skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why walk when you could use wheels to go fast! i bike or blade everywhere! (and i mean literally use wheels as in exertion. it's so much more fun than sitting on a machine.)

buses suck. they are biker killers. i always thought this was a shame since public transportation and self transportation are on the same environmental team. i've had buses seriously try to run me over (turn right even though i'm sitting in the bus lane making eye contat with the bus driver who is yelling at me, honking and not slowing the turn). to say nothing of the accidents that have put my friends in the hospital (bus smoosh).
According to their site, they claim to be treating "temporary tinnitus" of the kind that is brought on by exposure to loud sounds. Being a "temporary" symptom, I'm assuming that they are claiming to relieve it sooner than it would otherwise clear up naturally -- that's frequently an area where medical quacks operate.

Here is a link from Wikipedia to a site at UC-Irvine http://today.uci.edu/iframe.php?p=/news/release_detail_ifram... about substantially the same thing and you can listen to a sample of the therapeutic sound for free.

I also have the chronic (and unexplained) kind of tinnitus and my understanding is that there is no treatment for it. I know it can be quite bothersome for some people.
The learn more link doesn't do anything in MobileSafari.

Nice simple and clear introduction.

Your target market are business execs that are currently paying a lot more than free for thus service. Convincing them that your app is stable and credibile is your challenge.
Exploring How We Connect, And What It Means
It's an interesting idea and it seems a lot quicker to setup a call than going through FreeConference.com. However, I'm a little more methodical and the site doesn't explain how the process works.

A few questions come to mind:
- Who are you and why are you giving away free conference calls?
- Will participants hear ads during the call?
- Is there a limit on the number of participants?
- What about international callers (btw what country is this for?)

I like the clean and simple design and I encourage you to keep it that way. Perhaps linking to a FAQ or a page with a little more background.

Good luck and congrats on the release!
When I work on a proof, I worry about whether I've really proven it. How can I prove the proof? Yes, there are automatic theorem verifiers/provers (things like COQ), that guarantee correctness... provided you haven't introduced any other errors in the transcription, and the theorem verifier itself is perfectly bug-free...

It makes me think that an obsession with absolute truth is a misplaced priority, and perhaps a better view is that mathematics does not provide absolute proofs, but just a measure of certainty - like any other field, just much higher. And the real point of mathematics is something that you can sense is true, that is beautiful, and works correctly whenever you try it out.

I would be interested to know how any professional mathematicians here see it.
Oracle has owned the important parts of MySQL (InnoDB/InnoBASE) for a few years now, and that hasn't stopped them from fixing bugs and adding features in InnoDB.
Pimpin' [Software Projects] Ain't Easy
We can solve those problems when they become relevant.

That's the point. They won't become relevant until actual misions make them relevant.

Until we know what's out there we can't know when we'll want to send people far away.

Add to this that we won't want to send people far away because we haven't (still) the right technology and you have a nasty vicious circle.

This remembers me those other news on HN: the duck tape programmer. We need a duck tape exploration program, that's it :-)
That would be the next level feature - ability to define your own pass key that you pass on to invitees and change every time.

Professional conf systems offer that all the time
Nice. I was wondering how you did this. I've not used dropio phone numbers before, but I've done work with twilio. You could certainly add some killer features using twilio. Very nice app.

[edit] Actually, I'm not sure about twilio's conference call abilities, so maybe I spoke too soon.
Agreed. Also just remembered that Google Maps has public transit route-finding in major cities. I'm not sure if this is based on scheduled times or actual times (as reported by services like NextMUNI), but it's a fantastic service.
Brandable domain names for sale
Like I mentioned in a previous comment, the phone number is provided by dropio for the time being, while I make the switch to Twilio and add a 1-800 number instead of a NY one (if I can figure out a way to even out the costs.).

My target audience isn't really business execs, rather the more causal web users market who want to collaborate together. Let's say a twitter user and his/her followers, or a freelancer and his/her client(s).
Wow. Call me crazy, but it seems odd that Joel's original duct tape post should generate so much chatter. Maybe I'm the crazy one?
I still don't get to pick my own personal conf number with this approach, do I?
Especially given the fact that so many of the "conventional" treatments for tinnitus (like conditioning) seem more psychological than medical.
You are not crazy. It is just people on both side of the debate are feeling a little extra defensive about the subject.
Like it. When I use this service, what am I agreeing to as far as privacy? How do I know whether or not my call is recorded? How comfortable should I feel about discussing confidential information?
Do Americans have bad taste?
For the High Crime of the Heresy of Doubt against the Mathematics, I do hereby Sentence 10ren to a reading of the Principia Mathematica until such time as he reads the Proof of 1 + 1 = 2.

Which, according to the great Wikipedia (against which no Doubt is permitted either), occurs first in Volume 2, page 86, which comes after the nearly 700 page Volume 1, which does mention the Issue on page 379 of volume one but quickly moves on to more Important Things.

...

Anyhow, I'm not merely being sarcastic, although I couldn't resist the above. My point is rather that this is a deep question that mathematics has pondered itself, and learning about the history of the Principia Mathematica and the early 20th century of mathematics in general can be very interesting. How modern mathematicians see it, I don't know, I'm just saying the history is also very interesting.
Why is a desktop even necessary for a Chrome OS? Why not put everything in browser tabs? Want to run OpenOffice? Just lick an icon, or select a bookmark, and run it in a tab. If a tab has its own process, why have the Taskbar and tabs? Just have a tab per application, plus some sort of Expose-like thing within each tab.

If one developed a plug-in for VNC, this would be relatively easy to do in open source. Just run each app in its own virtual image, with the window manager tweaked to send an event asking for fullscreen to the first window that opens.

My girlfriend ran across a man-on-the-street survey, and it turned out that a big percentage of users aren't really clear on what a browser is anyways.
Swarm - Concurrency with Scala Continuations
Fabulous Adventures In Coding : String interning and String.Empty
I agree completely about people putting others down. I would call it more "bullying" than elitist. But that's just semantics.

I also agree with the claim that more disadvantaged people will make more noise to get noticed. That's because they have to.

The alternative is to simply accept the fallacy that people from elite backgrounds are simply better than you.

> There is also a tendency, in some of these people making a lot of noise, to do it in the form of diminishing others.
So likewise, what many non-elite persons perceive is that, through various overt and subtle messages, that elites broadcast that they are better than non-elites. Perhaps through acts like social exclusion or hiring discrimination. I don't think that instances of a person saying "~~~I~~~ went to Harvard, and ~~~you~~~~ didn't so nyah" are all that common (but they do happen).

I think the author gets this and does in fact rail against this practice as a form of bullying.
Introducing Qool CMS. A New Open Source CMS
What if online business model innovation is slowing down?
Negate Competition by 'Owning' Your Space
The bridges you will burn by broaching this concern are far more than any good feeling you will gain in yourself. Therefore, keep silent.

The bio will probably be down within a few months, but your name on the directory might stay unless your replacement is very active with your clients. They're servicing the clients that you no longer are the best way they can. Let them.
> Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now?

No, but the confusion comes from my ambiguous use of "copy".

Patents cover the use of mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y. Copying, for copyright purposes, is copying bytes (ignoring the whole look and feel thing). It's reasonably easy to use software mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y without copying bytes.

You seem to think that purpose should be limited to "H.264". If, for the purposes of argument, the relevant mechanism actually is useful for many other kinds of video encoding, it's unclear why that limitation makes sense. If the mechamism is worthy of protection for one protocol, why should it be unprotected when used in another?

Note that protocol ownership is different from mechanism ownership. The former is more akin to trademark, as in "real H.264" as opposed to some knockoff. (Coke vs Pepsi as it were.)
Good points. I will add a privacy disclaimer. And no, calls are not recorded, neither is your phone number ;)
Reasonable critique but I think it sidesteps a few things. Indesign and Photoshop are stable as hell, pretty much always have been.

I think most of the stability problems he points at arose when integrating Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver into CS. Basically created a split of differing UI standards and buggy software.

I think the single best point made here is that not everyone uses every single feature in every single app. If they could give us quicker access to our oft-used features I'd likely be happier (and they've started addressing this with the new panels structure, I just want some keyboard functions to toggle them now)!
It is just that people don't get that methodologies are just rules of thumb. They are not laws.

There are people that will develop wonderful code using TDD, while others will do the same without it. It is a matter of skill and personal preferences.
No. I will find a way to implement custom pin numbers if/when I move to Twilio for telephony.
Timothy Fitz - Continuous Deployment [video]
Oops, direct link is http://saucelabs.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/continuous-deployment%E2%80%94the-video/
This is really impressive. I'd love to be using it. The trivial interface for setting up a call is absolutely something I'd value over Freeconference.

The security of this scheme worries me, though. Here's several requests for the same key:

Location: /chinashop

Location: /chinashop9556

Location: /chinashop3025

Location: /chinashop1230

Location: /chinashop5900

It looks like I could probably write a little program to slow-poll for conferences on targeted keywords and find out other people's conference IDs.
Pidgin Stores passwords in clear text
You are right. As I have mentioned numerous times (I will add it to the site later), the phone number is provided by Dropio. I will move to Twilio in the near future to provide a 1800 number instead of a New York one.

In fact, most of the information you want is in the links "learn more" in the homepage, and "about this number" in the number page.
> buses suck. they are biker killers. i always thought this was a shame since public transportation and self transportation are on the same environmental team.

That's not how humans work.
Sometimes following orders is not the correct thing to do and it takes an above average intellect to challenge and to put the brakes on bad decisions.
Random numbers are added to the name if it already exists. I will probably add optional password protection in the near future. Also, I don't want to take much credit for the system, because, as I said, it is provided by Dropio for the time being - I just built a simple front end as a proof of concept.

If I see enough demand, I will make my own system with the Technology from Twilio, which would allow me to have more control over the system, and add a bunch of extra features like optional call recording and whatnot.
I feel like I keep a fairly brisk pace when I walk the mile and a half to work, and it takes me 45 minutes. I feel like I'd have to jog to break that pace.

It takes me 20-30 minutes to make the same trip on the subway, 20-25 minutes by bike, and less than ten minutes if my wife drops me off via car.
Just wanted to point out a few differences to people hitting PGSQL after getting their feet wet with MySQL.

1. While installing PGSQL get your configuration variables correct, or it wont work out-of-the-box (kernel.shmmax, autovacuum, shared_buffers)

2. learn about authentication. PGSQL depends on authentication of the OS ("sameuser" on pg_hba.conf). MySQL behaves by default as the "password" authentication method of PGSQL.

3. Learn about template databases. Your first database is a template database.

4. PGSQL has "pg_" databases and slash commands (\dt, \connect, \q) for system administration.
Some of our products are plug-ins for InDesign, and other than occasional PS work, I ignore everything else in the suite.

InDesign itself is rock solid, and a pretty impressive piece of work. (Even if they are slowing down on development--I guess there's not all that much to do with it.)

On the UI, yes, it's a kinda half-way house. But most print-oriented designers live in InDesign, so they probably get used to it as their own little world.

That said, everything else about Adobe's suite (updating, serialization, etc.) is just punishingly bad, as Merlin points out.

It does tend to make one despair.

The main problem with Adobe that I can see is that the suits took over once Chuck Geschke and John Warnock left. These guys were consummate engineers, and their products reflected that fact.

And, then, to add insult to injury, Macromedia took over Adobe, and pretty much turned the company into a Flash-only place. I hate Flash and all that it stands for.

Oh well, maybe I'll whine privately at Chuck...
ITA tried this with ILcelerate:

http://ilcelerate.wordpress.com/

And it doesn't look like there's going to be a 'second' annual ilcelerate =)
I wasn't expecting to see this in HN. I suffer CH, but my last cluster was two years ago. I am also knocking on wood.
They have the ability to connect calls, which is basically the same thing. I bult it with Dropio first as a proof of concept, as I did not want to spend much time with Twilio if no one was going to use it (TWIML is not very Ruby-friendly if accessed through Twilio's ruby library).
Integrating With Google Wave
I'm not the author, but off the top of my head:

* Audio recording and storage

* Speech -> text for transcripts

* Fax/email results to those who didn't attend

* Embedded meeting agenda in the web interface

* Voting app that participants can use during the conference
Nice idea.

A few features that might be neat:
- let people rate courses
- have groupings of courses (the newbie section, the system/compiler/database section, the OOP section, the algorithm section, etc)
- tag courses with their programming languages/topics/levels, etc
- search by keyword (could be offset by having tags)

I like the logo and really like that you have free ebook links on some of the courses.
How to setup OpenID for your domain with Google Apps
Your answer seems extremely biased.

So from your perspective, an employer should be able to use and/or profit off of it's former employee's identity and reputation indefinitely after that employee leaves?
I'd note that there is already a company called huddle http://www.huddle.net/
and given they are fairly well known and do online collaboration, I'd suggest getting a different name.
Excellent Resources - Testing a Website
It wouldn't work.

There are plenty of companies around here who could swing the money to fund YC-sized groups at YC-sized investments. But YC is extracting 6% from promising startups for the same reason that 37signals is extracting millions of dollars for a web-based bulletin board: the total package is compelling.

In YC's case, you're getting access to a hands-on software startup fanatic who's words you already hang on, plus the network of VC's his team has built up over the last N years. Part of the YC pitch, whether Graham says it or not, is that it ends in a showcase "demo day" which seems to improve your odds of scoring an "angel round". And in Autumn of '09, it's hard to get around the brand value that YC has. Getting "accepted" into YC is a marketing win.

I don't think cloning YC is a smart play for Chicago. It's possible to not like what YC stands for: the notion, implied or stated, that starting a company is similar to applying for college. There's got to be another way to nurture startups in Chicago, one better suited to the climate that we have here: hard workers flying under the radar independent of financiers and other gatekeepers.

Maybe there's some kind of umbrella contracting thing that we can come up with.
This is the biggest question I have and it's what keeps me from venturing out there.

To me it seems like the logistics pale in comparison to getting some momentum going (like the classic college grad's dilemma of needing experience to get a job).
The problem is... that's exactly how quacks operate.
Yeah, I see the random numbers there... they're just too small. =)

Use a 128 bit hex string from /dev/urandom or Java's securerandom or whatever you have that isn't PHP's mt_rand, and you'll be fine.
If/when I move to Twilio, I might charge a (very) small amount to power users. Twilio isn't really that expensive and I'm not interested in profiting from the app in the near future. Dropio is as hands-off as it gets, so I hope I can achieve the same level of simplicity with Twilio.
This is beautiful. Simple, immediate and actually useful to real people. Great stuff. I hope you don't add any features that will compromise its simplicity.
Good ideas. With Twilio I can easily do the recording and the transcribing, and build my own mailer for the emailing. Not sure how many people would use the fax thing, though, probably business execs but that is not my main market.
I entirely agree with that. It was just that the concert-CD idea also caries the implication '...and if just 1% of those people play the CD to a friend or come to the next gig...'. As someone else pointed out, we really don't know anything about the ad or the magazine it was published in, which might have seemed very well targeted to the artist (eg the ad was near a positive review/feature of the new album). It's very hard to judge the situation without more context, which is the problem with FOAF stories in general.
Do you live in the Alps?

Assuming reasonably flat ground, it's not hard to walk a mile in well under 20 minutes. Bicycling around 15 mph ain't too hard, either -- which would get you 1.5 miles in 10 minutes.
Well when I think conference calls I think business execs, but maybe that's just me. :-p
One of huddle.net's features is conferencing. I noticed they have an affiliate program. I could put a link that says something along the lines of "Looking for something more heavyweight? Check out Huddle.net!"
More of the Java programs have been re-written for quad core, which is partly why those programs faster and fatter.
Thanks for the comments about Rev. A few responses:

Yes, the product has historically been something of a niche desktop development tool (perhaps of particular interest to former HyperCard developers). That said it has seen its share of success, with large scale enterprise applications, real time systems and commercial shrink wrapped software, along with the tools, utilities, shareware and educational software you would expect for this type of tool.

The big news is that we are relaunching the product this year on the Web as a mainstream, modern language with a free entry-level version for both the browser and server. Its fast, efficient, with modern features like nested arrays and OO behaviors. To support this relaunch there will be some major new site sections on getting started with literally hundreds of code examples and walk-throughs, so if you're interested please do check the site out again over the next few weeks.

Contrary to the popular myth, I would argue that English is not a verbose method of programming, it requires much, much less code than a traditional lower-level language. And, the typical programmer spends a lot more time reading code than writing it. English is highly readable, doing a much better job of reflecting the way the human mind works. Once you get into the mindset, it really is very productive. We have a really exciting launch coming up and I think we can make a positive impact on the way that certain types of software gets written.

Kevin Miller
RunRev CEO
Ask HN: ideas for little projects you have?
I'm looking for a little project I can do, something open source. My requirements are that it not require anything too specialized (no computational fluid dynamics) and that I can get a bare minimum proof of concept running in a few hundred lines of code, or about one solid hacking session. Like the simplest possible version of it that could possibly work.

Any ideas?

If I implement any ideas here I will release it under the generally accepted free software license of your choice (MIT, GPL, GPLv3, Apache, etc.) and will report back here with code to share.
didn't you know? everyone loves hearing about themselves through communal psychoanalysis and horoscope interpretations.
Reverse Engineering the Brain and the ELIZA Effect: Is Believability Ethical?
I thought unofficial just meant not sanctioned for public consumption by Google, not that it wasn't actually ChromeOS at all.

ReactOS is _not_ an unofficial "Windows".
dimdim?
I wonder if there's any value in "lobbying" the TSA to implement rectal searches on the basis of this story. It's the reducito ad absurdum tactic: if the lobbying were successful, there's no way there wouldn't be backlash, right? As a result, we'd have people lobbying for sensible security, right? Please?

Of course, the worst case scenario is that the TSA caves in to the pressure, starts rectal searches, and keeps doing it... and then I get searched.
See if you can register huddle.me and call your company that :)
For sure, but I would use conference calls to talk with my twitter followers, or collaborate with clients (I used to freelance for a while).
Feltron vs. Kickstarter
Mr Mohr, GV has been only around for less than a year. Please give them some time to grow some legs and feet to stand on. Perhaps the limitation is not cost at this point, but the infrastructure. Again, they are still in private beta, meaning they are not claiming to be a legitimate service providing service to everyone, unlike A&T or Sprint or Verizon.

I've lived in a lot of different places in my life, and AT&T certainly does not provide DSL or a phone line in all of the United States.
It's taken...
> 2) MySQL is used and proven to scale on very large installments (Yahoo, Facebook, Google - just to name a few). Postgre's usage is much lower (Skype and Reddit from those I know of)

We use Postgres (as well as MySQL) extensively at Last.fm, including on our terabyte+ main database handling many thousands of transactions per second. Except for the lack of decent replication, I have nothing bad to say about it.

At a large scale, it's as easy as MySQL to tune (if not easier).
I thought that Adobe bought Macromedia...
Use Exchange's MailTips scripting to save help desk headaches