skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thing is, this recent HN article...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642677

...is actually tangentially relevant here, if you think about it.

The article this comment is attached to isn't really about "forcing" people to take the stairs, but to make using the stairs a more natural or obvious option to people. In too many tall buildings, the combination of architectural traditions and building codes lead to stairs being "out of sight, out of mind."
That c.l.lisp post was from 1999. You might want to invite Kent (or anyone with the experience) to give his opinion on a modern IDE vs. the mythical LispM. I don't think that something like C# on Visual Studio (or equivalent) is very far.

I don't care much, personally. I gave up fiddling Emacs many moons ago, and Python with a semi-competent text editor (nedit will do) is good enough for me. IDEs can write, but cannot read code for you.
Nobody started it that I know of, it's just an obvious example since Somalia hasn't had a functional government for a while now. It's the nearest thing to an anarchic society going at present (as opposed to a small community within a wider society).

I don't really know level of minimal government you have in mind; I'm guessing defense and courts and police, but I can't help feeling that much of what government does in the name of regulation is to agglomerate court precedents. As any society with writing progresses, refinements to their civil code are going to accumulate.

I think liberatarians would do better to provide examples of economically diverse societies and show how a minimalist approach provides better results over the long run.
Ask HN: Developing for WinMobile vs Symbian vs iPhone
I'm getting ready to start a project developing a mobile phone application utilizing the phone's camera and whatever other environment sensors are available on the device. Based on some code I'll be inheriting, it would be an advantage to be able to use C++ as part (though not necessarily all) of the project. I've spent some time looking at the development environments for the three platforms mentioned above, but I'm looking for some practical experience from hackers here. On which platforms is it easiest to interact with the camera viewfinder and other sensor data (GPS, gyros, accelerometers)? What's your preference?
The risk you are describing is that Google decides to shut down YOUR site only?

Where does that rank among:

- Your chief developer gets seriously injured or quits

- Your funding dries up

- You run into unexpected scaling problems when rolling your own data center.

- You miss out on some other opportunity because you have allocated lots of your finite resources to scaling.

I think we can look to Amazon AWS to see a more likely outcome of the sort of concern you are getting at: After a while Amazon did adjust the pricing of some of its services to better mirror its own costs. This was not to be punitive toward its customers, but simply to allow it to better pass along costs (most customers saw their bill decrease).

So I'd say the real risk is that if you use a beta cloud service and your business model is based on some sort of loophole in the pricing, you run the risk of that loophole being closed and your costs increasing.
migueldeicaza and abock are good if you're interested in Mono. They aren't particularly focused on the web though.
Not at all.

Consider Rails: Convention over configuration. The same applies to app engine, only with a slightly more restrictive set of conventions.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/silly-consensus.html
On a somewhat related note: I accidentally up-voted this post. Is there a way to undo such a mistake?
What I had really hoped was that Bing had a good search engine for shopping for computer hardware. There really isn't anything great out.

Froogle's ok, but sometimes gets bad results. So that $30 hd turns out to be a $30 cord. And it's kind of hard to comparison shop when you're going by the lowest price, and the lowest price is not the correct item.

I guess that this is an area for a human-powered search engine. Newegg's search is a really awesome example of how good search works. Unfortunately, Newegg is only one company, and I have not found a search engine that does something similar.
UK web pirates to be placed in 'slow lane'
I've heard of it. I'm curious about your thoughts in relation to this topic.
Threaded conversations & multiple labeling. This just destroys the folder metaphor other apps use.
I think the comment was trying to say "If Apple fails to live up to its incredible standard".

That is a point, since Apple earn its money from unique usability values -- and it isn't obvious it will manage to continue doing that.

You really expect better from NY Times than from e.g. me, but it was a quote from some economist...
Google Wave is Anti-Web says Microsoft? How rich.
It also probably won't make a difference for people who work on the 10th floor...
I want a way to find and contact everyone (those that want to be contacted) that comes to Hacker News on a regular basis in Atlanta.

That being said your site is very slow loading. Our fault?
Filters + Archive.

Keeps my life in check.
I tried really hard, but I just can't take this type of writing seriously.

Summary: Microsoft wants to expand their search market. They plan on spending a lot of money advertising this. This is a bad idea.

Guy who wrote this, listen up:

People do not giving a flying shit about the underlying architechture of any product they use. They do not care about the quality of results. They do not care about the logo on the top.

They care about how they feel when they're using things.

Lets look at apple's ipod. Yes, they are absolutely successful. Why is this? Is it because they have a massively superior product to anybody else? Or is it because they have advertised the living hell out of it to the point of an ipod being a fashion accessory/status symbol?

Haha, ipods are so hip, what, are you behind the times with that other mp3 player? Haha, look at how happy I am with this terrific, iPod, I'm with it! I'm hip!

The ipod isn't better, the feeling is better.

Look at the bing homepage compared to google. They have a nice big graphic on there with lots of colors. Its kindof beautiful. Oh, and the graphic changes all the time! Isn't that great? It's like you'd have to go to the page a few times a day to see all the pictures.

(now I'm adopting that annoying, sarcastic writing style. Sorry)

In search, getting results is the easy part. The part that keeps people coming back isn't content, its the feeling that they get when they're using the product.
Williams + Hirakawa is what was given in the magazine: http://www.williamshirakawa.com/
I think if you follow best practices with any platform you'll achieve great results.
e-mail :D

But seriously, a good, no, great spam filter.
There are always two ways in such situations - make perfect law or apply imperfect law selectively. If you ask me, I prefer perfect law (but I am biased because I'm in Russia and I often see how selective application may be terribly abused). On the other side, it is not always feasible or possible to design perfect law. But in this particular situation IMHO it is definitely the better option.
I'm not so sure. Perhaps the iPod feels better, in part, because it is easier to use, faster, holds more music, or integrates better with your computer?

These can be objectively measured, whereas "feeling" cannot.
I personally like all of the submission, whether it is 10 a day or 1. The point is, if they're asking, and you're looking to help, you'll connect here.
House of Troy Grand Piano Lamps
Here's a lamp that delivers light without sitting on your piano! This new lamp has a 44 lateral reach and a maximum height of 54; you'll be able to target the music without marring your finish!
Me personally, no, but I can imagine that this would be attractive to a small business. Anyhow, isn't the effort to port the app from being desktop-based to server-based minimal since all the interfaces are web-based?
I don't wanna poll anybody, sorry if there was a misunderstandig. I'm not trying to build some Webapp in my spare time here. I've written now tons of PHP in the last 3-4 weeks on an internal project and it's pretty much running and functional by now. Definitely not in a phase we're I wanna switch frameworks or something.

Somehow though, lots of stuff you do in PHP doesn't quite feel right and you constantly get the feeling that anything can break at anytime. If you're mixing in jquery and doing lots of ajax requests, you're just cross-calling functions anywhere around some loosely tied together code. When you even have to think hard about what kind of scope your variables & code are living in, it seems hard to get solid sturucture in PHP. So I was just wondering if that happens to everybody, that dares to touch this language :>
I do agree that this is a great story, but I think the homeless could be helped out a lot more.

Around 40 to 50 percent have a serious mental illness. And many are not being treated. Also some of the mentally ill have anosognosia, and so don't even realize that they have a problem.

So sure, it would be nice if a lot more people had the resolve to get off alcohol and work, but it is a lot tougher for some to do this.
In the iPhone, you can only use Objective-C, so unless you're willing to use it, cross it out. But mind that making apps for iPhone is a gamble.
Search. Absolutely the most important feature I use.
Microsoft sees lower margins from cloud computing
http://www.tonido.com/how.html

You forgot the "Systems Analyst".
I didn't bother to signup. Is there anyway to let people use the site without having an (immediate) signup? Cookies to hold some configuration? For example, Stackoverflow.com lets you contribute without signing in but then gives incentives to do so.
I'd rather not port code, but honestly, 80% of the project will be new code from me, not old stuff, and I think ObjC is a nice language. I'm most concerned about the speed of access to and ease of use of the camera and sensor interfaces.
It seems like I remember a lot of stories like this about Microsoft before the Xbox came out. Microsoft is going to compete against Sony and Nintendo? Yeah right! --Turns out they did OK.

Maybe Bing will work out and maybe not but that's no reason not to try. I'm sure Microsoft is very aware of the risks involved and the other places it could have invested the money going into Bing. I'm also sure they're aware of the money and power that goes to whomever controls search.
Yet again: I was referring to something else (which concerned a site that claimed an individual's DEBT as incurred by the government), NOT TAXES.

You're confusing the two topics: Peterson the man, and Peterson the non-profit. See this: http://www.pgpf.org/about/faq/ under "Our Nation's Debt." Question #2 in that states, "or a $184,000 burden on every man, woman, child and newborn in this country." I was simply stating that a child that has earned $0 should not be grouped similarly to a man that's earned $1,000,000,000.
Sketchiness quotient increasing:

http://www.tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=44

It doesn't look like you mean the same thing that everyone else means when you say "open source". You want to update this?
"Some simple interventions can do much toward encouraging people to take the stairs, research suggests. For example, a study performed at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention building found that playing music in stairwells and displaying motivational signs significantly increased the use of stairs."

Stairwell music?
my favorite is that when you go to a subway in San Fran, if you ask to have your sub toasted for 30 seconds, you then have to pay 10% sales tax on it.

cold food is free but "hot food" is taxed. i can understand the purpose--restaurants are more luxuries than needs--, it just seems absurd in that context.
Nice graphics but when I load the page the graphics take up my viewer (1280 by 800) and there is no copy to tell me what it is? I have to scroll down. I would suggest integrate short description into nice design right at the top so when page loads ppl get it right away!
U.S. broadband ranking: Does it matter?
DevCentral Top5 06/05/2009
It depends on what you mean by 'driver'. FUSE has certainly created a portable set of filesystem drivers for several operating systems. There are also things like ndiswrapper and project evil to wrap windows network drivers for various unixy systems.

The real reason that most drivers don't get ported seems fairly obvious though. Different systems expose different amounts of surface area, different programming models, etc. Why is the current standard of tight coupling bad? Gains in portability are generally offset by a loss in performance, which isn't really something you want on your root filesystem or your graphics card (or your server's NIC, as a counterbalance to ndiswrapper).
I have to say it's the lab features. With all the cool addon features you can enable on the fly. Canned responses and Undo features is the top 2 I can't live without.
I think this is well-understood by all the players in this space. The problem with utility computing is that, well it's a utility. Ideally, the market becomes completely fungible, with the only differences being price and reliability.
What was the most important year ever?
Each search = predictable $$. Spending $100M will increase searches and ad clicks. Which means they will get some, or even more, of that money back. (Could $100M get a higher ROI elsewhere? maybe, but unless you know the revenue per query MSFT makes I wouldn't call the marketing campaign a mistake).
ability to use it on my own domain.
You can develop an Access Management system (or integrate with a COTS).
You can watermark the files with timestamp and username. Thus allowing you to track who let the documents go into the wild.
Based on Meta data, you can restrict access to different files and restrict the client's ability to display those documents.

None of those tasks are trivial and all of them can be worked around.
You aren't building a military grade secure system, so, perhaps what you are doing is good enough.
I'd start with Access Management and add visibility controls on documents.
Recession triggers first internet ad revenue drop since 2002
You're wrong. The iPod was significantly better. People bought it. then it became 'hip' and 'cool', and some people only bought it because it was hip+cool.

I had several mp3 players before an ipod and the difference in usability was massive.

For a search engine, results are pretty much the only thing that matters. That's why google won.
Search, threaded conversations, the excellent spam filter, and excellent integration with Google Calendar.
Right, I understand the problem. Find and xargs can do wonders. However, that's usually an edge case (in my professional experience). I'm certainly not proclaiming the advanced-ness of 'ls' in this circumstance.

However, in the example in the article, he was using "ls" piped to "grep" in order to find all files with a 5 in the name. That would suffer from the same consequences you mentioned, on such systems, and is inefficient and verbose.

Note, I agree with your advice to teach "find" (and "xargs") to users.
Is The Java Store better than Starbucks?
You can use C++ on the iPhone, wrapped in ObjC for the API calls. See http://iPhoneDeveloperTips.com/cpp/c-on-iphone-part-1.html.

As far as using those features, it's fairly easy to do so using the iPhone SDK. I had no exposure to any other platforms though.
I don't understand why the video quality of these isn't higher. Who records in SD nowadays?
Facebook Photos Used to Nail Bail Violator in DUI Case
Sure, why not? After going up 14 flights of stairs I'm already breathing hard, which can be embarassing when there are others around. I'd prefer music to silence where everyone can hear you plodding and gasping.
Maybe for the first 3 months, by that time other companies got the message. So Apple started to advertise, advertise and advertise until everyone had a white on pink burned into their eyes.
It might be a good idea for you to look at currently open-source iPhone apps and check out the source code. Specially those that interact with the camera and sensors. Here's a few links I found for you:

http://opensourceiphonesoftware.com/

http://sunsetlakesoftware.com/2008/10/02/molecules-source-co...

http://petersteinberger.com/2009/05/open-source-iphone-apps/

And one that interacts with the camera:

http://code.google.com/p/zxing/
Searchable archive. I don't know how many times this has saved me, and how many times I was screwed by Yahoo!
The iPod could store a person's entire music library, which other players at the time could not do. That was a major selling point. While advertising wouldn't hurt, you can't say that a few commercials were the only reasons anybody wanted one.
Union filesystems are common in Linux systems, and basically every modern "Unix" (Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Linux...) supports /proc.

A lot of the other 'absolutely everything is a file' stuff is cute, but not having it isn't so terrible.

Some people seem to like the text editor, but some people like nedit- there's no accounting for taste.

Seriously, it's easy to be angry, but what do you miss from Plan 9 specifically? Why?
yes we can port it easily
RubyCocoa
'Send and Archive' from the labs. Once I've replied to an email, 9 times out of 10 having an email sitting in my inbox is pointless.
Facebook Developers And Ad Networks Participating In Race To The Bottom
> He used the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL instead of the default MyISAM.

Just to clarify this point, InnoDB was used because it's the default - and most widely used - engine for ActiveRecord/Rails.
I apologize, I should have been more specific. What I should have said was that results were important when web search was in its infancy.

It has been refined to the point of irrelevance.
Labels has to be the most useful feature there is especially when you get to use incoming filters to catch all the mail you want and pre-organize it.
Microsoft's DNA is to copy or buy things, it's simply what they do. It started with QDOS/86DOS.
Just about everything has lower margins than the Windows/Office monopoly...
This is an interesting issue -- what incentive is there to help the mentally-disabled homeless from an economic perspective?

After a minute of thought I cannot come up with one. It could be a psychological effect akin to the social safety net, which indirectly increases morale and loyalty, and then, indirectly, boosts the economy, but it is still a stretch.

Therefore, treating them looks to me as a wholly unfavorable proposition and the current non-arrangement would be the more-or-less optimized case.

How am I wrong?
1. Speed (I think it's faster than Outlook in almost all operations)
2. VIM like keyboard shortcuts

1 and 2 combined makes it a winner for me. :)
Kivuntu.com attempting to measure the "social good" of Kiva loans
I made this site using data provided by Kiva.org's REST api.

It attempts to predict daily the "social impact" of new Kiva.org micro-loan request. More details in the About section.

Would love to hear feedback.

Technical specifics:
Python/Django/Google App Engine/jQuery
I made this site using data provided by Kiva.org's REST api.

It attempts to predict daily the "social impact" of new Kiva.org micro-loan request. More details in the About section.

Would love to hear feedback.

Technical specifics:
Python/Django/Google App Engine/jQuery
I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for, so I don't really know what you're talking about.

You can't put a dress on an also ran and take on Google. It has to kick Google's ass.
The eventual goal is to have comment threads on the meetups, and you'd be able to choose if you wanted to receive new comments as an email. Do you think there'd be a use case beyond meetups for contacting everyone?

The site was loading slowly because our score updating scripts were bogging things down. We hadn't had a chance to test them with actual data... The site should be responsive now.
Ask HN: What online sound repositories do you use?
I am looking for decent quality sounds for sound effects and have been disappointed by the overall low quality of the results. Either they want too much money for a mediocre product or the clips are free but terrible.

Any good resources out there for an indie app/game maker that needs sounds and cannot make them himself?
Microsoft Threatens to Move Jobs Offshore if Foreign Tax Shelter is Eliminated
Says Ray Ozzie.
It's easy enough to realise that you're always selling less (computing power) than you pay for. The margins are inevitably small, but there are other reasons to get in the business. For Amazon.com the main reason was probably to build such a huge economy of scale that they don't need to buy extra capacity in Q4.
Keyboard shortcuts, and auto-filtering to different labels. I'm actually quite obsessive with my filters.
Not only that (parents complaining to teachers), it gets worse. Some problem parents actually go straight to the principal to complain about the teacher -- based only on what their child told them ("But mom, Mrs. So-and-so picks on me! She told us X wouldn't be on the test, but it was! And she's unfair!"). This is without ever even contacting the teacher (this tactic is often coupled with "but I tried to contact Mr. So-and-so but he never got back to me").

Other parents think they'll go "straight to the top" and complain directly to the superintendent of schools in their town. When time comes to renew jobs for non-tenured teachers, I've heard tales of non-renewal (for the next school year) just because of a couple noisy parents.
This is the shoeshiner version of getting an iPhone App Store Rejection letter.
Venture capitalists see their industry shrinking
I can see one significant difference here: the Natal has what seems like a very intelligent camera system, and that can be a standalone product, whereas the Wii system by itself is useless.

A media center that allows one-click videoconferencing with your TV, bundled with a Minority Report style photo album viewer, DVD player, AND has the ability to play games.

If the price isn't anything outrageous I can see fast adoption. Oh, and they have Square Enix lined up. I'd bet it's a worthy contender.
1. label 2. spam filter 3. search 4. thread 5. archive
Instant messengers are not yet "part of the web", but are trending that way (my family uses Google Talk via the GMail page, for instance).

A huge portion of all Mail users use it exclusively via the web. That an archaic non-web protocol might bounce those messages from site to site is besides the point.

I don't want to get axod started on IRC.

Groupware is exclusively the province of the net now. Even in big companies, which have coalesced around Sharepoint.

Usenet was supplanted by blogs, blog comments, blog-search, and news aggregation sites.
Fatty foods fire up hunger hormone
Spam filter, IMAP, threads, importing from other accounts (for those in which I can't just set .forward). Search. Mailbox size.
Things that are part of the web work in browsers and are linkable. The rest of it is just opinions.
I was going to say the same thing... it's more analogous to being drugged.
> I don't think that something like C# on Visual Studio (or equivalent) is very far.

Please try the Symbolics emulator. (Not as hard to find as it once was.) Modern tools don't even come close, from the standpoint of elegance, debugging power and "turtles all the way down."