skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree in general - if you were pure Debian/Ubuntu and didn't know how to create RPMs, use yum, know the Satellite API, kickstart, python, etc., then you wouldn't be great at something RHEL based.

But OEL is just a RHEL clone - literally everything is the same except the logos, release file and installer artwork - so if you know RHEL or CentOS then the experience is valuable.
I think what they are angry about is that Google claims to be the first one to do that (when their startup has been doing this for long) and since Google is so well knows the world is thinking they made a local (India specific) innovation.
They license the dataset. It is usually the algorithm which determines what is a landmark and what is not (it is my guess).
Agreed, there certainly is a difference. But 'Unix' is often used as a shorthand for a bunch of committee-created standards that people don't use anymore. Eg, POSIX shell will break when handling file names and data with spaces in them.

The defaults in the current Unix OSs - RHEL, SLES, Debian/Ubuntu, OS X, FreeBSD - don't match the 'standard' either - most of these, for example, are moving away from SysV init to something that handles dependencies (rather than starting an SMTP server when there's no network). None of these OSs use SysV packages either.

It's certainly valuable to learn multiple Unixs, but make sure that's practical experience rather than an expired 'standard'.
1. Improve my piano, harmonica, and musical ear. 2. Release my social networking app that I've been slacking on for a year. 3. Quit smoking. 4. Finish college (not graduate, finish).
Difference between AIX and Solaris | Web Technology I/O
Exception handling in Oracle(9i) | Web Technology I/O
HP Investigates Claims of ‘Racist’ Computers
Developing a Struts2 application step by step | Web Technology I/O
As well as 'the cool head', they're also the guy that automates the shit out of everything - OS installs, software deploys, reporting, monitoring, etc. Ideally, most sysadmin work should be automation rather than fixing shit, because you've automated some kind of pre-emptive check and redundancy.

Anything that saves a bucketload of time for other people deserves rockstar-like adoration, in my humble opinion.
Software distro for Win32 cross compiling, ports-like
Hacker News is simple, sure. But "hideous on the eyes"?
It's interesting to note that Nature is releasing this paper under a creative commons licence. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08656)

One of the authors is a big proponent of open access science. The genomic sequences are also available from a public repository.
Go to work for Google. Learn at least one new computer language. (These plans are pretty concrete at this point.)
Sony AIT-5 Media Tape
> The definition of a plant is that they produce food.

This can't be true: Not all plants are autotrophic, and not all autotrophic organisms are plants.
This kind of attitude is one of the things that drives people away from Linux and the open-source movement in general.

Sorry, but it's just the reality. Very few people write Free Software out of pure altruism. They write it because they have a problem they need to solve. Often there is personal gain in sharing this solution with the world (reputation, free bugfixes, etc.), so people do. This is the open source / free software movement in a nutshell.

If this attitude drives you away from getting something for free, then I guess that's too bad. The community only benefits marginally from consumers; it benefits from producers. If you are never willing to produce, the community can probably live without you.
When you consider the human consequences of this sort of unethical behavior, it's quite horrifying. It's like me selling you a car that I know is faulty, then betting that you'll have an accident.
though it was a disappointment of the year for me.
performance degrades significantly after 2M of entries :(
You left out a few possibilities:

-The poster hadn't considered that argument

-The poster doesn't want to have kids

-The poster will have a finite number of descendants

-The poster's concern for the standard of living of his distant descendants diminish according to distance (for instance, he probably cares a great deal for his children and a similar amount for his grandchildren, but by the time you're talking great-great-grandchildren his empathy has diminished significantly)

-The poster's descendants will not want share his fondness for the Maldives

-The poster's descendants will move away from the Maldives for other reasons

I'm sure you can think of a half dozen other alternatives if you think for a minute.
Try time the clerks in your local supermarket, I am sure you can find one which is twice as fast as the slowest, should he or she get twice the salary?

When it comes to programming there are relatively many bad programmers hired (on a base salary). Maybe the good programmers are underpaid, but definitely the bad programmers are overpaid.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that programmers are generally bad at negotiating their own salary.
I think that if an entity does more than about 99% of the work it takes to bring something into being, it's fine for that entity to take entire credit for it.
In Neal Asher's Polity novels, the Atheter are an advanced, starfaring race that has given up their technology. They engineered for themselves suitable bodies, strong enough to deal with predators etc, made certain adjustments to the ecosystem of their homeworld, then transferred into them and live pre-technologically.
It's often hard for a manager to judge how productive a developer is being. Often they're insufficiently qualified to judge the standard of the code being produced or whether one solution is more elegant/reusable than another, and instead are just using heuristics which work for other types of employment, such as estimating how much overall time and effort was put in.
Yahoo! India maps version has been having it for over a year or two now, which I have used myself few times.
The consequences of defaulting are not only moral or societal: it gets in your credit history. Banks will be less enclined to lend you money in the future, and if they do you'll end up paying 5x more premium.
Graduate from College, Make money and Achieve.
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I believe they provide pure alternatives to all of the C (or did anyway) so ytou can have a pure python implementation if needed.

http://selenic.com/repo/hg/file/37679dbf2ee3/mercurial/pure
We really need a modernized version of WvDial for wifi on Linux. The whole setup process is still so clunky. It seems to just randomly detect the wrong encryption scheme so shockingly enough my WPA key doesn't work as a WEP key, it can't figure out that if I have 5 open networks it should use the strongest signal automatically, if one of those 5 networks keeps dropping it won't pick one of the others or if DHCP fails it will just sit there doing nothing instead of trying another one of the networks. If someone could analyze how people actually use wifi and solve 90% of the most common setup problems it would be a huge boost for Linux usability.
grow my company from 1 to 6 employees and have 10 times more profit.
Try again and again to launch something that would be useful and popular. Failed twice this year...
As other people mentioned, if you send the diff by, say, pulling from your git repository, then you can roll back to any tag or revision.

What happens when your 300MB deploy needs to be pushed from your development machine out to 15 different production servers? I wouldn't want to send ~4.3GB for every deployment. Furthermore, a quick deployment time is valuable when a crucial fix needs to be pushed to production.

This is not to mention the space that your 300MB deploy is going to take up on the hard drives of your production machines if you deploy twice a day. That's over 213GB a year per machine, sounds like you would need to start deleting old revisions. Or start just sending the diffs.
I think I'd argue that this _is_ analogous to academia (well at least to mathematics). Take Fermat's Last Theorem for example, it's commonly accepted that Andrew Wiles proved the Theorem. However, without the work and results of thousands of other mathematicians throughout history he almost certainly could not have done so. The credit to those people is given within the proof; "combining the results of X with Y's theorem..." not in an enormous list on the front page. Equally, the name Google goes on the advertisements but within source code and blogs and bug fixes part of the credit goes to the technology that Chrome is built on.
Happy holidays! :)
"Complete" my key research goals and write a draft of my dissertation.
How to learn everything for Geeks: On Duality In Quantum Mechanics
E=MC^2 and about this Albert Einstein commented:

"It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind."

Duality is at the core of modern Physics. Back to the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton were debating about the Nature of Light: Huygens thought Light was consisting of Wave, Newton thought it was composed of Particles. Nobody at that time could ever think that both were right when Quantum Mechanics asserted the Wave-Particle Duality.

How Geeks can understand this ? Imagine a ...
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tl;dr: everyone survived; the safety engineering helped
Brightkite and faircompanies founders talk about happiness
Internet can be so fragile.
I don't mean it like that. I think you're probably being silly and/or missing the point. I should have probably said "the best sysadmins." I'm talking about the ones who make magic happen on a regular basis. The go-to guys of the department. There are certain levels of sysadmins whom you can find who may not know your company's particular flavor of Linux that will still pick it up quickly because they grok the entirety of the "unix" mindset.

It's difficult to grok the entirety of that mindset, however, with experience in only a handful of Linux distributions.

I've worked with a few folks like this, and they aren't hamfisted, show-off rebels like a rock star. They are elegant, precise and quick. Like a rock star.
Really neat, have a look 8 minutes well spent!

"Happiness is creation".

thanks Nicolas.
Wicd seems to solve all of the problems you listed here. Unfortunately distros seem to push their own broken or feature-lacking interfaces instead of adopting and extending this one (ubuntu, looking at you). It will not reconnect you to a network with a stronger signal automatically unless you lose the connection though - which I think is a good solution, because you don't want to be disconnected at 99% of some big download, just because the signal level changed (without actually disconnecting you).

But I agree... the state of distro-default applications for both ppp-based 3G and serious wifi is disappointing. I needed wvdial to connect to O2-uk. Not because it was impossible with gnome-ppp, but because only wvdial gave me enough debug information to figure out why I couldn't connect the first time.
I tend to agree that the design of HN isn't all that great. It's simple and usable, but it's not the easiest on the eyes. I've seen simple sites that were also beautiful. The design isn't what really matter on HN, though. The community is what's beautiful, so I can ignore the fairly uninspired design.
Merry Christmas & a very happy 2010 HN
Hello HNers,

Those that I've had personal contact with outside of the forum and everybody else too.

2009 has been a tumultuous year there has been lots of change both personal, business wise and in the world at large.

December 7th I was a HN member for exactly a year and when cleaning up my inbox the other day I suddenly realized that there is more out-of-band communication between other HN people and myself in my inbox than from any other group of people that I've ever been involved with.

What an amazing community this is.

Thank you all for a wonderful time in 2009, especially those that took the time out to educate me on subjects where I was as curious as the 3 year old from long ago asking 'why' all the time.

greetings, & all the best to you and yours!

Jacques Mattheij
Being very close to graduate in the end of the year, run a half-marathon, try to not be a complete slacker and play with my recently purchased VPS.
Er, you mean "2009 has been ..."

Regardless, very best to all.
The IPCC 4th Assessment Report is a good starting place. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_f...
Why in God's name would you want to learn Romanian?
1. It's a silly, silly language -- I've been speaking it all of my life, and, most of the time, I still find I express myself better in English.
2. It's only spoken in a small, god-forsaken country that'll probably never amount to much of anything.

If you insist on learning another language -- it is my opinion that one should try to say something smart in one language, rather than something mediocre in a couple -- you should at least learn something that might actually prove useful -- like Chinese (if you're young and you foresee you'll still be around when they rule the world), or Russian (for more-or-less the same reason)
Thank you :)

And not just for that correction.

j.
If you want branches side by side in git, just clone your repository. Or am I missing something?

The one catch is that the "upstream" repository will be the local one you cloned from, rather than your original upstream. git-clone could easily have a switch for that, though.
That's something I have been observing with some languages.

Perhaps there is a point it's so easy t build useful stuff that the ease builds fragmentation. If ít's easier to write a new library than to adapt to one already existing, you have a situation where everybody just writes new libraries from scratch. The easier to write, the more fragmentation you get.

Keeping fragmentation low requires effort.
It's A Blue Moon New Year's Eve Party
You can begin to learn to play the violin in a year, but it is a dedication of a lifetime to really learn to play the violin.

Noble causes though, I wish you much good luck!
You're welcome. I've enjoyed our exchanges and communications, and hope that in the coming year I have more time to pursue them.

As with several others here on HN. I, too, find this an amazing community. I hope that the attention PG has been giving to the questions of feedback, etc., help it to grow without exhibiting the downward spiral that has seen the death of high-quality contributions on so many other fora. I like the people I've met through HN.

Long may it continue.

Ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589
15 reasons why you should start using Model Driven Development
I'd replace Russian with Spanish in that list.

Romanian is very useful though, because of its reasonably strong ties to latin. If you know Romanian then Italian, Spanish and French are more accessible.
Clean Energy Hoax?
Hell yes, I finish my contract this year so I am going to regain my mind, catch up with .NET, sleep a lot, finish reading my LISP booky and I must code one thing this year that I would naturally be uncomfortable with, be it LISP, C or Ruby/Python.

Maybe start a business (if certain conditions evaluate to true)! :)
I think asking for upvoting is not fair but I seriously don't know if you sharing this is really okay.
Ebook-Readers Sales Forecast
That happens all the time. Don't fret about it, just ignore it and apply your votes the way you think things should work.

Over time those few downvotes are almost always balanced by the rest of HN.

Except for 'controversial' subjects, there anything can happen.

If you want to avoid being downvoted completely the easiest way is to avoid such subjects, specifically anything mentioning Ayn Rand, the glory of Capitalism, religion and emacs ;)
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i have just one, the same i set for 2009 but failed to do so: to live here and now, in the moment. without past or future worries. i hope i make it this time.
I can only hope you're joking. Design, by itself, is pointless; content, by itself, is the point.
Sure. Spanish is also a good choice. I could have went on and on enumerating interesting languages and interesting reasons to learn them (like reading history, philosophy, or great literature in their original form).

As for your second point, as far as I know, Romanian's ties to Latin aren't only reasonably strong; Romanian is actually the most like-Latin language that is still spoken -- however, Spanish and French still sound horrible to me (and I took French for 11 years, in school).

Also -- and I just couldn't resist making this point -- do you really think that the French or the Italians are ever going to do something interesting enough to warrant learning their language? -- please note that I'm not saying anything bad about their past (that's awesome); but, if you're forward thinking, I think you're pretty safe assuming that they're glory days are (long) over.
Researchers show off functional single-molecule transistor
I think any language is worth learning.

Right now I'm at 5, Dutch (my mother tongue), Polish, German, English and French (the latter poorly through inactivity).

I very much want to learn more languages and I find that with every language added the next one becomes easier.

So there is no such thing as a language 'not worth learning', almost all of the languages spoken on the European continent are related in some way or other anyway (even Hungarian and Finnish).

Whether a language is 'ascending' or 'descending' in influence can certainly guide your priorities but I'd definitely not rule them out simply on that basis.
I did all my college entrance exams (in 2006) with a sliderule. :)
Google's dominance draws interest of regulators
> Hg's branching isn't weak anymore.

And it was not weak at any time in the past, actually.
MQL, Prolog, and the future of Semantic Web databases
A brief discussion on knowledge-representation in Semantic Web databases like Freebase, and the use of MQL and Prolog to query such databases.

Comment and critique is much appreciated.
My knee jerk reaction was - fight or flee? As others have pointed out if I don't see what the page is about almost immediately I just close it. When skimming through the site the only thing I see is boring business talk which quite frankly bores the hell out of me.

Another thing I noticed on my second visit was how absolutely crammed it was. There are links everywhere, which is fine, but they're screaming 'Hey Look at Me!' and the next 'No Look at Me!' and so on. A clean page goes a long way for me but yours went the other way I'm afraid.
The Stage Breast Cancer
1. Try and actually write my fiction book (finally)

2. Sell a company

3. Work less and spend more time doing "fun" :)
it's called moral hazard. it is well known in the insurance industry.

lately I've been struck by the obviously directly related tendencies to

A) ignore history

B) act like everything is new
Yeah, I do feel the same way about Apple. Apple claims credit a lot more than Google. Google is definitely way more free software friendly than Apple in my experience - like a whole different magnitude of more friendly :)

I see your point, but without giving proper credit, the developers of open source projects will not get credit outside of the project. They won't get the credit from the press or from The People.

Even in other open source projects it would be nice to give credit more evenly. As an example, many interviews or articles mention 'Guido the creator of python'. Whereas the reality is that thousands of people have contributed to python to make it what it is today.

It's hard to give credit even when you try your hardest to. Also, where do we draw the line? Do we start with crediting Persian, Egyptian, and Greek mathematicians and artists? Do we need to give a whole raft of references each time a trumpet is blown? Do we list individual contributors? Or just major contributors, or founders? Or perhaps not mentioning anyone at all - which many hackers do. An 'open source community project' is a nice compromise as it gives credit to everyone.

Perhaps 'Made by the people of the world, for the people of the world' would have been a better advertisement.

-- merry xmas
What if amazon gets a new netblock assigned ?

Can you forcibly upgrade the software in that case ?
Launch my startup no matter what.
The list of questions attached to the article suggests an excellent reason why re-implementing something like this as a novice to a platform is a bad idea.

I've been guilty of exactly that (in java, a persistence layer for classes) and was rightly shown why that is not a good thing to do. Too many edge cases and a serious maintenance problem in the longer term.

Before you know it you are maintaining your database connector more than you are your original reason for writing it (the problem that needed to be solved).

I'm not too familiar with the common lisp ecosystem but there is a reason why there are N reasons of doing things there, all of them with varying degrees of feature overlap and stability.

Unless you have a really good idea on how you are going to move the field as a whole forward by re-implementing something your time is likely (but not always!) better spent by improving a solution already out there than by writing another partial implementation from scratch.

The first few weeks of progress on anything new it always seems like you're literally on a roll, after that the slowdown comes and the hard work begins.
While not "permanently off limits to foreigners", you might have difficulty travelling around parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for example without an official "guide".
I think it's ok to call astroturfers out, because too much of that sort of thing goes on.
Zsync - the improved rsync
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> Am I "losing my home"? If I'm not, what distinguishes my repo agreement/lease from other peoples call option/mortgage?

I actually agree with your basic sentiment, but there is an answer to this. Losing a mortgaged home hurts more than an apartment because people tend to have greater levels of endowment effects -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

> In behavioral economics, the endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion) is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not.

Endowment effects is looking pretty robust at this point, it's been shown on a lot of unrelated types of goods and services. People have a much greater attachment to a "home" than an "apartment" - I mean you can even think of the difference in connotation and prestige between being a "homeowner" and "renter" - this probably isn't a good thing by the way, but it's definitely real.
How bees perform perfect landing
Yes! Writing something significant is a great way to learn a language. I have also learned a great deal from solving the Euler Project problems. Either way, just get your hands dirty!
Sorry. Got tied up last night, but I am still interested in this data and appended it on my to do list. Ping me @ any of my contact info in my profile and I will link you when it's done!
How does a fly turn upside down to land on a ceiling? (with video)