and 28% went to the common good.
Not correct for me, my Twitter alias is my 'real name' and my username here is my online alias.

I added mine to my profile.
Ding ding ding! You've hit on part of why I don't watch tv. Commercials.

The other reason is that the news is just plain dark.
Bose and Audiophile do not belong in the same sentence :)

Check http://audiogon.com/ for equipment.

My friends basement looks just like his basement. However I would trade his solid state amps for otl.
One of my roommates here at the Hacker House uses two copies of Atlas Shrugged that happened to be laying around the house to adjust the height of his monitor.

It never occurred to me that the book might have other purposes than that. I think I'm going to check out The Fountainhead first though.
Are you being serious about Digital Fortress? Digital Fortress is infamous for its technological and geographical inaccuracies. I found it good for a chuckle, but I wouldn't really consider it hacker fiction, unless we're talking about Hollywood's idea of a hacker.
> ... a century ago most U.S. cities (about 689) had more than one daily newspaper. Today fewer than 15 cities have competing papers.

Yes, but the reasons behind that huge shift are probably irrelevant to the point the article is making.

A century ago, any sizable town in the U.S. would have had a Republican newspaper and a Democrat newspaper. The big cities also had Socialist newspapers, etc. But somewhere in the intervening decades the market changed, and people began expecting newspapers to be less overtly partisan. Thus, we saw mergers all over the country, which is why large parts of the U.S. are now full of newspapers with hyphenated names.

This was an interesting phenomenon, and I would like to learn more about why it happened. However, it appears to me that this has little to do with the recent severe decline in newspaper revenues.
You might like The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. Not the greatest book but it's about a hacker trying to change things for sure. And some of the details and concepts are exceptional.

Best black-hat hacker short story goes to "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (last story in the anthology of the same name).
Example: http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/3257513.html
Dropbox (YC S08) Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members
While I agree BC was dense, I still think it was very good. I'm not really into heavy reading like that but I've still been through the trilogy twice. I whole heartedly recommend any Neal Stephenson. (I wasn't completely enamored with Diamond Age, but I realize I'm in a minority there.)

On a related note, I recommended Cryptonomicon to a co-worker who was complaining how much she spent on books (she typically buys one hardback per week) and how much storage space she had devoted to books. I lent her my copy of Cryptonomicon and it took her about 4-5 weeks to finish. She was in for a good bit of teasing about the apparent 'quality' of her normal fare. IIRC, the term 'bodice-ripper' was tossed about. ;-)
The road of convenience isn't necessarily the best road for your product.

Looking at how github has exploded, and how much more momentum git has in the community, it's hard for me to be convinced that it's not worth the effort it would take google to support it. I also think they should support hg and bzr.
JR by William Gaddis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R
Such a great product, such a great team!
Yay for one line insinuations about people few of us actually know well enough to have an informed opinion about.
Ask HN:Plausibly deniable email
I've recently been reading quite a lot about cryptography, and being the impressionable young man that I am I've become somewhat paranoid.

I've installed OpenPGP and Enigmail along with TrueCrypt.

But I have been wondering, is there a mail encryption tool that offers the same plausible deniability for email as TrueCrypt provides for encrypted volumes?

A tool that allows you to send two messages, one phoney and the other private, each to be revealed with a different password (ala hidden volume in TrueCrypt).

If no such application exists (I haven't managed to find one yet) what other steps might I take to achieve plausible deniability?
Come on. You aren't going to get better than a high-end pair of studio headphones. I mean, unless you think you can improve upon what the mix engineer heard.
Could you give an example of a stupid mistake that could expose the database? SQL injection attacks are pretty hard to accidentally put into any reasonably well-built system, so I'm curious if you know of any other mechanism through which you could entice a database dump out of a web application.

I guess you could go after the OS or the web server, but I was under the impression you were talking about stupid mistakes from the web developer, not the developers of the OS or web server.
Disclaimer: I use Git for my own stuff and as an svn client at work.

But I wonder if Git's author's boorish-yet-sort-of-amusing behavior when invited to speak at Google a couple of years ago may have also quietly weighed on the decision some:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
Arguments without much substance. I'm still not convinced and I'm young with great hearing. I wish I could vote down this story.
Really interesting. Electromagnetism is one of the most amazing things in the universe.
VirtualBox doesn't. =/
I read both (Fountainhead second), and I preferred the Fountainhead first. It's a lighter read and will give you a taste for Rand's style. If you can stand the heavy ideological slant, then you might want to look into Atlas Shrugged. I don't think that they are for everyone.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez, it really reminded me of Stevenson's work, highly recommend it! http://thedaemon.com/

Also loved Microserfs and JPod by Douglas Coupland.
Your deniability will not be "plausible" if the two-message feature you described is in the software documentation.

At least with disk encryption, you could claim the rest of the disk is "unused". With email, your encrypted message would be twice as big as necessary for sending your "phoney" message, ... making it clear there is still a "private" message in there.

Besides an academic curiosity in encryption, what makes an impressionable young man paranoid these days??
Right, but this applies to other basic aspects of american society:

- you have a right to trial by a jury of one's peers, but people have better things to do than sit around and listen to you defend yourself or slag on the accused...you don't see people clamoring at the bit for jury duty, do you?
Newspaper circulation
This is a quintessential example of why I would like to see subdomains included in the parenthetical note beside the title. Not that the link was bad, but I initially expected it to come from the posterous founders' blog.
correct for me
I just found a great site that gives you a fake 800 number to use on craigslist, dating sites etc. When someone calls the 800 number the call is routed to your phone so you get the call and the caller never knows your real number.The site is http://PhoneGlow.com
I wish I could easily migrate from Slicehost to Linode.
Yeah, I read it back in the mid 90s while in grad school and became hooked on the cyberpunk genre. Wow, I'm old.
Quotidian Topography: Creative Business Card Hacks
Have you considered using git? I really prefer it these days over svn.
If Im in front of a screen I prefer to be learning, interacting, creating and or conversing with those in my inner circle.

TV lacks all the above minus learning when watching PBS and other similar channels.

I do watch free Internet TV; a few shows on Hulu & other sites!
Yeah, those that don't do anything probably assume privacy as the default, so they don't act at all.
There are actually already spambots that do this on reddit -- they find a highly-voted comment in a reddit thread, follow the link to the article and repost the comment there (filling in the URL they want if the site in question allows it). Unless you look carefully at what people claim as "their site", or happen to read reddit as well, they can be hard to catch.
Uh,

I agree with the point that you shouldn't spend all your time working instead of watching TV. But I would object that TV often only gives an illusion of pleasure and relaxation.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=television-addiction-is-...