skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My system is only meant to be used by humans. Software will still use the traditional filesystem.

Instead of the user supplying a filename/path for new content, they submit arbitrary metadata. When retrieving content, they query via a language called LQL (Library Query Language).

Basically the system works a lot like ID3 tags for mp3 files. 'Arbitrary metadata' is a lot like the fields for 'title', 'date', 'album', etc except they are arbitrary (you can use any set of key/value for metadata items)

Libraries can connect to other libraries. A 'Library' is much like an email inbox, except its one user per machine instead of multiple users per machine. Each library is 'addressed' via a domain name. All communication between libraries is done through HTTPS.

Traditional filesystems use a permission system that is very archaic. In 1960 it was common for there to be multiple users on one machine, but in 2014, everyone has their own machine. File permissions are useless, since I'm th one person who ever uses this computer. "Permissions" in the 2014 sense is which of my facebook friends gets to see these photos.
Lots of startups are creating or shifting lots of jobs, but I'm not sure they're the right kinds of jobs. I wish that that was explicitly mentioned. I'm not sure the creating/shifting is a big problem as much as it is just what the job is.

For example, all the rideshare companies are creating jobs, but if they're working longer and longer for less pay like the drivers are claiming, then I don't know if that's a good thing. Homejoy and Handybook etc. take a big cut from what I can tell, to the point that I'm considering just getting a cleaning company/individual directly instead of going through the convenient middleman. Alfred, the latest Disrupt winner, is just like huh? How is that supposed to pay more than minimum wage? Plus everyone loves the contracting workaround, which tends to benefit companies more than the contractor. Even the one company I can think of that doesn't seem to be too bad - Instacart - contracts as far as I can tell.

My side biz is owning a burger shop and I'm trying to pay more than minimum wage and giving out overtime to share what little wealth I have - and it makes me really happy when I see my employees happy and buying new iPhones and MacBook Airs. Would be nice if others followed suit. Not just a startup problem either... it's a potentially huge reason as to why Americans don't have disposable income any more. :/
Well, if you see it this way, then there is no way to not use files at all. You favorite song will always be a string of bits and you will have to store it on some persistent storage if you want to listen to it again after power cycling your device. You will also always need some metadata to remember where you stored the bits. You can now decide how to call your bits - files, rows, objects, ... - and make some choices about the kind and structure - flat, hierarchical, indexed, ... - of your metadata, but there is not much more to the whole thing. Maybe you can add some goodies like redundancy, garbage collection, deduplication and what not, but in the end there is not that much of a difference between files, databases, registry entries, user account information or even objects in memory - everything is just a bunch of bits with some metadata.
Oh dear god, the complaints are full of people saying, "well, I don't know when my employees are working". But then they readily admit that they are meeting their "production quotas". So what's the problem?

The entire point of the work-from-home program was to give employees leeway in when and where they work, as long as they do the work in a satisfactory manner and meet their deadlines (and it sounds like they are).

Now, I think the whole federal government should be massively scaled down, but in this case, I don't see what the problem is. If the managers aren't happy with the employees output, then give them more work and shorten their deadlines. It sounds like employees are meeting whatever work quotas they are given.
To be fair, most of the magazine is still dedicated to action games in ancient platforms, which have aged poorly. C64 and Spectrum were still the top bill, with some space dedicated to Amiga and Atari ST, both of which were rather short lived. The PC giant that was about to wake up was nowhere to be seen.

We also have to remember that Shareware games only really got real traction with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, which would not come out for years. Keen was always more of a cult classic than anything else.

And despite this, I see an ad for one Sid Meier's Pirates, which is a classic. An Amiga review for Cinemaware's It Came From The Desert, another big classic, getting a 95%. An entire page of clues on Indiana Jones 3, a tremendous adventure game. An ad for an old Dragonlance RPG/Action hybrid, which was pretty fun. A once page ad for one Sim City, which is about as important a game as it gets.

The top sellers for C64 and Spectrum are dismal, but on the Amiga/ST charts, I can't blame people for liking the Strider port, but we see one Space Quest 3 in there, and more Indy, Bloodwych, and the pretty good for it's time TV Sports Football, another Cinemaware classic.

Action games sold very well, and yet, like all action games, they are quickly surpassed by some of the same with some gameplay tweaks and better graphics. It's just an issue of genre longevity.

So based on my reading of the magazine, the games we remember from the era, barring a few exceptions, just happened to be the most popular games of the era outside of the action genre. They are all over the magazine.

So yeah, the great games were still there, and well reviewed.
How do you deal with weather? It's certainly a lot more comfortable to drive somewhere in pouring rain than it is to bike, even when well prepared. And that preparation takes time and effort. Not to mention trying to bike in winter.

I really really hate cars, but I can see why people prefer them.
An average federal indictment's stating of base facts ("on February 13th Nacchio sold 180,000 shares") is much more trustworthy than, say, the average Wikipedia page.

In court, the standard is that the prosecution should prove its case to the jury of the accused's peers beyond a reasonable doubt. That's great and should stay that way.

But for the purposes of Internet message board discussion, there's no need for that high of a threshold. The appeal didn't say Nacchio didn't insider-trade; just that his gains should be considered gains-less-taxes.
If you'd like to argue for a pure market system then please direct the poor to starve on your door step. Personally, I prefer having this social safety net but it comes with the responsibility of keeping employers from abusing the system as well with things like minwage. That is why how this is evil (read: unfair to other employers).

As the article states this guy gets DC bus rides for free. That annoys me. Homejoy users should pay the full cost of getting their home cleaned. It does not make sense for tax payers (including myself) to be providing a subsidy for home cleaning service.

Is this really the a wage floor or just indirectly abuse of the a social-safety net for cheaper services by the wealthy?
It's worth noting that the ubiquity of these "on a computer" type patents and similarly questionable other software patents is directly a result of the poor handling of the entire patenting process as well as general incompetence Ex: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/uspto-issues-patent-f...
It wouldn't surprise me if this was more widespread given my experience working with the US government, and everyone else I know that has worked with them has similar stories. When I did a contract for the FAA My coworker said to me sarcastically: "They take two hour lunches then take off Friday and still somehow manage to get 40 hours in. I only wish I knew how they did it so I could do the same"

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes. I'm sure your experience working with government is different.. Oh wait, you've never worked for them because if you had you'd know I'm right. I've lived in DC almost my whole life and I've got connections in almost every institution. If you think they're sharp as shit and work really hard you're in for a gigantic surprise.
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Random%20Number%20Generator
Git is pretty much only for versioning (specifically annotation of versioning). My system is more for indexing/sharing data.
Interesting premise, but I can't see a list of services you support on your site. Do you have such a list?
Nike Unveils High-Tech Team Plane for Pro Athletes
You are right, I don't understand the situation well enough to have an unbiased or objective opinion about it.
Swift vs. Objective-C: Which one should I learn?
Also came here to say the same thing. IIRC, it was also free-form data, so it was NoSQL before it was cool.

begins trailing off... I wonder if I still have any old PalmOS app code laying around on an old hard drive somewhere. Would be fun to have a look at that. I think that was the last time I did C++.
Actually, I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that you can't figure out a priori what's going to be awesome and what's going to be lame. The best way to be "consistent" is to be consistently doing a lot of stuff and then prune the lame. The next Minecraft won't spring fully-formed from Notch's brain, it will be the result of some tomfoolery he's involved in that hits him in the right way and becomes amazing because it's still something he wants to work on day after day until it has evolved into a great game.

Thus, criticizing Notch for "messing around" and having "no focus" is actively interfering with the creation of the next Minecraft!
TN isn't dual intent.
Posts like this are only allowed in the monthly "who is hiring" threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Hiring the cheapest programmers available generally doesn't work out well, especially if they are cheap and experienced.

Holding your nose up high and refusing to work for the prevailing wage generally doesn't work well, get a job, do something awesome for low pay, leverage that into something that pays well.

While most people were paying thousands of dollars a year going to school I was getting paid to learn tech working a shitty tech support job. While most of my colleagues were graduating, I was buying my first house at 22. (Yes, as tech support pay grade, no startup millions). Before tech support I was working at a warehouse stacking boxes and doing other day labour.

Don't complain about H1Bs work harder, faster, and smarter than them. An H1B is no different than any other motivated competitor.
Lessons learned teaching software development
check out MemSQL, we have an in-memory row store for real-time transaction processing, as well as a flash-optimized column store for batch processing. I'm a big believer in the convergence/unification of storage engines that enable analysis along a time continuum.
Although Multics didn't store "files" per se, but segments, which has a max size of 1 MiB of 9 bit bytes (36 bit CPUs). The were organized in a hierarchical manner, with '>' as the separator (vs. '/' for UNIX(TM) and its descendants, and '\' for MS-DOS and Windows since '/' was used in version 1 for argument :-( ), and were accessed in single level store fashion, mapped into your address space.

There was some time after its creation (as I remember hearing, at least) a "multi-segment file" abstraction created for data sets that were > 1 MiB, something of a kludge.
How about it being cheaper for companies to hire and maintain

Don't forget about being able to effectively deport them on a whim if they voice any objection over their treatment.
BeOS had a nice idea, although it still used files. It's file system doubled as a database, and you could add arbitrary columns to files. For example, contacts were empty files in a special directory, and had attributes like "address", "name" and so on. Mails were also stored in plain files, but unlike mbox/Maildir all the metadata was stored as attributes, not in the files, making it easy to process them with scripts, or to sort them in the file browser.

Its a lot like the never-finished WinFS from Microsoft.

Funnily, modern file systems (extfs3/4, NFTS, HPFS+?) all support extended attributes in some form or another. However, they are currently only rarely used: Mostly for the "this file was downloaded from the internet, do you really want to open it" flag. I wish more programs would use them to store interesting metadata, but it's basically a chicken and egg thing now.

Windows and GNOME also have concepts where you can have calculatable attributes - you have a little library that looks up metadata in a database or parses it from the file, and then serves it as an additional attribute on the file (visible in the file properties tab). You can see it e.g. on mp3s or word documents in windows. However, it doesn't seem to be widely used either, and I wouldn't be surprised if that function has been gutted out of GNOME lately.
Just managing disputes between rider and driver would cost more than that. Since you're the one running the credit cards, you're going to be on the hook for all chargebacks and fraud.

And are you going to vet drivers at all? Check that they have a license and insurance?
Browsers. Browsers are de facto operating systems (though typically running on another OS, not on bare metal), and they don't think in files. They handle windows, tabs, documents, document elements (DOM nodes) etc.
Its a conservative Supreme Court that had come down strongly in favor of free expression and religious freedom. E.g. Brown v. EMA, the video game free speech case. Different sides of the same coin.

What is insane to me are people who agree with Brown but disagree with Citizens United. A political movie isn't free speech, but Grand Theft Auto is?!
Nice development for trivial patents, but it makes me wonder if this could lead to people having to defend their (e.g., algorithm) patents by appeal to computational complexity or the physical constraints of human vs. computer memory, etc.
The last word of the references section of the article ("teaser") links to a more detailed comment about this -- from Hacker News 2 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4955201
Accessible HTML5 Video Player by the PayPal Accessibility Team
Oh, certainly. I just can resonate with the sentiment that these sites aren't the majority.

Even this site, honestly, is less than easy to deal with on a recurring basis. (Consider, hard to remember which was the top story three days ago at noon.) Specifically, sometimes I lose a story because I refresh and something plummeted off the page. Hard to have any idea how far to "scroll back" to see it.
So, you're not building a filesystem (because that's hard, and requires concrete engineering skills), but instead a glorified file metadata search?

So, MongoDB with a file URL? (Hint: that's you could implement the MVP of this, and if you use a URL you can even reference user files they don't store locally)

And file permissions are dead? Because nobody has kids that use the same desktop they do?

This is (from a technical standpoint) the silliest goddamn thing I've ever heard.

From a product standpoint, you could probably pitch and get a few M. Why the fuck not.
Does Swift have performance issues?
My wife would kill me if I left her alone for 3 months with a baby whilst she was pregnant.
I think implied here is that the quotas are insufficient for determining whether an examiner is doing work. I am sure that examiners and their supervisors would be at least somewhat aware if this were the case.

Based on the general quality of USPTO reviews for software patents, I would say it is pretty plausible that some of these people are getting credit for 'doing work' without actually doing their jobs. So few patents get extra scrutiny in court that I imagine many examiners could get away with that for ages - there'd be no external feedback to indicate that they are cheating.
Mobile app marketing: challenges in marketing social and photo apps
> How does one have a STEM degree and not have a job?

This can't possibly be a serious question. In today's perpetually feeble job market, there are talented folks everywhere with STEM degrees (and experience too) who are unemployed, under-employed, or working in jobs unrelated to their field of study.
This a surprisingly promising list of ideas, especially for an incubator to suggest. Things like internet infrastructure, ideally, are in the non-profit sector. And though YC does fund non-profits, I can't imagine they'd be happy with a swarm of unprofitable applicants coming in next round.
> invalidating software patents is an action that favours entrenched/moneyed interests

Not true. Large firms & patent trolls hold the patents and have the resources to deal with the legal expenses. Small innovative firms & sole professionals tend to not have legal departments, large amounts of capital (& time) to spend on legal "non-innovative" matters, nor do they have patent troves.

Invalidating the software patents increases freedom to create & innovate and reduces centralization of power, legal trifling, and bureaucracy.
I think the file metaphor is a must for the separation of OS and applications. Unless you have a better conceptual framework to deal with this problem, you'd probably live with "files".
Once again, you seem strangely convinced that I am obsessed with the "status symbol aspect" despite my repeated listings of the differences in features I care about. I'll try once more: the iPhone 6 is smaller, which I consider better because I have small hands. The bigger one has iPad-style landscape layout and a better camera that I care about. Notice how neither of those have anything to do with impressing anyone with my status. Notice also that I don't care that one happens to be called a phablet: it still contains features unrelated to the size that I want and don't understand why they left out of the smaller one, and I also fear the fragmentation of the app market for things designed for the bigger screen and arbitrarily not available for the smaller one (as has already happened in Apple's software).

And I absolutely care about the discrepancy of features with Android as well. I happen to stick with iOS since I develop on iOS, of course I'm sure you'll now respond that this is really subconsciously because I want to have the status of an obj-c programmer or something.
Show HN: Algorithms Rock
200 Please: Free site uptime and performance monitor
Given sama's enthusiasm for SpaceX, including as a "great example" in his blog post on the original new RFS, it seems unambitious for the RFS to mention space only in the context of robots and science.
The (ongoing) result of the Internet Slowdown
It's actually a fun and interesting real-world distributed computing problem.
You need computers w/ TV tuners in every major market across the country in order to get the _local_ broadcast news. The computers then FTP the data back to the central servers.

But you can't easily/cheaply get server racks in 100 cities that have cable TV lines going into the cages.

So you have to find reliable places to put all your distributed computers that have good TV signals, good upstream bandwidth, a person who can help reboot it when it crashes, and reasonable cost.
I discussed that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258032
Dumb, but practical AI would be a game changer. Look, I don't need HAL. I need a simple robot with enough vision processing and brains to vacuum up my house, pick up dirty clothes, and load the dishwasher.

We can't be too far from that. Even if that thing sold at $10k it would have buyers lined up.

Agreed about y-combinator not being the appropriate format for hard nuts to crack. Mobile stuff and low hanging fruit like disqus and dropbox? Sure. Breakthroughs that define how business and society works? That's probably going to come out of larger institutions that dont consist of 20 somethings living off ramen. This format can be seen as working with breakthroughs that are out there, but haven't been applied the right way or are under-monetized. TBL didn't need to invest TCP/IP, fiber networking, server kernels, etc. He just had to write HTTP.
Winkflash Shutting Down
Wife pointed this out. It's a bummer, they had really high quality prints.
I think the H.264 and MP3 patents basically patents math. I wonder if it can be invalidated using similar reasoning. The aforementioned Microsoft patents are on my wishlist for Satya BTW: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2014/08/my-wishlist-for-satya.h...
i probably think managers are concerned about the fact that, they don't have a say on work allocation and hence what can be considered total produce.If more people get away doing nothing, it can become an epidemic,hard to control .They are more worried that they are unable to manage these very basic values like honesty.
Dunno if it's a big deal. Most of the people coming here on H1-B visas aren't the highly-skilled workers that we actually expect; the vast majority of them go to garbage IT consulting companies like Infosys and Wipro.
This is a completely naive and subjective approach. Please enlighten me as to how you intend to tell the time in the absence of a compatible power supply and/or power grid. Or when that severely limited lithium ion battery stops taking a charge after a year of use. Even if you had acceptable answers to those questions, it still leaves one to question the need for something which implements a subset of the features my phone has at the same cost.

Mechanical watches are moving art and are rarely purchased out of need. With the advent of perpetual automatics, they approach the ideal of mechanical perfection - a miniature machine which can accurately track time (and many other features) in extreme environments without the need of a power source. As such, they continue to appeal to many different people - with higher end, more complicated designs continuing to come about at higher prices. I'm a software developer and I love my automatics for both their technical merits as well as their aesthetic beauty. To each his own
If anybody is working on the financial services one I would love to talk to you about it. My day job is in that industry and I think there is a ton of room for innovation. Sometimes it is hard to convince people in the industry of that as they retain the ideas they came up with. I recall hearing somebody say in a talk (or maybe on Twitter) recently that industry disruption happens from people outside of the industry rather than people inside the industry.

Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as being the way to go.

My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.
Excellent, this shifts the balance of power a little. Looks like the whole "everyone is a free agent" thing has some benefit for the little guys too.
My first Chrome Extension. Looking for constructive criticism and advice
Velocity Foundry Ribbon Cutting Ceremony