skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I want is an e-book reader that, when connected to the computer presents itself as both a printer and a disk drive. If I copy a .txt or PDF file over to the disk, it will be available when I unplug the device. By unplugging, it will automatically start indexing whatever changed. When printing, the disk drive will be automatically unmounted and, when done, there will be a PDF file with whatever I printed already indexed. It should make for a good reading experience without reformatting anything.

I have a ton of stuff to read, but I generate a whole lot more every day. Diagrams, spreadsheets, documentation in every conceivable format...

BTW, if the thing has 3G and wi-fi built-in and makes for a passable browsing experience, it would be great. I would love if it presented itself as a Samba server and a LPR PostScript color printer.

It's sure not that much to ask. Is it?
Ya, getting burned by EC2 is a rite of passage. I learned my lesson with Amazon's API tools. Dealing with IDs is cumbersome and dangerous when it comes to production instances. Automation is a necessity.

How are you running your automated backups? Have you automated deployment too?
That's part of it. I was looking at it more from a computation/energy-efficiency perspective.
I'll back this up with the addendum that SimpleDB has useful applications where using it might be a better choice than MySQL (e.g. a service that gets lots of reads but real-time updates isn't necessarily mission critical)
I guess it should be called "Render Diagram".
I am also a big fan of gliffy. I'll give dabbleboard a shot, though.
DNS toolkit for python
Arrington joins list of mentors for TheFunded Founder Institute
WRT the wine example, I've always noticed that, for those averse to spending money on wine (aka me), the second least expensive was the predominate choice. You want to minimize cost, but not appear "cheap."

This article suggests that restauranteurs are aware of this "second cheapest syndrome": http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18811
For a brand that's gaining momentum, getting coverage is a bit easier. You might already follow the writers on twitter or vice versa, or if you're in SF/the valley you might even grab coffee with them.

For a company starting out, you need to either have a product so thoroughly badass that it trounces something else that is hot, or you need a connection / intro to someone who knows them well.

It doesn't have to be Michael Arrington himself -- in fact, he's obviously such a busy and important guy that it's almost impossible to get his attention. However, at each of these blogs there are staff writers. They're the ideal person to reach out to -- they're looking for great stories, and hey, you've got one.

Final tip: use bullet points. Include screenshots if you can. If you make it so compelling and so obvious that it's a story, and you practically write it for them, you make their life easier and that makes it a no-brainer for them to write about you.

As for API -- that sounds very cool. We're very psyched about becoming a more open platform to let people build apps on top of Posterous.
Would love for you to use Posterous for this, and would love to chat with you offline about how it works out for your team and how we can get better. My contact info is in my profile. =)
I could not read that article due to the ad with the dude with the bug eyes staring straight at me. It annoyed and irked me. Yes may seem odd, but maybe Im not alone with this thought?
BBC BASIC on Acron -> DOS -> Windows -> BSD, VAX/VMS -> Windows 95 -> Linux/Windows 2K -> OS X (2006).

I have used them at various points in my life where the priorities are different. Of the experiences I have had, I can compare OS X, with Linux and Win 2K equally well (with Dell Hardware). I am a happy Apple customer now with occasional (mostly minor) complaints but I have always had complaints. [Should mention that I did try XP and Vista but didn't like the vibe of those OS]

What's with the self-assigned IPs on Linksys routers!? is my current complaint. Yet to find an answer but often a reboot of the router solves the problem.
"They will embrace MySQL and Open Source and put their technical expertise on it to ensure that MySQL continues to be the most popular advanced Open Source database."

That distinction rightly belongs to PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/about/
And I'm not sure how a mundane feature gets to the top of the homepage just because the company behind it was funded by this site's owner....oh, wait.
Apple in talks to buy Twitter for $700m
'You've got to find what you love'
Very cool! But don't make me WRITE code to create something visual. Let me draw it, then give me the code to make it easy to embed.
The software behind CMOs and the wall street meltdown
Interesting that she's a writer who appears to own more movies than books.
Is twitter's user interface intentionally bad to encourage creation of third-party apps?
It's hard to imagine that twitter can't find the talent to create a UI as slick as FriendFeed.

Maybe it's intentionally bad?
Digital media blogs, TechCrunch and Valleywag, both claim to have access to an inside source at Apple who believes the deal is already at the late stages of negotiation, with the hope of completion by June 8.

This is very partial reporting. The TechCrunch article went out of its way to point out that the rumours didn't check out with other sources.

So, effectively, despite the otherwise reputable source, it seems to me that this article is just echoing the same rumour around without adding anything to the discussion...
Two annoying UI mistakes websites make
Exactly. Title is misleading. As you say, most of the complaints are hardware based.

I've been running OS X on a Dell Laptop for about a year and find the experience quite good.
Just from the title alone, I can tell I'm going to like this paper :)
I feel the same way about Amazon. I find myself there for everything; books, MP3s, electronics, even parts for my bike. They are usually pretty reasonable price-wise, and since I have Prime, I know I will get my item in a day or so. It's wonderful. (No more dealing with places that have good prices, but ship your stuff whenever they feel like it, like a week after you order. With Amazon, you always know how long it will take, and that they are not absconding with your money.)
Just fished out the link there:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/twitter-mania-google-go...
Both of those are pretty minor and not very wide spread. Especially so for the second mistake.
Yeah, I'd even be interested in knowing if Facebook breaks down their server costs to that level of detail, e.g., the operational cost of Algorithm A versus Algorithm B.

Since capital expenditures seems to be a big part of their costs they might just be that detailed.
Always know, and work an angle. Most stories have multiple facets - the entrepreneur's personality, background, the product, it's target market, where it's developed, what tech it uses etc - they can all be turned into angles interesting to specific blogs and bloggers. Take every single facet and work out who that angle will be appealing to and pitch it to them right.
Oh man, get over it. In the scheme of things these are not "horrible, terrible" mistakes.

Was expecting content, just got whargarbl'd instead. :(
I wonder-- are they stripping out the reply/quotations somehow, or are those going to be showing up on the blog, too? Long, long streams of >>>>>>>>>>>>>||||>>>> make for crummy blogging.
If Apple or any other company wanted to use Twitter, why not create free accounts or pay Twitter for advertising like anyone else could without first spending $700,000,000.00?

I don't understand these "acquisitions" from a business perspective other than as an excuse to legally shuffle money from a big company to mutual investors and executives. Am I missing something?
Explain Google Apps Engine
I am trying to decide on a platform for my service. I like python, so I was looking at Google App Engine, but after reading the docs, I am not sure anymore. What is the opinion here, is it feasible to build a commercial web application using Google App Engine? What are the restrictions? What are the advantages?
Follow The Money: Bookies Favor Apple For A Twitter Buyout
Certainly possible. The Tesla Roadster's bodyweight is approximately 1,200 kg, the current Light-Sport Aircraft regulations (which is equivalent to most countries Ultralight regulations) put a vehicle with a max take-off weight at 600kg. Ultra-light engines are typically in the 80hp-120hp region, so it certainly looks plausible.

I'm sure, if you stripped down a Tesla to bare necessities (IE no crash protection) the weight to horsepower ratio will be even better. So I wouldn't doubt you'd be able to make a fully electric airplane that is capable of flying a fair distance. In fact, fuel efficiency in airplanes can be better than most cars. Again the fuel efficiency can also be affected by the parts used (obviously li-ion would be the minimum, lead-acid would either weigh too much or you'd plummet to your death after 5 miles) and thin-film PV cells could easily be applied to a plane's broad wingspan, however this likely wouldn't increase the flight distance much (even with 100% efficiency and optimal conditions, your average ultra-light wingspan wouldn't ever produce the total power needed for a 80HP/60KW motor).
Face transplant patient is revealed
While we are on pet peeves, how about the use of "blah blah blah after the jump" and then there is not, in fact, a jump.

E.G. http://themovieblog.com/2009/05/ladies-and-gentlemen-the-red...
Mutual recursion is pretty but it isn't always the case. In this case it sounds like they just stocked crappy products and sucked at customer service.
Ask HN: Help bring Drupal into the modern age, trace final bug in gmail contact importer
Did she? Here at work it's wider than my 1024 x 768 screen. The screen is suck, I admit, but this particular 'puter is mostly used for administration. And reading HN, of course.
As a data point, we see 53% of our traffic from some flavor of IE with a breakdown (for IE) of:

IE-6 / IE-7 / IE-8

39% / 55% / 6%

For us, this sadly means that supporting IE-6 is mandatory.
The debate seems to be between trusting your compiler to generate good code or writing close-to-metal code yourself.

There might be a third option though - code generation in a HLL. Coconut is a nice example of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=yHd0u6...

Instead the compiler being a black box, Coconut is structured as a set of libraries for code generation, analysis and optimisation. They report outperforming c SIMD by up to 4x on the cell architecture.
Good point. I did an experiment a few weeks ago to see how this was handled on posterous by sending an email to a friend and cc'ing post@posterous.com.

It was handled well on their end with a solid line on the left side of the reply. So it looks like something they are already prepared for.
"In C and C++, there's no such thing as an array - there's just pointers, which you can subscript and a shorthand for pointer arithmetic and indirection(x[n] in C/C++ is the same thing as (x+n).)"

Please remember that "char x[N];" and "char x = malloc(N);" are NOT the same. (Not sure if this is news to anyone, but when I was learning C reading that would have made me think otherwise).
ActiveState launches 'Basecamp for developers'
The British press is well-known for overhyping stories in this way.
That could be hard without color. I'm not sure I buy this, since the pdf ability (finally, duh Amazon) will compete with many of the textbooks.

I still fail to see why the thing has a keyboard. Just give me a USB port and let me plug one in, or something similar. 40+ buttons means 40+ things to go wrong. Waste of space, components, and maintenance overhead for a search function that could be implemented many other ways. I'm afraid the thing reminds me unpleasantly of the IBM PCjr.
Great Silicon Valley Echo Chamber in action.
Mozilla platform to use separate processes for UI and web content
Sorry for not following up sooner. Honestly I wonder if distributed version control systems, as currently being heralded by the open source community, might not be the answer. If you remove (or augment) the hierarchy with lateral connections perhaps you can solve some of these problems.

Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems.

Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.
I'm not saying buffet isn't a good example to follow. but the reason he's a good example to follow doesn't stem from his huge success.
I'm addressing the underlying error in thinking. It's like religion. Religion in general isn't the problem, it's a symptom of the underlying issue that people accept wild claims without evidence. Here too I'm sure a lot of people see Buffet's success and accept what he says without closely examining the claims.

You might ask "what's the point of seeking advice from people more knowledgeable than you if you judge the advice by your own inferior metrics?"

that's a whole 'nother discussion.
Yes you are. Once Twitter has a business plan in place (which they do supposedly but just not executed) they stand to possibly take a cut of every one of their client's profits (depending on the model of course). On top of that, they could still use it like everyone else of course.

Having said that... this all feels like a really lame April Fool's joke. Am I alone here?
Ahhh fravia.com...

One of the first things I found when joing the brave new world with my 28.8. The first thing i found on that new "www" thing that made me realize its potential, back in the bad old days when searching/finding anything on it was a bit of a black art. We'll miss you.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish."
As someone who creates a lot of diagrams, I disagree. Most diagramming tools require me to spend 80% of my effort on layout issues to make diagrams look good. I would much rather have a mini language in which I can express my diagram than fumble around with pixels.

Doing things in text also keeps the diagrams Wiki friendly, which might be a consideration (it sure is for me), allows easy auto-generation, and so on.

I've been looking for a good tool in this area. Groff has PIC, which was created by Kernighan and sort of does this (this is what W. Richard Stevens used in his books, for example), but I want pretty colors and gradients and rainbows. I'd love to hear suggestions for tools in this area.

I am thinking about writing my own tool, maybe in JavaScript to use a familiar syntax and allow a sort of eval loop on the browser.
Most of the time, people don't have their browsers the full size of their screen.

[citation needed] (seriously, I'd love to see some real data on this).
I have too much screen real estate. I find I spend 90% of my online time at less than 30 sites. Having them all just be buttons saves me a lot of time when you add it up. Scrolling through my huge bookmarks folder (even with lots of hierarchical structure) is annoying.
I like it, but it fails to load 3 out of 5 times when I click on a Posterous link. First day traffic blues?
A few of my textbooks are available as ebooks yet the price difference between physical and ebook is minimal.

The textbook business is a well-orchestrated sham that will need gov't intervention if it keeps going this way.
The 24/7 TechCrunch Office Cam Is Up And Running
rename your bookmarks as (blank) and you'll be left with just the site icon. this is what I do for most bookmarks on the toolbar. That way you can fit about 40 buttons per row.
Summary: another hosted trac site.
Agreed. I run into the first one from time to time, and it does bother me a tiny bit. But I just make my window a little bit wider and get over it. Anyway, I'd rather there be no left padding than have a horizontal scrollbar across the bottom.

And I've never actually noticed the second mistake in the wild.
Last time I checked, Apple's a "device" company (used to be a hardware company, still selling stuff). How will owning Twitter result in more sales of iPhones, iPods and/or Macs? If you can answer this question, then the rumor has legs. Otherwise, what's in it for Apple?

Does Twitter have some IP protection preventing somebody coming along and doing it again? If not, I can't see Apple buying a brand-name.
You could probably pull that off with existing software.. There are programs that let you "Print" to a PDF file (Such as CutePDF for windows).. combine that with some shell/bash scripts, and you could set it up to automatically email they to the kindle when they are printed. Bonus to emailing them would be you don't need to be tethered.
I like Kara Swisher's take on these latest rumors, namely that they are full of it:
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090505/ignore-the-twitter-buyou...

I mean, when is Valleywag going to stop printing variations of the "X is in late stage talks to buy Twitter" story?
I'd say he's wrong, as far as I've ever seen pretty much everyone but developers run their browsers, or any other app they're using, full screen.
After a cursory googling, it looks like AWS is still the only one where you can programatically modify the number of nodes in your cluster. If your goal is to launch a public facing site and automatically scale up to some limit as you get users, then AWS is a good choice. With AWS you are buying automated scalability and amazon's reliability (not that rackspace doesn't know what they're doing)
Man, I love Silicon Valley.

Where else in the world will you hear about $700M acquisitions of a company that is generating no revenue?
You have to install a coupon printer to get the coupon. Makes me nervous. Have you done this?
Honestly I actually agree completely, If anybody actually bothers to search through the trolls and actually uses a mac they might understand this.

When you have a problem with a mac you can't fix it, 90% of the time the problems are hidden away and impossible to troubleshoot.

My first mac, Kernel panic when using "Internet sharing" You plug in the Ethernet and it was 100% guaranteed to happen every time I got no support. Cool one bad laptop ok!

So i get a second one, Macbook 15" and it builds up it's own little box of problems, Overall it's wonderful but it just always manages to pipe up a few little errors here and there, Crash sometimes and not support very simple things.
I got 3 new logic boards (That's CPU/Motherboard/Graphics) All replaced and still had the same problems over and over, Either they didn't actually replace it or there was something very seriously wrong with my ram (Which was never replaced anyway and now is fine)

The whole bootcamp/windows/linux on a mac is bullshit, there are always problems, And you void your warranty if you remove OSX (Yes it's true I got refused repairs due to windows)

I wish I could replace this with a windows laptop.
You mean that you work like 14 hours a day, 7 days/week? Is it full working hours that you could invoice or just 100 hours that you spend in front of the computer? What does your daily schedule look like? Just curious.
I'd like to purchase all of the clothing. No wash.
> Yes, I stated that the society where such a cure was unknown is likely to be happier. This is not the same as advocating zero advancement.

It is if you think that happy is the only relevant criteria, which you've written above.

> I could do the same to you - I could imply that you favour

Yes, you could attribute something to me that has no actual basis, again. It's unclear why you think that refraining from doing so is some sort of virtue.

> Poor analogy, implies that there's some kind of cost/downside to the rich in this role.

There is a downside. They pay 90% of the NRE. If they're not 90% of the relevant population, they've paid much of the NRE for the rest of us. Yes, they get a benefit, early access, but denying them won't speed up our access.

Yes, they clearly think that the benefit that they receive is greater than the cost that they pay, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a cost or that they're not subsidizing the rest of us.

>> Actually, it's largely a construct of an envy campaign. Telling people that they have it bad has consequences.

> So the fact that people know they're massively less well off than another segment of society (despite working 63 jobs and getting hardly any time off) makes them unhappy? Sounds, well, kind of like what I've been saying.

Reread what I actually wrote. Telling them that it's bad that that someone else has it better has consequences.

> Have you ever visited? They tend to be happier, have longer lives, and experience less suffering.

Smug much? Yes, I have. I've also lived outside the US, in US ghettos, and done "poor people" work. You're comparing different populations and the difference that you're fixated on isn't particularly relevant to that difference between the populations. If you look at comparable populations, the difference that you're fixated on disappears.

Or, in stat-speak - averages can be deceptive.

> it's in the interest of the wealthy to advance justifications to support their position, whether they're reasonable or not.

And what's my interest?

Note that everyone has "interest", yet only interests attributed to the wealthy rate a mention. And, you're assuming that the fact that they have "interest" means that they're wrong.
not as smooth, elegant, or intuitive as basecamp. It could just be that I'm biased because I've been using basecamp for the past 2 years.
Or you can just use Amazon's console.

https://console.aws.amazon.com/
I'd venture to guess that current battery energy density makes this a far-off dream. Certainly that could improve, and the idea that battery components might double as structural components is interesting. Still, one has to wonder whether it will prove to be greener/faster to develop electric airplanes or to develop carbon-neutral sources of petroleum-like products (i.e. Fuel from Bacteria).
Couple of UI tips: Center-align the layout. It's way too busy, I have no idea what I should read first or even click on. Cut out 90% of that text and assume your user has never been your site before. Show me pics and tell me why I should switch from Basecamp. It's also loaded with colors; I feel like I should be wearing a hard hat on this site.
You can do things with EC2 you can't do anywhere else.

I've helped companies build deployment processes with EC2 that allows them to launch a staging environment with a single command that includes a complete copy of production data. They run their tests, then cut a release and shutdown the staging environment with another single command. That's not possible without EC2 and EBS.
So it is cool to be part of the establishment, if you do it in an artsy, cool way. I'm so tired of kids who don't understand economics.
Erlang Factory Recap
SEO Wordpress - Step by Step | shan.biz
That was fast. I downloaded the app (which mostly looks like a frontend to OpenVPN) for OS X. Hulu then told me when I tried to watch a video that my IP address is from a known anonymizer and to turn it off or go away. :-(

Time to figure out how to turn my Linode VPS into a (non-open) proxy.
wireless signals go around walls
Forget Apple, Amazon Should Buy Twitter. Why Not?
That's because you're already on the full article page. If you saw it on the main page of the blog, it'd make perfect sense, since the full pic isn't featured on the main page.

Basically, the phrase 'blah-blah after the jump' should be removed from the full article, which this blogger didn't do.
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