skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DevCentral Top5 07/17/2009
I've been a fan of http://www.craigslistwatch.com/ for a long time, and they'd never gotten banned but unfortunately currently undergoing some sort of restructuring.
ΔWeight = Energy in (food) - Energy out (exercise plus metabolism)

The flaw in the understanding of this equation as written in "The Hackers Diet" and many other sources is that the components on the right side of the equal sign are not independent variables. They are dependent variables. If one eats less, the rate of metabolism falls to compensate. If one exercises more, the appetite increases, and one eats more to compensate.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/more-braying-...

Here's another article that explains this:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/metabolism/thermodynamics...
I read "The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth" (Jonny Bowden) recently and took from it this extremely condensed diet advice: "Avoid grains and industrial processing." Grains have near-zero nutrition, and industrial processing is the source of a lot of questionable practices.

On this diet, which I've followed just a few weeks, I cheat all the time, but I feel and perform better in ways that I can quantify at the gym: more strength, better endurance. Noticeable improvements every time I've gone, so far.
[Goodbye Reddit] Guy Gets Flamed for Trying to Learn about Infinity
I used to do that, but I'm not always at my computer. This way I can have results emailed to my iPhone and instantly be notified. SMS isn't a bad idea either now that I think about it...
The privacy statement is a good point, I will add one in later for sure.
The EV Files - Stop Arrington from Publishing More Documents
Here’s a neat app for optimizing PNGs after saving:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676973
To be honest, it was just a little web app I wrote last night. No marketing or business model, although I can see how one could make money off of ads in the emails?

I'm not really looking to develop this into a business, just thought it would be useful and some people would get some use out of it. :)
GM doesn't have a car monopoly. The monopoly is why what I said makes sense, and what you said does not.
Next week, Amazon plans a special interactive commemorative edition of Fahrenheit 451 that will trigger a battery-overload, setting your Kindle on fire and destroying its entire contents.
You can sign up for as many cities as you want, I couldn't think of an easy way to combine multiple cities/search terms without creating an account, which defeats the simple/quick signup aspect I was aiming for.
This happens automatically within the HN system when you post a link to a PDF?
Step 1 - Remove legitimately purchased e-books that the publisher "changed their mind on"

Step 2 - Remove books that cannot be identified as legitimately purchased.

The "whispernet" functionality is often talked about as this great feature of the Kindle. It's the single biggest reason that I won't buy one.
The emails sent out are short (around a paragraph), and every email that is sent to you has an 'unregister' link at the bottom that you can click and you will stop receiving emails regarding that search result.
Good point! I'll add that feature tonight. :)
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/53924

While you can hide the number of likes using other scripts, I did want to see the number. So I moved it to the most logical place. Right next to the “Like link”
If research about "diets" has found anything it's that they don't work. Any calorie counting approach is doomed to fail for most people.

This diet is straight out of the Stalinist four year plan school. Normal people have zero chance of tolerating this. The bondage and discipline rigid planning approach doesn't work in any field. People aren't machines.
Actually, the board members have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to maximize corporate performance.

If the CEO isn't cutting it, it doesn't matter who he is, he should be fired.
Don't mark down his comment just b/c you disagree with it. He's accurate about the legal import of "buying" an e-book from Amazon.
Web font licensing: the basic idea
It happened to me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690526

I never put that link to scribd, never uploaded it.

I'd love to discover I'm wrong, as I think it's utterly iniquitous.
Samsung S3030 Tobi Unlocked
Samsung S3030 Tobi is a very cool featured handset with very attractive look is here. The basic features that phone integrates and gives you the easy way of living are its MP3 player and MPEG4 player, Organizer and Voice memo, T9 and SMS, MMS.
Whoops, my bad. Fixed :)
Yeah. The high contrast changes draw the eye and make it hard to actually read.
The idea that each feature in a software package costs $50 to develop is, of course, nonsense.

But... I've worked for a couple of companies that don't allow their developers (such as myself) to talk directly to their clients because any feature requests that come up in those discussions throw off project management planning and projected timelines. When you are trying to convince management that their developers should be working on XYZ feature, it is a much different world than an individual requesting a feature in such a way that it is an insult to the software developer.

Also, I don't know that my pride has ever been hurt by a feature request, but maybe that is because I'm used to working in a corporate environment and my core development strategy is not always "to make great software that delights people".
Actually, you can write a wrapper in your favorite language around your favorite database and call it your favorite filesystem, which is really a CMS.
One of my favorite non-fiction computer related books is 'Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution' http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/other-books/hackers

Very nice list, a lot I haven't heard of.
I don't really agree with this assessment. With the release of IE8, we also saw the browser upgrade coming through automatic windows updates. IE will eventually probably accept this as much as safari and firefox, thereby keeping most users up to speed.
I'm of the camp that never wants to see the word "software" associated with the word "engineering." They're too different to be under the same umbrella, and I'm worried that the various engineering accreditation bodies will start to believe that software falls under their auspices, like civil or mechanical engineering. It would be quite a prize.

As far as I'm concerned, software development is about as much a branch of engineering as actuarial work - yeah, we both tend to study a lot of math, but that's about it. Software "engineering" is a useful metaphor, but I don't want formal, PE style accreditation bodies to start thinking they have any sort of claim on software.
I'm sick of Techcrunch's attention-whoring headlines and shallow stories.

This is a dupe submission, a much better version lives here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710506
"If you worry too much about competition, you are always playing the follower game, following in their footsteps. You stop seeing the lay of the land since you are so focused on what your competition. Instead of leading the company with your own strategy, you start driving based on someone else’s strategy which you might not understand, and which does not focus on your strengths."

Words to live by. I love this article. Stay connected to your innovative-self, and not reactive-imitative-self. There are countless similar stories and examples of techs that should not have thrived based on the fear factor of competition from big playas.
record: n int, val varchar2

Manage and sort in-memory and store already ordered when done (no matter if it is physically unordered).

That's why I said, for small trees and in-memory management.
Person A wasn't on any of the incorporation documents? Sounds like Person A wasn't paying attention, and just got either a very cheap or very expensive lesson.

I would negotiate for more shares, but then take what you can and move on. If this is the way Person B does business, why would Person A have any faith that it will go anywhere? Especially since Person A is no longer working on the company and chances are wouldn't have left if it was the next Facebook/google?

If Person A had signed an agreement, it probably would have had a bunch of stock upfront, but then each of you would have a pile that vests over time, so that if you had left the day after signing the documents, you wouldn't be owning 50% of the company and not putting in any time.

Person A decided to move on to a different direction. Person A let the company be incorporated without their name involved. Person A should move on and let Person B fumble along.
Locate NYC Subway Stations Using Augmented Reality On Your iPhone
The photographer Weegee used to bring his camera with infrared film and an infrared flash bulb into darkened movie theaters and photograph the audience behind him. Back in the 40s!

http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/weegee/weeg...
Criminally illegal, no. But that leaves open civil suits, which are sure to come.

1) You can sue anyone for anything. The US does not have a "loser pays" rule, though frivolous lawsuits can include attorney's fees.

2) Class action lawsuits are very profitable for lawyers when they win. They need to convince a jury of 12 people who couldn't get out of jury duty that "Big Corporation" was wrong. They get a percentage of the total judgment.

My guess is that some lawyer will pick this one up. They'll sue Amazon based on "common sense" and Amazon will realize that a jury isn't going separate a "book" from an "e-book". The plaintiff's lawyers will equate it to removing a book from your bookshelf in your house.

Amazon will argue commas in their TOS or Amazon will settle. On top of it all, Amazon demonstrates why I purchased a netbook instead of a Kindle for my e-book reading pleasure ... and why I don't buy e-books that I can't remove the DRM from.
Sorta, not really. Contracts have a lot more leeway than they look like. If the judge thinks you're being abusive in the writing of a contract, they'll say "nope, sorry, you lose", or throw out that clause and keep going.

IANAL, etc.
Fuck high school reunions. Instead of going, stay home and watch Grosse Point Blanke.

I wasn't a geek, and instead hung out with the delinquent/stoner crowd, so I can relate for entirely different reasons. Everything that's wrong with the world, well, High School is a perfect microcosm of that.
If that's a majority view, then the dumbing down of the discipline is complete.
This is the annoying thing about diet/nutrition advice, and why "The Hacker Diet" is really appealing to me, even if it's a little simplistic -- it's at least logically consistent and has some rationale behind it, even if it's a flawed one.

Most diet advice is vague and full of generalizations and never backed up. It makes sense, but you hear often opposing viewpoints made in the same hand-wavy fashion. For instance:

Okay, why avoid grains? Are some grains worse than others, or are they all magically bad? Either way, why, and what evidence supports it? Does this apply to any carbohydrate, or just strictly grains? What's wrong with industrial processing, and is there evidence to prove it? Does it apply to everything that could possibly be considered industrial processing, or just certain types of industrial processing that are particularly bad? Is it possible to make up for whatever negative effects it (anything one is advised not to eat) has, and does it apply to 100% of people, or a set of people that you make a set of assumptions about?

I'm not attacking your viewpoint specifically -- I think you're most likely right -- but this is just why I have a hard time believing most diet advice. It's always so wishy washy, and it always brings up more questions.

Another example: advice around drinking soda. There are many types of sweeteners used in diet sodas, and lots of studies done on their effects on humans and other mammals -- none particularly damning. But no one giving nutrition advice will say "avoid ingredient X because Y", they'll say "avoid (vague category of food which may or may not contain ingredient X)". And then someone else will come along and say the opposite. And then there's always some link to some study done in the 1940's that's since been discredited or something.
Doesn't the Enterprise DB distribution of PostgreSQL include a tuning wizard? http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus/overview....
Google Search already does this in a few places where the cost of supporting IE was prohibitive, eg. if you do Search Options -> Related Searches and scroll down, the search suggestions stick at the top of the page on every browser except IE6, with the results scrolling underneath them.
Nowhere near the same level of disappointment, but it is kind of sad that an article from the NYTimes lacks any mention that they tried to contact Amazon for a comment. Even a simple 'Amazon was called but declined to comment' would have been appreciated.
DIY Wireless Keylogger
Don't argue. Present your case as "You can have IE6 support or you can have features X, Y, and Z. Make the call." Sometimes they'll say they want IE6, and sometimes they'll want the features. But it should be framed as a tradeoff: you can't have both, and supporting obsolete browsers means you can't deliver functionality that may get you more users in the long run.
The same could be said of... LISP. But few languages are as syntacticly confusing as Perl are to the uninitiated. Thats just how it is, eh?
How to Eat According to the Primal Blueprint
This is something that really irks me about people when they talk about diets.

It takes a species more than 100 odd years or so to get rid of that "eat whatever the frak you can and store as much of it as you can because there is a good chance that you're not going to find much other than grass for a WHILE".

Your body is NOT going to just "discard" (poop out) "un-needed" calories.

The other thing that bothers me is people talking about "starvation mode". That just sounds like a buzzword (because it is). If you stop eating, you're going to start getting tired. THIS is the mythical "starvation mode". If you tell your body to just fuck off, and go jogging or whatever anyway (omg free will!) you are going to lose weight really really quickly.
There's a similar emphasis on removing "chart junk." I don't have the books handy to confirm, but I don't think Tufte is entirely about information density, especially because in some cases, there just isn't density available. The case study about the shuttle disaster in one of the books was very much about presenting just the right information and communicating the "emotional impact of an idea."
Top Young Internet Entrepreneurs
For me, my needs were a little complex, so I didnt want to invest my time in a bunch of searches on a site that might go away in a week. With craigwatch its just a simple gem install, and you know its not going anywhere since you can run it on your own box. Its well written too - I made a couple improvements on the lib for my purposes and it was a painless process
I've done the "Hacker's Diet" that posits that a calorie is a calorie, and what we eat is not important. I've done the conventional wisdom Low Fat diet. I've done a very low calorie high protein diet. All diets can work, at least in the short term. However, nothing I have done has been as effective and satisfying as eating "Primal". It's very similar to "The Paleo Diet" (see http://thepaleodiet.com/ ) with a more enlightened understanding of the role Saturated Fats play.

Another introductory link:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-bluep...

An index into most of the content:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/

FAQ, and comparisons to other diets:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/references/questions...
Why not use JPEG unless you really need transparency?
I didn't accuse you of confronting him, I'm just warning you not to confront anyone. Criticizing someone for being vocal about unpleasant events in their past and not healing fast enough doesn't help them heal, it just makes things worse (and makes it harder to heal by pushing the person into repression and denial). Frankly I think he seems to be doing just fine.
Well, I already wrote my own form/admin helpers. (Wanna see them? Email me at martin at diers dot us.)

What I'm trying to do now is do an integration with jsTree, so that I can do drag-and-drop reordering of my CMS pages in the Admin.

As it is now, I have a MoveNodeForm showing up in the Admin's change list for each row, and I created a modified version of the result_list tag to enforce tree order (since you can't sort by two columns in the Django Admin), and pad the object names with spaces to represent the tree structure visually. It works, but it's hokey.
Im not 100% sure about the process. I wasnt too happy at first BUT reading the Scribd site it is a possibility thatthe "slurped" document is brought in on demand (i.e. not stored on the Scribd server). That seems ok to me because it amounts to using a piece of PDF reading software - only it's web based.

Scribd is pretty handy for reading the documents because it lets you read them in a more dynamic way (bookmark etc.).

If their saving it then that's another matter. Im still down with doing that at times - but only on documents with permission. Automatically is just bad manners!
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707044
I don't think it does. Where Amazon is the single largest online player in the book business, Sony is a small-scale newcomer. Where Amazon can exert an extraordinary amount of pressure on book publishers, Sony can exert bupkis. These differences are probably much more important to Amazon's ability to muster an impressive list of titles than the fact that it can withdraw books already purchased.

Amazon didn't have to put that ability in the Kindle. Without it, it'd still have a huge list of titles. Amazon wanted to have that kind of control.
I won't mod you down, because I think your view needs to be out there. But read the article - it hardly seems like paean to any doctrine. Rather, it seems like an insightful look back on a long career.
Renraku OS: Initial Release
From what I saw on the Kindle forums, the publisher of these editions (MobileReference) mostly offers $0.99 downloads of public-domain texts. There's a $10 version of 1984 still available for purchase from Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W

So, it looks to me like this was a case of a publisher illegally distributing a book to which they had no license. As an analogy, think of people who buy a bootleg DVD from a flea market while traveling overseas, only to discover it won't play in their region-locked DVD player at home. Yes, it sucks that DRM prevented them from using media they thought they had bought, but they also knew perfectly well that they were getting a deal that was just a little too good to be true.
My (non legal) advice.

Learn the lesson and move on.

Or rather talk to Person B and try tyo work something out (no threats!).

A lawsuit just sounds an expensive waste unless the company is pulling in a fortune. As far as I can make out you haven't put an awful lot into the site (sorry if that sounds harsh but speaking, perhaps, from B's point of view). He probably see's the code as the be-all-and-end-all of the business and so cant understand why you value your input so high in comparison (what percentage did he offer?)

I'd be inclined to forgoe lawsuits unless big money is on the table. And remember the mistake for next time :)
This is pretty bad, but is it possible the publisher didn't have rights to publish the book in the first place? Orwell died in 1950, which makes his work free of copyright in many (life+50) countries but not in life+70 countries like the USA. The company selling the book (mobilereference.com) appears to be hosted from Canada, where Orwell's works are in the public domain. I wonder if by some oversight or misunderstanding (or something more malicious), they were distributing the books in the United States without having the rights to.

I can't think of another reason a company would want to stop granting the licenses.
UK Entrepreneurs: Get Your Funding While You Still Can
It's always cool to see various OS-projects and new kernel designs. It serves to remind me that even the most basic parts of the stack we take for granted can still be shaken up. So congrats to Daeken for getting this far.

That said, what are the big points that drove you spend so much effort on this project? What did you think would be unique in your offering?
Why don't we just break into amazon's systems, take the books we want, and distribute them ourselves?
I think he does explain about it in the book, or that's what I understood when I read it, that metabolism does adjust if you eat less or more - http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsubsection1_2_3_0_7_...
Edupreneurs are a Good Bet to End the Reign of the Kleptobankers
They're good tips but unless you're addressing a large audience on 28k or less of bw then you're just as well to use pngcrush and be done as this will give you nearly all the optimisation with barely any time spent.
There's probably a more realistic version - to put expensive-to-prove legal loop for extending copyright (but not as expensive as lobbying congress) so large corporations can take that option instead of breaking copyright for everyone.

Another option would be to create a branch of IP "in between" copyright and trademark (which is indefinitely renewable).

But IMNAL, so it might as well be my ass talking.
Thanks for the kind words, it's greatly appreciated.

Renraku is really motivated by two things: 1) I believe that by going to pure managed code and getting rid of address space separation, we'll see great increases in performance, and compiler technology is getting better by the day. 2) Existing OSes simply aren't built for the world we're in now. With everything interconnected, OSes that make it hard for computers to interact are simply holding back progress.

Renraku aims to change the landscape by leaving unmanaged code completely behind, making everything in the OS an object, and making all objects network transparent. The goal is to make it easy to develop for, easy to use, and incredibly fast. I believe we can do it, even if it does take us years (and it will).
How does calorie counting not work. You put in less energy than is being used and the body makes up the rest from reserves. Or is the body somehow generating energy without burning fat?
I would love a Sony with a 3G modem, a Kindle-like keyboard and a usable mouse. A big bonus if the Linux underneath the book-reader is usable.

I wonder what xterm would look like on e-paper...
CD-Rs have no monopoly, and yet, there are blank media levies in many countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I recall this was one of the original goals of "namesys" (the file system that eventually became ReiserFS) but the paper describing it seems to be lost. The only reference I found after a short search are a few pages in a power point presentation[1] comparing it to Cyc. For the curious, the set "grouping" construct is on slide 7.

1- http://psy.st-andrews.ac.uk/foldiak/NamesysAndCyc1.ppt
The song "Happy Birthday to You" is protected by copyright.
Memcached 1.4.0 released
Whispernet is not the problem (although I would prefer a less "world-proof" GSM modem with no tie-in). The problem is the software that has this kind of backdoor.

Owners of those titles were robbed by Amazon. Amazon broke into their libraries, took the books and left some money on the table. All through the backdoor they had installed when you purchased your book case.
> it is a possibility that the "slurped" document is brought in on demand ...

If that's true then it's even worse. They use the owner's bandwidth, and they prevent people from going to the owner's site. Getting the traffic to my site is important, especially if I'm paying for the bandwidth. I'm sure many people make papers available on the understanding that people are therefore coming to their site.