skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm here as a hacker rather than a musician so I didn't put the band URL in my profile. Anyway, this is the band: http://www.rivodrei.de. We're German so most of you won't understand the lyrics. (There's some English information here: http://www.rivodrei.de/en/) That's also one of the reasons it's on a much smaller scale than you would expect.

These are a few things we did:

-I built this website as a community website early on. There's some additional material when you sign up (e.g. demo recordings etc.). You can find out which other fans went to the same concerts and communicate with them. There's a shop, guestbook, Google Maps integration, galleries, and a forum. Couldn't find any off-the-shelve package that did all of this together so I had to code it myself.

-All our videos are zero budget. People like them anyway (they don't care about quality so much). We're currently shooting more videos for our new album.

-We gave away a few tracks in the past and I'd like to do it for our next album which is due in the fall. But like I said, I have a feeling I will fail to convince my drummer/bassist.

-Remix contest: http://www.rivodrei.de/remix/ (And yes, we could give away all individual tracks of all songs but the demand doesn't seem to be as high as for the no-drums version where everything else is pre-mixed.)

-Live webcasting from the studio during our recordings for the new album (via former Mogulus.com).

-Some fun stuff such as this one: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/the-... (This is in English, btw.)

-We try to collect email addresses as much as we can, especially at concerts. Newsletters are sent about once a month and people can opt out any time.

-About the use of Flash: There's a little box at the top right with pictures of live concerts. I have a feeling that people thought they were ads because of the animation.

-We have a MySpace page but for many months now, we've been attracting mostly spam. I am considering deleting our profile there. We haven't used Twitter yet because it hasn't taken off that much in Germany yet but when it does, we will use it more. We have a Facebook page and that seems to gain some traction now. YouTube is doing ok. No Flickr account. (We have our own gallery and I'm too lazy to post all pictures twice.) I like to focus on our own website because all these services come and go.

-I answer all (serious) emails. This is very important. And it's funny how excited some people are to get an email from the singer and not from some management. ;)

It takes a lot of time to shoot on all these channels and create new material (music/videos) at the same time. I'm not doing this full-time so unfortunately, there's not much time left for something else.
Ah, I'm glad we're not in the Wayback Machine because our site back then was pretty embarrassing!

I'd say over 80% of what you see today was done after we left our jobs to do this full time.
Firstly, US companies tends not to care about other countries. To the extent that they do, it is mostly European countries that are important. The reason is pretty simple -- money. First world countries can (and will) pay for things. It is generally more useful to have paying customers as your user base. (Here I include customers of other products, i.e. "eyeballs" that you can sell to advertisers. Advertisers want access to people who buy products.)

Secondly, the third world has shown rather resoundingly that it doesn't want non-Microsoft products. Here in Thailand I routinely see Thai people install Windows XP onto their iMacs and Macbooks. They don't use OSX, and I have never met a Thai using Linux. Even laptops which are supposed to have Linux pre-installed will routinely have XP installed by the shop before they are sold.

Here, the reasoning is a bit more complex. For starters, Thai language support. XP has very good Thai support (i.e. it actually has a Thai language locale). OSX does not at all, and Linux has extremely half-assed Thai language support. Obviously, Thailand isn't an important market to Apple and Linux using Thais haven't stepped up to do the translation. This is a unique issue for Thais, so we can ignore it for the general "Third World". I would suggest, however, that most Third World users don't speak English as a first language. Some African countries will do ok with French or English (or German!) locales, so we'll leave it at that.

Besides language issues, the main issue I've encountered here in Thailand is that Thai people want to learn marketable computer skills. They believe that since everyone uses Windows and Office, if they learn, for example, Linux and Open Office, they will have the wrong skill set. They want to emulate the West so they can be successful, and the West uses Microsoft. Thats what they want to use too.

Microsoft is quite deeply ingrained into the computing culture over here. If a Thai wants to add you to their IM list, they will ask you "do you have M?" <<are you on M[SN Messenger]?>>. Alternatively, they might just say "add email someusername42" <<add the MSN Messenger contact someusername42[@hotmail.com]>>. Microsoft defaults are just assumed (MSN Messenger, hotmail.com, etc.)

So, given that OSX and Linux can't penetrate into the third world (and in Apple's case, probably don't even want to)... why would you assume that Chrome OS will? That is, assuming that Google even cares (which is a huge assumption)...
FirePHP offers not only ability to monitor errors in log, but also displays other information as a script progresses and dumps value of an array when desired. In addition you can turn on/off all its reporting at with one statement at beginning of code.

Quite handy for use in PHP development - or in understanding code you inherit from someone else. Works for me!
Cell Phones That Learn the Sounds of Your Life
I see the Authors point... it would make things easier, but you still have to write the actors. Might as well write the C bindings to your language in that time.

Although the performance wouldn't be noticeable for small applications, the latency can really start adding. I mean using HTTP and Protobufs to pass messages around for a core functionality like image handling.

Now that I think about it, the C bindings are kind of a common theme for almost all the core library functionalities.
alright you win, i can't convince the novice! i got better things to hack..
Twitter Nabs an Intellectual Property Legal Eagle from Google
Seriously, what are we actually doing in Afghanistan?
Supposedly the primary goal is to find bin Laden and 'al-Qaeda' and 'remove the Taliban regime' because they 'supported the terrorists'.

1. There are a crapload of people saying that al-Qaeda was really a CIA database and that name isn't even used by any actual terrorist groups. Is this something conspiracy theorists made up? Why would someone make something like that up? Does anyone know what al-Qaeda really is?

2. Do we really need to 'remove the Taliban regime' because they 'supported the [supposed] terrorists'? Is there another reason to take over the country, and if so, why don't we say what it is? Does this really have nothing to do with oil/natural gas, opium or simply control over territory?

Here are some things that make me suspect that the reasons given for the war in Afghanistan are false pretexts:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.stm
Central Asia pipeline deal signed "The building of the trans-Afghanistan pipeline has been under discussion for some years but plans have been held up by Afghanistan's unstable political situation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan#European_influence_in_Afghanistan_.281826-1919.29

Here is another: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm 'Opium financed British rule in India'

This map shows the (coincidental?) proximity of Afghanistan to India. http://www.welt-atlas.de/datenbank/karten/karte-0-9014.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

To me it seems like they might really want to build a natural gas pipeline, take the profits, and possibly may be financing it with drug money. The worst part is lying about the actual nature and reasons for military and covert operations. Someone please tell me I have just been confused by reading too many conspiracy theories.
Universities Websites
Downloading Copyrighted Material Legal In Spain
This brings me to an off-topic idea along the same lines:

Have your phone record everything with a rolling buffer of the last 5 minutes or so. If you ever have a important conversation, or get in a problematic situation, or just want to remember what someone said... you can just press a button and have the recorded buffer be saved (or listened back).

Press to retrieve the last 5 minutes of sound
Unity of Interface
Real-Time Conversations Hasten Social CRM
The expression in the title is incomplete. Let me fix it:

Great Hacker != Great Hire unless (Good Company && Interesting Work)

That's better, and now you don't have the read the article, which is just some whipped-sounding guy complaining that all the smart programmers don't want to waste their time doing telephone support for his Visual SourceSafe tool.
Amen. After working at Amazon for three years and seeing plenty of relational and non-relational storage engines in very large-scale production use, the #1 lesson is that both are scalable, both are useful, and each is a better fit for certain problems.

I agree that relational databases are often applied to problems where other systems would be better, and we should work on studying those other systems, improving their implementations, and educating engineers about their use. But we should be "pro DHT" or "pro document store" or "pro column store", not "anti SQL."
With every new law against file sharing and open communications I'm edging one little step closer to becoming an activist.

I wonder how many people are in that same frame of mind.
If you want to play around with webcams and bluescreening as well as stereoscopy find the old webcam installer for camarades.com.
My experience is unique to me, I can't speak for this being status quo, but I'll answer your points. My wife and I have been looking for the last year and a half or so, the first 8 months with a realtor, the last without. We're looking primarily in SF in the 800K range but at some houses in the East Bay and Marin. Note that in this area this is not the large end of the spectrum 800K will get you a nice condo and if you are lucky maybe a single family home. This isn't like some areas where you're looking for a premium property at that price.

We're also doing this in a buyers market - which gives us a lot of leverage and we also know the area. My wife has lived here for 8 years, I've lived here my whole life, so we don't benefit from getting a locals input from an agent as we would moving to a town where we are not familiar, this would be a benefit to many.

In the first months, working with a realtor, we never saw a house not listed on MLS, (which we used via Redfin).

Second we we're always able to call a sellers agent and get a showing. If you tell them you are not currently working with an agent we found we got a very responsive agent who see's the opportunity to get both sides of the commission. Again its a buyers market so this may be easier now then in the past.

If you found the worth in using an agent by all means use one, its your prerogative. But the point is that the amount of work required of an agent doesn't really change with the price of the house. A commission basis for a buyer's agent is a piss poor model, and I'm at the end where its ridiculous.
Wasn't this already discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110
The Cathedral and the Pirate
If this gets cheaper maybe we can paint the Sydney train stations with it. I "admired" graffiti art as a child of hiphop, but Sydney will make you wanna go slaughter anyone with a spray can. The vandals have touched every surface of all train stations :-(
OpenBitTorrent Tracker Muscles In On The Old Pirate Bay
Politics eh? Kuro5hin is that way.
Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycle for a reason.

It's simple things like vehicle emissions testing -- if you have money you don't think about it -- but if you drive an older car you fail emissions -- and it costs way too much to get it fixed -- so you drive without registration -- and end up in court. Worrying about things like the environment or organic food is a luxury only the gilded class an afford.

"Sophisticated" people love to shit on the big bad wal-mart empire as they happily truck into target to buy shit from the martha stewart collection-- as if there is any difference. The only difference is that poor people happen to really love wal-mart-- so you can take your sociology degree and shove it.

The poor do get exploited, but Michael Moore style class warfare isn't the answer either. The truth is that the poor exploit each other even more than the wealthy do. Poor people are poor because they don't have the social capital to get out of poverty. Most social programs do nothing to deal with social capital so they don't create long term solutions.

Those people throw indulgence money at poor people all day so they can absolve themselves of their materialism. Or they take vacations to Africa so they can post self-righteous photos on facebook that shows how socially chic they are. Is that a save darfur bumper sticker on your prius? But ask those people to spend their TIME actually building into people's lives and befriending people in a sacrificial way and you can forget it. When you're poor nobody wants to be your friend.

And by those people I mean me. I was poor, so I should know better, right? But MY time is too valuable. I would rather start a website to help the poor or raise a couple hundred bucks for some suburban 5k fun run to support some inner city whatever. This has to scale damnit! But be an actual friend? Take someone to a job interview? Have them over for dinner? Let them hang out with my cool friends? Don't bet on it, because I'm the problem.
Does Google Know Too Much About You?
From one of the comments on the page it looks like this is a marketing ploy:

nslookup tracker.thepiratebay.org

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tracker.thepiratebay.org
Addresses: 2a01:298:3:1::2
192.121.86.4
192.121.86.2
192.121.86.6
192.121.86.3
192.121.86.8
192.121.86.7
192.121.86.5

nslookup tracker.openbittorrent.com

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tracker.openbittorrent.com
Addresses: 192.121.86.5
192.121.86.8
192.121.86.7
192.121.86.4
192.121.86.2
192.121.86.3
192.121.86.6
Wireless Cybercriminals Target Clueless Vacationers
There is probably a high correlation between people that have had some traumatic experience and those that know how to enjoy their lives.

Best of luck to you!
Solution:Freezing problems with Intel Graphics driver on Ubuntu Jaunty
'the devil shits on the larger pile'.
That's so wrong it is not even funny. People with some money can easily afford to have others take care of the drudgery of life for them, which means they have more time.

You don't have to line up because you send someone else to do it for you. It is only in very rare cases that you can't 'jump the line' if you have cash. (airports ? business class. shopping ? have the maid do it etc.).
Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. . . . Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. -Sam Seaborn, West Wing
I was once poor (grad school) and I can attest that the first point is valid. I didn't have a car, the grocery store was 3 miles away and the bus ran once a hour on weekdays and much less frequently on weekends - making it hard. 9 out of 10 times when I ran out of groceries, I ended up buying them at the gas station nearby.

I did work only 20 hours a week but gradschool easily consumed most of the remaining time (including weekends).
Dried Food | Dehydrated Food for your home food storage at Low Prices
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GOTO is here
Let’s not GOTO there, people.
http://instructables.com
What are your favorite cracking news sites?
Some months ago, I used think that cracking/hack tools are danger and they just waste our time.

But now after using them and learning about how they are made, I'm thinking that hackers should also have some knowledge about crack tricks, underground news, hack tools etc. Trust me, it's definitely useful!

Oh, I forgot to ask you, what are your fav sites?
But that was a while ago, right? Don't most supermarkets deliver these days? Seems like that one, at least, should be a solved problem.

The biggest thing with groceries IMO is having the spare money to "stock up" when the prices are low (eg on sale, large sizes, etc) and then getting into the cycle of just replenishing that opportunistically, instead of constantly running out of things and buying replacements on demand.

For example, if you notice your favourite brand of washing powder is half price, don't buy one, buy ten. And then a few months later when you notice it's getting low, keep your eyes open the next few times you go to the supermarket, then buy up big again when you see a good deal. This is far better than repeatedly buying small quantities at high prices because you don't have any choice and need it that day, but it does require some spare money to start.
this (or something very similar) was already covered a few days ago.
Does anyone have any good resources for amateur/hobbyist hacking biotech?
It would be better if you could email some code and it was automatically posted to Gist, and then inserted in to Posterous.
"There are a crapload of people saying that al-Qaeda was really a CIA database and that name isn't even used by any actual terrorist groups."

'Craploads of people' is always a valid source.

You have just been confused by reading too many conspiracy theories.
It seems that a more appropriate title might have been "Effective Learning". It's an excellent essay.
Paul Graham's business plan for viaweb http://www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html
You pointed to the SIC codes used by the SEC. It's a legacy US only system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Industrial_Classificat...). There's a seperate UN initiative called ISIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Industri...)

But in any event, it's a classification for the purpose of bean counting, or meta bean counting if you will :-)
I've never seen a supermarket that delivered. To a degree I could order some groceries from amazon but thats it.
Unfortunately, recording conversations without asking permission first is illegal in a number of states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws
Riiight, I mean can't everyone just FreshDirect to their UES studio?!
Teachers themselves - specifically, teaching unions - are the biggest barrier to that happening.

Incidentally, in the UK we spend GBP 30Bn/year on defence and GBP 70Bn/year on education. It is already incredibly expensive. Literacy and numeracy rates have been falling for over a decade. More money isn't the problem. In fact, the graphs show that more money is making education worse.
This is a great essay. The core tensions that he outlines for developing a sense of purpose really resonated for me:

"I believe that the key to developing a strong sense of purpose and meaning is
to balance three activities.
o The first is development of a common understanding with a large group of people
with whom one is later able to feel a common sense of community.
o The second is development of abilities which are not common to your community,
and which eventually give you the ability to make a unique contribution
to your community.
o The third is making a creative contribution to your community,
to something larger than yourself."
It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things. -Stuff White People Like
I agree that the consistency of esac isn't very nice. I prefer } to esac/fi to end, actually. "end" is horrible. You can consecutively }}}} or )))) in a way that reduces some of the whitespace-significance jealousy

end
end
end
end

But I don't think the syntax is bad. In fact, "fi" and "esac" give some hints to the reader in deeply nested structures (I can hear it already: then don't deeply nest)

The two line = { is only for compound functions; a single expression with a "where" seems fine. I do agree that code layout conventions that reduce the usable vertical space are questionable; scrolling sucks.

I didn't especially like SML (or Ocaml) syntax, but they're both solid languages.

http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/index.html seems to contradict the story by Mythryl's author that SML/NJ isn't maintained. His fork doesn't seem to do 64-bit, while SML/NJ does.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the reason this project is not just a set of libraries for SML/NJ. I guess the author has strong opinions about syntax and didn't like ML's.
At the end of the first and second principles, I was reminded of thoughts by two other writers... who were mentioned in the immediately next passage (Kay and Covey, respectively). It seems like a clear nod to the audience.

But I'll mention my first thought anyway: abstract ideas that are difficult to reason about can be made easier to work with by finding a better representation. Hopefully one exists. Alan Kay compared multiplication with Roman numerals (in Roman times, only geniuses could do it) with today's positional numerals (in modern times, children can do it). We haven't got any smarter, he said, we've just changed our representation system. Inventing better representation systems is something important that we do as programmers. This was Kay's explanation of "point of view is worth 80 IQ points" that Nielsen mentioned.

Perhaps, in the context of teaching, this itself was an example of the communication technique where you set up a trigger for the audience - a striking image to evoke their own memory, or a puzzle to provoke their own reasoning - so that they take ownership of the message, and it makes more connections to their own network of pre-existing ideas. The "nod", or implicit punchline, is confirming for those who caught the reference; is completing for those who half caught it (filling a gap is another way for increasing memorableness); and just plain informing for those new to the topic.
Or am I reading too much into this physicist's writing, and he has quantumed me out?
Public domain work published by a government funded institution.
If you want a public domain photo of a public domain artwork, then take such a photo yourself and assign it to the public domain. Simple.
We're German so most of you won't understand the lyrics. That's also one of the reasons it's on a much smaller scale than you would expect.

It's really amazing how there is zero market for German music in the US. Germany is something like the 3rd biggest market for music after the US and Japan. If you go to a big store like Amoeba in LA/SF they will have a huge section for France, Italy, etc. They will even stock folk CD's from places like Bulgaria, but the German selection is incredibly small (almost nothing contemporary). Amazon, etc., is better, but not by much. In the past I have had to order from Amazon.de.

I once tried to set up a German language station on Pandora, but it proved impossible.

I imagine that if you wanted to break into the US market as a German group you would need to sing in English with American accents and not advertise that you're from Germany (unfortunately). Scorpions, etc.