skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by "prefer?" It seems like people say that Bing is better in certain design criteria, but they still use Google. They use Google's design because it seems more familiar. That sounds to me like people prefer Google's design. I also suspect Google has tweaked its design to maximize this comfort and familiarity, so even if Google doesn't appear the slickest, they cultivate huge brand loyalty. Bing just feels generic, although nice.
True, but innovation may occur based on necessity rather than incentives (Most of the population is still ridiculously poor). Different constraints and resources may also yield other solutions.
> I have several friends who have successfully gone on and off of the polyphasic sleep cycle.

The big question is do you know anyone who went on, and did not go off.
Thank you for your reply. I actually fully agree with the principle that it shouldn't matter much at all who says something, as long as there are facts to back up what the person says. I have said so before here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

But on two recent occasions, I have seen submissions that were so flat wrong (this is the second occasion) that it would take serious work to reply to the wrong factual statements in detail, and meanwhile I felt it important to buy time by registering immediate factual disagreement with the author by the general statement that the author is not an acknowledged expert on the issue discussed in the submitted article. In both cases, I kind of half expected that someone who agreed with the author would refer to verifiable facts that might support the author's conclusion, but in neither case did that happen.

The kind of reply that takes time and effort to make to a factually mistaken submission I have made in another place in this thread. Yes, in principle anyone or no one might have a correct statement about a matter of fact to add to one of our interesting discussions here. I hope that if people have statements of fact to make about controversial issues such as how much human genetic limitations constrain the improvement of education, then they will take care to cite verifiable sources for the crucial factual statements and join issue with those who disagree with the factual statements.
OK, I sent you an email a few days ago.. you didn't reply.. what gives?
Bing and Kayak both use the same underlying (third party)
database.

Furthermore, Kayak is a clone of Fly.com's design, so Kayak really has no ground to argue about Bing allegedly copying them.
In a previous job, I sometimes had to context switch often and on short notice. I'd invariably lose track of my time allocations. I needed to keep track of billable hours across often 3,5,7, or more projects and tasks (and categorizations of work type) at a time, and manual recording was just not cutting it.

This was a Windows shop, and I found, of all things, a little AutoHotKey script whose interface was, in the main, exactly what I was looking for.

At a predetermined interval, it would pop up a dialog asking whether I was still doing the same thing. The dialog was on top but did NOT steal focus. If I was in the middle of typing something, I could continue uninterrupted.

If I was doing the same thing, one click to dismiss. If not, I could select one of an active set of items from a dropdown list, and time recording would start logging that item instead. If I was doing something new, I could type it into the textbox at the head of the dropdown list, and it would become the identifier for the new record. No additional dialog or multiple step set up: Just type it in and go.

Also, if I remembered to do so, upon context switch I could click its icon in the taskbar to get the same prompt immediately.

Data was saved as simple CSV or similar. I could suck it into whatever I wanted and sum and reconcile it there. Typically, I'd do this in Excel, and it would go quite quickly.

I set the time interval to 5 minutes; that was enough resolution for my billing. It sounds annoying, perhaps, but I quickly got used to it and responded mostly automatically.

There were two problems:

1) It was buggy. A subset of records would have their start and/or stop times recorded incorrectly. I could fix them manually, when summing and reconciling, but grumble.

2) I would have liked a further interface to tweak records on the fly, for when I recorded the wrong item, got called away from my desk, or whatever, while the program continued to measure my time under the last/wrong event.

I never got around to learning AutoHotKey's scripting and improving it.

That job is over with, now. And perhaps that is in a way a comment on the need for such time recording. If your time, ore measure of same, is becoming that fragmented, you may want to consider an environment that is less fragmented.
No, it has those features because it aims to be SQL standard compliant, as do those other RDBMSes.

Where is the Standard for these 'Document-oriented' DBs?
I voted you up.

But I don't fully agree with you. Maybe you didn't mean it but your tone sounds a bit too condescending to me -- like some Wall street rich guy saying if you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out of my sight -- not everybody has a dream job at a dream work place, in fact, I would argue most don't, regardless of industry. Should we care why many IT workers are not happy even if some individuals can't escape the blame? Shouldn't we be a bit more tolerant and listen more so that hopefully we will make the IT a better industry to work in?

Last but not the least, the Joel on Software crowd is not really drawn here with similar submissions, even though I will probably refrain from submitting similar moody articles here, wherever they are from.
One of the reasons people do Delaware instead of their home state is that nobody knows how psycho their home state incorporation laws are going to be. For instance, several states require you to run ads in the paper announcing your incorporation. At least one --- New York --- allows individual shareholders of a company to be held liable for wage claims by employees!
Not exactly "one-file-per-record", but Haystack is a nontrivial example of a FS based datastore. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919
Company tries to scam iphone developer, claiming they own public data
Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times?
hmm are you sure you went to www.wikifieldtrip.org and not .com?
State of incorporation always affects the bottom line, immediately. It determines what legal requirements you must satisfy in organization and funding your business, including who your investors can be. It determines what taxes you pay, what tax credits you may qualify for, whether you can qualify for special small business contracts that many state governments restrict to small businesses within their own state. It also plays a large role in whether banks will provide business loans: many banks will not loan money to small businesses that operate in the bank's state but which are headquartered in another.
"He boldly argues that instead of restricting H1Bs, the government should just levy a payroll tax on them."

That seems like a very reasonable idea. If the current regulation stays in place that says that H1-B workers have to be paid prevailing wages, and in addition to that a company has to pay a specific tax on each worker hired, we'll find out in a hurry just how economically essential all those workers are.
That's actually not true, about New York. You're referring to the veil-piercing doctrine, and that only applies in very rare situations, such as where the shareholders set up a fake/shell company solely for the purposes of trying to shield themselves for legal liability for torts, taxes, or other legal shenanigans (IOW, a sham company).
Hey, thanks. Yeah, if there's a connection between artistry and hacking, I think this has to qualify as an example. The visual effect is truly impressive.
You mean like liking children waaaay too much?
I'd be interested in seeing the actual questions. The ones mentioned in the summary (how easy was it to find the shopping area? and others about the Explore Pane) seem biased towards Bing.
For me, the ultimate HP calculator was the HP41CX. You could even hack it using a technique called "synthetic" programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-41

I even had the magnetic card reader so I could store programs.

In my opinion, RPN gave me a big speed advantage at school during exams.
this is exactly what we are doing. we are updating our app through server side but will keep all the files on the iPhone itself.
Indeed, among the physicists we might also find those who are moved to tears by Baudelaire, and among the critics of French literature those unafraid of contour integrals.

For every Terence Tao there are a thousand Nameless Toilers. So intelligence, for most people, is not a rocket to ride but a bar to clear.

Then, given enough of a brain to be taught, the more important question: do you have the stomach to learn?
How To Organize For Social Media
Sweat. Sweat is worth 80 IQ points. Hard, disciplined labor.

Yeah, maybe the guy with the big swinging "g." has it easier. Mommy & daddy gave him his 80 free extra IQ points.

My extra 80 points came from severe intellectual self-flagellation. So I think big swinging "g." is a wimp, because he never made anything of himself.
I'm not sure if this would apply to thesis defenses, but it's at least relevant for more general presentations: make a presentation on the essentials of your research. Your research is too complicated to explain to an audience (even an expert one) if your were to talk for the whole day. Your choice is between describing a very "narrow" (and boring!) view of your work, or simplifying it!

The problem with simplifying your work is that it's not actually as simple as you'd have to pretend it to be. You will end up telling half-truths. This sounds dishonest, but I'm not sure if it truly is. I think good presenters know this. Read a pop-science book. The authors that are good at explaining a broad topic have thought very hard about which caveats to slip buy you without mention.

I find making presentations to be very difficult. But I've been getting much more excited feedback from my audience (physicists, ecologists and mathematicians, depending) when I tell them the interesting parts at the expense of rigour. They catch some of the gaps (which are there intentionally) and ask me questions afterwards, at which point I'm happy to fill in the details.

The trade-off is between rigour and relevance. Choose relevance. It's why you've done your work in the first place.
How Apple's App Store is like McDonald's
Woah, Northrop Grumman cited this patent: http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&...
IIRC, Counting Sheep by Paul Martin has some references in this area. I'll try to dig them up later.
Michael Jackson was a celebrity has-been who made mediocre music.

His death truly affects few, let alone profoundly.

The fact it's covered on every news station indicates it's probably not news and reason enough not to include here.
So many RIP news on HN lately :( .

RIP MJ.
He wasn't talking about an academic career. Most people don't go to college for an academic career, they go because they think it'll lead to a nice private sector career. If that's unlikely to happen because of your aptitude, it'd be good to know that before wasting all that money on college. Most people don't need college, they need a vocational school where they can learn a trade or skill.
Denver Homes for Sale
Denver homes for sale by Dayn Fox. Dayn Fox is the leading Metro Broker in Denver.
great submission. Thanks. I really like hearing about this kind of hacking vs using something like provigil.

My experience has been that I can function with less sleep (4-5 hours with 1/2 hour nap), but less optimally, eventually. The naps can often be very refreshing, and sustaining even, but eventually it's not enough. At least for me. I've done these sleep patterns for about 6 months at a time - with longer sleep once a week.

Exercise (more precisely, blood flow to the brain) makes a big difference for me. Staying vertical in a chair for 12 hours a day with no exercise or nap vs 16 hours a day with exercise break/nap feels comparable.
This is amazing. Definitely a must read.
New chips don't deliver, Facebook says
What I worry about is recent studies that suggest that declarative memories (memories of events, objects, and so on) are consolidated during slow-wave sleep. I'm thinking specifically of Rasch et al., 2007 (DOI: 10.1126/science.1138581).

Since the theory behind these polyphasic schedules is that it mainly reduces the time spent in slow-wave sleep, I would expect that the declarative memory would be affected.
Then the message should be about not showing off, rather than give it all away.
Erm. Wow. That's really cool and all.

I mean, the guy was obviously amazingly talented and everything. And this is a really cool tidbit of information that lets me look back on his career as a performer in a new light.

But really, folks, is it a good idea to claim Jacko as an ideal to which people in this community might aspire?

I don't want to speak ill of the dead here. The guy lived a hard life, and had been an object of scorn and derision for a long time. I hope he had found some kind of peace of mind before he died.

But I gotta ask -- don't hackers already get enough grief for being thin, pale, eccentric, socially awkward, obsessed with artificiality, and bizarre in how they relate to women?

Let the downmodding begin.
His death truly affects few, let alone profoundly.

I'm not an MJ fan and I never will be, but your comment is just overly myopic.

I know people who were impacted profoundly by his music and no doubt when I next see them, I will find out that his death has also affected them profoundly. Just because I personally am not affected in the slighest does not mean that I cannot understand why others will be.
We're veering dangerously close to the broken window fallacy here...
You all complaining about this submission are being pretty ridiculous. Despite all the disgusting derision about so-called mediocre music, this is actually a big deal.

Probably the most famous living person in the world died a few hours ago. This is not just some other celebrity news story. It's just a HN submission. It's not as if someone, heaven forbid, changed the Google home page in memory of Michael Jackson, that would be crazy (rolls eyes). Furthermore, he was very talented; though such an evaluation is subjective, it seems somewhat strange and incredulous to deny this much.

I hope the people making these weird derisive comments aren't involved in any kind of social networking or related startups as probably your only hope is that understanding something about people has nothing to do with building social software for them.
There can be only 1 best selling album of all time. And that album is Thriller by Michael Jackson.
Microsoft launches free Windows 7 upgrade deal
Who here is asking for hackers to copy all of Jackson's traits?

> Let the downmodding begin.

I expect your wish will be granted...
One of the best comments in HN about HN-Eligibility.

May I add by saying that everytime there is a question of HN-Eligibility (every other day!),we should hot-link it here to this post by TomOfTTB. Better yet add it to the FAQ!
One submission does not Reddit make.
Wow.  So this is what it's like to lust after a Microsoft product.
But I gotta ask -- don't <creative people, innovators, scientists, artists, pioneers> already get enough grief for being <different>?

Yes. Yes they do. But thanks for adding to it anyway!
Need a favor? Ask it in the right ear
It's just hand-wavy to say that any exception leads to a slippery slope or opens the flood gates.
The best summation I think you'll read of Michael Jackson comes from Bill Wyman; today, abbreviated but current:

http://www.hitsville.org/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-and-the-...

and from 1992, with much more detail:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/michael_jackson/

It's not a happy story (and not for the reasons you assume; for instance, search the latter story for "South Korea"). Bill Wyman tells it better than I think anyone else can, as an expert and well-regarded music journalist writing outside the confines of any mainstream music publication.
Unfortunately, he had to sell them later in his life, as he was going bankrupt.
Yeah, probably most famous living person in the world would do it. I'd agree with you.
His death affects ticket brokers... I got a 3 pack of tickets two days ago for his final show; they were just about the best seats on the market and I would have been able to sell two of them for enough to very comfortably finance my trip to see Michael Jackson in person.

So I'm personally affected in that I'm out $1000+ in potential profit and I'm missing the chance to see the King of Pop perform. It is a sad day for lovers of music.
But that is still different from "no matter how hard I tried, I could never dunk."
That's funny, because myopic is exactly how I would describe the attention this is getting.

I guess it depends on your definition of "profound." I know people who are profoundly affected in the same sense when their fantasy football team loses.
There are easy ways around this with cache plugins. The MT approach was always just too painful to work with.
That's true only until they lobby congress and get a national lobbyist protection act passed.
I imagined your biggest regret would be wasting all of that time trying to force the site to work on RoR and then finally relenting and switching back to PHP.

Not a flame, just a serious thought: from what I remember the RoR was worked on for a year or more - did it take longer than that to implement internationalization?
Facebook "Publisher" Takes Another Page from Twitter’s Playbook
Foursquare Push Notifications, For The Ultimate In Friend Stalking
But the irony here is that you're whining about how "hackers get grief" for being totally dense socially but your comments seems to be totally socially dense. It's really interesting to see how someone can be ironic about being ironic.
Thank you.

Should I bother with encrypting that file, or plaintext is fine?
You lose motivation knowing you can just stop your project with no real consequences.

Yet another reason why you should start charging money early and often, because nothing says "real consequences" like a few dozen, hundred, or thousand paying customers wondering where you went.
It does look like somebody at Microsoft fired up Firefox/Firebug and had a copy-and-paste party.
Sweat is worth a lot more than that. It's not additive; it's multiplicative.
Whoah, if you include the first part of that monograph you have a 230 page explanation of how to add two fractions together.

I'm really enjoying the writing so even though I already understand how to add fractions (at least I think so!), I'm going to try to read it all.
"Here's how far I am willing to go: I believe the iPhone will ultimately be judged a more important product than the original Apple Macintosh."

I've been saying the same thing for a while. Like many revolutionary products the iPhone isn't the first device to ever offer these features but it IS the first device to make them accessible to the masses. Part of that is a good user interface but an equally, or possibly more, important part of it is advertising. Apple educated customers on what the device could do out of the box. Now they're even advertising third party apps. As a result many people are able to use services & technologies that were out of reach to them before -- or they were ignorant these things even existed. Lots of people will say marketing doesn't matter and it's just fluff and blah blah but making people aware of something, and making it possible for them to use it, is a huge part of what makes a technology revolutionary.
You know who gets even more grief for being different than the creative people, innovators, scientists, artists, and pioneers?

The mentally ill. Is that wrong?
<Old fogey alert>
I'm afraid I've never seen Jackson dance--are there some videos that demonstrate these tricks?
</...alert>
I've had some experience in this space, and good on you for tackling a very challenging issue.

I really like how you've done your interface, the ability to add and filter by a fairly easily understood group of labels.

Unfortunately, you still have a lot of work to do on the quality of playlists being created.
I started with funk/slow temp and got back Neil Young and the Beach Boys. I kept going and added 'bass', and I have a very twangy harmonica filled blue grassish track by "the trouser legs of time".

The best I have seen to date is http://theperceptron.com/ which was written by a girl from the UK (I believe a CS student as well).
Looks like they opensourced their technology too, check it out (their site used to play the tracks, but apparently it doesn't anymore) :(

http://theperceptron.com/blog
Quick question for those who maintain that this story should not be on Hacker News: where else can a person get timely notification of extremely notable events without being barraged with lots of noise? Don't say BBC Dot Co Dot UK or Wikinews or Wikipedia Current Events. I tried those -- way too much noise.
Okay then.

Which of Michael Jackson's traits do you think are worthy of emulation? Did he have any traits that people should be discouraged from emulating?
You do realize that's a headline right?
White Glove Tracking
Microsoft's revenue has increased consistently for its entire lifetime, until recently (Q1'09). [1] In other words, for 23 years, their revenue has gone up every quarter, and even though it "dropped" in Q1 it was still 13.65 billion dollars for a single quarter. About $3.4B of that is from their client division that sells Windows.

Windows isn't the only revenue that counts (e.g. people may not upgrade other software either, if they haven't upgraded Windows). And revenue isn't the only effect on long-term viability. They are no doubt spending a lot to maintain Windows right now. If they gave a free upgrade to Windows 7, they could pretend Vista doesn't exist and eliminate most of its support costs; simply tell all customers that Vista will not be supported because Windows 7 is free and is compatible.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/23/microsoft-rev...
I tried looking up instrumental music (I've really gotten into instrumental/post rock stuff lately) and your site changed my search into "inxs" and I started to listen to "need you tonight"...although funny, I think you should disclaim that I'm only searching for what's in your system, rather than replacing my search with the closest thing you do have.

Also, I know it's a school project, but be careful with the copyright stuff. Especially if your school is potentially liable (server space or something)
First, find yourself some tall parents. Also, make sure to hang out with a tall crowd. Standing compresses your spine, so spend as much time as possible in a reclined position. Measure your height every day to track improvements.