skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think iTunes on the Mac is pretty decent (compared to the Windows version, at any rate. God, have you tried doing any heavy I/O stuff in iTunes for Windows?).

I'd love the ability to have nested queries in Smart Playlists. The only "solution" at the moment involves having folders full of Smart Playlists for individual queries and then having another Smart Playlist to assemble that "level" of the query.

I'd also like the Genius Recommendation feature to be a bit better. The Genius Playlist feature is pretty solid at the moment (when it came out in iTunes 8, I was pretty much blown away), but the recommendation stuff is still nowhere near as accurate as what it's actually trying to emulate -- asking an expert, "hey, if I like this music, what else would I like?"

Edit: Oh, and more album art in Apple's databases. The Gracenote stuff isn't exactly fantastic. I know there's TuneUp and stuff like that, but Apple boasts that it's a complete feature built in to iTunes, when really, it's not that comprehensive in my experience. Who knows, maybe I just listen to obscure music.
Better support for another MP3 players/mobile devices? Right now, if I use iTunes, I need to use an iPod or iPhone as my MP3 player. Other companies (e.g. Palm) that have tried to use iTunes to manage music have been shut down by Apple.
Web apps can't hope to achieve the kind of responsiveness BeOS offered, at least not for a few more years. Unless you have near-zero network latency and multithreaded JavaScript apps, you cannot possibly build responsive web apps. We will get there, sure, but it will take a while.

BTW, I know this because I use Haiku on my PC. Haiku is responsive because it has been built to be that way from the ground up :)
> In my opinion Malthus is getting way too much credit considering real life proved him wrong.

Additionally, William Godwin refuted his arguments, at the time. But gets no credit.

BTW, no one seems to have mentioned it, but Malthus said that food production grows linearly, whereas human populations grow geometrically, so food production won't be able to keep up.
Shahrukh Khan says stopped at US airport
Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan was detained and questioned for two hours at the Newark Airport near here on Saturday.The 43-year-old actor was detained by immigration officials because his name was part of a common checklist prepared since the 9/11 attacks.
Why do you want to switch to git? I say this as someone who uses perforce, subversion, git and mercurial on a regular basis. Version control is largely similar for the 90% of your work life, and that 10% can usually be solved by hand.
First of all I don't think Obama is suggesting setting up a health care monopoly. I think he's suggesting supplementing the private market with a government-provided option.

As for how health care is different from everything else, it's very expensive sometimes, and society has kind of decided that everyone deserves a basic level of care regardless of the ability to pay. By that I mean people will generally respond negatively to a statement such as "If you can't afford it, you can't expect to receive treatment when you break your arm." In contrast I think it's pretty reasonable to say "If you can't afford it, you can't have a car."

I don't think the government should run a health care monopoly, but there are significant flaws in the market system that require government intervention in many cases, and health care is certainly one of them.
I love that people keep finding these old papers to post. For me the most frustrating aspect of "technology" is the constant reinvention of the already (mathematically) perfected wheel, poorly. We should look to the past for wisdom before reinventing what someone wiser than us has already perfected.

Keep posting this stuff.
In the United States, Netflix has the right to pay the same for a DVD that they rent out to others that you do, if they chose. Google "First Sale Doctrine."
WordPress and WordPress MU are complete PHP4 hackjobs. It is a developer's nightmare to fine-tune any website that uses these platforms. Since BuddyPress just turned stable and barely has any plugins, it is not worth its salt as a Social Platform, unlike Vanilla 2, which uses the MVC design pattern and ships with just as much if not more out-of-the-box features. The OP's suggestion makes 0 sense.

The main reason, I find, that people use WP is because it is free and does the relatively simple task to managing and displaying a blog decently out of the box.

If WordPress was completely rewritten (like Vanilla 2 was in lieu of Vanilla 1), then I'd change my argument. But you'd lose the thousands of plugins it currently supports, though perhaps only 100 of out them are actually production-ready.
Schema-migration utilities are in a phase where there's some competition going on and features and support cross-pollinating; sooner or later there'll be a clear winner and it'll be time to talk about bundling with Django itself, but for now it's best to let the community evolve things, since that'll develop useful things much more quickly than stuffing something prematurely into django.contrib.
It's dog slow for huge libraries, and doesn't watch directories for added/removed files.

musicbrainz support would be nice
fonbois = fan boys?
Honestly, if they removed the URLs from the front page and just kept the conversation topics and community, I'd still get 98% of the value from the site.

(Ads are value-neutral for me, incidentally.)
Job World: Syntel (MNC) Walk-in for Freshers: Weekdays
And fixed. Thanks for the report.
Business plan: how to model visitors per hour from multiple geographies
I spent a while a few years back trying to track down the source(s) of the "superprogrammers are an order of magnitude more effective than mere mortals" belief. From my own experience of working with some great programmers, I believe this to be true, but I wanted to see if there was actual data to back it up. Unfortunately the study that's almost always cited doesn't really say what people think: the 28:1 ratio oft quoted is for debugging someone else's program, and involves two entirely different scenarios — one debugging machine code without realtime access to a computer, and one debugging a higher level language at the computer! In fact that's what the study was actually testing: whether working at the computer was really faster than old-school batch job programming. Really. This was a matter of much debate in the late 60s. Proponents of batch jobs argued that allowing a programmer to actually sit at a computer and type their code there would make them much too lazy and sloppy, just letting the computer tell them when they made a mistake, rather than taking the care to get it correct first like Real Programmers™. (Reading old CS papers can be fascinating!)

I'd bet quite a lot of money that most people citing this study have not only never read it, but don't have the faintest clue what it was actually about.

http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/category/papers?s=sackman
This was also on HN a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346

I find the version linked on HN, from dennisdutton.com, much more readable.

EDIT: Your link could be considered "closer to the source," though, seeing as it's the author's webpage rather than Dutton's.
In the United States, this is not the case. First sale doctrine allows one to resell, lend, or rent a DVD once one purchases it.
Missing Sync lets me use my Blackberry with my iTunes library. I assume Palm works as well.
I would disagree (and others share this view) that the economic collapse was the result of unregulated markets. It was the result of bad regulation (e.g., the CRA of '95 caused the amount of mortgages issued that were subprime to jump from 1% to 12% by '98 alone) and bad government interference (e.g., low interest rates under Greenspan made money too cheap for too long). Greed was indeed a huge factor, but it came from directions that aren't currently being fingered. Now, I'm not going to defend all private institutions: AIG, for one quick example, had some sketchy things going on that definitely need looking into.

But, for the most part, I am skeptical of any kind of central planning. I believe the federal government should stay out of things like health insurance. If Washington didn't help create the current environment where we rely so much on employer-based health insurance, maybe we would have individual health savings accounts and costs wouldn't have gotten so out of control because individuals would actually care what they were paying. And, in turn, hospitals would actually care what they are charging (i.e., competition).

I mean, just read the Wikipedia page on HSAs to get a feel for how complicated one tiny part of our system is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account. I don't feel comfortable having this system reformed so quickly (especially when these bills aren't being read!). So much of the motives behind the current movement are purely political. I would rather take it slow and have a real, honest look at the problems from both sides.

I think the ultimate obstacle is that we perceive America to be as free market as it gets, but that notion is, in reality, so far from the truth. This belief seems to render any free-market approach to reform as "out-dated" or "pro status quo".

Sorry if I got off-topic. I've been trying to keep my political thoughts off of HN for too long. :)
Genius is nowhere near as good as Pandora.
God this is old. Why is this appearing now?
quite a few reasons, none of which aren't covered in tha parent post except for one, which is that subversion on test environments is a real pain to get working on various environments. As the dev team uses tortoise and always gets "there is a new version available, please update here" I have seen the unenviable position of having repos on staging environments rendered un-updatable except by tarball because subversion on the remote end refusees to work with the newly incompatible repository post a single commit from tortoise SVN 1.6.3 for example.

This is not a problem with git, and the being able to push updates directly to the staging environment can also be non -trivially handy too.

That said, that's a minor annoyance vs the full blown excellent points that the original article makes about the advantages of git over subversion, so I'm a bit puzzled as to why this question is being asked, did you not think that the things covered in the article were worth anything?
Online Cassette Tape Museum
I really like iTunes (on Windows) and don't know how it could be made better. It's perfect for the way I want to browse/listen to music. Am I alone in this?
Agreed, Pandora is great!

It sucks to live outside the US. I could probably access Pandora through a proxy (I haven't tried), but it's a barrier, and even one complication makes a lot of people not do something (look at sites where you can comment anonymously versus sites that make you create an account just to comment on a story).
This is commonly thrown around:

I believe the federal government should stay out of things like health care.

The government's not trying to provide health care. It's trying to provide health insurance, which the private market has shown itself to be incapable of providing for 50 million Americans.
dvorak is history.
Here are most of the suggestions from the link:
- Have fan with a pan of ice in front if it pointed towards you
- Keep a damp hand towel on your forehead
- Put an ice pack under your neck
- make a rice sock, put it in the freezer and then inside of your pillow
- sleep nude
- sleep in a 'spread eagle' position
- take a cool shower, wet your face, run your wrists under the cold tap

Please correct me if I'm mistaken - How does an air conditioner use less energy than a fan turned on for the same amount of time? I did a quick search and most of the hits say that air conditioners use more power. (Here is one of the links that came up: http://www.todaysgreenconstruction.com/2008/07/battle-green-...).
I sold more printed copies than electronic copies (of my Catalyst book).

Personally, I buy ebooks whenever possible. Printed books are fine, but you have to wait for them to arrive. When you buy an ebook, you can start reading immediately.

For technical books, I don't mind being forced to read in front of my computer. I am going to want to play with "real code" while I am reading anyway, so I am probably not going to be too far from my computer. (An exception; I read "Real World Haskell" on two very long flights. There was just a lot to play with when I got home...)

For non-technical books, the Kindle is much nicer than a physical book. Smaller, lighter, cheaper content, and nobody knows what you are reading about.
When it was 40C+ here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, I simply went outside and slept there in a nice cool 30C+ weather.

If you have computers and electricity, by 10-11pm it will be significantly cooler outside so if you have a deck or roof or backyard, try sleeping there.
I have problems with iTunes for Windows because the QuickTime platform isn't the native way to handle media on a Windows box (which it is in OS X). So already you're dealing with a beast that's more complicated than it should be.

That said, I use iTunes on my Windows PC. It's not great for large libraries or doing heavy I/O stuff (changing meta-data for multiple long movies, for instance), but it gets the job done and it's a pretty seamless experience between the music player, the store and the iPod/iPhone.
It's good, but in my opinion it needs a lot of work making it more responsive and efficient
I know its 'crude' to post ones own article, but I'm hoping the community can highlight flaws and improve the spreadsheet in the post.

I'm working to build a template open source virtual world (or freemium) business model. I feel there are too few resources - I'd like to make it easier for entrepreneurs. This is the smartest community I know. So I figured a great place to get the needed feedback!

BTW - my first post, but been reading the site for years, way way before TC first posted http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-new...
You had to expend the energy to freeze the water. You probably did that with a freezer, which runs using a compressor just like an air conditioner, except that it has to get a lot colder.

I think you're still right that it comes out cheaper, though, because you'd be spending most of the freezer's energy output anyways.
I know you didn't ask about Windows users, but assuming you are from Apple and have an ear there, please forward this message to the appropriate individual...

With my fairly large, multi-gigabyte library, iTunes often takes minutes to respond to user input. Sometimes during syncing it can take up to 30 minutes to respond to my input. Please performance-profile iTunes before frustrated and contractually-obligated-to-use-iTunes iPhone users slap you with a class-action lawsuit.
It's amazingly useful! It teaches you more about computing than anything ever will.

There was a bit on here about a guy that did his own computer from the ground up using ttl level logic, but I'm not aware of anybody that did his own chips including the routing.

Is it important to others ? Yes, again I think it is:

- a series of amazingly performant chips came out of that (novix, shboom and now the a series)

- lots of people got to see that it was possible which is inspiring (it certainly is for me)

- the fact that the compatibility is so low is actually a boon, this means that you get to think in ways off the beaten path, which is a good thing. It gets people to think outside of the box for a bit. That's always a great way to widen your perspective permanently.

Even today, there isn't a cell phone that does not have a forth interpreter stashed away in its innards! (I can find you a reference for that if you want).
Blah, bad editing. Insert a period between "quite nice" and "I can".
I can give you temporary access to the analytics stats of two major websites if you want, drop me a line.
U.S. doctors earn more than twice as much as UK doctors.

How much of that money goes to doctors vs how much of it goes to insurance companies, middle-men, lobbying, trial lawyers, billing and debt collection and what have you?
Support for classical music.

iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.

Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.

Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.
Maybe 80% think they have insurance, but US health insurers are notorious for finding ways to weasel out of paying and cancel policies of sick people. An industry that actually delivered what this one promises would cost substantially more. (Not that we shouldn't spend that money.)
The freezes compressor will run longer if you stuff it with things that are not yet at the temperature of the rest of the stuff in the freezer.

This is also why it is a good idea to de-ice your freezer every now and then, keeping all that ice at a low temperature against the leakage through the walls of the freezer costs energy.
There's less functionality to test if you've described your business constraints in concise type declarations. The type contract is short enough to be validated at a glance.

I'm having a hard time imagining a situation in which static typing could replace even one single test, let alone it being a common occurence. In any such case I can come up with, the test is needlessly limited in scope and can be replaced by a much more comprehensive test. What specifically did you have in mind?
That would be fascinating, thanks.

Screen shots of daily traffic from different geographies would be amazing. I'm interested to know if the traffic flow is normally distributed for a given geography - or if there is a better approximation.
Ah, but Pinax isn't a good solution either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764566

Having said that, FeinCMS looks pretty nice and more modular, as you say.
I have an espresso machine that partially implements this.

EDIT: Here's the partially-incomplete and largely out-of-date source: http://github.com/burke/coffeeclock/tree/master
Better idea...

http://lifehacker.com/5335024/how-to-build-a-diy-dorm+legal-...
What Comes After the Mouse, Circa 1987
I think most of these suggestions just give you something to do while you make yourself sleepy.
India is concerned with work that pays. There is no .NET bias when you compare it to the other enterprise platform, Java:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby%2C+.net%2C+java&ctab...
Teeth are covered in the UK. You don't just randomly exclude body parts from healthcare.
In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-“Opt-Out” years, we’ve now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!

What? Huh? This article is written in such überhip language, I can't tell what it says.
Yield (when your bliss feels like a curse)
Short term memory is the filter, the seemingly subconscious awareness that tends to allow only relevant information to pass through to the consciousness.

Because of the fleeting nature of our memory our minds are uniquely conducive to effortless hyper-specialization. The more you think of something, the more you think of something.

It is, then, curiosity, fascination or obsession that enables one to experience a cognitive leap in conceptual understanding. If one lacks the means to satisfy the appetite of obsession with real-world experience he will resort to using imagination, the Sweet-n-Low of experience.

The centripetal momentum of what is, essentially, a positive feedback loop is the mechanism by which the emergence of novel thinking occurs. Novel thinking excites us, naturally. Satisfies our obsession, momentarily, just enough feeling of light to allow us to persist emotionally despite illusory outward resistance.

All that is in existence has emerged from chaos. What we perceive as order is unimaginably complex... chaos, still. Only now, mechanisms for ephemeral forms of order are within the reach of increasingly conscious forms to manipulate. Therefore it is the nature of the universe for one to become consumed with the flavor of thought he so choose.

To "follow thy bliss" is to be in alignment with the universe. Trust that your current obsession will lead you to place thy hand next to those who will together lift the vail of uncertainty and fear to reveal truth and solace.

Do artists really toil away in obscurity? Is the gift of a provocative vision really a gift AND a curse? Are those who see "differently" fated to a solitary existence?

No.

As strong-willed as humans can be, we cannot voluntarily sustain a state of suffering. So it is the power of the network that all nodes have one beautifully simple rule of operation from which all novelty emerges... yield. Yield to that which will not let you "conform and live blissfully ignorant". Do not try to find your mother's embrace in a stranger, know it's significance in your mind exists for the purpose of compassion not imitation. All institutions are a juxtaposition to your pursuit of happiness when you rely to heavily on them. Do not let the scorn of women or organization send you on a journey which destination is redemption, but instead yield... you don't belong, yield.

Then proceed until the short bursts of light become long slow paces and you become the beam of light your son will follow.
I tend to filter information also using www.postrank.com for high volume sites such as the ones mentioned by OP.
Many of these ideas are variations of an evaporative or swamp cooler. They work great west of the Rockies because of the lower humidity. They don't work very well at all east of the Rockies. Try a fan with some ice in August in Miami. You won't be hot. You'll be hot and wet. Better to just turn on your ac.
Of course our Congressmen/women aren't going to be performing medical procedures on us (thank God, ha). You know what I meant. I'll edit it for you though. :)

And again, I don't believe you can blame private insurers for that. The government is largely to blame for rising costs.

(BTW throwing that figure around opens up a whole 'nother can of worms, but I'll not go there)
The 35 Best iPhone Apps Of The Year (So Far)
Out here in California the state is broke and to balance the budget the state reneged on funding some local programs, confiscated county and city money (as a forced loan back to the state) and other chicanery -- so the local cities are stepping up issuing traffic citations to make up for lost revenue. I hear that cops used to let you slide on doing 5 mph over the speed limit but not any more. I recently got a totally unjust parking ticket for not curbing my wheels on a street that was flat and unsloped and this a-hole cop ticketed every other car as far as the eye could see. So be careful or you will become the source of budget-balancing revenue.
We thus conclude that Ahmadinejad is the duly elected president
Anyone remember when you could share your library on iTunes with anyone, not just on your local network. Yeah, I'd like that back...
Learning Memory Management
I think it very much depends on what it is that your website is doing, and how well it has been internationalized.

The really interesting thing imo is to track such data over time, to see if a site is trending towards one geography or another.
Thank you. Between your comment, the REST post, and that object store OS, Daiken I believe, it just clicked what objects were supposed to be. Though I'll still need more practice before I really get it.
yeah, i know that. but if they took out X11, then it stands to reason that all the standard window managers went with it.
The Inner Structure of a Trojan Horse