skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks nice. The account auto-creation is neat. I didn't see an option to change the auto-generated account name (such as a35) to something of my choice.

The Preference checkboxes at the bottom of /settings.php don't appear correctly on Chrome.
I read many of Stross's and liked them, but I can't help but feel most (all?) are pretty similar to one another.
Maintaining a model feature in three places, the SQL, the class and a manual mapping, violates the basic principles of database modelling (store facts once), at the meta level (rather than the data level).

ORM is a flawed attempt to remedy this. It is flawed because client/server sql databases create a distributed system, and distribution is hard to abstract away.

Other solutions solution are to ditch the SQL model (something like bigtable, db4o or Gemstone?), or to ditch the object model (something like PHP or Access?).
I can see why it was killed. What a load of drivel...

I mean, seriously, who ends a blog post with "[w]e’re in this together"?
Its a strange observation that really has nothing to do with the topic but it disturbs me in a weird way that he's edited his videos so that you never see him blink.

Is it just me or is this disturbing to others as well? Its a good gimmick if it does. It sure got my attention.
the screenshot could use some work. its too small to read or even convey any info about the app at all, it has an evil twin lurking behind it, the perspective is way too tilted, and about 75% of the image is an ugly brown gradient.

also, regarding the general color scheme, i'd start by using the sign-up button blue instead of the turquoise. brown can be done, but its tough. check out the nettuts design for a nice example.
Actually, the libraries in the google books project get digital copies, too.

It's also important to remember that university libraries very adamantly do not view themselves as archives at all and are constantly weeding out books that they view as no longer relevant to them. The only items that can be assumed to be retained by the library are those very few items that are in each library's special collections.
I loved it... we are currently working on a ind of idea storage systemsolving exactly that problem. (And I'm only writing this comment as a a kind of bookmark)
With smoked Gouda and a side of caviar.
I've often wondered why http://news.ycombinator.com/classic is not on that lists page... Are there any others missing that people know of?
Ah I miss Ze's "the show." A lot of great videos from a man who never seems to run out of great ideas and topics. I'd highly recommend hitting on "popular shows" and going down the list. He thinks a lot about creativity and creating communities. Some interviews he gives are also very insightful.
Heroku is on EC2, so its just as local/fast as their instances. Cost is probably a wash. What you're gaining is flexibility and control, you're also taking on some responsibility. Heroku -> RDS -> Your own EC2 instance is just a sliding scale trading flexibility for responsibility. I would start on the left and slide to the right as my application needs dictated.
South Park did an episode on exactly this - called 'Tsst'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsst
So it seems that the record labels are more to blame for the low amount that artists are making, which isn't particularly surprising. If the labels did get some amount of ownership for advances on future royalties, the artist would be making significantly less due to the labels not collecting said royalties.
Sass Now Supports Rack Natively
I searched the full text of this story for "Cartman", "South Park", and "Tsst", and finding none of them, decided not to read it. I'll bet that not one parent who claims to be "taking mental notes" about Cesar Milan has not seen that show.
I wanted an easy to admin wordpress site and picked dreamhost.com as its just about as turn-key as I needed. Backups, upgrades all work seamlessly. This gave me the added benefit that for a fixed price per year, I can host other people's wordpress sites on the same plan. Turns out I have several friends that want a site but know nothing about running one, so I do it for them.

For a wp theme that looks good and has flexibility and support, I picked http://diythemes.com/thesis/
Here's one problem with browser history: http://startpanic.com/
Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned what I thought of the article, instead just said that it didn't deserve to get killed.

I am a very discerning reader and the article resonated well with me. I'm glad I read it and I'm sure there are more people who would have enjoyed it.

That's why I brought it up. It was killed before more people could have read it. The only reason I found my way to the article was because I'm also discerning on HN, using the five "tips" I outlined more than the points on submissions.
Like this:

http://andrewfarmer.name/screenshot.png

Using this:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

Not sure it really addresses any of your issues though. Just know that it wouldn't be hard to implement some of your ideas with a GM script.
It's not about Karma and points, it's about the quality of the site as defined by the current users. You weren't downvoted for trolling, but for the style of your comment. LOLspeak and emoticons are standard elsewhere, but not here.

Generally, your 'thanks' will be better appreciated here if you use the best standard English that you know. You aren't being punished, rather your comment was being moved lower on the page to make room for better ones. You can choose to ignore the feedback this rearrangement provides, but your stay here may be more enjoyable if you pay some attention to the local customs.
I would rather love to see it go more complicated and geeky. Hackers would figure it out and non-hackers would get filtered away.
At first blush, this project is very exciting.

Persistent objects through JSON. No muss, no fuss. Lawnchair indeed!

[edit: Here is the github source directly: http://github.com/brianleroux/lawnchair ]
I do. Since that post went up, I've received quite a few emails from people thanking me for that drivel, too. So I guess it's not drivel after all?

If my goal was to write simplistic, overemoting drivel, I'd have namedropped Bukowski instead of Joyce.
You should receive a message at the top of your list if you have an auto-created list. I'll do some testing on chrome, thanks!
An auto-complete would do good to this app. A rich auto-complete with images, better.
I do this and I make money in 1 out 2 trades. Do you know what the heck you are talking about ?

http://www.brettsteenbarger.com/articles.htm
Ask HN: Review my jQuery Plugin (jQSlickWrap)
Over the course of the past week I designed and wrote a plugin for jQuery which provides a client-side implementation of the "Sandbag" approach to getting text/content to wrap around the actual contents of a floated image (as opposed to the typical bounding box you are usually stuck with).
You get the full power of WP, hosted on their servers. It's not as flexible as rolling your own, however.

I'd also vouch for Posterous, but it's not as advanced as something like Wordpress is.
I work with two designers currently, both are great guys and do quality work. The first is Brandon Silverstein, who is also a developer and owner of Impulse Development (the company I work for). Most of the designs at http://impulsedevelopment.com are his work. The other is Armando Alvarez with Viva Creative Group (http://vivacreativegroup.com). Mando did the designs that are not Brandon's work that appear on the Impulse site. Impulse shares an office with Viva Creative Group, so I've gotten to know Mando fairly well.

I'm not sure what Brandon charges for just designs, but basic websites generally start at $3k. I believe Mando is typically more expensive, but he also has more experience with branding and advertising, if that's what you need.
In terms of price, the Ronin is 200/month, and you could maybe switch that for the smallest rds instance, which would cost about $80 at $.11/hr.
1) Its usable forever, its checked by cookies but you could just return to that URL and continue using it. However its possible that another user could add remove things, which is why the password protection exists.

2) That was important to us, glad it came across that way.

3) Thanks, looking into it.

4) We have a number of affiliates including Amazon, hopefully with more traffic we can expand. We are also looking into recommendations and price matching directly related to affiliates.
We have affiliate accounts on some online shopping sites, on those items we get a small commission for the sale.
Well, Kristof couldn't be bothered to give us a screenshot either this time nor back in June when he first brought up the issue:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/microsoft-and-ch...

Either MS changed it since then, or Kristof is plain old wrong.

For what it's worth, here's some queries in simplified Chinese. At least in my results I can see a number of websites that are blocked in the mainland:

"Dalai Lama" (his official website is the second result): http://www.bing.com/search?q=%E8%BE%BE%E8%B5%96%E5%96%87%E5%...

"Rebiya" (i.e. Rebiya Kadeer; there's an Epoch Times article around #7): http://www.bing.com/search?q=%E7%83%AD%E6%AF%94%E4%BA%9A&...

"East Turkistan" (Wikipedia at #1; the website of an Inner Mongolian separatist movement is #6) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%E4%B8%9C%E5%9C%9F%E8%80%B3%E5%...
I believe we are in total agreement. My experience is that as an entrepreneur, it is tough to get up in the morning if all I want is to make incremental change. But being audacious and being practical are not necessary mutually exclusive of each other. We need to be both.

As I have written in the past ... “Entrepreneurship is all about creative destruction. Entrepreneurs exist for one purpose and one purpose only which is to destroy status quo, complacency and mediocrity, thereby giving renewal to excellence. But the successful entrepreneurs are the ones who actually respect the environment that they do determine to destroy. Without respect, they can never levitate themselves by the forces embedded in their hearts. Without respect, they can never learn from the mistakes of their elders. And without respect they can never stand on the shoulders of the giants who marched before them."
i really like it, the search works well, the design is nice...well done!

the auto-generated name thing is a great idea, but I wonder if you could increase the conversion rate by replacing the copy "Create an account now, so you can choose a better name for your wish list!" with the form itself. That copy makes it seem as if I need to register in order to select a name, but in reality selecting a name (and making a password) is the registration process.

one question: are you only pulling products from amazon and newegg currently, and if so, plans to expand?
1 - use a minimal server base install. start with a linux/bsd install that has as little running as possible for your needs. I've found both ubuntu-server and FreeBSD work for me.

2 - Install things that you understand. I don't install large meta-packages. I also install most things from source: nginx, ruby, gems, postgresql. All these things make/install without much effort. When compiling, only include options you need.

3 - Lock down SSH. Login only with SSH keys, protocol 2. Also, change your sshd port to something less likely to be scanned. This way, your SSH log files won't have too much garbage in them and you actually can check them with little effort. You can find lots of tutorials on locking down ssh.

4 - Document _everything_. If all else fails, your docs enable you to recreate your server environment within a few hours.

If you do all this correct, when you upgrade your server, e.g.: apt-get upgrade, you will only be upgrading basic distro stuff, mostly security updates.

oh yeah, _little_things_ like making sure your ruby/blub app processes are connecting to your db with an "app" id instead of an "admin" one is a choice decision ;).
Being a hacker doesn't mean embracing unnecessary clutter. In fact, many people would argue it's the opposite.

I don't do complicated and geeky. I'm smart enough to figure it out, but I have better things to do than subscribe to an asshole designer's ego trip. I stick around on Hacker News in part because its design respects me.
I am seeing the FireFox issue, I think the CSS needs to be tweaked a little more. I am investigating the results for the search items now.. Thanks for the bug finding!
This is one of the oldest practical problems in encryption, and the reason that groups handling PII use full-disk encryption and encrypted VM; even if the OS wasn't archiving your plaintext for you (and really, what else do you expect it to do?), there's probably 10 other ways your plaintext is persisted after encryption.
Except you need the actual device. For J2ME development this has become impossible for "small guys".
Wow, this is exactly what I never thought to wish for.
I just want to add that I read some of the Turtle Trader books and one more on Trend Following. The last book finally got across to me the point that the trend followers used computers and math not to try and predict where the markets were headed but rather to try and classify markets as rising, falling, or side to side. Their theory is that once a market has a direction it is likely to keep that direction - until it changes.

This is very different from most of the stuff I read about with neural nets. In most of the other books the idea to try and predict when markets are over sold or about to change so that you can be in on the ground floor.

I'm doing a webapp about card counting at black jack and the trend following approach seems a lot more like the reality of card counting. When the deck is hot or in your favor you bet more. Most people think that card counting is a super complicated exercise in combinatorics where the player is recalculating basic strategy in real time and able to prove that certain plays are the best.

Just something to consider.
The author of the post is Michael Nielsen, who coauthored the standard textbook on the subject. In fact, he says so in the first full paragraph:

I worked on quantum computing full time for 12 years, wrote 60 or so papers, and co-authored the standard text.

I was a grad student at Caltech when Michael was a postdoc there, and knew him from his reputation for general awesomeness long before I met him.

N.B. Michael is also a frequent reader of Hacker News, so be nice. :-) (In fact, he submitted this article himself over a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289212)
Good idea, I'll see how feasible it is to work that in. We are slowly adding more sites as we discover their API's and such. We hope to at least cover all the main shopping sites.
An excellent idea! Thanks!
FreeBSD handbook goes over some practices, treat security like layers of an onion peel.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/security-intro....

Some things we found useful

* don't have ssh bind to a public interface on. You need to VPN in first and then ssh to the private IP. we only have 80 and 443 open on public interfaces

* portaudit is awesome. it keeps you up to date if there is an exploit for software that you run, not just "is there an update". portaudit will tell you if there is an unpatched vulnerability out there so you can make a decision on what to do.

* paranoia - don't trust anything. we run WP on a DMZed box that doesn't have access to anything. we mod_proxy all requests to this box from our edge servers. jails are also great for this, give everything the least amount of permissions necessary to run

* monitor your servers, any weird cpu usage or bw. cacti is quite nice

You can also block all outbound traffic on your serves that isn't responding to a requests.
Ask HN: How do I regain my attention span?
I'm at step #1: admitting I have a problem.

I consider myself a skilled programmer, but for the past few years my ability to sit down and finish a project has been waning. HN, do you have any advice?
Smoking may void Applecare Warranty
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869034
I consume HN as a light snack between projects throughout the day.

I'm not too bothered by it if I miss something.
Michael Caine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddUbsWnEVXM

Powerful stuff.
Don't make your projects big monolithic tasks, make them consist of a series of fun, small iterations (like Agile development). You'll have a better time, and it'll be easier to stay motivated - especially if you're making your project open source and can do minor releases along the way.
I had a feeling I wasn't the first to ask. Thanks.
Don't. Read the 10,000 Year Explosion instead[1]. Criticism of Diamond [2].

[1]http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
[2]http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/ggs
Break up tasks into the smallest parts that you can. Once you start finishing a few of these, you'll notice significant forward progress.

Release to the public often, and write notes that highlight your changes. That's important, because it forces you to think in terms of those notes; if there's nothing "release worthy" happening, it would be hard to write anything.

Every now and then, allow yourself to do tasks that aren't strictly related to forward progress. Fix some code formatting you've been meaning to do; write a document; try something new. The mixup helps to keep things from becoming boring.

Don't be afraid to literally walk away. If I talk a walk for an hour, I can often do as much work in my head as I would at the keyboard, but it helps me focus (and it's healthier).
I love apps like these, especially when they have domains that make sense to have usernames in them.

The amazon.com price comparisons are a little annoying to me, though, because most products don't ship internationally from Amazon.com. Not only that, if I'm entering prices that are in CAD$ and price comparisons are from a site (Amazon.com) that sells items in USD$, the price comparisons don't add a lot of value. It'd be nice if there was a way to set a locale to get price comparisons from. That way, you'd still be able to earn affiliate income, but even more than before because it's more highly targeted to the user.
No, your goal was to sound smart. It's cliche... just like saying "we're all in this together."

I'll break your essay down for you.

A) A section in which you say you hate small talk. You use this fact to claim that you are deep, because small talk is shallow.

B) A section in which you talk about your love of James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read, in order to sound smart.

C) A section in which you talk about how lonely you are, because you're emo. You are very sad and lonely because the girls you date like different music than you.

D) The conclusion, in which you try but fail to connect the fact that you are a) deep, b) smart, and c) lonely, by saying that we're all in this together. wipes away a tear

If this sounds harsh, I've spent all day grading essays, so I'm out of tolerance for bullshit.
Yeah for sure. I've noticed this technique before in some great comedians - for example Andy Kaufman and Will Ferrell. In fact - that was what really got me about Kaufman's bits - the utter lack of blinking. I love how it makes the character seem possessed by some personality outside their own self.

I also think that when we are in conversation with other people, we innately calculate when to blink based on when they blink.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5925932/Huma...

So of course when that character doesn't blink it genuinely f*cks with out sense of balance in our communication - In the case of comedy, it's hilarious. Maybe in the case of a physical confrontation, it would be threatening instead..
Localization is important to use, especially regarding sites like Amazon, we are currently working on getting it integrated. Thanks for the feedback!
1. NSFW thumbnail in recently added items list

2. The grey boxes and text-shadows combine to form some really unreadable text
One way to be a voyeor on the internet(passively)
They actually have one of these here in Vienna - http://www.phil.info/

It seems to be more popular among the liberal arts/philosophy crowd than tech geeks, although I've admittedly only been there twice and I'm no good at socialising with random people, so who knows. Normally not my crowd, but I found out about it because it's one of the few places you can hang out where there's no smoking allowed. It's also much quieter (volume wise) than your average bar, which is great for having an actual conversation. Apparently they have regular literary events (readings, whatever); I haven't quite worked out how the book part works, it seems to be somewhere between library and bookstore. Drinks and snacks are a tad pricey though.

I haven't yet discovered a hacker/nerd themed bar/cafe, though there's the Metalab http://metalab.at/wiki/English which is a local hacker space and seems to be quite popular with people who are smarter and way more productive than me.
I would expect it to archive the ciphertext? Honestly, it sounds like TrueCrypt should warn Win7 users about the feature and maybe even hook into it if possible.
I've also made a lot of dietary changes, but that wasn't relevant to the question that was asked of me. If you are interested, there is a website listed in my profile which talks more about what I've done.

The bookworm with respiratory problems/allergies is a stereotype in popular culture. I have concluded that being a bookworm helps cause those respiratory problems and it is not merely coincidental. Most paper is treated with strong chemicals, like bleach. Some books also have a lot of dyes in them (and I toured a printing company about 3 years ago -- it's quite a toxic environment and they openly acknowledge that). I react really badly to some things with heavy dye concentrations. Plus there is just the aspect of rotting, mold, mildew...etc.

As an interesting additional footnote: When my sons and I were sharing a single bedroom while living with relatives for nearly a year while I was going threw a divorce and job hunting, we stored boxes of soda and other foods in our room with us. We found that removing the cardboard boxes consistently lowered the temperature in our crowded little room by 5 degrees Fahrenheit and also lowered the humidity. Coincidentally, it also cured our problem with sometimes finding a large roach somewhere in the room. We have concluded that cardboard boxes are essentially a rotting compost heap, giving off heat and humidity like any compost heap. The temperature and "climate" in our apartment is dramatically more comfortable and stable than it has ever been now that upholstered furniture and cardboard boxes (and books and magazines) are not part of our local "ecosystem"
I do not embrace that too. I have spent a good deal of my last 3 years out of college learning usability and can not agree more on what you said.

However, I do believe if hacker news was more obvious and followed all those principles, it would attract
- Hey, we got a job for you.
- How do you read the contents of the file in a string in Java ?

and other such things.
“We thought that obedience was the enemy of love. We didn’t want the kids to be afraid of us, but after a while we found ourselves wondering: do we have to do what they say the whole time?”

That sounds rather confused - one isn't the opposite of the other. Kids not having to be afraid does not mean you obey the kids.
1. We attempted to white list the recently added and most popular lists by trusted sites. It seems amazon sells adult toys, so we will have to tweak that filter a bit...

2. Very true, I'll switch that to something more user friendly
i like your script. Ask HN are the best part of HN.
same here, I bet the writter of that article is getting his inbox flooded right now for doing no research before writing the article.
What I don't understand is how the general public gets access to information about his ATM withdrawals.
Encryption isn't magic. To the OS, a file is a file is a file.