skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's pretty much how I use Linux on my Windows 7 notebook, except I only need to use it once a week or so. I really don't have the time to bother with all the hardware issues I remember facing back in the day, when I did have time to tinker around.

I see Linux's future being in a VM rather than on the desktop. I think more and more "power users" will eventually switch to using virtualized Linux on Windows or Mac, to get the power of Linux without any of the hassle.
Startups and financial models for SAAS companies
It would be better to say it is done in one expression.
It's worth noting again that this should reflect on the credibility of the submitter who chose the headline, not on the original presentation - which makes a different point entirely.
Antikythera mechanism
Java Virtual Machine developer documentation
I have been wondering the same thing since watching the video a week ago. Specifically, would it be good to use corn syrup (the old-fashioned glucose kind, not HFCS) as a replacement for fructose/sucrose?
Selecting an OpenID selector
Did Apple just become a whole lot nicer to iPhone devs?
Yes, I do not have a problem with the content of the video at all. In med school, we are already being taught the evils of fructose, so this well-done presentation is actually in line with what we are taught now.
The best thing about Linux is its rate of improvement. Linux in January 2010 is much nicer than a year ago and barely recognizable from, say, Linux 2003, the year when Windows XP launched. Windows and Mac OS are much slower to innovate. There are several reasons for this.

- Because Linux has many distros, it can't take a big stumble like Vista. If Ubuntu stumbles, RedHat, SUSE, and Debian keep innovating (to name just the biggies).

- There's a constant churn of projects contending for every component of Linux,from media players to Ethernet drivers. The distros continuously select best-of-breed.

- Linux has a huge developer base, comparable to the whole Microsoft development ecosystem. Many of them aren't paid, and those who are paid are distributed across hundreds of companies. This huge developer base isn't subject to Brooks' Law because open source projects release early and often, and because Linux is decomposed into many independent but interoperable pieces.

Unfortunately, I don't think Linux will ever take over as the desktop market leader.

- Windows and MacOS are good enough for most people most of the time.

- Linux requires extra effort to get and install. Microsoft has shown repeatedly that they can keep it that way on PC compatibles.

- The network effect works against Linux on the desktop, just as it favors Linux in servers and embedded systems. Since 90% of the world runs Windows, Windows is the default choice for independent desktop software developers. Even Google, a very Linux-friendly company, released Earth, Chrome (browser), and SketchUp for Windows first. There is still no SketchUp for Linux.

- The highly innovative development process leaves too many loose ends visible to end users. Linux always needs a little tweaking (though this has dropped dramatically in the last decade).

There are some things that could disrupt the current desktop space.

- OLPC or Google Chromium (OS) both have the potential to push Linux into the majority desktop OS. Other platforms could do the same. But those platforms are so different from the traditional Unix/GNOME/KDE userland that they barely count.

- The other potential disruptor is non-x86 CPUs. ARM or another architecture could come from below and replace a significant fraction of the desktop boxes. Windows is pretty tightly wedded to the x86 architecture, so Microsoft does what they can to bolster x86. But Moore's Law is still in effect, so a disruptive CPU is certainly a possibility.

Basic usage answers: I've been using Linux on my desktop and laptops since 1998-99. I use it all the time on my primary and secondary machines. I cautiously recommend it to others. (Cautiously: I don't push Linux. Whenever anyone shows interest, I explain the pros and cons, and make sure they have an Ubuntu LiveCD in their hands when we're done and understand that there's no commitment to trying it.)
> When ALL kids are exposed to technology at the very beginning, I think computer programming will become increasingly mainstream.

"I’ve been working on an education project, which is another place where, again, there’s tremendous potential for Google to do stuff. What we're working on, having passed the gauntlet of Google’s trademark lawyers, is called App Inventor for Android, and the idea is to make it easy for beginning computer science students, non-computer science students, maybe eventually high school students, to build mobile apps. Right now we are thinking about where this project wants to go when it grows up. Even where it wants to go come 2010. There’s a range, from focusing it more on education, to focusing it more broadly – i.e. making it so anybody can easily make Android apps."

-Professor Hal Abelson of MIT

http://research.google.com/university/relations/visiting-fac...
Alex Tabarrok: The Meat Market - Paying Donors for Kidneys
Background: I've used Linux a lot for around 4 years.

In the time that I've been using Linux it has come a very long way. When I started it was absolute torture. Hardware compatability was terrible, very few things worked. I had to update drivers by compiling and installing them. No where close to being usable by anyone that wasn't pretty tech savvy.

However, I was able to install SuSE linux on a laptop for my dad and it has been working just fine for him. That being said, there are things that are seriouly lacking. The main one, and the reason I pretty much have switched to Windows 7 is graphics.

The state of graphics in Linux is completely unacceptable. Compositing breaks often, the performance is poor, and if your hardware is even kind of unusual things won't work. Want to get a sweet notebook (http://tr.im/JUuy - amazon.com) with 10 hours of battery life and the ability to switch between a discrete card and integrated graphcis (to save power)? Tough luck, Linux can't do it. Want to have composite with 3 monitors (admittedly just for power users) you're pretty much out of luck.

Beyond that, there needs to be a company promoting and selling linux, a company that has a vested interest in fixing problems like the above. More than that, there needs to be a company that needs to find a way to make money with Linux desktop/laptop computers. Until that happens, I feel that it will always be stuck behind the curve and playing catch up.
If you get traction and press attention particularly, then doors and options open up to you. Also if you have a chance to speak at a conference you get a lot of respect, often from people who didn't know who you were previously.

However, getting traction and press attention are the hardest bits. Also, how much of your own money do you lose before quitting?

That said, even if you fail, if you had a job before, the chances are you could at least do the same thing again after.
I also found another one-line solution for the same problem: http://catpad.net/michael/apl/
I worry a little that the inability to focus will negate a lot of that fluency with technology. Every major technical innovation took a long period of focused, dedicated work to come to fruition. Woz worked on the Apple I for a year before it was ready, Larry and Sergey worked on Google for 3 years before it became a company. That seems like an eternity when you're used to getting feedback within 10 seconds of typing something in.

We saw a lot of this in the Web 2.0 boom of 2005-2007. Lots and lots of people started companies because they were fluent with the technology - but most of those companies were simply "me too" copies of the latest fad, because that's all you can do in the 3-month timescales that were being promoted for new startups. Real innovation happens over much longer timescales, as you take what you've learned, discard the bad parts, build on the good parts, and finally come out with something the world has never seen before.

Heck, I've got a compiler sitting in one of my background windows that I've been working on, on and off, for 3 years, with little progress. Because it's in the background. Instead, I'm posting on Hacker News, where I can expect a response in an hour or two. And if you're responding - don't you have a big hairy audacious project that you could be working on but aren't?
Yes, that's what I mean by advanced statistics. I've read many papers in economics using such techniques. They are 99.9% utter garbage. The issues I mentioned above (data quality, data coding, issues with choosing the right controls, too many variables, sensitivity to variable selection) doom the project before you can even get to using the statistics. Garbage in, garbage out. If you data munge and get a result, you can never determine if it's a real result or a data mining effect.

And yes, I understand you cannot get published in the social sciences without using advanced statistics. All this means is that the economics academia is following into the trap of Schoclastism, and insular world that uses complicated and absurd methods of research, increasingly divorced from reality.

Social science needs to get over its science envy. As I've written here before, the proper tools to use as a student of policy and sociology are the tools of product management: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836196

I have not read Freakonomics the book, but I read their blog occasionally. It's interesting when they find a simple statistic that raises an interesting point.

It might be easier to explain the problems with reference to a specific example. If there is some social science paper that uses the techniques you mentioned above, and you think is particularly good, send me a link, and I can explain why I think it's likely garbage.
I think that's far too optimistic. Using technology is not the same as making / hacking it. Far too many people don't care.
Exactly, HN is not explicitly for "Hacker News" but rather news hackers (and entrepreneurs) may find interesting. I find this interesting.
Since groups also self-perpetuate, why wouldn't selectionist pressures apply to both individuals and groups?
Well, all the dutch HN readers will agree it would be "Etter".

But I personnaly don't think this would change much. For me there are two categories of information: private and public. For the private information email is the only solution and for the public solution I have my personal website. People who don't have their own website/blog won't care on who's server the messages are.

* EDIT * I was just thinking, isn't this what sites like blogger are about? You can make a page where you blog, several people can follow you, and they can reply.
No, sms is too personal. I think the point was that you can have several followers.
Gremlin is not that old, and still in 0.1 ALPHA. Hope you enjoy it, feel free to join the users list at http://groups.google.com/group/gremlin-users . Would love to get feedback on it!
I can't really agree with you. If you care only about 99.9% of your requests being on time, it means that one in a 1000 can time-out and die. Not that bad? Ok - let's have an example:

Facebook - one random user-page view == 63 requests (reported by firebug). That means 16 people generate >1000 requests. Even with 99.9% requests within your "acceptable range", you get every 16'th person either missing an element on a page due to some DB timeout (for example), or seeing an incomplete page for a not "acceptable" time (with 1/63'th probability of it being the main document, if we don't know which element fails).

Is that really an acceptable behaviour?

I don't believe that a requirement saying "the complete website loads in less than 1s" is affected by GC or context switches at all, tbh. If you actually tested the website with load of 10x the average expected one (over a couple of hours of random scripted walk with a natural write/read balance - testing you'd do on a service you really care about) and you still get random glitches with the expected load, then there's most likely something wrong on a higher level (disk seeks failing? shared hosting overloaded? network? etc. etc.)
I wonder if one could use the rank of "Milk" as a predictor of the conservativeness/liberalness of a particular area.
Also I don't think we should "make up [our] own mind"

Although it's true that don't-think-for-yourself-and-don't-question-authority is standard practice, it's not often one hears someone explicitly argue in favor of it.

I have three objections to what you're saying. The first is that it's ahistorical. You don't have to look back very far to see the insanity that human deference to experts can produce. ("Breast feeding is bad for babies", anyone?) Scientific consensus isn't nearly as stable or as true as you're implying; nor, for that matter, nearly as scientific. Which brings me to my second objection: it doesn't consider the economic and political interests that drive these things. There is a great deal of money being made from people being fat and sick. This has a huge influence on the research and regulatory systems surrounding this stuff. It follows that naive trust of consensus recommendations is foolish. Finally, everyone does make up their own mind whether they intend to or not. It's like Sartre said: not to choose is to choose not to choose. Everyone has a pool of their own judgment to allocate; if you like to invest yours completely in the expert consensus du jour, that's your perogative. I like to diversify mine, including putting a little into my "own mind", thanks. As far as I'm concerned, any discourse that penalizes people for asking simple questions is not to be trusted.
A Year After Program, Under 100 Hyundais Returned
It's weird to think that for kids who are in fourth grade today, odds are their first girlfriend will be someone they meet using their cellphone.

Also, this article quotes Mizuko Ito. If you haven't already read her book Person, Portable, Pedestrian, it's really good. It's all about the anthropology of cell phone use in Japan. It's probably starting to get a little bit dated, post iPhone, but there is still some really cool stuff in there.
So ... why do people use Twitter, when blogs already existed?
FatWallet Finance discussion of the article:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/981895

I think this comment really nailed it:
I never understood the program. If I lost my job, I'd still need a car to drive to interviews.
True. I see people everyday on the train, using their mobile devices to fritter away time. They're consumers of technology, not producers.

However, the ongoing democratization of technology(1) will make it easier to make. Or at least for them to share something. Or at least for non-technical people to do the stuff that they want. My brother-in-law had a PC for years. He got a MacBook and suddenly he was making DVDs, slideshows, editing video. Was it just the technology or was it the fact that Apple makes it easy to do things most people would like to do be able to do with their computers (the iLife software)?

Why do you think YouTube became so successful? They took a really hard problem (how to allow people to upload and share a video and made it easy).

"Over the span of one week two million people downloaded [Tap Tap Revenge] to their iPhone or iPod Touch devices.

Something has changed. It has changed for good. Has it changed for the better? I’m not yet sure – but I am sure there’s no going back."

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67

(1) This essay by one of the coders behind Tap Tap Revenge that was posted yesterday on HN (but kinda got buried) goes more into the democratization of technology, wherein the people don't care about big software, they want Pop Software, they want to do cool stuff with their mobile devices.
For me the desktop Linux year was 2006. I'd been using it on and off since 2000 (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake), but it wasn't until 2006 (Ubuntu) that it could do all the things that I needed without a great deal of complication and diversions. I've been using Linux almost exclusively since then as my primary OS on multiple desktop and laptop machines. I also feel comfortable recommending Linux to other people now, which wasn't the case even a couple of years ago.
selection doesn't even apply directly to the individual, but to the survival of individual genes through individuals.

if a gene establishes itself within the genepool of a group, that is because it has been beneficial to every individual (and the genes that survive through that individual), by it's own merit - not by merit of being widespread in the group already, along the way.
The fastest way to readability fail: use that font.
Imgur Goes Pro - Now Serving 10m+ Images Per Day
If you ignore opportunity costs and assume no money is borrowed, then yes, there is no risk.
Just to clarify, I _do_ find this interesting.

However, I don't find it interesting because I am a "hacker", I find it interesting because I am a person, and people are likely to find this interesting - it has nothing to do with whether you are a "hacker" or not.

When I visit Hacker News, I want to see news that is interesting, sure, but also related to hacking or entrepreneurship.

There are lots of interesting things in this world and like I said, it could easily make up enough content for another HN-style site. One that I would visit. When I wanted "generally interesting" news. As opposed to "Hacker" News.
I ran linux on the desktop for close to a decade, and I honestly regret that. The hours I spent futzing with x-windows, apmd, the broken pcmcia support, etc were unproductive periods of my life that I can not get back. It formed a ridiculous "us versus them" mentality that took years to fully get out of my system.

I still remember the day seven years ago that my laptop failed while at a customer site. I jumped onto an imac, the first time I had ever touched an apple product. The next day I went out and bought a macbook pro, and haven't wasted time trying to shoehorn a server OS onto a desktop ever since.
And it sheds that light by portraying a scene where a bunch of people critical of aspects of capitalism are sent by train into a tunnel and killed.
The list was a lot shorter when I started:

* Don't eat the dirt

* Don't piss on the chief's tent (when he's home)

* Don't sleep under the horse.

* The brown pills are not specifically good.
I believe it will continue to grow but not as fast as it needs to be any serious competitor to Windows or MacOS in 2010.

It still lacks a good-enought variety of (proprietary) third-party applications and games.

This is what most of the younger power users care about -- and they are the ones who learn computer usage most easily. But there's no compelling reason for them to try or to switch to Linux.

What blocks the supply of third-party applications is the lack of a default decentral installer on the major Linux distributions. APT just doens't cut it. In a recent review of using a Macbook, former GNOME Quality Control lead, Luis Villa, wrote [1]:

"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great."

I do find new software like that, too, but APT wasn't made for this use case. As a result, I stopped reading reviews of Linux applications. Most of the time, it's a hassle to get the dicussed software installed, for they are often not available in Ubuntu's repositories or it's an old version.

I also stopped buying or reading Linux magazines or journals for this reason.

So, even if there are new great applications out there, the word spreads slowly. As a result, Linux appears to be boring and to lack behind the other two OSes. It's simply more fun to use Windows or MacOS for a power user.

And if the majority of power users don't switch, the less literate users are not going to be convinenced to switch, either. Neither more advertising nor having Linux pre-installed will change that, in my opinion.

[1]: http://tieguy.org/blog/2009/12/23/continued-notes-on-the-mac...
Taking more than 100ms is not the same things as "time-out and die". Performance is focused on how long something takes and it normally assumes that the system is not broken. It would take a horribly broken system to timeout 1% of requests. Assuming that 1% of your requests taking long enough the user might notice, but still working is generally acceptable performance for a webapp. So a reasonable goal might be 99% within 150ms and 99.95% don't fail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory
And at home you must be certain that you don't have anything non safe for wife.
"Landlords, however, typically take out commercial loans for shorter terms of three to 10 years. In normal times, landlords coming to the end of a mortgage simply roll the debt over into a new loan. But collapsing asset values have wreaked havoc on this process."
I have a simple metric for determining the validity of a scientific consensus: "Does it make true predictions?"

It does not take much research to discover that it is an objective truth that the nutrition dogma does not make true predictions. It says if you eat less (of the same thing) and exercise more, you will lose weight. The peer review verdict on this is rock solid: False. It treats fat cells as passive bags: False. After that the logic flows pretty simply. (Including the flat-out evil of people still talking as if calorie-reduction diet and exercise is some sort of scientifically proved therapy when in fact the exact utter opposite is true.)

People claiming that the dietary orthodoxy is false have plenty of fully credentialed experts on their side, and your implicit claim or belief that it's not supported by evidence or peer review is flat-out false. I commend to you the first few frames of the video linked in the topic, for instance. I can't beat PhD with years of actual field experience; can you? Because that PhD with years of field experience is not on the side of the orthodoxy.
Not only that, but while there may or may not be enough evidence at large to support his claim w.r.t. mandatory life without parole, it certainly cannot be derived purely from the fact that some past murderers have since been released on parole.
I know where I'm retiring!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079219/
It looks like this article went to press just a little too early. As of yesterday, Tishman and Speyer have defaulted on Stuyvesant Town:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870353510457464...
Business Accountz Independent Review by Henry Hardoon FCCA
I don't run linux on my desktop because windows XP really does just work for me.

I know the evangelists really hate to hear this, but I'm currently sitting in my conference room watching a DVD on our projector (I didn't even have to screw with xorg.conf to get the second monitor that windows treats the projector as working!), with a couple of sessions of putty running into linux boxes.

I wouldn't run linux on my desktop for the same reason I wouldn't run windows on my DNS server: it's just the wrong tool for the job.

(I wrote a blog about this here: http://newslily.com/blog/permalink.cgi?blog_id=77
if anyone is interested)
Medical reporting is by far the worst type of reporting in the modern media. Anything health related that a journalist sensationalizes today will be contracted by something they sensationalize two years later. 16 years of agonizing about weight, and still I have no clue what might work and what might not work.
You know, you could use the edit functionality to actually remove the typo. I'm pretty sure that's what it's there for.