skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My core skills are in fabrication and I spent many years doing custom work. Each job was different but the more I was able to "automate" for the customer the easier their jobs became. A well designed storage system, work station or tool could turn a tedious or awkward task into a money maker.

Regular computer users, especially in small businesses need the same non glamorous repetitive stuff you mention automated for the same reasons.

The software components are out there already, all that's needed is some "custom fabrication" to glue it all together.

I think there is a huge invisible niche between shrink wrap and enterprise. Not necessarily big money, but steady and satisfying work.
I do think that Keynote blows PowerPoint out of the water, but I think it would blow PowerPoint out of the water on any platform.
I would agree with the don't worry about it comment. I make a MMORPG for the iPhone called Epic Pet Wars. Our paid versions are getting pirated at a rate of about 2:1, but I strongly believe that these users would not pay for the app anyway.

We are making enough money with the pirates and we have other ways to monetize these users like direct payments on our sit. Also, the pirates seem to be heavily active on the game.
The title is a little off: security updates boost security, and silent updates boost adoption of updates.

The recent stink with Adblock Plus and NoScript using my browser in their personal snowball fight makes me leery of auto-updates. Making the normative choice the default setting has an okay track record, but I'd like as many as eyes as possible helping me keep developers in line with my needs.
I just said the possibility is there. If you can't come up with a way to monetize that, it's your fault.
Eh, yes, but no. You seem to take the fall in revenues as prima facie evidence that CA is overspending. First, I'm not even sure there is a proper level of spending, but in any case, CA has a peculiar funding structure where we are overly reliant on highly cyclical taxes for revenue. This is by design/evolution, since we enacted Proposition 13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978... ), severely limiting revenue from property taxes, which would be a more stable / less cyclical funding source.

To be fair, however, fundamentally, CA continues to vote for a government which creates more goods and services than we want to pay for. Schwarzenegger papered this over with a bunch of loans, but eventually we will run up against a wall and be forced to align our desires with our willingness to pay.

Also, worst financial crisis since the Great Depression accompanied by a drop in real industrial output that, IIRC, actually exceeds the Great Depression in speed, and so forth and so on. Plus a state that has been particularly devastated by the housing bubble.
Yeah, I like my Mac and all, but I wish no one would ever submit one of these stupid articles again.
True....and cardboard boxes often come with the flaps connected when they are folded...I see no reason why a robot couldn't unfold the appropriate size box for an order, leave the top flaps open (but still connected, giving at least 50% more volume than a sealed box), then a sophisticated warehouse like amazon has could likely easily treadmill individual the items into the box (in proper order according to item size, etc), scanning them as they go in to ensure success, then the fine tuning of packing could be done by a human. Some orders might not qualify for this level of automation, but thats pretty easy to figure out.

I would imagine Amazon might already be doing this, anyone ever seen a video??
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Like I say, I'm still finding out how to parse queries effectively, particularly for comparison data...in between working (cough).
My mom is a programmer, raging against the machine
Since mother's day is around the corner, just curious, how many of you have mothers who are/were programmers?
It cannot be with 3.0. Subscriptions and one time charges are only supported for apps that initially cost money. You could get away with charging .99 cents for it initially and then charging a subscription.
He's right. 'JFK' gives me:
full name | John Fitzgerald Kennedy
date of birth | May 29, 1917 (91 years ago)
place of birth | Brookline,Massachusetts,United States
date of death | November 22, 1963 (age: 46 years)
(45 years ago)
place of death | Dallas,Texas,United States

Oh, and (like many topics) it also offers a Wiki link in a sidebar.
Actually..

Ask it "Who killed JFK" too.
Natural language interfaces have failed repeatedly. And so have attempts at the semantic web.

What does work and scales is more free form as is the case with the Web today.

And Google makes "free form" work.
I can barely see out of my pigeonhole, but I'll try to reply anyway :)

Neither I nor the article ever suggested that performance is not important, or that low-level work is not important. The parent gave two examples - language development (almost entirely not a commercial activity anymore), and the development of the Linux kernel (GPL). Neither was supported his point, which was that performance for its own sake is the key in those markets, and I was responding to that with generalities about the 'commodity nature' of those examples.

You're outlining markets where performance is an important feature - to products sold to well defined paying (and massive) customers. Thus you are supporting the article, my summary of it, and disagreeing with parent, even as you lament the 'social media rockstar' phenomenon.
Remember Cuil? Fostering press that you're an X killer is a good sign of future failure.
This made me think of the Whereabouts Clock:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sds/whereabouts_c...
The issue is the transition; if you continue with our present economic model, as well as the prevailing cultural attitudes in the U.S., more and more workers will be marginalized, and if police and military forces can themselves be swapped out for robot counterparts, a revolution against 'The Man' becomes all but impossible.

Of course, you can stop that from happening by creating 'comfortable enough' homeless shelters, and lacing the food with appropriate chemicals. The poor masses will be happy, fed, and clothed for a minimal amount of money, and can be quite easily swept under the rug.

I don't think this is terribly far-fetched; culture in the U.S. seems to be highly focused on 'who has more', which is meaningless and self-destructive in a society that can readily satisfy the needs and wants of all of its inhabitants.
I think it's more than just Keynote though. Keynote blows Powerpoint away because it is philsophically different, and that philosophy is inherited from its operating environment and the DNA of the company that made it.
> revenue from property taxes, which would be a more stable / less cyclical funding source.

Obviously not a resident of the central valley.
Brilliant!

If feels like big companies have figured out how to DOS the USPTO to the point where the PTO is so overwhelmed with all of the incoming submissions that they have no choice but to grant the patents.
So you'd be cool with people selling patent medicines and shark-fin cancer cures too, I take it? We'll have to agree to disagree.
I miss the ability to maximize windows. When you first switch to a Mac and try to ask for help with this on a Mac forum, you get responses like:

"You can drag a window to the full size of the screen, but more often than not you simply won't bother. It's rarely helpful to have a window at full screen anyway. I know your mind is screaming "No!" at this, but try it for a couple of days and you'll see for yourself. Just drag a window to the size you want it to be, and leave it at that. "

"If a web page only uses 60% of the width of your screen, what's the use in having the window at 100% -- covering important desktop icons, other windows, etc.

Windows uses an "application-centric" approach to windowing, while Mac OS X uses a "document-centric" approach to windowing -- where no one window should monopolize the entire screen."

"On the Mac, because of the universal menubar you really don't have to take over the entire screen since you'll always have access to the menu at the top of the screen, unlike the other desktop environments that have them per window which can get confusing for some users."

"Another reason for not going fullscreen is because it makes it easier to drag and drop components from one application into another. "

---

So yeah, apparently I don't want to maximize a window, I only think I do. However, software like WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom), a full screen text editor receives terrific reviews:

"WriteRoom — Distraction free writing. For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you're used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text."
Ask HN: Legal Packages for Startups
We are a bootstrapped web startup and looking to incorporate soon, mainly to legitimize since we will be charging subscription, as well to protect us in case of IP/Liability issues.

I wanted to know if there are any firms/companies out there that provide legal work packages for tech/web startups. Think of it like the service incubators provide, except we pay a company to do it for us.

I am asking because there are thousands of web/tech startups that get incorporated and all the other legal work, and they all have more or less the same structure. It would seem logical for a company to provide a packaged deal. This is in contrast to hiring a lawyer.
If the pitch is for a great product that people want to use, does it really matter if it's on a Mac or Windows laptop? Substance is more important than style.

I use PowerPoint, but I design my decks using the principle of "austere minimalism". Each slide makes one point with the minimal amount of material. Keynote wasn't better or worse as a presentation tool when I had a Mac.
That question is interesting from a techie AI perspective, but irrelevant for end users IMHO.
If they want to know when JFK was shot, they'd probably google "jfk shot" or go to his wikipedia page and search in the page for 'shot'.

Getting users to 'unlearn' that behavior and instead use natural language, and then trust the answer is going to be hard IMHO.
See above comment about dtrace probes, also there is ruby-perf and services like http://www.newrelic.com/features.html

Also, what is the way PHP handles profiling in 2009 ? I haven't developed in php in quite a while, and I admit I never used anything more complicated then the profiling tools built in Zend Studio.
Maybe that is why they want hackers, to help create the "new news".
Juxtaposition in ML is function application: f x y = f(x,y)

Although you're free to discount ML and its ilk (OCaml, Haskell) as non-mainstream.
The more complicated situation, which we are presently experiencing, is that where a 3rd world country with a massive population is given the technology to essentially overnight (ok, one decade) be able to perform manufacturing for virtually the entire planet, at labor rates that make robots look expensive, not to mention they are capable of far more diverse tasks.

I think society has the ability to adapt and diversify fast enough to keep up with our technical innovation, but I don't see any way that we can adapt fast enough to handle the ultra-rapid industrialization of China, especially considering their seeming willingness to work 70 hour weeks for wages that are miniscule compared to the value of their output.

I just don't see how China can manufacture basically everything for us (there is still more that hasn't been outsourced, but will), we outsource whatever information based services we can to India, and we sit here and cut each others hair and build each other beautiful houses, while they live in shacks and share one bathroom between 20 people in workers dorms.

And what do we send them? Pieces of paper with ink on them. Which they use to buy our government bonds.

If overseas workers don't start charging more for their labor, thereby being able to actually consume some of their output, I don't see how there is a happy end to this story in the medium term.
Sadly, no browsers now-a-days have that default gray background of yore. :)
"So yeah, apparently I don't want to maximize a window, I only think I do."

You need to be re-programmed to accept the Macintosh way.
How about "What is the complete list of films made by Orson Welles"?
Ask HN: Review my idea and free web app (for site monitoring)
Hi HN,

I submitted a similar post a while ago, but it seems that my msg was lost (yes, I shouldn't have set a URL).

Anyway, what we developed is more than just a normal site monitoring that checks if a site is up or not, but a new concept of Network-based integrity monitoring (NBIM).

The idea is to monitor the integrity of network/Internet assets, similarly to what we are used with file-based integrity. In a nutshell, it will verify that important parts of your Internet presence have not being altered.

Our beta product, NBIM, offers this functionality to detect changes (malicious or not) on web pages, http headers, whois database, DNS, host, HTTPS pages, and SSL certificates (with more to come). If anything ever changes, you get an email alert (or tweet to be cool) almost in real time showing a diff between the old and new snapshot.

The link:
http://sucuri.net/?page=nbi

Comments about the idea, page design, implementation, concept, etc are welcome!

Thanks!

--dd
an erlang talk is cool and all, but why do people post links to videos from 2007 here???
Tax revenue has fallen. How do you interpret that as evidence that the government is collecting "higher and more ubiquitous taxes?"

Generally, during a downturn, governments continue spending into debt which is the right thing to do. Their usual fault is in not banking the surplus during good times.
Those numbers are probably from non-real world benchmark tests of sequential read/write. You probably never reach to those levels and when put TT to the equation # will decrease even more.
There is no language called "Hindu" (page 76) -- ah the ignorance of the "western" world.
"filled with detailed drawings done in Google SketchUp, a program he downloaded from the Internet."

Is it only me are is that a weird detail to a weird factoid?
My local paper sucks. It's a corporate revenue generator. They give us as little real content as possible. Just enough to maintain the illusion that they are a News Paper rather than an Advertising Sales and Delivery System.
The editor wails about how important he is to the community but he is merely an impotent tool for Gannett, just as his predecessor was for Knight-Ridder.
The Dizzying Economics of Cloud Computing
Factor programming language
How about "What are Google's search results for 'Orson Welles filmography'?"
You'd have the make the subscription cheaper to offset the app's cost, so you'd still be losing money on piracy. Plus, making the end user pay twice sounds annoying.

It sounds like Apple set it up this way to make sure they are getting a piece of all the money coming through the iPhone. I won't begrudge them that, but I feel for the developers.
You've just described the plot of the Manna story, to a large extent.
Analysis: SSD performance -- is a slowdown inevitable?
Behind the scenes: Getting Real with the Backpack homepage
Backing up MySQL's binary log is probably a better solution than doing periodic mysqldumps. Also the ordering of the inserts in the dump isn't likely to be deterministic, screwing up some of the benefit of this method.
All I can say is 'it's different'. Wolfram said this morning that he is not seeking to compete with Google, about whom he spoke generously. Rather, his goal is to provide a fast interface to a wide range of computable data.

As an example of its quirkiness, 2 slices of swiss cheese + 1 leaf of lettuce + 1 quarter pound burger gives me a USDA style nutrition label. If I add bacon it says it doesn't know what I mean :-)
I guess Alpha could come with tech support to gently rearrange your questions, but it seems like cheating ;)
I think that people in low-population areas often drive more recklessly because they assume that nobody else will be on the road, and they're usually right. (And they tend to have a larger distance to go to get to anything interesting).
> has a peculiar funding structure where we are overly reliant on highly cyclical taxes for revenue.

Taxable incomes haven't dropped by 50% in CA. What has dropped is the taxable incomes of the small fraction of CA folks who pay the bulk of CA's income taxes.

CA's income taxes are very progressive. That makes them very volatile.

Prop 13 has nothing to do with the volatility of CA's income tax revenues.
Sorry if I'm being obtuse but are you making a profit from the average pirate? If you are making money despite them i'd imagine you'd be less sanguine, but if you're making money even from the pirates wouldn't it be in your long term interest to switch to free distribution to grow your user base much, much faster? Obviously the timing is an issue particularly if it'd leave you without much cushion, but shouldn't it be part of your strategy, because otherwise someone else will get there first in that niche and have the fast growth that could otherwise be yours (not necessarily sustainable but fast)
Signs of Trouble in the Network
Diversification = Mediocrity.
Sounds like a great idea for a startup. I know I would have used it.
First it's annoying that people call Apple computers "macs".

Second isn't this more of a case of devs picking "*nix laptop that doesn't suck" rather than choosing an apple.
ruby-prof is a module that runs inside the ruby process, and hooks into the interpreter to track what's happening. You have options for how to run it. You can run the entire program within the profiler, but if you do that, you won't get data out until the process ends (you kill the webserver, in this case). Or, you can do what's more typical for profiling Rails, which is to explicitly activate the profiler for the course of a single request, and report on that single request.
We have a free distribution model. We give away the application and charge (our app is #22 in top free apps) We monetize through character unlocks and virtual goods using paid versions in the app store. These versions are being pirated quite a bit, but yes we are making good money despite of it so we dont mind.
Yep. I've tried tracking mysql dumps, and lots of little things can cause spurious diffs.
My mother is a programmer, quite frankly the best programmer I have ever met. But she doesn't like computers and says she longs for the old days when she would write out her program on a piece of paper, hand it to the technicians and get a print out of the results a day later.
Really, that was the best they could come up with? In the entire ad, they don't use the word "browser" once. It doesn't offer me a single reason to choose it over another browser if I even identify it as a browser in the first place.

And Google already has the best possibly place they could advertise Chrome - Google.com. People visiting Google.com, presumably, already like/trust/think highly of Google. Right there, you're only marketing to people who are more likely to be in favor of your company. Beyond that, they can offer lots of information and a download right there - getting much better results than a TV ad.

With the TV ad, I'm left with little other than a message to "Install Google Chrome" whatever that is. With a link on a website, I can get more information, see why Chrome is better, and install it right there. Rather than trying to leave me with an impression of playfulness/fun (which I assume the blocks are supposed to do), real information can leave me with a good reason to install it.
Ask HN: What web server do you use?
What web server are you currently using? Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, Cherokee, IIS, Custom, Other? Are you happy with your current setup or do you plan on switching to a different web server for your next project?
In my opinion, monopoly is not a problem. unfair monopoly is. By unfair monopoly, I mean monopoly status achieved with unfair Govt support, or monopolies that exploit their status to achieve gains elsewhere etc. In case of Google, it was well deserved and I don't even see what the courts even plan to do. splitting it into two search engines would be the most ridiculous solution.

If the Govt is really interested in stopping monopolies, it has to first fix the monopoly of the Federal reserve and its right to print money out of thin air.
We've already heard today that focusing too much is bad (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599977).

All we need is an article warning against a balance, and we'll have the whole set!
C'mon, you think I didn't try all those :-)

Until I get home (and can fire up Mathematica) I'm not sure how to do such symbolic queries. It's not Deep Thought - I feel like getting the most benefit from it would require some kind of Regex. Might be me. They haven't put the FAQs or tutorials up yet.

I do feel a lean towards computable rather than retrievable data, if that makes sense. I just started with that example as something I knew about that seemed to typify the popular imagination of how it might be used.
I thought CA's top bracket was $47,000+...?
Scott Adams blog has the best "thought experiments." It's like a playground for out of the box thinking. This is just one great example.
Debian moving away from SHA-1
Samyabdo g's profile on Yahoo
You may like Mega Zoomer http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html

Personally though I agree with most of the comments you quoted. I've only found fullscreen mode useful for cutting out distractions in apps like Terminal.
Are you really a Scotsman?
Ask HN: Review my service (monitoring replies on Twitter)
Hello,

I would like to ask people here to take a look of the service Tweeplies (= Twitter + Replies :-) (http://tweeplies.qwe3.com/) which we created recently, and let me know what you think about it -- do you find it helpful? How often do you need it? Do you find Twitter a nice place to ask questions and get results? Everything is helpful!
The code is open and available on Github, and it's very simple. The idea is to show replies to specific "status" on Twitter, and as we didn't find how to do that easily, this is how Tweeplies was born.

Thanks!

http://tweeplies.qwe3.com
Lots of keyboard/keystroke mapping differences.

Home/End do what they're suppose to instead of what everyother computer platform I've ever used does.

Page up / Page down, seriously WTF! Why would anyone ever want them to work that way.

Various other oddities like ctrl arrow

Half the typical ctrl bindings are Apple key which is in the alt-key position.

Window manager issues:

No consistent focus follows mouse. No raise on hover

No way to get select to copy -> middle button to paste(well you can get middle button to paste but then that is only thing in all apps your middle button will ever do.

I'm getting use to the multiple desktop ("spaces") but it still lacks features I've come to expect under Linux.

Can't for the life of me figure out how to get an icon that will open term and ssh into a particular box.
you are almost certainly right about that.

See Alex3917's comments.