skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, there's no link. But I believe it's the first chapter of his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Nemesis-Death-Star-Richard-Muller/dp/1...
His website looks rather messy, but as a 65 years old astronomy professor I guess he has other stuff in his mind...
Maybe he's thinking of the Lucene, which CouchDB uses.
TwitterPeek – Would @Aplusk Buy This? | My Philly Network
Create a Command Line Calculator
All I'm seeing here are comments about video performance on Flash on various systems. Nothing about games or website navigation or etc.

So why can't we just admit that what we really want is a way to play those other video formats (especially ON2, you porn lovers) on the iPhone?
Depends on what you mean by 'worse.' Electricity isn't automatically good. An electric train could be vastly more inefficient than a diesel train, and the way that the electricity is generated is also called into play.
Well, since you already get karma points for upvotes, if you charged karma for the submission it would essentially be the same as a bet.
Dont shy away from school. But gravitate toward feeding your creative self.
Yes, but it would save everyone else from having to read your drivel.
You make a good point.

While it is useful for web apps, JavaScript in Mobile Safari is not sufficient for creating the vast majority of standalone applications.

Flash, while hardly a world-class systems programming language, is a step beyond JavaScript in several respects.

Most importantly, it is more consistently cross-platform compatible, meaning that I could actually take advantage of preexisting Flash applets on the iPhone, whereas oftimes when designing a JS app one must consider a far wider range of discrepancies between platforms. In other words, given a randomly-selected JS applet and a randomly-selected Flash applet from all available to me, the probability is greater that the Flash applet will be correct in an officially-supported Flash VM than that the JS applet will be correct in Mobile Safari.
I cringe at the "hack" usage, but I agree. It's amazingly pathetic how many people are instantly impressed when they hear the word CEO.
Oh, I missed that. Great.
The US school system is more BS than ever. At the highschool closest to where I live, teachers are NOT ALLOWED to give a midterm grade lower than 60. The student can literally do nothing and get a 60 on the midterm. Then it only takes like a 75 on the second half of the class to pass. So overall, it's something like 37 percent of the points the student actually has to earn to pass. Even if 100% of kids passed that wouldn't be a sign of the kids doing well. It would be a sign of a stupid system.
well, most data is exposed via a website, so if the api doesn't exist, just mechanize it. its not really feasible to rely on goodwill for these grand visions.
One (database) size does not fit all
Check out Atlas: http://280north.com/blog/2009/02/announcing-atlas/
Can you honestly see yourself ranking people based on how many levels of the people they ranked you want included in your white list? Do most people even use the filtering capabilities available today? I don't think I've ever blacklisted anyone on a forum, even if they drove me absolutely insane.
I believe the primary alternative to NeXT was Be Inc., that might have been interesting.
I'm pretty skeptical of accounts like these. With proper maintenance, the AR-15 system (upon which the M-4 and M-16 are based) can be very reliable. The direct impingement gas system does increase fouling, but as long as you keep the rifle properly maintained it's not clear this translates into decreased reliability.

I think a lot of the stopping power complaints would be relieved by one of the following not-at-all-realistic changes:

1. Issue the M193 5.56 round to units fielding the M4 carbine. The M855's heavier and more complex bullet has been shown to fragment less reliably at the sort of velocities the M4's shorter barrel can achieve. Since the 5.56 FMJ round's lethality is tied to fragmentation more than punching big holes, this could fix many of the failure-to-stop issues

2. Back out of the damn Hague Convention and issue hollow point ammunition to our military forces. Hornady TAP law enforcement ammo is some pretty nasty shit, even out of a poodle shooter like the M4. Not as effective against body armor, but much more effective against flesh. Our LEOs and civilian contractors use this ammo; why not our military forces?
yes, but what about when I mechanize my own API to my bank anyway? it's theoretically impossible to detect more effectively than cat-n-mouse.
It's not a good idea to discourage voting, generally the more voting we have the better.
Can you honestly see yourself joining a knitting community?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry
I'm borrowing pg's phrase "hack a real world system" from yc applications.

If you cringe at that, watch this funny bit http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/218485518/merlinlabs
Google chrome browser gets a massive speed boost and bookmark syncing
X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions
I think this is a very serious possible problem with this sort of system, but there are ways around it. The system could take everyone's whitelist and derive a "public whitelist" that it can use to filter articles and comments for people that are new to the site and have unknown preferences. This "public whitelist" could be derived from an average of everyone's whitelist, with other heuristics thrown in. As the system learns what type of posts a new user prefers their whitelist is updated.

One can also imagine how a user could use a whitelist on their own posts to maintain a separation between the things they would say in public vs. their private thoughts (which others may find offensive or unpopular)
Exactly. This problem is why the friending / follower / newsfeed format has won. Everyone's accountable for curating their own feed. Want to expand the universe? Allow friend of friend, or friend of friend of friend views.
Jon Udell had a very interesting article recently on a related topic: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-...

Jon's particular slant was reading the comments in the timezone database and reflecting on the political influences captured within. A fun read.
Top ways to destroy earth
This only prompted eye rolling from me. This isn't a specific critique, just generalised griping.

Besides, nothing has ruined music, least of all shredding. There is plenty of good music still being made, I feel awash with awesome stuff myself.

I like extremely complicated, technically proficient guitar work myself -- Indricothere, Behold.. The Arctopus etc. It's purely a matter of taste. That's the real point; music snobbery is lame. There is nothing wrong with saying what you do and don't like, but terms like Musical Masturbation are about trying to make your taste someone else's problem.

Here is a quote from Steve Albini, talking about John Peel:

"John Peel said something that I thought was really profound. He said when he gets a record from somebody and he doesn't like it, he assumes that it's his problem and that the band would not have made that record if there wasn't something valuable about it."
We allow anonymous voting but not anonymous commenting.

We'll be moving to a more blog style commenting system (name+email) in the near future that won't require an actual login.
We're working on that. I just updated the status on it.
Stalqer: A Location Sharing App for Real Friends
It is a good article indeed. And I agree with you on the way the discussion went off-track. (though I don't know if I'd call the guy a jerk) I think it got just under a hundred comments but there wasn't much very interesting in it. It was mostly comments about Jason Fried not reading fiction but watching fiction on TV…
I want, I want, I want. How about you propose how this should be done? It's harder than it looks, and no, Unix is not the one-and-all answer to everything.

Take one of his example scenarios:

"When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, get the latest tech news podcast (downloaded overnight) from my computer via WiFi or a wired network connection. Play the podcast through the alarm clock’s speaker/s. If I hit “snooze” on the alarm clock, pause the podcast. Once I stop the alarm, remember where I was up to in the podcast and give that information back to my computer. Now when I go to listen to the podcast while I’m eating breakfast, it will continue playing where it left off."

This has a number of hidden assumptions:

* What is "the latest news podcast"? One user-selected source, or a blended filtered combination, or a crawled set selected based on previous behavior?

* How does a (not the!) computer know how to talk to the alarm clock? I hope I don't have to create a home network myself, cause I know my Mom certainly can't. How is this connection authorized? What happens if the power goes out on the computer - what will the clock do? What if the clock batteries fail - will the computer play the podcast instead?

* Is the saved position synced only the one source computer (I hope not). What if the network to the computer is down - can the alarm clock sync somewhere else?

* Can I resume listening to the podcast on a different computer at breakfast? My partner/sibling/friend's computer? How do I log in? How is the position data saved along with my identity? How does the breakfast computer address the first computer, or the alarm clock?

The problem here is not access to the external APIs (not that hard) but federation, identity management, authorization, privacy considerations, and addressing between these disparate systems. Proposal adopting existing standards for these requirements, or new proposals for standards are, of course, appreciated.
On my machine, it likes to kill my whole webbrowser whenever I use the Youtube quicklist too many times. Then I can't relaunch the browser because it doesn't actually kill the browser cleanly; it's zombied. A few kill-9s later, and I can finally watch a cat flushing a toilet.

Not optimal.
Why would you want something shorter, that was a nice piece of writing.

Of course cruel to just leave us hanging there.
Of course, playing the same flv file full-screen in mplayer uses almost no CPU at all.
He should chuck a link into the amazon site, I really want to read that now.
Aaron is really out of his range of expertise with this one. Did he just read a book on Adwords or something? Almost as bad as his attempt to re-explain Keynesian economics to the world. Among other things, his comments about Google not trying improve CTR are just flat out wrong. Everyone should realize an advanced beginner level of knowledge does not enable you to make profound insights into any complex subject.
I have a 2nd generation iPod touch. They could have doubled the thickness to provide a longer battery life.
see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
Nice job application.
In general, you'll hire people who,
* are smart/productive enough to automate the drudgery,
* are smart enough to get by, but whom the drudgery provides some lasting challenge, or
* are screwing around and will likely screw around more as you keep them on for more hours.

So, even assuming that simple work will allow you to get a significant long-term productivity boost working people 8 hours instead of 12, in the long run, you're going to be working with a set of people who'll likely be challenged by the work, so fatigue will cause problems if they're challenged at 8 hours/day, or you could be getting smarter work out of them if they challenged at 12 hours/day.

Of course, building the tools to automate drudgery does take some time, and considering Ars Digita apparently operated during the first .com boom, time-to-market was critical, so some of this logic doesn't apply to the original example.
Is Software Engineering Still Relevant?
MIT Technology Review is great ... though it got a little expensive for my taste at only 6 issues for $25. I consume that one online now.
I am amazed. Let's ignore the whole against the law aspect to this enterprise and look at the business. A bunch of things have to happen to make this work even once -

1) Advertise for "work at home" workers.
2) Acquire those workers, process test transactions, get the worker comfortable.
3) Write and execute some code to acquire the victims bank account info.
4) Execute a transfer from the victim to the worker.
5) DOS the victims bank to prevent the transfer from being reversed!!! (I'm speechless)
6) Make sure the worker transfers the funds.
7) Profit!

A lot of us run businesses with less complex work flow. Whoever is running this scam is doing it from another country, avoiding the U.S. Government, working with people who have never met each other, they have to remain anonymous, and keep track of a massive amount of information.

I'm not saying it's OK, but is is logistically impressive.
Peek - Simply Connected.
JQuery.mb.gallery 1.5.5 new release
Major issue and bugfix:

* added a new param: containment to let you choose either to load the gallery into a specific DOM element (a div on your page context) or up over your page.
* Fixed a bug in IE that prevent the display of images if invoked a second time.
* Fixed a bug in IE that mismatch the top margin of the gallery.
* Now you can have links and images in the image description area.
> What I assumed and is true is that healthcare is more private in the US than in Scandinavia, which it is.

You're ignoring the fact that US poor get govt healthcare. Unless you want to argue that said govt healthcare is better than the private healthcare that the rest of us get, the US has "govt healthcare or better" and more stuff. By cohort, our poor people have govt healthcare and more stuff than yours and our richer people have better than govt healthcare and even more stuff.

Which gets us to the question of how our govt and private healthcare compares to yours, because the "more stuff" conclusion seems pretty solid.

> Retail spending however will not as you don't buy healthcare as a retail good.

What is the basis for your claim that healthcare can not be a retail good? You may not think of healthcare as being available as a retail good, but I see it in stores and the like. I happen to received an advertisement for a "get an MRI to see anything interesting is happening inside you" service in the mail today, and that sort of thing is reasonably common.

Surely you're not going to argue "necessity", as food, clothing, and shelter are both necessities and retail goods.

> if you get continuous preventive medicine you won't get as much cancer

Oh really? We just started to see vaccines for a common form of cervical cancer, and that was a first. How about some supporting evidence. Be precise - what types of cancer and what kind of healthcare. (Note - precancerous growths are not really pre-cancerous - they're early stage, as evidenced by the fact that the success in treating them is evaluated the same way that we evaluate other cancer treatments.)

> The other flaw in the whole "cancer survival is higher so healthcare must be better" argument is that although cancer is a very important illness it is far from the only important one and not even the major cause of death.

I didn't say that cancer survival rates were a decisive argument. I said that they were more relevant to the healthcare quality argument. I'd be happy to see more and better data, but see no reason to assume anything about that data before it shows up.
"Trying to tap into the popular belief that entrepreneurs are somehow more authentic — and more innovative — than big corporations"

Haha, yeah, I wonder where that crazy belief comes from.
Adobe can't even make a performant flash plugin for Mac OS X or Linux, why on god's green earth would it be any different for lesser hardware?
> Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?

Yes, I am under that impression. If Apple shipped with Flash, people would constantly complain about the battery life of the phone. I have been working on user interfaces for a couple of years now, and I can tell you that my user interface code is constantly at fault. Every segfault, random pause, incorrect data, data corruption, missing file, and plugin bug gets filed under "user interface" by anyone who is not directly part of the project.

Now, its possible that you're the guy who would spend a week testing battery life under various conditions to determine that Flash was at fault. Maybe you would publish all of this to your blog, and 1,000 people would read it and agree. Even if these were both true, the other 21 million iPhone users would be bitching about battery life all day long - and they would not care that Flash is at fault - and they certainly would not be able to live without it now that they spend 29 of their 30 minutes of battery life in FarmVille.

Apple has no control over Flash, and Flash sucks on every platform except maybe Windows. If Flash really mattered, one of the other smartphones would support it and make the iPhone obsolete. This is what competition is for. What we need is more diversity and interoperability in this industry. Flash on every device is not diversity.
It's not really that relevant IMO, but maybe fans of screen want to extend the screen approach to their whole computing experience? That's basically the goal of ratpoison, which is a window manager based around the idea of tiling and complete control via the keyboard, overall much simpler than KWin, etc.
Let's add insult to injury: Apple has reported that a majority of crashes on a Mac — across the board — are due to Flash.
I don't know what you have running on your Macbook, but I have two Macbooks, one new and one about 2 years old, and my kids watch hours of Flash videos and Flash games until I have to wrestle the computer out of their hands because it is bedtime.

This "30 minute battery life" smells fishy. It is a friend of friend of a friend who woke up one day in his hotel room with his kidney removed and his iPhone battery drained.
That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities. People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go through some of the complications of this system?
This is true: http://www.surpriseindustries.com/ is doing very well.
I think it is useless to argue (as in this article) that students are doing either better or worse in the American school systems now than in the past.

What is significant (and much more interesting) is the fact that compared to other rapidly advancing countries (e.g. India), our educational system is much less effective, and that this could have severe consequences for the US in the near future.
Yes - take a look.
www.kidthing.com
I don't think the IITs have ever been famous for their research programs. They are well known as a magnet for the smartest engineers in India. Those smart engineers then come to the best US universities and contribute to the reseach, start companies etc. The IITs are a very effective filter and not world class research institutions.
You have misunderstood the consulting business model. The metric is billable hours. Been there, done that.
I had the same headache, and finally spent an hour reading java docs and experimenting with the classpath. It's straightforward once you do that. Learning maven on the other hand ... :/
Asimov wrote a novel about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Isaac_Asimov_novel)

Not to be confused with the "Nemesis" by Clarke which is about something different apparently.
Interesting investment, if the US economy is indeed undergoing a restructuring with the dollar declining and exports replacing imports, then this should create a lot of business for the rail-roads.

However, while the transformation away from import driven consumerism, to manufacturing led exports may sound like things are great, they are in fact getting slightly worse. Because it is driven by a reduction in American global purchasing power, this makes imports, oil among them, more expensive and domestic products more price competitive.
> Police are public employees, their pensions have to be paid when the time comes regardless of how badly their pension fund has been raided. Ditto for teachers. And so on and so forth.

You write that like it's a law of physics or something. It isn't. There's absolutely no reason why public employees can retire using 401(k)s and the like. In fact, a lot of them do get much of their retirement benefits from 403(b)s, which are basically the same as 401(k)s.

In fact, pension funds, both public and private, are a huge mistake because underfunding and raiding can be, and is, hidden for decades.
Having good design and visual communication is a key element of brand creation, understanding the message and good user experience.
This is a wonderful visualization.

Product Sales on the Shopify platform ( ~ 5000 e-commerce stores) for the past two years:

http://img.skitch.com/20091103-rmsiithcy81qbfs6u3ee195n1s.pn...

Really interesting to see how great Christmas period is. You can clearly see that it starts in the second week of november in earnest. Also interesting to see that the weekends are usually pretty slow but in the christmas time they totally blend in.
I have an incandescent torchiere, in which I've now placed a full-spectrum compact fluorescent bulb. Works just fine, and adjusting color is just a matter of picking out a different bulb. My recommendation for cheap, indirect lighting. And yes, indirect lighting is great, in my opinion.

There are (dedicated) fluorescent torchiere lamps. I have a couple from GE, both dim-able. One has worked for many years like a champ. The newer GE one had the balast (non-replaceable -- at least without hassle) progressively fail over the course of a year or two -- slower and slower startup times; now completely dead. A third such torchiere -- same bulb, also dim-able -- a floor model I picked up more recently that is made by another manufacturer, is also dead. So, my recommendation is to stay away from this design.

P.S. If one lamp doesn't seem to produce as much light as the halogen torchiere, try two lamps. The incandescent type are quite cheap, and with compact fluorescent bulbs (maybe LED bulbs, someday), your energy use should still be pretty low.
I'm not a doctor, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that it's a Really Bad Idea to take antibiotics when you don't know that you have a bacterial infection and roughly what it is. Sure, it might happen to help if you happen to have just got infected, or to be about to get infected, with bacteria. But it also might happen to be harmful, e.g. if you get infected by something when you're near the end of the course of antibiotics -- seems like a great way to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria inside your body.

Contrary to what your article says, the British system does not take you straight from "see your GP" to "be hospitalized" with nothing in between. If you have, or might have, something wrong with you that requires specialist treatment, your GP will refer you to a specialist. (Who will typically work at a hospital, so you'll see them there, but why does that matter?)

If Polish GP-equivalents are typically able to see you the same day as you call them up, that's certainly better than in the UK. (Though if you have something that seems like it may need urgent attention, you will likely get a same-day appointment from your GP in the UK too. For instance, I think every time we've taken our 3-year-old to the doctor we've had an appointment the same day as we called.)

I am not trying to argue that the system in the UK is perfect or close to it. But some of these specific criticisms don't match up with my own experience.