skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be great if they actually come up with smart receptacles that transmit power usage to your phone. I think that would be an effective way to cut down on power usage - if the receptacles themselves didn't consume too much power...
In bash, just press ctrl+c to get back to the bottom.
Also, 'cd -' to get back and forth between your current directory and last directory is great for the edit/execute cycle.
Can we all please move on. There's nothing to see here.
Do you know -- off the top of your head -- who the primary contributors are to Apache? They wrote the HTTP server that runs the web.

[Edit] Why is the reply nonsense? The point is fairly clear -- there are far more established, widely used, complex and important projects that do not have such vitriolic personalities attached. Zed Shaw's known for his blog posts, not because of any proportionally notable contribution to the open source community.

(The original unmodified comment referred to this reply as "nonsense").
It's also not as hard even without editing because comment ids are extremely predictable on hn.
> Otherwise I’m just not interested anymore.

I'm afraid your article rubs me the wrong way. Could you explain further why an independent developer (who has written code in their own time to satisfy their own need) has _any_ obligation to satisfy your desire for better documentation? I can certainly understand why one wouldn't choose to use undocumented code, and why one wouldn't recommend it to others, but I don't understand the sense of entitlement.

Further, what greater obligation does the original author have that you as a user of the code do not? Why should the author be expected to sit down and write documentation intended solely for the use of others, whereas you, now capable of doing the same, do not? Your 'duty of care' argument falls short for me, and instead I see a favor not being returned.

I don't mean to be too negative (your writing style itself is great, for example) but I really don't understand the underlying sentiment.
I've had a lot of fun with AwesomeWM, and ratpoison before that. It really helps with workflow when you're not distracted by Evolution and Pidgin popups every thirty seconds. Sure, there's a bit of configuration before you get started, but isn't there always?

Really wish Gnome would throw in a feature that auto-maximizes windows like the other two managers I mentioned do.
If you wanted to find a needle in a stack of chicken feed would you use 1024 chickens or two oxen?
Any other authors on here horrified at Google Book Search?
I wrote a book on Ruby on Rails over the course of 2007-2008. While checking out Google Books for the first time today, I searched for my own book and found that the India branch of my publisher (John Wiley & Sons) posted virtually the entire text online for reading (http://books.google.com/books?id=za3qrVS3bwYC&source=gbs_navlinks_s). Investigating further, there apparently is some sort of class action which gives Google the right to do this with all publications, whether or not the author even knows about it or agrees to it.

Having spent about a year of late nights and neglecting my friends & family to put this book together, I am horrified. I'm a big believer in open source, and have contributed to more than a few open source projects, but I also believe that the hard work of individuals shouldn't be pillaged by companies with giant legal departments.

Authors / readers on HN: Am I right to be angry? Have you had a similar experience with this?
Listia is extremely fun. Just paging through some of the auctions, you see the goofiest stuff. Ex: PG's dracula cape (I think worth at least 10 credits...). http://www.listia.com/auction/197
That sounds like it could work real well with a google finance type interface. A line graph showing a timeline of how much buzz the URL got, with links to the sampled data.

Perfect, lets build it.
What did your book contract say about your rights with regard to international editions? Could you quote the contract language exactly, so we have a better sense of what rights may or may not have been violated?
Most performing artists I meet are very professional, friendly guys. Show them respect and take it seriously, and you'll get it in return.

If you love insane/awesome riders, here's my favorite, Iggy Pop's: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/iggypop/iggypop1....
What it feels like to be an Entrepreneur
I am getting a weird sense of deja vu here. Like when VA Linux hired that other loudmouth, ESR. How did that work out for them?
I don't use the mouse except for interacting with flash inside the browser.

For the browser I usually use a mix of firefox's "mouseless browsing" and search with ' key.

The shell is bad for copy/pasting with only the keyboard. Even if ctrl+alt+c/v copies and pastes, selecting without mouse is really troublesome. I run shell inside emacs.

For changing desktops, I have hotkeys ctrl+alt+1/5 for each of my 5 desktops. I usually keep 2 windows maximized at once so I'm always at most 2 (usually just 1) key presses from any window (instead of following an alt+tab app cycle or a alt+ctrl+arrow desktop cycle)

pretty much everything else you need to do can be done inside of emacs.
No, you can set the in_reply_to id in the request using the same approach. Then it'd say "in reply to @myname", and the "in reply to" link would link to the same tweet.
The end of bloatware: The return of programming's golden age?
Holograms That You Can Touch and Feel
I think the reading order phenomenon maybe be why statistically fewer right-handers drew the zebra on the right than left-handers drew the zebra on the left. I imagine I (right-handed) would draw the zebra on the left for exactly this reason.
LukeW did a talk in March that goes in to more depth then that article. It's definitely worth listening to: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?794
I'm not a lawyer... But, isn't it a legal issue?

My guess would be that the reason they're acting like they are, is that they have to strictly enforce the rules as they are written.

If they make exceptions or even approve an app that doesn't conform 100%; could that not later be used as a prior art opening up all sorts of discussions/legal-nastyness?

If they rephrased the rules such that they could use their own best judgement on a case-by-case basis, the discussions would just be bigger when one app gets approved and another one doesn't.

At least this way, it should be fairly clear as an app developer whether your app will get approved or not: If they can find anything "bad" in it, it won't.
Use the "f" key to jump to links. It's probably just as fast as using the mouse (some would argue it's slower), but as with most things, gets faster the more you use it.
I thought that's what he was doing...
You might as well ask why an independent developer has any obligation to release code that actually works most of the time.

No, in the broadest sense, there's no moral or legal obligation. However, in the social sense of interacting with people that you're offering software to, you're not doing a favor to anyone by releasing crappy code or putting up lousy documentation.

You may be confused by the level of the argument - it's not at the level of "must", but "should".
Yeah, they also made VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264). It's not a bad move on Google's part, despite the open source alternatives that exist.
The source of many of these quotes: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
I will try to dig it up later this afternoon and paste in in here.

My assumption is that because I share rights with Wiley, they can do as they please with the text. So from a legal standpoint I assume no agreements have been violated.

Where I do feel violated is my understanding of a mutual desire between publisher & author to sell the work. I imagine their calculation is that once publication costs have been recovered, if the book isn't a best seller it may be more worth their while to give away the book and use it to build their brand. This is completely at odds with the motivations & needs of the author, even if it is within their right.

I understand that electronic text is a non-rival good, so the following example isn't a perfect one, but it is like if you and I went in 50/50 on importing lemons to sell on the side of the road at neighboring stands. Then, the moment I recovered my costs, I began given the rest of my lemons away for free, completely obliterating your ability to sell lemons for a price, and thus removing your ability to recoup your costs. It may be legal, but it is a pretty lowly thing to do. I end up breaking even and you end up with a net negative.
zsh is rather amazing. Only so if you are familiar with how it is better than bash (besides the fundamental ways) and how to configure it for maximum ownage! Much like complicated editors like Vim, it helps to try to dedicate effort to imprinting a new command in your mind per-week (or so), such that it becomes second nature to use.

Some good stuff: http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html
Is he just upset that Starcraft 2 hasn't come out yet?

I wouldn't bet against Blizzard. They knock every single one out of the park.
Depends on utilisation. If you own a cluster and are able to keep it busy 24x7 then it pays off pretty quickly. Amazon have to have enough spare idle capacity to handle unexpected customer loads and make a profit - you are paying for this.
37 signals doesn't get paid specifically for rails though. If 37 signals went away, rails wouldn't. Not without a huge fuss anyway.
Ask HN: What to do you think about Metaki?
This is a friend's website, he doesn't know HN, but would very much like to get your feedback to improve his site. Thanks!
When to Get Massages
I've never lived in San Francisco, but it's no secret that tech centres like Silicon Valley have very few women. Not only that, but based on these comments it seems like most coders have given up on socializing with women! Surely this must negatively affect the product development of applications meant for the general public.
Vanessa Hudgens Photos Uncensored
Namely is a less complicated alternative to Quicksilver on OS X. It only works for applications.
http://amarsagoo.info/namely/

Enso is interesting alternative to launchy on Windows. It's no longer in active development.
http://humanized.com/enso/launcher/
VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264)

I have no idea where this misinformation comes from. VP6 was released well before H.264 and was meant to compete with MPEG-4 Part 2, aka Xvid, DivX, etc. It did that well; it is probably at least comparable to Xvid, though I haven't tested VP6 myself. It is nowhere near H.264, however. A good H.264 encoder can probably beat VP6 by a factor of two in compression.

VP7 was meant to compete with H.264, and is not supported by Flash. It, however, was only competitive with very early H.264 encoders, which were quite bad. It quickly fell out of favor as H.264 encoders got better.

VP8 is meant to compete with H.264 again.
Best Collection of Free Wordpress Themes
Bell Labs pretty much won the Netflix prize
I certainly hope Apple doesn't ban this app.
Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet
<rant>These Seymour Cray quotes have been obsoleted by changes in technology, and trotting them out yet again just displays ignorance of those changes.</rant>

There are no "strong oxen" in today's world; both supercomputers and EC2 are clusters using more or less the same processors.
I've enjoyed these first two - they're a good summary of how things are laid out, without getting into too many of the messy details. I miss an explanation of closures, but that'd require lots of messy details, I'm sure.
It's sort of a 'teach a man to fish' problem. If someone is standing on the corner of a hypothetical 14th Street, and if the layout was something like "the Streets run East-West, and the numbers go up as one goes North", it's probably worth their while to explain this. And if the city is designed such that all the avenues are alphabetical from East to West, I'd probably mention this as well.

Personally, I greatly prefer to receive directions that include some redundancy and background information. And yes, every now and then I think "Wow, those were great directions" when someone gives me an explanation that increases my knowledge beyond the narrow scope of my question.
RTF contract, apparently. Always a good idea.
Kansas's rider specifies that the venue is not allowed to bill any other band as "the original Kansas", which is something of a reaction against Proto-Kaw, a band composed of the original members of Kansas (since Kansas itself has faced numerous personnel changes). Something of a Theseus' ship paradox. They also require prune juice! (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/kansas/kansas1.ht...)

According to the documentary on disc 2 on their latest live DVD, Dream Theater's rider specifies that their drummer, Mike Portnoy, be supplied with a jersey from the local basketball or soccer team. He has a sizable collection.

Meat Loaf is a superstar. Don't believe me? His rider specifies (and I quote):

"Purchaser acknowledges that it is promoting a worldwide "superstar" artist and that each and every element of such promotion, production, and other arrangements shall be absolutely first-class in nature and commensurate with the stature of a "superstar" in the entertainment industry". (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/meatloaf/meatloaf...)
This American Life covered this as well: http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1308

(not much more on Van Halen than the Snopes page but the episode was pretty good)
Insider trading simplified? Does this mean I can call the Goldman Sachs CEO through this site and whisper soft, hot insider information in my ear?

This site is a good example of how even industry oversight can be privatized in some ways: Instead of the government regulating then feeding the results back to the public, give the public the tools to properly analyze companies and judge for themselves.
The same principles apply here as they do to piracy (which is essentially what Google is doing)... If the book is any good people will buy it regardless. I have several books out that are doing quite well in spite of widespread piracy or appearing on Google. I've surmised that a majority of any book's sales are going to be made by honest people, and therefore any perceived monetary loss from piracy (or Googleiracy) is not in fact loss at all, but just a matter of whether or not the trolls have been fed.

In addition to this, having your book pirated/circulated could actually lead to more sales because it'll fall across the eyes of more "honest" readers who will buy the book if it's any good, regardless of whether they found it online.

Also see: Libraries.
Lovely project. Wish I had the patience for that (and a nice logic analyser). By the time I'd started at university, it was all FPGAs, HDL and simulation. A shame really.

The nearest I ever got was a pure TTL digital clock.
UCB RIP
I still didn't get it, until I read this: This distinctive taste is reflected in the British company's marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." (from Marmite wikipedia page)
This is quite different from the Van Halen story. No lessons to learn, but at least there's "Dead Dog Island" to give a few laughs...
Guiding Principles on Using Racial Categories in Human Genetics
I've found the feeding infants a mixture of milk mixed with 25% pulverized IRS forms and 10% pulverized army field manuals, results in a 65% chance that by age 8, they will be obsessed with writing documentation.

By next year, we'll have an army of 1,000,000 tech writers ready to serve the emperor and rebuild the empire, errr, or at least document it's rebuilding.
Terrible HCI. Another form of mystery meat.

Giving some people jQuery is like giving a monkey a gun.
I'd like an allen wrench bit for a traditional hand-powered screwdriver. Though one of those low-power electric screwdrivers we use at my work to install rack-mount equipment into racks might work OK too (if it had an allen wrench bit).
Hat tip to thras for posting this link today (for disagreement, it appears, in his case) in a comment on another HN thread. I am posting for agreement and for specific discussion on these issues.
Why Rails' magic and DSL style might not be good
If there's something to learn from it, it's that you can be professional and hilarious at the same time.
Before getting angry, consider the positives as well. There are roughly 3 camps of people reading your book online:

(1) This group will use your book as a free reference because it's available but _cannot buy your book_ (think poor student, 15 year old with no credit card and other priorities, third world country - too expensive). You didn't gain a paying reader but they are not hitting your existing stash of cash, just potential earnings. On the plus side, they know of you now because of your book. Maybe you can actually get paid for a speaking gig.

(2) This group will peruse your book online a few times but _will buy it_ because they prefer to have a hard copy they can read in their cubicle, on the train, etc. A win for you.

(3) This group can afford your book and _would have bought the book but now will not_ since it's available online. A loss for you. However I have a hunch (though no data) that this group is a minority especially when it comes to the well paid (and often reimbursed) group of engineers who are the market for your book.
StumpWM + Conkeror for browsing, terminal for everything else.

No mouse required. Try it. Love it.
I really like Enso for Windows. Half of their dev team went to Mozilla to build Ubiquity, which is a similar idea for web services instead of apps: https://ubiquity.mozilla.com/
ok, the other lame-ass brute-force long-term percentage-playing solution: buy mad badwidth, create tons of whitelisted twitter usernames, and continually send tweets with a url to a tweet id that hasn't occurred yet.

for instance, every tweet contains a url for tweet id 3149892792 (2000 more than the current most recent tweet on the public timeline at the time of this comment). once the system creates a tweet that overshoots the desired id, a new goal id is selected.

eventually, you'll get the right answer, especially if you can tweet a good percentage of tweets for a particular period of time.
The Sorry State of Project Managers and Business Analysts
All that intelligence, and he can't create a YouTube video with sound :)
Better to use e.g., vertical or left-justified labeling and use the in-field support to put in example values.
A Brazilian TV ad urges folks to urinate in the shower to conserve water
"so that marginal black people could have those positions."
In the first half of the 1900s, it was legal for government-funded schools to deny academic positions to qualified students based on race. Until the 1990s, it was legal for private institutions to bar students based on race.

Affirmative action isn't about giving up the bottom 10% to unqualified minorities. It's about giving qualified candidates an opportunity they would otherwise have been denied. If the institution chooses to waste those spots on unqualified minority applicants, it's the fault of the institution and not affirmative action in general.

BTW, you appear to be conflating welfare with affirmative action in #1, 2, and 3. They aren't even remotely the same thing.
the analytics firm additionally claims that over 90% of TweetDeck users are over 25, making it unlikely that there are masses of uncounted young people on third-party Twitter apps

That's because most of the people using TweetDeck are those let's-do-marketing-on-whatever-is-hot-this-week people. 30 accounts spewing stuff about Web 2.5 or SEO or Pepsi or whatever.
They've sold more iPhones in 2009 than the previous 2 years combined and the year isn't even over yet. Something has gone very right.
Also have a look at Perl6 gather/take for another way: http://perlcabal.org/syn/S04.html#The_gather_statement_prefi...

Its also been ported back to Perl5: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl6-Gather/Gather.pm
Perez hilton == Paul Carr
Is Google Voice Sweet? - My Thoughts After 2 Weeks
To summarise the brown M&Ms were a "canary" to indicate if all the details of the contract had been attended too. If there were brown M&Ms then the rest of the contractual points would be examined with more stringency.

It's interesting that they used this as a careful "get out clause" or an indicator of other more serious ones.
would love to see a leaderboard of companies with the happiest employees and with the unhappiest ones.
And "F" opens in a new tab.
one has to wonder why Goldman needed in on the bank bailout last year

All banks of that class were required to participate to avoid stigmatizing any single one and weakening their credit further. Goldman took the money and simply gave it right back.
> Also see: Libraries.

Ha :). But the library isn't providing a download link, is it?

Regarding a majority of a book's sales being made by honest people, yes, I assume you're right. And perhaps the publicity from being available for free will increase the number of honest people that buy a book.

But it is a tricky line to walk.

I remember reading about how the Soviets were suspicious of supposed "free markets" being able to stabilize themselves in the Reagan / Thatcher era. They just couldn't believe that things would work out to an equilibrium in the end. Auctions are similarly magical.

Perhaps the "give it away, and then let people pay you if they like it" model of the internet is similar from the standpoint of an outsider: sounds impossible the first time you hear it, but it tends to work out in the end.
WorldMate is well-known for its WinMo/Blackberry application.

I'm surprised that they ported it to the iPhone, given the almost complete lack of business users on that platform.
Stat arb usually does well in when vola is high. I wonder if volatility has been unusually high lately? Easy to check, anyway.
Voted up because this guy is an idiot.
bookmarks in the cloud?

http://www.delicious.com
By far my favorite mouse killer is the Ion window manager (http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/).

Using the lua config I changed a bunch of the key bindings so that the entire environment behaves like vim. I can easily change windows using the vim directional keys, which are second nature by now. I never lose windows behind other windows.

After a few days in this environment you start looking for apps that provide a keyboard interface to all their functionality so you can throw away your mouse entirely.

Vimperator is a good example. Also, I use irssi (http://irssi.org/) for all chat and instant messaging. We modeled the chat interface for ShopTalk (http://shoptalkapp.com) after irssi for exactly this reason.