skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very difficult to find a lot of people that aren't 'vacuous.' I mean, I just got out of college, so I have a handful of technical friends, but I'd be willing to say that most people I've known or met are like this.

It's sort of self selecting. Most people aren't hackers; they don't care how things work. They just want to use stuff, and... things. I don't even know. I can't understand that mindset, becuase I'm not one of those people. And neither are you, apparently. So yes, to you and me, it's pretty silly, because these things aren't that complicated, and we need to figure out how they work... but most people don't. Depressing, but true.
to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations

Why would you want that, if every generation has the option of designing their children anyway? And they can always revert to a backup genotype from 2000 if there's no other recourse.
Sounds like some fascinating stuff that might have provided the inspiration and foundation for this work. Got any links or titles?
Or because few of those sites have a clear method for making money or any profound use beyond pure leisure.
This is interesting; you've posted the exact same set of links as mikedouglas below, but 4 hours later, and yet (at the time of writing) your comment's got 3 points, and his is on -1

Is it because he used bit.ly? (I'm not being snarky, just curious)
Do you have any specific faults with xmpp or is this rant based purely on speculation?
Bringing Design to Life
List of Social Bookmarking Sites that drives traffic
We have hundreds of Social bookmarking sites but sites which drives traffic to your blog are very less. I consider this list of social bookmarking sites that drives traffic would be helping you in order to bring a decent traffic to your blog.
Things You Didn't Know Apache (2.2) Could Do
Better searching in Gmail
Another Popular Developer Lays The Smack Down On Apple’s App Store
From the article:
The Boston Globe profiled this gadget over the weekend (price tag is $77.50 plus a $29.95 monthly subscription charge), and the accompanying video is worth a watch. You kind of have to see Maya to believe her.

What's the subscription fee for? None of the services this thing provides need human intervention or a central server (except the e-mail, but this does not need to be THEIR server). The costs should be entirely development and production of the physical device. Why does a subscription model make any sense?
Donate an idea to HN: Checklists
Here's an idea that I'm never going to get time to follow up. Maybe it has merit, maybe not. If you want it, it's yours. If it makes billions, remember me.

A colleague who is a hobbyist aerobatics pilot says that aviation has become as safe as it is through the ubiquitous use of checklists. Everything has a checklist, and said checklist goes into the smallest detail. I've taken that on-board and we're starting to use explicit checklists when we deploy new systems, run through tests, diagnose problems, etc., and it's starting to make a real difference.

But building the checklists was a pain.

Recently I had a new boiler installed at home. No problems, great hot water, great heating, everything seemed fine. Now I find that some of the hot water taps are leaking. They were installed with the older, lower pressure system in place, and they need upgrading to cope with mains pressure hot water. Similarly, sometimes the kitchen hot water tap makes loud, ugly noises.

If I'd had a checklist of things to confirm before signing off, the plumbers would never have left the building without dealing with them. They're being great, but it's costing them time and money, and me hassle, to get these things put straight.

A checklist would save time, money and hassle.

How about a web site where I type in "Hot water" and it gives me a checklist. Or "New ISP" and it gives me a checklist. Perhaps the checklist can then be refined further, or perhaps it allows me to mark things as done or pending.

I think I'd pay money to be registered with a site like that.

Comments?
FT broke the story originally (I think) - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/89f80508-9663-11de-84d1-00144feabd...

The Register calls it a "Microsoft-snubbing deal" - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/01/sony_google_chrome_d... - and also mentions that the Big G is in similar talks with other vendors as well.

MSFT vs. GOOG marketing muscle makes for some awesome popcorn-viewing!
Borges its great, i find his tales super-concentrated: one tale mentions people or stories that can spawn hundreds of other tales or biographies, and that leaves me wishing to read more of him to see if that story is told somewhere else.
> But I'm willing to bet that a lot more developers will be able to understand this since this is in a programming language they understand well.

This is one argument I don't buy. He talks about the Mort programmers never being able to understand Lisp. I am willing to bet, any Mort programmer who looked at this C# would not be able to understand it. I'm sure they could take advantage of it, but write it themselves, I don't think so. And anyone who could write this, can grasp Lisp themselves.
so basically a site where you can share user-made checklists? a wikipedia of checklists?
Unreal Unconferences
I don't completely disagree with you here. But I think a distinction needs to be made between national papers and local papers. I find it completely plausible that small city papers, such as the AnnArbor and RockyMountain Newspapers, could have continued operating profitably if it were legal to telemarket. If the stats are correct, newspapers were suggesting that 60% of their print subscription sales were generated using telelmarketing. Let's be real here, there is an entire (older) generation of people who don't yet feel comfortable reading news online. Since these old newspapers did not adjust well to the operating on the internet in the first place, it can be assumed that their core market for print must have still existed only their sales channels were murdered. What do you think?
One minor quibble: as far as I can tell, Apple is actually mostly shipping drives manufactured by Toshiba, which don't seem to be rebrands of Samsung's tech. The way to tell is to look in System Profiler; Toshiba drives will be labeled "Apple SSD TS128" or "Apple SSD TS256", while Samsung will be "Apple SSD SM256" (they only seem to show up in the 256GB option, and even most of those are Toshiba).

Anyway. I recently picked up a new MacBook Pro and went for the (256GB, ended up with Toshiba) SSD option, and I've got to say I don't ever plan to go back to a mechanical drive if I have the choice. It's not just the flashy-but-pointless things like boot time or first-time application launching. It's the fact that most of my life consists of reading, paging and grepping through lots of files, and that is stupid fast with the SSD. I don't worry too much about write performance, because typically I'm in an incredibly read-heavy workflow.
"I do a lot of high-end stuff now,"

What you mean by high-end? im asking because im looking into consulting as a career option, and want to know what people's doing.
Any hindsight will be appreciated.
s/women/people/g
Interesting story...but did anyone happen to browse his site and read the previous article? It is a bit sketchy...

http://lovelornprogrammer.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-stop-p...
Last paragraph made me laugh out loud, but perhaps not intentionally. Flagged.
Messy Code is not Technical Debt
With tagging and/or search.

Yes.

Think of a household or service disaster, and ask whether it could've been saved/improved by asking the right question at the right time.
Sketchy but so cool! It's like a sciency relationship hack mixed with taboo and unknown side effects!

Edit: I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but reading about it is interesting. I had no idea that there was nitrous oxide in my house.
Hack Heartbreak with Household Chemicals
While I wouldn't recommend WhipIts as a cure for love lost, they can be fun if you like that sort of thing.
Very dense, the kind of book that a book geek writes.

When i read The DaVinci Code years later, it feeled like a very decaffeinated (really "de-lots of things") version of Foucaults Pendulum. It also feels like it spawned this sort of genre of history-mystery-conspiracy-airport-and-beach-novel.
I actually somewhat disagree with the premise of this article, but I found it quite thought-provoking. From my standpoint as a programmer, the concept of "messy code as technical debt" is too valuable as a tool to get my manager on board with rewriting & refactoring to get rid of. I would consider ceding "messy code" as part of my definition, but only if an equally expressive phrase were coined in its stead.
Whoa. A much, much simpler version:

http://www.rxvitality.com/
"I have to admit that I like the idea that as an American I could walk up to President Obama, address him as "Mr. President", and then hold an intelligent conversation as fellow citizens. That's pretty cool."

I couldn't help but think of this Ronald Reagan joke.

"I told him the joke about the American and the Russian who were arguing about how much freedom they had. And the American finally said to the Russian, ``Look,'' he said, ``I can walk into the Oval Office. I can pound the President's desk, and I can say, `Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country.''' And the Russian said, ``I can do that.'' And the American said, ``You can?'' He says, ``I can go into the Kremlin. I can walk into the General Secretary's office. I can pound the desk and say, `Mr. General Secretary, I don't like the way President Reagan's running his country.'''"

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/072986e....
Secrets of the Symbolics Console
Then shouldn't it be "A programmer's wife"?
"And in fifty more years? Guess what? They'll be feeling the same way about us."

Sounds like progress.
I think people overestimate Microsoft's power of persuasion. I mean yes, they can threaten a company whose main business is to sell PCs. They can do that because that company then loses the price battle with its competitors.

But a company like Sony that has investments in music, movies, cinema gear, game consoles, home appliances, digital cameras, hand-held devices and God knows what other fields ... I don't think it can be threaten this easily, DOJ/EU intervention or not.
I agree, I read this and I just didn't see how developers were "being raped." The users? Yeah, they got screwed.

It's one thing when AT&T leans on Apple to prevent a Google voice app, which somehow AT&T feels threatens them. Or even the hazy definition of porn that is applied to other apps, I suspect Apple is completely within their rights but I can understand some of the developer outrage. It's entirely different when developers want to cash in quickly and put out buggy and inferior software quickly and hope to be one of the "made a couple million in a month on the iPhone" stories. If you don't want "one star reviews" then don't submit one star software. And since when is it Apple's job to identify these defects? If anything, Apple is doing it's paying customers a service here.

You don't get too many chances to screw up in front of your customers without it having an impact.
TED Talk: Adjustable liquid-filled eyeglasses [video]
You've backed up your comment with one 2 minute long video - that is a response to a heckler?

Hicks performed for over 10 years - and covered a lot of ground during that time. If you see his performances as juvenile or foul, you've missed a lot of the brilliance, and humour that I have found in him.

For those curious about him though, here's a lazy link to youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search...
"What to make of that? Was he a genius? An evil slave-holder?"

Yes.
The legwork is in determining which badges are available and applicable to your specific sites. Here's an example:

Publishers: WoW forum, StackOverflow, HotOrNot.com

Consumer (me): Hacker News

As HN, I obviously don't want to display the HotOrNot badges, probably just the SO stuff. So, I set it up to pull those. Not too bad. Now imagine that there are hundreds of producers, some that make sense, and many that dont. You probably have to do a fair amount of digging to find those that make sense for your site, and a lot probably fall into a grey area. Then, you may find that only 1% of your userbase uses any particular 3rd party badge-producer. So you have a choice: include lots of badges, most of which will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of users who see them, or include only the most popular badges, which means the service ends up dominated by a few big producers (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

I guess I'm having difficulty articulating, but I'm just thinking that as someone who runs a community site, I don't want to go digging through dozens of other sites' badges to determine what they mean and if they're applicable to my site. Plus, I don't want to have to re-do this every couple weeks to add any new badges that have appeared in the system. And, the only end result I see is being able to decorate user profiles with bling that is meaningless to the majority of the other users on the site.
No clue, I voted him up and was tempted to vote masklinn down for being redundant (but didn't).
Yikes!

Sorry about the misinformation. I said that based on how he closes "Last Colony" -- he makes it pretty clear he's done for a while.

I guess the lure of the steady paycheck is a tough thing to resist.
LDAP schema, LDIF tools for .NET
A new, open-source API for working with Lightweight Directory Interchange Format (LDIF) and LDAP. Useful to almost anyone who does directory services in DotNET.
if(x < -10) print("whee");
Few seem to be able to take an email and easily make it into an event - just a regular email dragged from or forwarded from an existing MUA parsed for a start date (earliest date mentioned in the body), time, duration, people who need to know about it (sender and recipient at least).

Easy synch is vital.
eHow kind of does that:

http://www.ehow.com/search.aspx?s=hot+water&Options=0
Well yes, I understand that they would claim that murdering schoolgirls is good, taken in isolation. Of course the act has to be taken in context.

The distinction I'm after is this:

Nate's brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school serves a greater good, which overwhelms whatever bad is inherent in the act.

Your brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school and killing everyone inside, in this situation, is unambiguously good.

My problem is that I don't believe that the Taliban, in general and as a rule, are completely without a trace of Nate's description. If there's any evidence at all that I'm right, and I think there is, then recognizing this gives us at least something to work with-- makes them less alien.

However, I do understand your overall point about the danger of ascribing moral bases across cultural lines, and you may well be right. We've waded into territory where I'm largely a layman.
Or having your history disabled.
"There’s a Mac Edition of the Vertex, unfortunately it’s no different than the regular drive - it just has a different sticker on it and a higher pricetag."

As a longtime mac user, this kind of thing drives me crazy.

Also the article talks about Windows XP and Windows 7 but doesn't mention anything about TRIM support in Mac OS X. Is this something that needs to be enabled at the kernel level? Does anyone know the status of this command with the Snow Leopard kernel?
I don't know if I'd say simpler. It's different, and both have their pros and cons.

I think it would depend on how many different pills you're taking at once. For me, I liked the way the Maya was laid out in a grid. It makes it easier to see the big picture.
$80 for a pillbox is pushing it, but I can see the value in this product. But a $30/mo subscription fee? That's ridiculous.

If you pushed me, I could see $5/mo, maybe, but $30 is just silly.
What do you do when they aren't willing to do a lot, and don't have great intentions, but rather the intent to just slip by with "good enough"?
Awesome tools!!!
Crazy, I had this same idea around the beginning of the year and actually fooled around for a couple hours working on a prototype. It'd be great if someone actually made this :)
Attributes of good research
If they would bring the HTC Hero in to multiple providers they would see a pretty significant jump in users I would imagine.

Although, that new Nokia looks pretty great, I might be switching to it if T-Mobile doesn't end up getting the Hero, bad choice ignoring the Hero for the one they used for the mytouch.
I just read that Haidt essay, and I'm hooked; thanks for the link.

I hadn't heard of the fire in Saudi Arabia, but yes, that's just the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I'm finding all these anecdotes leaving me a bit unimpressed. I installed Snow Leopard on my home machine on Saturday, and since then I have been through two 3~4 hour work sessions with Photoshop with no trouble. (To be fair my anecdote is no further proof of anything, I just thought I'd share for the sake of a more complete picture.)
I want to hate IE 8, but this promotion is actually pretty cool.

I love this part: "we will double the donation for people upgrading from Windows Internet Explorer 6". That's music to my ears.
Given internet access, one could build such a thing pretty easily atop SpringPad, which has pretty extensive template generation and sharing features built in:

http://springpadit.com

I used to work with a number of these guys. Given what I know about how the site works, they could probably get you off and running pretty quickly in the unlikely event that it doesn't already do what you want.
It took a minute to wrap my head around it, but this thing has really got me thinking:
http://www.linkedprocess.org/

Summary: XMPP extension protocol to create remote VMs and inject code into them, language agnostic, asynchronous (you can leave the job running).

Until now, when I heard "distributed computing", I thought of number crunching, protein folding, etc. which doesn't excite me.

But think of it this way: with a ubiquitous system like this, you are effectively decoupling applications from resources. Instead of inventing formats to serialize data, or protocols to transfer it around, or RPC schemes to provide remote services, you just make everything available
locally in a sandboxed VM. Consumers inject code to assemble and transfer just the data they need, when they need it, with the power to deal with whatever constraints the network places on their particular use case.

Creating local APIs, in practice, is vastly easier than creating network protocols, especially when it comes to cooperation and standards. So... move the cooperation boundary to the easy part of the pipeline.
None other than that if you or somebody else builds it let me know, I'll be a user for sure. That's an excellent idea.

Combine it with a todo list service maybe ?
This is unbelievably awesome. Can you imagine what we could achieve if every company had this level of transparency?
These look very much like the Wave search keywords, which work well if you can remember them.
If you're doing LDAP on .NET, try these as well:

http://www.codeplex.com/LINQtoAD

http://www.hookedonlinq.com/LINQ2LDAP.ashx
I disagree in the situation where there is a business case for slinging something fast out there: sometimes it can, and certainly has for me, move the project forward in terms of money or some other short term goal. So be it, one can't fight gravity in certain situations (i.e., create time that simply doesn't exist). If your goal is to merely create great code then I guess that does not apply but I suspect few (working) people are actually in that situation.
Are You Ready for Open-Source Hardware?
Beyond search:  Better browsing via memorization games (e.g., for libraries)?
For example, consider a game to help people memorize the first three digits of the Dewey Decimal Classification. How useful would that be?
Apart from the usual seed money do you ever invest more in a startup, either as YC or as an angel?
Previously posted and killed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795670
Is it illegal to synthesise partial DNA to match a particular fingerprint? If not then it doesn't matter if criminals can't do it they just call a lab and get them to make it up - looks like a good opportunity for a lab that doesn't care where it gets it's money from; or a sideline for a morally ambiguous student/lab-tech.
Whether or not the government consists of individuals is really irrelevant. The government, regardless of who happens to there at any point in time, is an entity onto itself. Much like a corporation is an entity apart from the people running it. So in one sense the government of today is different than the government of the 50s (different people minding the shop); but in a legal sense it is exactly the same (it's the same shop). So the people minding the shop should are in no way personally responsible, they do have a responsibility for addressing valid grievances (whether or not they were running the shop at the time).
Personally I think <- and := may be ugly, but at least they avoid the = vs. == legibility and typing nightmare. Ugh.
Oh man, a visit to your house is always gonna make me feel jealous... damn geek children too :)
Most people, until very recently, did not care in the slightest about 'apps' on cell phones. You guys are thinking way too much like silicon valley geeks about this.
Brave or Brazen? Bold Tactics Don't Always Get the Job
A 5 Minute Intelligence Test for Kids
Interesting idea.

How would you deal with differences of opinions in what should be on the checklist for a topic? Wiki-style colloboration?
Mozilla's "bespin" collaborative development system
Worked well on iPod Touch 2G 3.0

The external links got stuck in the on position, and the Todo demo flickered the row when checking/unchecking items.
I don't think compete.com is all that accurate either. I saw some numbers on twitter.com and it reports around 30k uniques per month -- a little low for a site that gets a few million tweets a day. By comparison, quantcast.com reports twitter getting around 31 million uniques per month -- much more plausible.
New Windows Mobile phones due in October, but expectations are low
EBay backs out of Skype in $2.75 billion deal
Tetris: It thickens your cortex
http://chcheck.com

You can create checklists, create and track changes between instances, diff changes between the master and instances, create iterative checklists, embed checklists in other checklists and set dependencies. Also the interface was built with usability and flexibility in mind.

I have also added task, data list, comment, contact and document management since all of those are necessary for a good process management tool.

My inspiration for this was the fact that process and workflow management is a pain point for individuals and small businesses and there have been no easy-to-setup, user focused solutions out there.

I will be putting up a directory of public checklists in the near future, once the rest of the product is stable and usable.

I was waiting to post this but until I was ready to open signups but I have working on it for the last 4 months.

Email me if you want to be a Beta user: daniel at chcheck dot com. There are some bugs but it is definitely usable.
http://chcheck.com - daniel at chcheck dot com if you wanna try it out
I always thought it was best to focus on what I did best (application software) and leave the infostructure to others. Until I saw this:

Raw Drives $81,000
Backblaze $117,000
Dell $826,000
Sun $1,000,000
NetApp $1,714,000
Amazon $2,806,000
EMC $2,860,000

I had no idea. Kinda makes one rethink what business they want to be in.
The GUI: The early years
I love how open they are about their solution, and I also want one for Christmas:)
Tool of the Day: Get Organized with Springpad (usefultools app review)
Here is an animation showing how it works:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/20/Rouleaux_trian...
all these are create ideas and built into http://chcheck.com -- the focus is also on process and workflow management for small businesses and teams