skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't looked exhaustively, but there are solutions out there to book appointments with your doctor or dentist, and there must exist some solution to book an appt with your professor, but what's needed here is something simpler, i think. it would be interesting to see what others say.

See also http://officehours.firstround.com/ and I think Fred Wilson does office hours now too. I wonder what tool, if any, PG uses?
"Optimists may accomplish more than realists, realists certainly accomplish more than pessimists, but optimists do many times as much damage. For example, nearly all "revolutionaries" and criminals are optimists. Lenin, Hitler, Sadam Hussein, Bernie Madoff, and probably all con-men and burglars were extremely optimistic. The conviction that they will never be caught is nearly universal among criminals. Many, perhaps most, excessive risk takers are optimists." From my blog, back in March, http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/optimism-is-not-ne... , it is something that has annoyed me for years.

Before someone starts throwing around "Godwin's Law", you should actually go and read a bit about Hitler's life, a serious optimism is one thing that comes across very strongly, from early on, through WWI and his time as a pretty revolutionary, to his decisions in WWII.
Ok I read a lot so I will just give you my favourite authors just in case someone is looking for new writers to explore. I have read the majority of books written by each of the ones below, and really cannot choose a favourite. So here they are:

sci fi:
PK Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Vonnegut (some of Bradburry's work may join this group but be careful not all of his stuff is brilliant)

crime:
raymond chandler, dashiel hammett

russian lang lit: dostoevsky, bulgakov

english lang lit: vladimir nabakov, joseph heller, evelyn waugh, joseph conrad

All of the above writers are absolutely brilliant and you will not be wasting your time picking up any of their books (except for bradbury, make sure you only get martian chronicles or farenheit 451).
Back in 2007, tech reviewers greeted Windows Vista fairly warmly.
And after hitting this bug, doing a clean install becomes much less of a hassle. Silver lining!
The equivalent exercise for the Windows PE file format:

http://www.phreedom.org/solar/code/tinype/
Also by Umberto Eco check out Foucault's Pendulum
Seriously hardcore
Try setting it to spawn a new tree every 1 or 2 frames; you get some amazing patterns around the outside.

Performance is good on Safari, even after a few minutes and fade turned off.
Yea... That page is next to useless. Had heard of them a while ago and thought they would have more write up then that on their home page.

Anyway, this is very simple to do. You first create a server that can authenticate you just for itself over the web. You send it your id, it sends a random string. You sign it and send it a random string of your own. Server signs your random string and sends it back. You both know you are authentic, server leaves a signed cookie at your end. Now this server can act as an openid server too. You give random web-app your openid residing on this server... random web app asks this server. It confirms or denies and life is good.
Microsoft Silverlight Vs Sun JavaFX Vs Adobe Flex/AIR
Robin Hobb's new book is available for pre-order
The general consensus is that a successful small family farm is a very rare and dying breed.
See: http://www.methlandbook.com/

Would be interesting to see counterexamples, that is some small family farms that are doing good.
California Budget Is Already in the Red 10 Weeks After Passage
"Hero With a Thousand Faces" (by Joseph Campbell). On Amazon.com: http://tr.im/hwatf
Provability (that is, being able to be proved by deductive means) is not generally taken to be a requirement for asserting a fact. To prove something is to demonstrate that it could not be otherwise (that it is necessary, given the logic employed and that that the premises are true).

For example, I might assert that "Tomorrow, the gravitational constant be the same as it is today." This seems like a fact: we have pretty strong theoretical justification for it, given certain empirical evidence, an assumption of regularity in nature, and the continued predictive success of the general theory of relativity. However, if tomorrow the gravitational constant is slightly different to what it is today, then although no (deductive [1]) logical law has been contravened (as would have to be the case if a provable statement turned out to be untrue), my assertion was clearly not a fact.

However, proofs (as in mathematical or logical proofs) are obtained through deductive reasoning, not inductive reasoning, as my statement was. Thus, I would argue, there is nothing wrong with presenting something as a fact which is not provable. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to assert very much at all: the restricted epistemology obtained would rule out all of science, for starters, and might even cast doubt on certain classes of observation statements.

Of course, you may have meant something other by 'provable' than I do, in which case clarification would be appreciated, since you presumably meant something by your assertion that facts must be provable, and it would be nice to know what it was!

[1] It is controversial as to whether a general inductive logic can be formulated.
I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, didn't use the Guest account under SL until yesterday... thankfully I did not experience this bug.
I almost feel like it's "lose all user data week".

Anyway hope this kind of situations are well handled by Apple EULA.
Healthcare Business Intelligence Solutions Identify Improvement Opportunities
Better understand the business side of healthcare with health business intelligence solutions. These solutions offer the ability to integrate point-of-care clinical data with administrative data and convert to actionable anlytics
Oh I know and use a lot of their open source software but what has that got to do with fb connect?

"FB connect" is a session management and authentication product from facebook. I find it obnoxious. It is pretty much literally the antithesis of openid. FB open source: good, FB connect: horrible.
Umm, Silverlight is currently at 3.0, not 1.1 alpha. That pretty much ended my interest.
Just to name two out of the many i love:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy and The adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
I don't know if he has, but I've read the source code used for user logins in the OS I'm running.

Depending on exactly where you draw the line between "code used for user logins" and the rest of the OS, I may have fixed bugs in it, too.
Frog.NET - open source ORM for .NET
Superfreakonomics: Guardian Article
Great app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by Twitter"?
It's interesting to see how much the world has changed in 10 years and what's left of the companies that were hot back then.
you are often the exception rather than the rule, cperciva.
Haven't read that one yet, but his _All the Pretty Horses_ was one of the highlights of the year.
Downvoted by accident, sorry. Hope we get an undo feature someday.
I didn't know C++ had lazy-functional semantics.
Ways of logo design
I read it last year and absolutely loved it. It was tough going for a while though, and I might have sated myself with its style, because I couldn't get through _The Urth of the New Sun_, the sequel, immediately afterwards. Maybe I'll give it another try soon.
Inside the processor
Joe Haldeman appears to be recovering from his emergency surgery
Increse Firefox Download Speed up to 400% with DownThemAll | Tricks Machine
I'm slogging through Ulysses now - it sure ain't easy, but I love it.

I loved Midnight's Children the first half of the book or so, then it became more and more forced and strained to my taste.
That's what I thought too, but it doesn't work here (for me at least / Ubuntu + Firefox)
If you haven't read it, esr had an interesting take on qualia a while back http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1192#more-1192 . His take is that qualia is the internal feeling of having a particular sensation. That is that the qualia of redness is the feeling that is internally associated with seeing red.
We should add Guest Login to the list. Because nothing focuses the mind like total data loss. (OK it almost certainly affects productivity, but 1 out of 2 ain't bad.)
Picture of Dorian Gray and the short story collection of William Hope Hodgson.
Maverick - Ricardo Semler (For inspiration)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemmingway(For enjoying the process)
> cost is the only metric that matters. And on that metric, it is impossible to compete with hydrocarbons.

Even if considering the cost of the side effects?
Flux Capacitor Fluxing.
Nice combination of bonus abuse and sportsbetting arbitrage. You can still make money in similar ways, although online gambling operators have tightened up the last few years.
I guess my biggest hack is getting myself well and off all medication with a condition where the typical answer is drugs, drugs and more drugs (plus surgeries) until it kills you.

Life is chemistry. Knowledge is power. But many people seem to think only drugs are chemistry and power. <shrug>

Edit: Secondary related hack: Managing to share information about what I've done without getting myself thrown off any of the health forums I belong to, in spite of routinely inspiring controversy, outraged reactions, and open hostility.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean you're hoping Apple is well indemnified against civil action because of this flaw, I wonder why you're so concerned for Apple Inc.'s bottom line. Are you an investor or employee of Apple Inc.?

Some degree of liability in cases like this is necessary for companies to have appropriate motivation to avoid it. Yes, there's reputational damage involved, but for situations where the brand / product is less central to the company, the company can't be allowed to just walk away.
Your FlowingData is a nice use of Twitter
Learning is itself addicting; for me it's almost as addicting, and a lot more fun than TV. Apparently, I'm not the first to feel this way; Heinlein's protagonist in "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" made a similar observation.
Accelerando - Charles Stross. Has the fast speed feel of "the flow" coding throughout half the book. Really good for keeping motivated.
14 Best CSS Editors for Web Designers & Developers
Makes you wonder if the 'hot' companies today - facebook, twitter, myspace etc etc will be around in 10 years time, or will have fallen.
CSS Specificity - Coding Method
Information That Can Save Lives, Your Own Included. There’s An App For That.
Mirror Neurons: Why Watching Others Succeed Won’t Help You Succeed
Relevance Over Time
Please tell the tale
Multitasking is often necessary but can decrease focus and productivity, I agree. But I often require several apps to complete a single task. So hiding apps wouldn't help me be productive. I find judicial use of "Spaces" along with 2 or three large monitors helpd me quickly focus on the task at hand and get the job done. I like to keep the finder open in all Spaces. And learn the key commands for tabbing through windows and applications, etc.
It depends on your working habits. Simply having someone else to report/share progress, ideas, etc to can make a huge difference, especially if, as recently discussed on HN, you're inclined towards the manic depressive. Having someone else there really helps during the low periods.
New Ad-Aware offers behavioral detection
You may want to check /. wisdom http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/07/2256206/Tech-O...
I think one unraised question is: what do you do once you have a potential cofounder?

Do you interview them? How do you figure out if this is going to work? Is it all on instinct?

In my case it's been the latter, mostly, but I think it would have been better in retrospect to work on something together - these hack days/weekends/Launch48 etc sound ideal - before bringing him into a business I'd founded. Then I would have had more of an idea how to establish the relationship formally within the business too; doing it casually has its downsides, especially if you're not in the lifelong friends situation.
It's hard to name only two. I'll choose two that deserve to be more famous than they are, in my opinion.

Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_ (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie) is the best novel I've read in years, a brilliant tale of an absurdly precocious childhood, with several more rich tales of their own value nested inside. Anyone who finds curiosity and love of knowledge one of their defining qualities should read this book.

Vikram Seth's _The Golden Gate_ is a smart, funny and moving novel set in the Silicon Valley of the early 80ies. Astonishingly, it's written in verse, in the rhyme scheme of the classic Russian masterpiece _Eugene Onegin_ by Pushkin, which Seth read in translation and loved so much he decided to write a modern American novel in verse. His execution of this unorthodox idea is terrific.
Reality checks are best provided by customers, or potential customers.
Gregory Maguire: "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"

The other would be this 8088 chip reference book I had. I loved that book. Had all the instructions with timings etc etc Blue cover but I forget the exact name.
_ contains the value of the last expression evaluated in irb. I don't think there's a way to retrieve ones which were evaluated longer ago, although I might be wrong.

>> "Expr"
=> "Expr"
>> _
=> "Expr"
Check the eyebrows too. We pluck them, and the contrast seems to cause that effect as well.
Juggling was recommended to me by a physio because I was getting shooting pains in my wrists. I used this to learn:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6366713757585864298...

I find it rather good for thinking about bugs, as it's totally automatic once you get the hang of it.

Learning new things (mills mess at the moment) is great for coding productivity too. I can only handle dropping things every 10 seconds for about five minutes before giving up on procrastination and getting back to work.
The post is a bit light on details - no indication of why I might be interested which is a shame as I just might be.

I am currently handling some rather complex data that has to be represented at the client end (JavaScript objects), the server in classes and also within a relational database. So far I am happy with my custom solution - but there might be something better out there.
Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Set Analysis
Are you sure ?

"I just went to google for news and nothing from any of the News International outlets was there, I'm off to Bing!"
interesting, I did improv with a group and then bought Johnstone's book, and couldn't stand it. I think because it was turning something I had been 'trained' to do instinctively into rules and analysis.
These books are both ones I read as a kid and hold in lifelong regard as a result:

The Fellowship of the Ring - long before the movies were a glint in Peter Jackson's eye, this was my introduction to fantasy, a genre I adore.

The Way Things Work - I still remember the frabjous day when I understood how an internal combustion engine worked.
Top comments on Stack Overflow
To be honest, I don't think you've got it simple enough. There's still a buttload of jargon for someone to wade through. Think about the customers, what benefits they get, and push those. Although, talk to prospective customers and users (do we on HN count?), maybe this is a field where jargon is simple - but the first thing I see on the site is Realtime Conversion Optimization Suite, and I don't know what that is, so I'll click away.
I think he means that if the bug was in some open-source system, we could expect a patch to be ready from someone a few hours after such announcement, instead of "as of yet, Apple has been silent."
until then, here's a +1 to your parent
How Indie Game Makers are Embracing Controlled Chaos
"Writing Multithreaded Programs Can't Be Done In C" - Spolsky
haha, nice hacks indeed! The following week you should've changed it to OUT OF BATTERY
If this were posted to Reddit, then a quick explanation of what git and vim are, and why a wrapper is so useful would make sense. But this is Hacker News for heaven's sake.
If you're using .NET then I would recommend Sub-sonic. It worked well for me, for a side-project.
Grrrr... auto-start audio is evil!
The 'male' picture seems darker - did they control for that?
After being bedridden for 3 1/2 months, I was diagnosed in May 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis". My doctor informed me "people like you don't get well -- symptom management is the name of the game". But I have two sons. Since it is genetic, they tested both of them. I told them which child had it and which didn't before they ran the test. My oldest has the same diagnosis I have and had not been on antibiotics for over three years at the time of testing. So when I was told "people like you don't get well", I replied "It may be true that I will spend the rest of my life fighting off the next infection, but This particular infection has to GO as it is killing me." My doctor physically took a step back and looked like I had slapped him in the face.

I spent the next five years trying to figure out what we were doing right that my son was so healthy and talking to people in the alternative health scene who seemed to have some clue. I gradually made changes and developed a mental model for what was going on. For that initial five years, I intentionally avoided joining any online CF forums or otherwise making any strong connections to the CF community. I didn't want my analysis of what was going on to be contaminated by the clearly failed current mental model for what is going on with this condition and how it 'should' be treated.

After five years, I began joining CF lists and forums. Most people on such forums have enormous difficulty believing that diet and lifestyle can do anything meaningful for their condition. Most of them are desperate for A Cure but they seem to all be waiting for a purple polk-dotted dancing, singing pill that will cost gajillions of dollars and have an eight page fold out describing the horrifying potential side effects. Eating right and giving up a few pleasures of North American Affluenza apparently seems to them like A) it can't possibly work and B) the prospect of giving up their couch is more mortifying than the prospect of having their lungs consumed by infection until some doctor decides to cut them out and replace them with the lungs of some perfectly healthy person who died tragically young in the prime of their life.

To each his own. I'm very happy (and comfortable) without a couch, thanks. As of this summer, I am 100% drug free for the first time in nearly nine years. My son has been drug free for close to three years.
I have failed twice. Business tips in hindsight.
It can be done, if you use the right paradigm and the right library: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread

If you use pthreads, then you are certainly doomed.
Acid: A Debugger Built From A Language
fiction: time enough for love - robert heinlein
non-fiction: on power - bertrand de jouvenel

both are treatsies on the human condition.
You're right that Chinese and English can be comparable in input time, provided that you're using something like t9 for the English.

However, you lose a ton of speed the moment that you hit a word that isn't in your t9 dictionary. Chinese input methods don't have that problem. So, the best case for English usually equals the average case for Chinese.

Of course, since texting is the primary communication mode for many young Chinese, they can usually text blinding fast in any language.
It's the exceptional hackers that generally catch these problems early and patch them before they become a big problem, that is true.
It's Apple's attempt to convince people of the wisdom of enabling Time Machine.
I'm not really sure if this qualifies as a "hack". A friend and I were riding dirt bikes through the forest and he crashed in a mud hole which was next to a bees' nest in the ground. He was allergic, got stung twice and we were deep in the forest, so we had to get out asap. The bees were swarming around his bike and going 2up on my bike was near impossible. I turned my 2-stroke bike around and pointed the exhaust at the bees and revved the engine. The resulting cloud of oil/gas mix subdued the bees. My friend took the throttle, I wrestled his bike out of the mud and we made it out of the forest as fast as we could.
300 million spent to eradicate smallpox; 4 trillion to save Wall street
Is bailing out Wall street the best use of our money?
Bollocks. I made good money selling my anti-spam library polymail that is written entirely in C, tiny, fast and multi-threaded.
Arguing? Let Online Strangers Be the Judge
Everyone and their ORM.

Yeah, I've wrote one in Java, internally, too.
But why announce it without code examples, feature lists and praises about issues with ORMs it would fix?
If you use pthreads, then you are certainly doomed.

Our project has done it just fine for about 4 years. This is complete FUD.

Certainly there are use-cases where pthreads are more challenging, but for the vast majority of cases they seem to do the job just fine.

In most cases you cannot eliminate the complexity of threading. To use terms from The Mythical Man Month, it is "inherent complexity"; no matter what language or library you use, one has to find a smart way to subdivide the problem efficiently. There are implementation details that can be made simpler (reducing accidental complexity), but the problem of parallelism--the inherent complexity--will always exist.

Anyone who claims a magical way to do this without human input is lying, or at a minimum talking about situations far too simple to fit any real use-case.
I also think this article is lacking. Something also about domain[1] theory and categorical models could be discussed. Particular the latter as they relate to abstract machines, .eg. Curien's thesis work on combinators and functional programming. I'm not saying one can explore these in depth, but at least throw them out there for further reading to help provide a roadmap for the "meatier" side.

One could also cite a few programming constructs, .eg. (let (... and show how lisp is essentially syntactically sugared lambda calculus.

I should also add Carl Gunter's excellent "Semantics of Programming Languages: Structures and Techniques", as a good intro to this area.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_theory)
Wooah, jargon overload - you've managed to put pretty much every technical term on one page and I think that could be a problem to your audience. Publishers & marketers are a varied bunch, and very few of them would be able to understand the value of what your suggesting from that first page (that's from 10+ years experience in online advertising - publisher, portal & vendor side)

I'd suggest you hide the detail (or maybe put a 'already an expert? here's the technical stuff' type clickthrough) and replace it with a simple (as possible) explanation of what you do for the customer and why it's great in language a layman could understand. Add in some performance metrics ('Customer A experienced a 350% increase in signups') and then build a structured 'next steps' flow for the how bit.

Easiest way to do the 'next steps' is think of your customers - get inside their heads and then have links that focus on the specific problems your solving for B2B, B2C, Marketers etc.
Besides, checking all "OS" source code won't save you. You'll also need to read all source code for the compiler etc. as proven by Ken Thompson:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Most of HN viewers are Objective.
Not sure why you were downvoted, except maybe for the ranting.
Perhaps Snow Leopard marks all users as guests during install (with extended attribute or something), then when you have used Guest account starts to delete all guest files/folders.

BTW, I would expect it to be in some shell/Apple script anyway, so Open/Closed Source argument doesn't really stand here.